Still Life, With Cats

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

After covering too many war zones, Joshua returns to his grandparents' place to find the house neglected and the patio filled with cats.

He wants a refuge from the death he witnessed, but the cat yowls remind him of the cries of the wounded. No matter how hard he tries, the cats keep appearing.

So, he finally calls for help, help that proves a little weird, a little strange, but maybe just right.

"Like early Ray Bradbury, Rusch has the ability to switch on a universal dark."

—The Times of London

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Mar 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386558484

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

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Still Life with Cats

Still Life with Cats

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

WMG Publishing Inc.

Contents

Still Life, With Cats

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About the Author

Still Life, With Cats

The feral cats in the courtyard were having sex again. Joshua pulled his pillow over his head, and tried to go back to sleep. No matter how many times he got animal control out here, he never seemed to win.

A thousand cats had to live in the trees behind the old stone mansion. A thousand cats, and a thousand more being made every single day.

No one had warned him about the cats when he moved in.

Or the raccoons. They made even worse sounds during sex than the cats. Cats were bad enough; they sounded like panicked children or terrified women, bringing back old memories from his years in Beirut, Bosnia, and Iraq.

But raccoons sounded like vicious lions ripping up a corpse. On his first night in the mansion, he grabbed his largest flashlight and ventured outside to see what was causing the noise—his curse, always to run toward danger instead of away from it—and expected to see a bear mauling some skanky kid who’d been smoking meth near the back of the property.

Instead, he startled two raccoons having a private (well, not really private, more like intimate) moment. One screeched and scurried toward him, while the other fell over backwards.

He ran all the way back to the mansion, laughing harder than he had in years. Fortunately, the raccoon didn’t give pursuit.

Outside his window, the sex continued. One particularly throaty yowl sounded like Stuben’s cameraman right after the roadside bomb sliced off his left leg.

The image—blood spurting, Stuben covered with shrapnel crawling toward his injured friend, the truck burning behind them—already flashed in front of Joshua’s eyes.

He wouldn’t get any more sleep, maybe not for a few days.

He rolled over and looked at the clock alarm he didn’t need. Six a.m. A long day of nothing ahead. But if he stayed in bed, he would either haul out his gun and shoot the damn cats—which was illegal, since he was just inside the city limits—or he would try to sleep and would