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"I told you not to visit me like this anymore!" the girl scolded, but an unconscious smile crept across her face, and the creature meowing on the sill knew she was pleased.
It leapt into the house and she closed the window, sending a wary look outside. Her heartbeat pulsed nervously, but she need not have worried. Darkness swallowed the cars and poplar trees, enveloping the streets in stillness and silence.
She still tried to sound stern. "It's not safe out at night." She picked up the creature, cradling it against her chest. It put a playful paw on her shoulder. A purring rumble filled the room.
"What if the bear gets you? The news says it's still out there. It could attack you too."
She buried her face in its fur, seeming hurt by the idea. The creature's claws flexed against her shoulder to reassure her. Nothing could hurt it. Besides, what waited outside was not a bear.
She sighed. "You'd better stay the night." She set the creature down on the bed. "I'll get you dinner, too."
It curled into a shadowy ball as she opened the door and stepped down the hall. In the other room, the TV was playing; a man and a woman argued anxiously about the maulings on the news. When the girl came, they stopped and questioned her with obligatory curiosity. In a quiet, distant voice, she told them she was hungry. Then she slipped back into her room with a can of tuna, which she opened.
The smell of preserved fish irritated the creature's senses. It ate to indulge her, and when she pushed the can away and laid down on the bed, the creature draped itself across her stomach. She wrapped her arms around it with a contented smile, gazing into its eyes, and did not notice how its body bled into the shadows that filled the room, wrapping around her and merging into the walls to spill into the sky and the streets of the town outside.
The humans who summoned it from beyond the shadows saw what they wanted, since its true form was too vast for the human mind. Some saw a god; others saw calamity. Somehow, this child had looked at its form of terror and incomprehensible darkness and seen a little cat with yellow eyes and velvet paws, a creature that she could take care of and love. Her best friend, she'd called it once, with a hitch in her voice. The creature had little use for such human fantasies.
But it didn't mind lying in her arms, listening to the brief contractions of her heart, the slow, steady thump of a heartbeat it did not wish to stop. It had never cared about such things before. It let her think it was purring, and as her hand stroked it on the head, it closed two of its eyes and pretended to sleep.
When it grew hungry, there were others in the house it could eat.