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For a long time the things that Hob understood had been known as “truth”; and then for a while as “Lollardism”; and then “heresy.” Hob took a step back from all of that right around Wat Tyler and for a long time no one cared about his opinions on religion, so he was careful not to have any except what was fed to him by the nearest priest. He held the opinion though: cats belonged to witches and the devil.
And then he met a man granting immortality in the White Horse in 1389 and thought it all was a joke, right up until the sheriff’s men beat his skull in and left him on the roadside. There was no reward in catching him—he wasn’t the leader of the band, he was just a hired thug. He would have assumed that he’d been thumped in the head and left for dead, except he woke up lying in what he later learned was his own brains. Even the rest of the band—they only wanted Ketil—surrounded him, and for a while he assumed the chips of skull and what he would in later centuries call grey matter belonged to them. He sat up and sobbed and went through the usual traumatic process of finding that everyone around him was dead, then checked their pockets (the sheriff’s men had robbed them back, the bastards), then hauled himself and his concussion down the road to the farm where a widow had been letting him spend some of his nights and meals in return for the odd bit of coin and warmth of his body. The widow fed him eels out of the river and told him to get the hell out, so Hob got the hell out, and assumed he’d been given his life by grace of some arbitrary, perpetually bemused god.
The knifing, five years later, was hard to shrug off, partially because he woke up with the good knife still inside him. Only then did he begin to seriously consider that he had in fact made a covenant back at the White Horse, and he was likely the Devil’s man now.
Which was when the cat thing started. He didn’t notice it much—cats were ubiquitous in barns, and if he was avoiding notice in a landholder’s hayloft for the night, he wasn’t going to begrudge the mangey bastards the exchange of fleas. He’d been on a job when, as they were all waiting for sundown, a she-cat wedged herself in the corner behind Hob and not at all quietly gave birth, getting effluvia and kittens on his tunic. Hob had been disgusted, and his mates had ribbed him, but he hadn’t let them take the kittens and do whatever with them (the river was still nearby).
He supposed he thought of that widow with her three sons and how at first she’d let him in only because he could pay, and the she offered him a bit more if he’d stay the night and keep other men from the house, and Hob thought it was a more than fair exchange and gave her his best for it, and pulled out so as not to get her pregnant again for courtesy’s sake. Something about the she-cat picking him to sit between her and the rest of the gang reminded him of that woman.
And Hob slept rough often and had no love for rats. The kittens were dry and squeaking by the time they left that hideout.
So cats liked him, and would eye him no matter whether he looked at them or not, and would beg for scraps on the docks. Eleanor found it very amusing, and he assured her that a woman needed a cat to keep out vermin in her marriage and brought her a kitten of a sandy color like her hair. She laughed and cooed over it and when Robyn was born the nurse was ordered to keep Eleanor’s cat out, because it wanted nothing more than to get in the cradle with him and everyone knew that cats stole the breath of babes. This was truth.
When Robyn was ten and near the size of a grown men he came home with an eye blacked and a lip split and a bag of kittens he’d pulled out of the river, and Hob had to explain that thrashing the boys whose fathers worked on the Gadlen estate meant those boys would grow up to be men who remembered the man they’d worked for had beat them. It was maybe the first time he’d seen his own rage in his son’s eyes. “No one will ever do that in front of me again,” he said with a venom that a Tudor-era father was not accustomed to hearing from his child. And while Hob didn’t care much for cats either way (aside from Eleanor’s tremendous beast, who was a friend of the family) and he didn’t appreciate the backtalk from his son—he was proud of him.
Later, he wondered if he should have curbed that anger.
By the time Robyn was killed there was a veritable colony of cats living on the Gadlen estate. They didn’t help in the witch trial, which was a sham anyway. In Hob’s years on the street, he developed a certain distaste for cats—competitors for the same food scraps, frequently—that was tempered by their almost unvarying willingness to curl up with him and keep him warm when he was on the streets.
By the time he got back on his feet he had a profound affection for the various absurdly-named ship’s cats he met while sailing, and then he didn’t think much more about them. Occasionally he would acquire the odd cat, the same way he acquired the odd paramour.
All this is to say that Hob didn’t think about the cat thing until he brought Dream of the Endless to his flat for the first time.
Dream’s movements were always elegant, but in stillness he had a certain awkwardness—he didn’t truly belong in the narrow hallway of Hob’s building, and there was nothing that could convince reality that he did. When he was speaking or moving it wasn’t noticeable, but as Hob got his key in the door and Dream waited to be let in he had the same awkwardness of anybody standing without anything to do but watch. Hob turned the lock and held the door open for him, and Dream smiled his tiny smile of appreciation and swanned in to accept Hob’s hospitality at long fucking last .
And a volley of hissing and spitting went up from Hob’s couch.
Hob forgot hospitality and almost crashed into Dream as he crammed himself into the flat to see what the hell was happening. He knew that Turtle was skittish, but he’d never heard her get aggressive before.
