Apprentice Cat: Toby's Tale Book 1 (Master Cat Series) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Apprentice Cat

  Copyright Notice

  Acknowledgments

  Free Book Offer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Free Book Offer

  Also by Virginia Ripple

  You Might Enjoy

  Author Bio

  Apprentice Cat

  A Master Cat Novel

  Toby’s Tale Book 1

  Copyright Notice

  Copyright © 2012 by Virginia Ripple. All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Virginia Ripple

  Photo image courtesy of Eric Isselée/Bigstock.com

  Acknowledgments

  To my husband, who has always been my biggest cheerleader and greatest supporter no matter how strange my ideas might seem, and to my family, who believed in me and were always there to give me great ideas

  Free Book Offer

  Go to www.virginiaripple.com to download your FREE book today!

  Chapter 1

  The old mage shivered as the cold damp air worked its way through his robe. His torch sputtered and hissed as water dripped from the low ceiling. Edging carefully past an overturned sarcophagus, he wondered again if he should have told anyone else what they had planned. But who? He shoved the thought aside. He’d made assurances everything he and his companion knew would be found by the High Council. Now was not the time to second guess. Accomplish the mission. Wonder about should haves later.

  He had studied the old maps of the High Council lower passages and compared them to the maps the Brothers kept of the city crypts. Somewhere there was a door leading from this crypt to one of the hallways just below the council chambers. Blast this dank vault. How was he supposed to see anything with his torch flickering so erratically? His aged hand slid across a crack in the stone wall. He traced it from floor to head height. This was the door. He pressed his ear to the cool stone. Were those voices?

  “R’VELthay.” He could hear them now. Two males.

  “They captured him at a meeting.”

  “I assume you interrogated him.”

  “Yes. He was very informative. Of course, I made sure he was cared for after he’d answered all of our questions.”

  He heard the muted sound of cloth being pulled over fur. The old mage pressed his hands against the wall. Who? Was it Victor? Surely it wasn’t Kiyoshi. The black and brown cat was a master at infiltration. His stomach tightened with the thought. He closed his eyes and prayed to the One that he was wrong. The mage opened his eyes. The cats on the other side of the wall had begun speaking again.

  “How hideous.”

  “Gargantua Felis Asesino: The Great Cat Killer. A favorite pet of mine.”

  “A spider bite did this?”

  “A sting, actually. I thought it fitting.”

  The torch fell to the ground as the old mage pushed away from the stone door and closed his eyes again, fighting the sting of tears. He drew in a deep breath. The musty, decay-laden air threatened to choke him. Foolish old man. They knew. They knew all along. He curled his hand into a fist, wanting to pound the wall. He blinked his eyes in the darkness. Keep it together. Still a job to do. He placed his ear back to the wall.

  “What of his companion? Do we know where he is?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” The mage sucked in a breath, his heart beat loudly in his ears. He heard the soft sound of paws pacing toward the door.

  “Right here.”

  The door scraped as it opened, spilling the old mage onto the floor. He looked into the yellow eyes of a large gray tom. Turning his head he saw the misshapen lump of fur the two had been discussing. He crawled to his old friend’s side, the mottled black and brown fur unmistakable. He reached to touch the once silken body.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

  The old mage stared hard at the gray tom whose whiskers were splayed wide. He could feel the strain of the muscles in his jaw as he clenched his teeth. His vision dimmed to pinpoints, centering on the yellow-eyed cat.

  “A single feather touch can rupture the victim’s skin and cause it to expel an acidic fluid that would eat through metal.”

  The sound of a rough tongue on fur from behind caught the mage’s attention. He turned to look at the large black tom near the crumpled body of his companion. The cat looked up at him.

  “Quite a nasty experience, I would imagine.”

  The old mage stared at the sleek black tom across from him. The cat’s piercing green eyes made the human’s neck hair stand on end. Dragging his gaze away, he saw a wooden barrel behind the cat. The old mage looked further down the hall toward more barrels. He turned his head to see the other end of the passage. More barrels. His brows furrowed. He could hear the swish, thump of the cats’ tails.

  Cautiously, the human crawled toward the wooden drum nearest him, keeping the black tom within his sight. He reached out to touch the wood. He slowly brought his fingers to his nose, his eyes never leaving the black cat, to smell the fine black powder on them. It smelled like the residue leftover from fireworks. The black tom’s eyes were twinkling, the cat’s whiskers splayed wide. The mage’s eyes widened as he realized what they were planning.

  “You won’t —”

  “Get away with this? But I already have.”

