Raindrops gently tapped the window over and over. Cory, now a silent crow, sat on the inside looking to the dusk and drops of rain. Teardrops also fell now and then.

Isidore was in some kind of trance. She had held Persephone to her breast and wouldn't let them take her. They had said they would return for it. She was slowly falling asleep, her willpower losing slowly to combined mysteries of science and nature. Her body was not strong after birth and their drugs had weakened her resolve.

"Do something." She said to me.

"Isidore." I looked at her and saw her muttering to me, her eyes half shut. I wanted to tell her that there was no baby. What was the point? She had not accepted it. Had I?

"Gaylord Briar?" A nurse had poked her head in. "A call for you."

"Not right now." I said quietly. The shaft of light went away as the door closed.

"My Lord, what will the other humans do with the body?" Cory asked me with his magic English-speaking voice.

"What do you think?" I asked him. He tilted his head and pondered this, blinking more than usual. Then he responded in Corvin:

"Gathering." And he added: "In this gathering we come and look upon our dead and find the wound. What made this wound? Was it a fox? Was it a poison? Was it a hawk? Was it a parasite? We must look upon this and think upon this until we know how this death happened."

"Something like that." I realized absently that he could switch to speaking in Corvin, choosing not to use the words given by the enchantment.

"Yet you know how she died. All did see, she did not breathe." Cory pointed out.

"What does that mean? Should she breathe? What is her spirit doing, Cory?" I asked my crow. He looked at the baby.

"Sleeping." Cory looked away, after I saw the glow of my daughter's ghost in his midnight orbs.

"And when she wakes?" I asked, my voice rising above a hush.

"She will leave. Her guide will come and take her away." Cory sounded thoughtful and then added: "At least that is what I believe will happen. I am not personally certain of this."

"Is there a chance for her to breathe?" I wanted to know. Cory refused to answer so I asked again before he said:

"My Lord compels me to advise him of the existence of an evil option." Cory protested.

"I care not of its morality, in your sense. Tell me what it is that you know." I ordered him, just above a whisper.

"Very well. She could breathe if her lungs filled before sunrise; with the breath of the night." Cory explained.

"What is this that you speak of then?" I demanded to know with a quiet voice.

"You must realize that at night the world is different. Humans seem to think that it is just dark, instead of different." Cory explained carefully. "At night it is like a different world under your feet. No shadows. Think about it. It isn't just the sun has gone down."

"I don't really see it that way." I agreed. "You mean that something is different at night."

"Yes. All is different." Cory made a rapid clicking sound that was one of his laughs. "You must speak with one of them and be true to them. Do not look away or you will be destroyed."

"One of them." I repeated. Then I asked: "One of them, Cory?"

"Cat." Cory said in Corvin and shuddered.

"How? I can't leave them?" I pondered.

"Just open the window and tell them you will make such a trade as is worth the breath of your unbreathing child." Cory sounded complicit.

"And never take my eyes off of them." I chuckled, opening the window.

"Well, if you do, you shall most likely be killed in a very nasty and gory way. You have heard my warning again." Cory stated. "Also, my Lord might still choose not to commit a terrible act of evil. Let Persephone go when the sun rises." Cory spoke his animal warnings and will.

"I hear you. That is enough on those matters." I grimaced, leaned way out the window over empty darkness and then called out into the night: "I will make a trade as is worth the breath of my child!" At the most severe my lungs could belt. I almost thought I had awoken her. Cory flapped around nervously before finding a perch.

It was an hour before a marble of blue and gray with heterochromic-eyes of blue-green and fiery red. She meowed at me several times.

"She wants you to come with her." Cory told me.

"How's that? We are seven stories up." I kept my eyes fixed on the cat, just taking Cory's word that I would be killed. Part of me believed that this was merely crow lore, although my instinct that I should not test it did prevail.

"See? As she turns, just put your hand on her collar, or where she would have a collar." Cory explained. I walked forward.

"When she jumps: you must also jump with her." Cory clicked several times, to make sure I knew he had said that correctly.

"Come too." I reached for my bird. I tried to keep my eyes on the small animal, the cat, and my hand upon her as she slinked forward. I felt a sinking feeling as I realized I was stepping off the ledge from the window. She was jumping, so I jumped.