Dream, for his part, looked perfectly unsurprised. He tilted his head back and peered down his nose at Hob’s grey shorthair—pulled into a Halloween stance on the arm of his couch, claws digging into the leather—and then turned to look at Hob.
“You have adopted,” he observed.
Turtle responded to his voice with a growl Hob had never heard before.
Hob set his bookbag on the floor gently, not wanting to startle her further. “I’m sorry, she never does this.”
Normally Turtle greeted him at the end of the day by climbing up to his shoulders and rubbing herself against his head, meowing the whole time. When Hob had people over, she usually hid until she felt safe enough to venture out and investigate their company. Never, ever, had he seen her like this.
“It is understandable,” Dream said. “I will not intrude.”
For a moment Hob was afraid that Dream was going to turn around and exit the flat and the evening would be over because Hob’s cat didn’t like Dream. But instead Dream sat down directly on the floor and folded his legs under him in a way that made Hob’s knees ache in sympathy, and put his hands in his lap and waited. After a moment he yawned, as though deliberately. Hob had never seen him yawn before; he curled his tongue up rather like a cat and didn’t bother to cover his mouth.
Hob pretended that this was perfectly normal houseguest behavior and moved slowly over to pick up his cat. Turtle was trembling rather badly, and when Hob scooped her up she pushed her head into his bicep, hiding.
“Oh, my love,” he said, squishing her a bit. To Dream he said, “Let me put her in her hiding place, see if she calms down.”
Dream said nothing but continued to sit very straight on the floor. Hob decided that meant he was fine with it, and took Turtle into the bedroom closet and popped her on top of the big Rubbermaid containers. She had commandeered an old cotton jumper of his that he’d shrunk in the wash, refusing any number of more expensive pet beds in favor of something Hob would happily have given to Oxfam. Now, by sheer composition of shed hair, the jumper was probably more Turtle than cotton.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked her as she settled on her jumper.
Her eyes were huge. She began frantically licking the back of his hand. He rubbed under her chin, but she would much rather groom the little hairs on his fingers than receive her favorite chin scratches.
“I’ll be back, ’cos we have a guest.”
He pushed his cheek into the top of her head and left her there, leaving the closet door just a bit cracked in case she changed her mind.
Dream was still sitting just inside of the front door.
“She’s hiding for now,” Hob said. “You can get up if you like.”
“I am perfectly comfortable,” Dream said.
Hob considered that Dream was going to spend the rest of the evening sitting on the hardwood in front of the door, and then considered whether Dream had ever been shy about asserting himself before.
“Would you like a cushion?” he asked.
“That would be pleasant,” Dream agreed.
Hob took a pillow from the couch, dusted the little gray hairs off of it, and almost threw it to Dream before he remembered himself and crossed the room to offer it to him. Instead of sitting on it, Dream tucked it under his knee and sat alertly while Hob went about pouring him a drink and then talking about the wine tour of Japan he’d taken the year before he opened the New Inn. Dream had missed out on most of the twentieth century, and so had no context for the scale of winemaking in the Pacific after the Second World War, but he listened attentively and sipped his very exclusive Furano ice wine. Hob had gone to the cellar door outside Furano Station to buy from the limited batch.
When Hob began to yawn—covering his mouth—Dream at last stood up. “I will not disturb your rest,” he said. “I will see you again soon, Hob Gadling.” He handed him back the pillow.
After Dream left and Hob put the glasses in the sink, he a bit sadly went to adjust the pillow on the couch. There were several long black hairs on it—not the texture he might expect from Dream’s hair, but the airy fineness of a cat’s hair. Hob thought of where it had been tucked under Dream’s knee and wondered if Dream, too, had a cat, one that left hair on his trousers.
For the rest of the week, when he came home Turtle did not run to greet him at the door, but instead was sitting determinedly on the pillow and made him come grovel to her.
Turtle Soup Gadling—what? You can name a cat anything these days—was an indoor cat. That had been something of a culture shock for Hob, but he had read the studies about bird deaths and automobile accidents and cat lifespans, and since he did not know how to instruct his pets not to die—it devastated him every time—he thought the best solution was to simply never introduce his cat to the outside, so she never knew what she was missing.
Turtle was the product of an unspayed mother who came in through Hob’s window, gave birth under his bed, and then consented to live in Hob’s sink for three days while he went about arranging homes and veterinary care for her and her four other kittens. Hob found Turtle’s mother suspiciously amicable for a feral—these he trapped regularly and took to have them fixed before re-releasing them—and so named her “Mama Sink” and sent her and one kitten to live with an employee and the employee’s young son. Mama Sink and Sparkle, Turtle’s sister, were apparently quite happy according to Margot’s son’s Instagram, in which Mama Sink was frequently portrayed either sitting in the sink or removing toothpaste from her fur.
