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Miss Kitty Fantastico’s claws sink in deep enough to draw blood.
Tara yelps and pulls back, cradling her hand before the blood can spatter on Willow’s bedspread. “Ow!”
The kitten’s eyes are like a pair of solar eclipses, her pupils have gone huge and round and the yellow rims of her irises have reduced to faint gold outlines. Her ears are pivoted back on her head, her muscles have gone taut, her tail has puffed out to triple in size and her little bottom shakes. She’s still locked on to Tara and Tara is still her prey.
“Oh, kitty, no!” Willow reaches out before Tara can get her mouth to cooperate well enough to warn her not to. Willow’s never had a cat before, all of her experience is with fish and human rat girls. She doesn’t know she’s about to make things worse.
But she doesn’t.
Willow grabs Miss Kitty and Miss Kitty is instantly docile once more, like she’d been ten seconds earlier before Tara tried to join their little party on the bed after her long day of classes. Her pupils shrink back down to little slits and she flops boneless into Willow’s hold with the tiniest, cutest little mrrp sound that, at any other time, would have made Tara’s entire chest ache with more love than the human body is designed to hold.
But right now it leaves a cold dread blooming inside her.
Willow holds Miss Kitty up to her face. “We are not so large on the violent teenage rebellion in this family, young lady,” she scolds.
Miss Kitty bumps her forehead against Willow’s nose and begins purring loudly.
Willow’s resolve melts instantly and her eyes go misty as she smiles. “Ohh,” she coos. “She says she didn’t mean to!” She nuzzles the cat and glances at Tara over the puff of cheerful black and white fur. “Are you okay, baby?”
“I’m f—f—fine.” Tara smiles back and hopes the turn of her mouth doesn’t look as forced as it feels. Her right hand is hot, the pain is sharp and pulses through her bloodstream with each thudding heartbeat, but it’s her stomach that’s doing most of the work in making her wobbly-legged and unsteady. Miss Kitty’s sudden aggression twisted her insides into one of those tricky knots that only sailors know how to do. Her easy reversion cinches those knots tighter.
Tara turns away and runs cool water over her injured hand in the dorm room sink. There are four puncture marks into her skin, one straight through the knuckle of her pointer finger and another piercing into her thumb. Blood that’s so perfectly crimson it might have come from a cartoon wells up in small beads and in dotted streaks from the scratches that run down to her wrist from when she’d pulled away.
“Maybe she just got so excited you were petting her,” Willow suggests. She flips Miss Kitty over like a baby and buries her face in her soft belly while Miss Kitty purrs like a motorboat and kneads into the air. “Just, like, ‘oh, hey, cuddles and snuggles and love for kitties!’ and then— bam! Total spazz mode.”
“I’m s—sure that’s what it is.”
The water numbs the sting of the claw marks but it does nothing for the anxious squirming in her belly.
Is the blood too red? Is that a sign she didn’t know she was looking for?
Her mom always looks human on the outside. Even in the end, when she was gaunt and grey and didn’t much look like her mom, her mom still never looked like a demon.
When Tara looks into the mirror, she still sees herself. No bumpies or fangs and funny little swirlies on her skin.
Her whole life, she always wanted to hide this face, for being too plain, too round, too sad. For being her and therefore never being enough of anything.
The last few months, though, she’s spotted her reflection and seen someone she liked. She’s seen someone happy. She’s seen someone beloved. Willow’s affection glowed off her skin like the day’s sunlight reflected off the moon. Tara would look up from her book and catch her reflection in this same mirror, or in the window of the Magic Box on the way to another Scooby Study Session, or even warped across the surface of a shiny car while she waited at a stoplight and she’d see an unfamiliar crinkle at the edges of her eyes. She would find herself surprised by her own smile or by how thoughtlessly she’d tuck her hair behind her ears and leave her face unobscured. She had dreamed of someday seeing someone else in that reflection and now, instead, she was so much more glad to see herself than she ever had been.
But October has arrived too quickly. She has not even two weeks left and that brilliant shine has left her face when she looks at it now. She’s seeing her fate and future creep in and she knows she isn’t the only one.
Animals are attuned to the natural world in a way most people aren’t. They sense things humans can’t, like dogs that run away before an earthquake or fish that swim up into the inlets before a fire. There are cats in nursing homes that lie down to sleep on the chest of the person who will die next.