I was falling, rapidly. I looked past her, as I stared only in the direction of the cat. I could feel my body hurtling, falling. The lights below were not stars but the world we were leaving. Then we landed with a soft thud in a silent and cold place. The cat bounded away and out of sight.

I looked around. We seemed to be on the moon. I wondered how I could be alive with no oxygen and in the cold vacuum of space. Sure enough the cat had brought me within walking distance of the lunar lander. I found it eerie that it sat there still, and that the astronauts had left it behind somehow.

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"What is this place?" I asked Cory.

"Luna." Cory rasped.

"You mean this is the moon?" I asked in disbelief. "How can we be alive here?"

"How should I know, my Lord?" Cory wondered too.

"I can tell you how." A man in a tattered astronaut suit told us. He stood by three graves. He had some kind of weapon he had fashioned, a kind of ax and hammer with a spike on the end of the handle. "Oh, this? Merry Bell, she keeps me safe from the moon beasts."

"My Lord." Cory spoke in Corvin: "He is lying about something."

"What moon beasts? Did they kill the others?" I asked.

"What others?" He asked strangely. "You feeling alright, man?"

"Those are graves in the moon dust." I pointed. They were obviously graves and had crude markers with astronaut helmets beneath their headstones.

"Those that don't leave, looked away." He bit his lip oddly and stared intensely at me.

"How are we breathing?" I asked him.

"Well, we have not yet looked away. The moon beasts, you see them and think they are like cats. They are also the beast within, a shadow on the wall. That monster is also the cat, yet it is a beast, a nightmare." He instructed me.

"What is your name?" I asked him.

"I was once a man with a name. Now I am just Sam." He claimed.

"Alright Sam, can you show me where they are?" I asked. To this, he laughed crazily, and did not stop, until a cat of tabby arrived with a man in a white bathrobe. I did not look away from the cat and Cory said:

"We are told we should follow. Everyone here should feel invited. Come Virgil." Cory translated the meowing. Our footfalls on the moon dust were very quiet. Soon we arrived at the edge of a vast crater. I stared past our feline guide to see the head of a rat, or rather a giant skull of a rat. Someone had carved it out of a dry and blistered green stuff that was in the core of the moon, under its dust layer. Tunnels led down into the darkness, once we reached the skull of the rat.

"Isn't this exciting? My name is Virgil." Virgil, the guy in the white bathrobe introduced himself. We continued on in the dark, the beams from the eyes of our cat leading us onward in the darkness.

We came to a great chamber and it looked like we were inside of a block of cheese with holes in it. That was the shape, yet this was a wrinkled green surface of some kind of rotting mineral. All the tunnels were carved into the putrid core of the moon. We went further; Virgil told us about himself, until the cat meowed and Cory told him in English that the cat wanted him to stop talking.

We came to another great chamber and in this one we found the orange garbed vermin piled. They wore clothing and accessories and lay heaped and dead. All of them had bristling fur, most of it was brown. Their long pink tails were all severed and ended in caps of dried blood. The cat meowed, telling us something of them:

"These criminals were all killed." Cory translated. "The cat says they are rat men bodies, their tails taken as trophies."

"Barbaric." Virgil objected, staring at the dead. Since he was ahead of me I saw the shadow look into his eyes. Then it pulled him from his path, his white robe flailing. Virgil screamed in terror as he fell to the green ground that squished like soggy cheese beneath our feet.

"Don't help him." Cory suggested.

"Help me, help me!" Virgil begged me. Then the shadow raked his back and tore through the white robe. He whimpered from the claws. I could see that the claws had drawn blood, savaging him. "You just going to stand there and watch?"

"I have to go." I told Virgil. I know I sounded sorry to leave him, that is all I could do. I kept going, hearing his screams. The massive shadow cat was using him as a cat toy, swatting him around behind us. His cries and whimpers never quieted.

The moon shadow beast was behind us and had Virgil. "Gawd, please kill me. Oh my god, let me die!" Virgil was crying during moments when he wasn't being sliced and bitten and batted around by the playful monster kitten. I was crying as I walked along.

Finally we arrived at another chamber and here a small orb of light burned dimly. It did not make the shadows of the cats flinch. They had another person there already, she knelt with her dress spilled around her and her hair in a raven flux. Her arms were up in offering to the cat before us.