  A piercing pain in his neck. He slapped a hand at it, flinging something large and furry against the floor. An orange and green spider scuttled away as it tucked its stinger back under its abdomen. The poison burned its way down the old man’s arms. The room reeled. He crashed to the floor, gashing his head on the wall as he fell. His body began twitching. Too late. He’d come too late. The gray tom paced over to his master and sat down, gracefully wrapping his furry tail around his paws. Curiousity gleamed from their eyes. The black tom’s tail swished back and forth as if he were watching a mouse he intended to pounce on.

  “What will happen to him?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve never seen a human stung before, so it should prove to be interesting. Most likely he’ll live, but his mind be will gone.”

  The black tom swung his head toward his henchman. His ears flattened.

  “Most likely? This is not the time to experiment.”

  “Not to worry, master. Even if he still has more brains than a fool, no one will believe anything he says. I’ve made sure of that.”

  “You had better be correct.”

  The gray tom said nothing. He sat watching the old mage as his twitching grew less and foam began to ooze from his mouth. The man blinked slowly. He could hear the gentle sucking his eyelids made as they parted. The cats became blurry images.

  “Then let us alert the High Council of this man’s treachery.” The black tom’s voice sounded like it was coming from a long metal tube. As he watched the gray and black blurs slip out the catacomb door, he wondered if anyone would be able to decode the documents he’d left behind.

  “Wrong. Do it again.”

  Toby grimaced, flattening his ears and wrinkling his nose. It was a spell he’d done right a hundred times, but never when his mother was watching. She always made him as nervous as a
field mouse venturing into the open during winter.

  “Pulling faces will not make the writing appear coherently,” she scolded, piercing yellow eyes never wavering in her scrutiny. “Do it again and this time concentrate.”

  The orange tom schooled his expression with difficulty. How he wanted to growl at her, make her understand that he knew “pulling faces” would not make the spell work any better. In fact, when he was alone, he could make any writing appear crisp, clean and in modern language without so much as a twitch of a whisker. Yet every time he tried to perform it for his mother the words would blur together until they formed a solid ink snake, which would then slither off the page, down the table leg and through the cracks in the floor.

  Collecting his willpower, he stared at the complicated scrawls upon the page. He stretched out his mind to touch the first inked letter, pulling it into the air just above the time-worn paper. Satisfied that the first letter was stable, he drew the others to it one by one until every word was floating inches above where they had been. With great caution, Toby sent a tendril of will at the writing, hoping that this time the letters would cooperate and transform themselves into something at least resembling modern language.

  The letters began to tremble, then slowly rotate. Toby spun more willpower into the process until the letters were spinning so fast they were little more than tiny balls of black. Just as it seemed the process would never cease, he felt the little snap that meant the letters were ready to be pulled into a new form. So far so good, he thought. It was further than he had managed the last time. With a quick twist of thought, he halted the spinning letters. The ink spread into long loops and flattened into miniscule blobs as it coalesced, becoming words that could be understood by any mage in the present time.

  Just as the ink was settling back onto the page, there was a knock at the door. With the speed of a blue racer, the letters ran together and slithered off the page, down the table leg and into the cracks in the floor to join its predecessors. Toby sighed. A moment more and the words would have sunk into the paper. After that, only a reversing spell would have put them back into the form they had originally been in.

  Toby chanced a glance at his mother. She looked steadily back at her only son, her whiskers clamped together in irritation, her ears swiveled outward. He knew that look very well. Without looking away, she twitched her tail at the closed door.

  “Enter,” she called as the door opened on its own.

  “Oh,” the startled housekeeper replied. “I’m sorry Mistress. I thought the Master had forgotten to remove the no disturbin’ sign again. I was jus’ on m’ way out and thought I should pop in to check the firewood.”

  “No apology necessary, Mariam,” replied the black queen, never taking her eyes from her son. “We were just drilling in the art of Transferring Ancient Glyphs, something young Toby needs practice in if he ever wants to be accepted into the King’s Academy of Mages. Please go about your chore.”

  “Yes, mum. Won’t be but a moment.”

  Toby stared resolutely at the scarred table, listening to the housekeeper bustle about the fireplace. He could feel his mother’s eyes boring into his fur. He wished he could join the inky snakes in their dark crevices beneath the floorboards. The housekeeper was as good as her word and was gone moments later. She closed the workroom door on her way out, saying nothing as she left. He listened as the outer door leading to the street clicked shut.

  He was alone with his taskmaster now. He waited. The clock on the mantle ticked the minutes by. She said nothing. He curled his tail tighter around his toes. Still she said nothing. He slowly hunched himself on the table, trying to make himself appear smaller. And yet the tongue lashing he was expecting did not occur. Steeling himself, he slowly looked up at the black queen. Yellow eyes pierced to his heart. The only indication that she was not a royal black statue was the rhythmic tapping of her tail tip.

  “Well?”

