Asprin, Robert Lynn – Catwoman – Tiger Hunt (With Lynn Abbey)

A shiver raced down Selina’s spine. It was the same shiver as when she pulled the costume over her arms and legs. She was uncannily alert without knowing why. Then she got a look at Rose’s face. Costumed as Catwoman, Selina stalked in an unsuspecting city, but she was a thief, not a predator. Catwoman stole, and although she had killed, it was never personal. She’d never put death on someone’s face the way the gray kitten put it on Rose’s.

While Selina’s heart thumped against her ribs, the battered blond woman saw death, feared it, accepted it, and finally invited it. Selina was forced her heart to beat normally again when the kitten—the little gray tiger kitten who’d been captured, imprisoned, and jostled beyond his feline comprehension—succumbed to his instincts. He sprang at those wide-open eyes above him.

If he’d been a gray tiger, or even a tiger kitten, there surely would have been blood and blindness in the mission. Instead the kitten went flying as Rose let out a shriek that stunned all the other women, leaving them witless while she tumbled out of her chair. Rose tried to escape, but her arms and legs would not behave. Her flailing movements, the peculiar breathy sounds she made after she stopped shrieking awoke primitive resonances:

Flee. Death comes, all-mighty and inevitable. Flee. Don’t think. Don’t look back. The beast of death is feeding. Flee, if you fear the beast. Flee, if you would see the sun again.

It took a special kind of stupid—not just human stupid, but civilized human stupid—to disobey that primal voice. Mother Joseph was the first to disobey. She shook off her deepest instincts with a shudder, then she was kneeling on the floor, giving orders to the others as she struggled to keep Rose from crawling under the sink.