Our guide vanished and we saw only this new cat before us. The woman who knelt used one arm to try and lift her dress back up. The cat blinked at her to leave it and she raised her hand back up. Virgil fell next to her and he was all red and tattered. He coughed.

The umbra sphinx behind the cat put one lion's paw on his head. "I can show mercy." Cory translated. There was a crunch as his skull was crushed, ending his life. Two of the orange garbed rat men came and dragged away the body with difficulty. When the spectacle did not divert our gaze the cat licked his paw and looked in turn at each of us.

I knelt, stunned by the sight of this creature. This cat was of the Egyptian hairless breed and he had a crown like Pharaoh. His crown was different though. He had earrings that looked like they were made of ice and the gemstones on his crown looked the same. His crown was of stripes of white and a dull red or brown color. His eyes pierced into our souls.

"What is it that you come here for?" Cory asked Sam, translating for the cat.

"To destroy you, moon beast!" He rushed forward and he was caught up by the jaws of the shadows of the cat. As all of its shadows flirted their teeth into him, he screamed out: "Are you going to do nothing?"

He dropped his weapon and it landed near me with a sick squishing noise into the green stuff we stood upon. My nostrils were burning and I felt sick. The smell was so rancid I had not even felt it on my pallet. Suddenly it hit me in nauseating waves. Whatever tunnels we were in smelled of death and putrescence. The noxious gasses were in my mouth, my lungs, my stomach. I knelt and vomited.

"That's it then? You just going to start breathing their gut gas and belch? Got no fight in you?" Sam wanted me to look up.

I didn't look away from the cat, my head on the green ground. Then I could hear him being torn apart and gurgling above me. Bits of him rained down, and I was sprinkled with his insides, and drenched in his blood.

"My name is Ket. What is your name?" Cory asked me, translating the meowing of the powerful cat ruler.

"I'm Lord." I replied, gagging and getting back up onto my fists. I was kneeling and leaning forward on my fists.

"The goddess has smiled for the conquest of this place. Should I use such favor for you? What do you want?" Ket asked, meowing, and Cory spoke the words.

"Breathe life into my child." I stared.

"For a worshiper of Bastet, my mother, this child should cry out right now and suckle from her mother. You are not." Ket told me, in Cory's voice.

"What must I do, for that favor?" I asked. Cory said something to the cat, meowing carefully. Ket looked at my crow and looked ready to pounce, only did not. Ket stared at me for a long time before he meowed:

"I am only a half god. You are a mortal that can walk otherworldly paths. I have such terrible use for your feet." Ket decided. "I will purchase you with my blessing."

"You want me to serve you?" I asked. Ket nodded.

"Always: you will serve my command, so that she will continue to breathe with my blessing upon her." Ket meowed in finality and Cory came to me as he spoke. Ket went past the woman, and I did not see her nudity, as I watched the cat going. Ket vanished.

I found I was kneeling upon the floor of the hospital as I was before, in the green chambers and tunnels of the moon. I was still sludged in Sam. I looked to where Ket was, my eyes following him to my child.

The cat found her bundled in her swaddle in the crib. Isidore had gone into the bathroom and left the body there. She was waiting for them to take it away. She had woken up and prepared it and left it as an offering for Cory's 'gathering' to come.

Seeing her there I wanted to look, keeping my eyes on Ket. Ket leaned down onto her and put his cat lips on her baby lips. Then he exhaled his breath into her. He looked at me and meowed and vanished.

The dawn broke and sunlight burned away all nightmare and illusion. I got up, sobbing in horror. She was not moving or anything, she was still quite dead. I started stripping off my blood soaked rags. I put on a blanket and took her up into my arms.

It felt okay just holding her there in the sunrise. I hummed to her, regretting wherever I had gone. I should have stayed by her side. Now she was leaving, gone with the daybreak. I was crying, wishing that Ket was real, that I wasn't broken.

My burning eyes closed and I fell asleep there in the chair. Isidore woke me, smiling strangely. She looked awful, she had cried herself till her eyes were dark and swollen. She was holding Persephone and feeding her. I felt sick.

Then I could hear the sucking sound. I leaned forward, staring with more intensity than I had at the cats. Persephone was breathing and already able to grip her mother's hair. Isidore looked amazed, bewildered.

"She's strong." She whispered in awe, her voice breaking into a kind of laugh. "I love her."