  Toby wasn’t sure what answer she expected him to give. She growled in impatience, making him shudder. If she weren’t his mother, he wasn’t sure he’d escape with his fur attached if he said what he was really thinking. Even so, she had taken a clump from his hide on occasion, though certainly not without provocation. Toby worried that this might be one of those times whether he remained silent or not.

  “Don’t just lay there like a worthless dish rag. One interruption does not mean the lesson is over.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  He sat up, turning toward the open book. Try as he might, though, he could not order his thoughts to make the writing on the page even begin to hover over the paper. His mother hissed. Toby didn’t need to turn around to know what his mother looked like. Her ears would be flattened, her eyes slit in annoyance.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how to begin.”

  “Of course I haven’t. You just won’t give me a chance. You never give me a chance. All you ever do is criticize.”

  The hair on the black queen rose along her sleek back. She bared her sharp teeth, growling and raised a paw to cuff the orange tom. Toby stood his ground, waiting for the paw to fall upon his ears.

  “How dare you speak to me that way,” she hissed. “I’m your mother. I brought you into this world and I can take you out again.”

  “Then do it, mother, because obviously I can’t please you.”

  “Maybe I should, you ungrateful whelp,” she exclaimed, voice rising to a yowl.

  They stood, staring at each other, fluffed for battle. The moments inched by in dreadful silence. The paw still hung in the air, ready to strike, yet never fell. Hair by hair, their fur flattened, though the air crackled with leftover anger. Toby turned and leapt to the open window sill. He glanced at his mother’s reflection in the window pane. Her mouth was open, as if she were about to call him back. He didn’t want to hear another sound from her. Without a backward glance, he jumped from the sill to the ground.

  Toby landed between the hedges with a thud, not caring what creatures he startled. She can be so unreasonable, he steamed. She knows I study every night until Master O’dorn comes home. What does she think I do? Look at the pictures and drool all over myself? The orange tom stalked down the worn footpath toward the garden gate. He jerked his tail at the latch, which snapped open, then butted the heavy wooden gate with his head. It didn’t budge. He slashed his tail to the side, making the gate slam open against the stonework fence. His ears flattened as he slunk past the rattling gate. This was Master O’dorn’s prize herb garden and deserved his respect. He could hear his mother lecturing him about strong emotions and lack of magical control. He growled and snapped at a dust mote floating past his nose.

  Toby trotted to the huge oak past the gate, its trunk worn and scarred. As thoughts of what his mother had said to him rumbled and rolled through his mind, he vigorously clawed at the tree trunk, its bark completely gone as far up as he could easily reach. The way she had virtually accused him of being an idiot made his hair stand out in rage.

  The bark-less trunk wasn’t doing it for him this time. He needed something he could really get his claws into. He peered through the low branches, backing away from the oak. There, about halfway up, was the perfect branch, straight, solid and with plenty of bark to claw at. With a wiggle of his behind, Toby shot toward the tree, swarming up its length until he reached his destination. It was perfect. He set to work scratching with all his might. Eventually Toby was able to calm down. Logic began to inject itself into his thoughts.

  She never actually called him an idiot. In fact, in a strange way, she seemed to be saying the exact opposite. Never once, in all the times she had drilled him at lessons, had she given up on him. He had given her enough reasons to believe he was incapable of doing even basic magic, but still she persisted. That didn’t seem like the reaction of someone who considered her pupil stupid. Did it?

  P
erhaps I was being dull-witted. Toby sighed. The orange tom peered through the leaves, noting that fall would soon be here in the slight change of coloring. He lifted his nose to sniff the crisp evening air. Yes, fall was quickly approaching. The time for him to go to the academy would be very soon. With another heavy sigh, he put his head on his paws, flattening himself out along the branch. It was so obvious why his mother was in such a foul mood. Time was growing short and he had yet to display any real abilities. Add that to the problems Master O’dorn seemed to be having in the Council and it was enough to wear any cat’s patience thin.

  Toby peered down at a lower branch where a bird’s nest lay empty. He had watched in interest as the little sparrows had built it, then hatched their young. He wondered what it was like for the hatchlings to snuggle together while they slept and be taught how to hunt worms. How did their parents react to their failures? To Toby it seemed they didn’t mind because the little birds soon learned how to hunt for themselves. Too soon, they had flown away to begin families of their own.

  The little family was nothing like his own. His mother had spent a portion of her time each day teaching him to hunt when he was a kitten. That had been almost as miserable an experience as learning magic was from her now. He chuckled as he remembered her frustrated expression when he had mistakenly caught Master O’dorn’s bedroom slipper rather than the mouse he had been chasing.

  She had said nothing, only given him that same look she’d bestowed upon him earlier today and stalked away. When Toby’s father had returned home that night, she recounted the entire episode. When his father had laughed, the black queen had hissed at him and told him that if he thought it was so funny, he could be responsible for teaching his son the difference between rodents and footwear. She then stalked from the room.