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I would either heal or continue to torment myself. I pointed at the entry on the menu. “This is what I’m getting. It’s spicy, so if you haven’t had something spicy before, I recommend you get something a little gentler on your stomach. I’ll share a bite of mine with you so you can try it.”
As I doubted the kitten could read, I took the time to explain the entire menu to her. When I got to the poultry section, a Cornish game hen bathed in a lemon cream sauce excited her so much she squeaked. Laughing, I promised she could have it. It took a few minutes to calm her down enough to discover she didn’t understand the sides, resulting in me promising I’d get her a selection to try.
The extras would go home with us, and we’d feast on leftovers later.
As Garnet couldn’t sit on the chair and eat, I adjusted the table so she had enough space to enjoy her meal without feeling cramped. The waitress returned with my drink and a platter of saucers filled with servings of milk for the carbunclo kitten.
Garnet trembled from her excitement, but she contained herself, waiting until the waitress had all the little dishes lined up before sniffing at them all. Making squeaking sounds, she tasted one.
Judging from her haste to drink as much as possible so it wouldn’t escape her, I would be spending a great deal of money providing the kitten with milks safe for her consumption.
Ah, well. Easy come, easy go.
I kept an eye on which of the milks she liked best, and when the waitress returned, I ordered her a larger bowl of that one. Between sessions of drinking her milk, Garnet purred and washed her face.
I hoped she’d have enough room for her real meal when it arrived.
While Garnet drank and I waited for my meal, I sipped my tea and began the process of reviewing my plans for handling the investigation. I would need to adjust for Garnet.
I only trusted the titanium dragons to a certain degree. Excluding the kitten from some elements of the investigation protected us both. She couldn’t betray what she didn’t know, and if nobody thought she knew anything, she might escape from being targeted.
I would do my best to protect her, even if it meant having to play a little less at being an ordinary human and begin pursuing some of the dangerous elements of my heritage.
Both my parents believed waking the destructive side of my pedigree would take a little work and effort on my part.
But only a little.
I had taken every precaution to avoid taking any risk that might result in conjuring fire or controlling heat. My mother had warned me that my heritage might wake something more dangerous than her flames or my father’s shadows.
I considered calling my father to ask what other abilities I might acquire should my ancestry haunt me. With my intent to seek out those behind the attacks on both pilgrims and brothel workers, I expected I’d find out how much of a weapon my parents had brought to life.
When I stopped and thought about it, I marveled over how good of a job my parents had done making certain I didn’t become anything other than what I wanted to become.
I’d never aspired to become a dragon, and so they had focused me on my dreams rather than theirs.
I had become a cop.
But then life had gone sideways on me, as it tended to do, and the dream had changed.
Erik had swept into my life, and I’d thrown away everything I’d worked on for so long to protect him and his successes. Peering through the lenses of the past, I worried I’d made the wrong choice. What might we have built together?
The waitress returned with our food, and I requested more of Garnet’s preferred milk before I settled in to eat, keeping an eye on the kitten and taking the time to cut up her pieces the few times she appeared to struggle with conquering her chicken. The sides came in individual dishes, and I spooned a sampling of everything onto the edge of her plate, telling her what it was before she tried it.
She turned her nose up at the spinach, which suited me just fine, attacked the asparagus with amusing ferocity, and gobbled down every speck of mashed potatoes, leaving me with none. I thought about ordering more, but I accepted that I owned a potato-thieving kitten, and if I wanted to have any for myself, I would order us our own shares.
I couldn’t even blame her. The next time I spoke to my mother, I would ask her if I had been a potato-thieving fiend when she’d fed it to me for the first time.
No, I wouldn’t wait. After I paid the bill, I would go to a phone store, pick up a cell, get a plan with some form of internet, and rejoin the real world. Once I gathered sufficient nerve to call, I would tell her I’d gotten the phone in Dragon Heights while passing through, leaving her to wonder where I lurked in the world.
It wasn’t much, but I would reclaim one part of my life.
With that decision made, I finished my meal, waited for the carbunclo to stuff herself silly, and waved for the waitress to pay the bill and get a bag for everything the kitten hadn’t managed to shovel into her bottomless pit of a stomach.
After paying, the waitress returned with a bag, and she presented a glass jar of milk. “On the house for your little one,” she announced. “The bottle is charmed to always stay a good temperature for milk, so you can leave that on the counter for her as needed. It’s rare we have such behaved feline guests, so this is her prize.”
I smiled at the kitten. “You hear that, Garnet? You’re the best little kitten, so you get this milk all to yourself.”
Garnet mewed, purred, and wobbled across the table in her effort to snuggle with the chilled bottle. To prevent a disaster, I tucked the bottle away with our leftovers, captured the beast, and thanked the waitress for the wonderful meal and her generosity.