2.

Back up the stairs to the city, one small hand trailing over the metal handrail. The green paint was chipped and faded under her fingers. As soon as she left the cool safety of the train station, Tamara felt the city pressing down on her. It exhaled, sending a swirling, white dust into her face, and she froze. She held her breath, pressing her lips closed against the chalky, dried air. Clenched in one sweaty fist were two small white pills. The pressure that began to build in her lungs, the silent scream for oxygen, just barely kept her from being crushed into the grimy, cracked sidewalk, disappearing forever. She froze, terrified, in the gritty, orange light of a streetlamp. There was a graveyard across the street, a quiet piece of transported hillside, as fragile and preserved as the sickly trees that lined the sidewalk. Tamara walked quickly, awkwardly towards it.

She took off her shoes before walking inside the graveyard, curling her toes in the prickly, dead grass. Closer to the graves the air smelled sickly, of decaying flowers, but she could breathe again. Tamara knelt beside a small stone, running her hand across the illegible carvings. She touched the two dates, her fingertip lingering on the tiny dash that stood between them. Someone was sobbing behind her, on the other side of the graveyard, and she felt a stab of jealousy. She decided to cry over the weathered, anonymous stone in front of her.

Wiping her eyes and turning to leave a few minutes later, Tamara caught sight of the graveyard’s other occupant. It was a man without skin. The grungy fabric of his shirt clung to sharp, white shoulder bones, and she could see him shaking. She watched his heart beat, dry and helpless, inside his open chest. His brittle skeleton was obscenely exposed, crumbling slowly under glancing blows, intended for someone else. When he looked up at her, there was no moisture on his cheeks from the empty, dark sockets. She wondered if it hurt more to cry without tears.

- - - - - - - -

The cat had moved again. That was the first thing she noticed when she stepped back into her dark room. One of the curtains had kept bleeding, and the dark, sticky liquid had pooled on the floor by the open window. That was the second thing. She ran to the bathroom, placing one pill carefully on the edge of a white, enamel sink. It spun slowly for a moment before trembling to a stop. She swallowed the second pill, then rested both hands on the edge of the counter and stared into the mirror. There was a thin crack, a vein that ran diagonally through it, and one corner had broken off. The glass was dark and liquid, as if smoke, trapped inside, was sloshing back and forth. Which meant that the cat was nearby.

The cat was a mystery to her. It had appeared with the mirror one day on the floor below hers, glaring balefully at everyone who walked by. After a week, when it was obvious that no one was going to claim either of them, she had moved the mirror into her room. The next day the cat had been sitting beside it, and he had just never left.

The cat was black. It had poisonous yellow eyes, and ragged wounds that never quite seemed to heal. It was the size of a small child, and half of its left front paw was missing. She had never seen it move. The only thing reassuring her that it was, in fact, a living cat was that it blinked occasionally, and even that was done with great, premeditated malice. At the moment, the cat was sitting upright, tail curled snugly around its body. It was staring at Tamara’s reflection in the mirror, and when she saw its glowing eyes on her, she shivered. The cat blinked.

There were at least two cats inside the mangled black body, and she called this one Tezca. He was the one with eyes that shone like streetlights, sitting stiffly in front of a smoky piece of glass. The one that seemed to be made of leftover pieces of darkness, stitched together and turned to stone. The other cat was Yahua, and he was the one that spread like butter across the rug. A lazy, liquid shadow. Mostly, since he had appeared in her apartment, the cat was Yahua.

Tamara let her clothes crumple to the wine-red carpet, spreading her arms and relaxing her shoulders. She stood for a moment in the cool darkness, closing her eyes and feeling the tension seep out of her. It was a thick, black tar, leaking out of her skin and coating her hands and forearms. At first contact with the air, it began to wither and crumble like caked mud, and Tamara brushed it off with one hand.

The cat was Yahua again, sprawled, boneless, across the cold counter, when she walked back through the little bathroom. It was grinning unpleasantly at her. Tamara gave it a stern look, and hurried into the next room. She began to wipe down the bleeding curtain, the sticky, viscous liquid smearing itself wetly across both her hands. Though she had been watching the door closely, Yahua had somehow managed to move to the couch without her seeing, and he was busy digging his claws into the thick cushions.

The doorbell to her apartment rang, and the sound tasted jagged and metallic in her mouth. She pulled open the door, and Ix filled the wooden frame. She had a nimbus of spiky, candy-pink hair around her head and ashes in her eyes, and she filled the room with her small body as she slid inside. An old, leather dog collar hung around her neck. She stared at Tamara's hands.

"Who'd ya kill?" she asked, her mouth curling into a brash grin. Her lips were smeared with emergency-red, and a short, black dress had adhered itself to her body.

"Curtain's bleeding again," Tamara answered shortly. Yahua was Tezca now, and he had moved again, and was sitting perched on top of a bookshelf. He didn't approve of Ix, or of the way she swooped in to scratch behind his ears when she got the chance. He stared balefully down at both of them.

Tamara went back to cleaning up, and Ix dropped onto the couch with a sigh. She swung her legs up and curled them over the armrest, idly watching the cat. She listened to music coming from inside her own head, heavy and primal, and tapped one foot lightly against the air. The two women were quiet together, no need to talk, as the afternoon shadows lengthened and spread across the room.