Within the compound Vrech and Havermeyer had for some days watched the cats and studied them, but it was Vrech who would do the training. Havermeyer had proven totally inept, and the night before last he had returned to the city offices of Lillith Corporation. Vrech knew he had been sent up to the ranch simply to oversee him. He preferred working alone, now that he had selected the female to be trained as the false Catswold queen.
She was darkly mottled, her coat a brindled, muddy mix of black and rust unrelieved by white. She was so mean she ran off males and females alike, and had lacerated the hands of two keepers who tried to pet her.
He caught her with raw meat, wearing heavy gloves. He put her into a cage, and carried her into a locked room with barred windows. When he said the spell, when she found herself turned into a woman, she leaped at Vrech, clawing at him. He grabbed her and turned her toward the full-length mirror he had provided. She stopped clawing him, and stood looking. A curiously childlike wonder transformed her face.
She was naked, of course, and she stared at her bare skin, at her breasts and her long legs and long slim arms, clasping and unclasping her hands as if her fingers had retractable claws.
Then she looked at her hands, examined them, and began to use them. She turned the doorknob, but couldn’t open the door. She flipped the window latches and reached through to try to remove the bars. She pinched Vrech and stroked him, then tried to undo the buttons of his shirt.
She was thin, hard, angular, and well muscled. She had amber eyes, street-wise under her dark lashes, and dark, arching brows. Her black hair was red-streaked and lank, hanging to her shoulders. She watched Vrech with a shrewdness that kept him alert.
“Helsa,” Vrech said. “Your name is Helsa, after a lesser entity of the Hell Pit.”
“Helsa,” she said, touching her breasts and cupping them.
Vrech smiled.
Here in this room she was prisoner. She would remain so until she was sufficiently trained and trustworthy. He would be selective about the spells he taught her. She might be appealing and lusty, but he had no illusion that he could trust her. When he took her into the riding ring he would keep her spell-cast.
He clothed her in jeans and plain shirts. He spent three days teaching her horsemanship, then began to train her to the sword. He did not trust her sufficiently yet to take her to bed. In between riding lessons he taught her about the Catswold nation. When she understood its stubborn, defiant history and understood what Siddonie wanted of her, she saw at once the possibilities. Soon she lusted to lead the Catswold people, to hold absolute rule over them. She respected power and wanted power. She quickly understood that she would sell the Catswold nation for her own complete and absolute power. She understood that soon the queen herself would come to be with her and train her in further skills.
She could soon wield a spell to make the other cats storm the fence, make them leap and tear at the wire roof or fight one another. She could make the compound cats stop eating for days, or force them to gorge themselves. It was some weeks after Vrech began training her that Siddonie arrived at the ranch.
She was in the blue Rolls; Havermeyer had driven her up from the city. She had come up to San Francisco to sign business papers and check on him; he was good with the details but she didn’t like to give him total freedom. The corporate takeover was so complicated that Havermeyer could too easily cross her.
She had used the tunnel that opened out of Xendenton. She kept a car in the parking garage into which the tunnel opened, deducting the monthly parking fee from her taxes. It was ludicrous to her that she must pay upperworld income taxes. She had brought only a dozen staff with her—they had gone directly to the hotel where she kept a suite.
She exited from the pale blue interior of the Rolls dressed in a black riding suit with diamond cuff links closing the sleeves of her white silk shirt, diamond earrings, and diamonds at her throat. Her black hair was piled into a complicated arrangement caught with diamond pins. Sleek and impeccably groomed, she ordered Vrech to bring Helsa to her in the compound office.
The office featured an orange-and-cream Khirman rug, and cream leather chairs against a wall covered entirely by a spell-cast antique mirror that did not reflect. Siddonie stood before the patterned gold mirror watching the Catswold girl enter, watching her eyes. Seeing Helsa’s immediate envy.
Within an hour Siddonie, with skillful spells and with promises, had made Helsa her slave. The girl not only envied Siddonie’s beauty and was determined to copy it, she lusted after the power Siddonie offered her. When she rode out with Siddonie in late afternoon, Helsa was totally committed to her.