Tara’s not dying, exactly, but in some ways she might as well be. And Miss Kitty Fantastico knows it.
Miss Kitty can smell the demon under Tara’s skin. She can see the transformation coming. She knows that Tara won’t be Tara for long, and she definitely won’t be the beautiful, radiant, beloved Tara she wants to stay. Soon Tara will be something wicked, monstrous, and foul. In two weeks, Tara will become exactly what Willow and the Gang hunt down.
She’s been hoping this whole time that she can find her way out of it. Her mom taught her all of this magic and working with Willow has made her more powerful, she should be able to find a way to lock the demon inside of herself and shut it off. She picked UC Sunnydale for a reason, for the magic that runs stronger across leylines and in the air like the charge before lightning strikes.
So far Tara has read her way through the campus library, overcharged her credit card at the Magic Box on old books of obscure lore, and even flipped through Mister Giles’s personal collection when she was supposed to be helping Willow digitize his archive over the summer. But every tome she’s read has been a dead end. The Wiccan club couldn’t conjure a Tinkerbell light to save their lives, Mister Bogarty had his neck torn open, and all of the Scoobies are… They’re so nice, but they’re Willow’s friends. And when they learn what Tara is, and that she’s been lying to them all this time, they’ll hardly want to help her.
Tara’s never been that helpful to them anyway. Every spell she teaches Willow, Willow takes and improves and surpasses her. And she loves her for it, she’s so proud, but it means the Scoobies have never really needed Tara .
So she should go.
She doesn’t want to. She wants to be the beautiful Tara in the reflection, she wants to be beside Willow and to stroke Miss Kitty’s fur and be included when the Scoobies make jokes. But she knows she should go. It’s only going to get worse after her birthday, when the demon takes over, without her family to use the old rituals and keep her in check. Willow deserves to be with someone who isn’t a monster. Miss Kitty deserves to be owned by someone who doesn’t frighten her.
Tara bites her lips and presses the paper towel hard against her hand to absorb the blood. The sharp pain keeps her tears at bay, or it does until Willow touches her on the elbow.
Tara jumps.
“Sorry!” says Willow. “Sorry. I just, I got the Neosporin. Loaded with all the necessary sporiny goodness.” She holds up a little yellow tube with a white cap, flat and rolled up at the end, already half-empty. They go through a lot of Neosporin, what with all the monster hunting.
Willow reaches out, but doesn’t grab Tara’s hand and waits outstretched until Tara gives in, unable to resist her charm and the magnet pull of open Willow palm. Willow’s fingers slip into hers and just like that night in the laundry room, Tara feels that thrill of connection course between them. Willow holds Tara’s hand gently, tenderly, with soft and perfect Willow fingers and runs the greasy antibiotic goop over the four scratch marks.
The coolness of the ointment eases away some of the sting, and Tara looks up from the enthralling sight of her hand in Willow’s, up to Willow’s face with its warmth and care, and she sees, from the corner of her eye, herself.
The glow is back. The Tara she likes has slipped back in. Once again, she is someone worth comforting and worth tending to. She feels delicate and cherished and connected.
She feels complete.
Tara doesn’t turn to look in the mirror, just lets her eyes fill up with Willow and her Willowy perfection. She can see herself well enough from just this, her girlfriend’s face and their entwined hands. The perfect closed loop between them, Tara’s knowledge and Willow’s eager, amazing power that radiates off of her like sunlight. Tara has never felt anything like it before and she knows that this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. If she leaves now, she’ll never feel anything like this again.
So she won’t.
Whatever it takes, she will do it to stay here. To keep this. To be this.
She’ll stay up all night, all week. There is a spell, somewhere, because there has to be. And if there isn’t, she’ll make her own. She will find a way to lock away that true, horrible self until the only version of her that is left is the one in Willow’s eyes.
When she’s finished, and Tara’s hand is slick and soothed and very thoroughly Band-Aided, Willow bends and kisses Tara’s fingertips, just beyond the shimmer of the ointment, then turns over Tara’s hand to kiss her open palm. “Does that feel any better?”
“Oh, yes.” Tara can only speak in a whisper, her love for Willow and her new resolve ignite inside her and burn the pain away to a distant memory. “It’s perfect.”