Turtle was a gray shorthair tabby with a pouch to her belly. Hob went back and forth on allowing her to free feed, because when he did she got fat, but when he scheduled her feedings she woke him up in the morning by jumping on his head. She was very vocal, and liked to stand in the shower after he had used it, licking the glass door free of water droplets. Leaving the sink tap to drip did not curb this behavior. Neither did buying her a circulating water fountain so that she could have what she thought was “fresher” water, but that did cure her feline acne.
Hob told Dream all about Turtle at their next meeting, somewhat afraid that his friend would never agree to visit his home again because his cat had thrown a tantrum. Dream listened with a certain softness between his eyes and cheekbones.
“I quite like cats,” he said, when Hob was done.
Hob suspected that, had he shared this information in 1489, Hob would have assumed that he was indeed some kind of witch or devil, no matter what he said, and spent the next century being a crazy cat man instead of sourcing venison pasties.
“Do you have cats?” he asked, already picturing a matte-black Maine Coon roaming Dream’s palace in the Dreaming. Hob had no concept for what that looked like—in his head it was the Gadlen estate, but larger and all in black.
Dream blinked once as though considering. “I have a raven,” he said. “Cats do not suit my purposes.”
“Cats dislike serving purposes other than their own,” Hob said, thinking of how Turtle had begged him for a sweet roll out of the bag by standing up on her back legs and putting her claws in his thigh. “What do you do with a raven? Is he a pet? Or a familiar, or?”
Dream was silent for a long moment before saying, “He is a rescue,” with a little quirk in the corner of his mouth that said Hob was not in on the joke.
Before he left—Hob had an evening class—Dream said, “I have a gift that I wish you to pass on to Turtle Soup.”
“Oh?” Hob asked. It was hard to keep a straight face when Dream insisted on using his cat’s full name.
And Dream handed him a cat toy. It was a banana, not quite the length of Hob’s hand and filled with small beads.
Hob never knew what to do when someone handed him a toy banana. “Thank you,” he said. “I will… make sure she gets this.” He tucked it into the front pocket of his bag. “Maybe you can bring your raven next time. Or we can visit the Tower.”
Dream blinked once, then said gravely, “I will extend your invitation.”
For twenty-four hours, Turtle left the banana on the corner of the rug and examined it suspiciously. By the next time Hob saw Dream again, he was able to report that Turtle loved the gift and alternated between going up and down the hallway tossing it in the air for herself and dragging it into the bed with Hob and tucking it under his pillow. Hob had found this behavior very cute until Turtle buried the banana in her litter box—to what end, he did not know—at which point he had to enact a firm “no bananas in bed” policy. He did not make this joke to Dream, for fear of having to explain it.
“He said what about me?!” Matthew demanded.
The next time Dream came to visit—Hob had opinions about The Shawshank Redemption that necessitated Dream’s reading the short story and then watching the movie—Turtle vanished into the bedroom as soon as she spotted Dream coming through the door. Because this was better behavior, Hob got out the prescription wet food for feline kidney health—the stuff the strays went wild for and he used to bait his small animal traps—and filled her dish with it, as a treat.
When the movie was over, Dream was frowning, Hob’s paperback anthology still in his hands.
“There are adaptations of the other stories?” he asked.
As Hob went to put on Stand By Me , he heard the sound of Turtle eating in the kitchen. He poked his head in to make sure it was from her own dish and not the little pot of grass he kept in case she had a tummy upset, then set up on the couch with Dream.
Dream enjoyed Stand By Me much more than Shawshank , and Hob felt anxious about his decision to show his friend a prison movie. But Dream’s eyes glowed during the story-within-a-story about the mass vomiting at the pie-eating competition. Hob began making guesses about Dream’s sense of humor, and figured he had a choice either to start Dream on Stephen King’s oeuvre or to introduce him to classic British horror.
“There are many ways. To explore a story,” Dream said, sounding pleased.
Hob looked down and saw that Turtle was slowly approaching Dream’s black-socked foot where it was poking over the edge of the couch. He drew no attention to it.
“I mean, if it’s adaptations you like, we’ve got plenty.” A vengeful little part of him remembered Shaxberd. “You like plays, right? They did a film of Marlowe’s Edward II with Tilda Swinton, it’s perfectly surreal. Oh! And you have to read Christie! She’s astonishing . I asked her out twice; she wouldn't give me the time of day. Lucky bastard, Mallowan was. I’ll give you my copy of Styles —I love that one, it’s a double twist, and we can go see The Mousetrap if you like her.”
Turtle’s nose touched Dream’s toes, and she locked into place as though startled to have found herself there. Dream seemed not surprised at all, and looked down at her very slowly, and then turned his head away to look back at Hob. There was a sort of air of dismissal about it. Then Dream yawned again. It appeared to have no correspondence with either the hour or Dream’s level of alertness.
The day after that visit, Hob was making his morning tea when there was a tap on his window. Turtle gave Hob a look of mortal betrayal and bolted from the kitchen, as she usually did when she was incapable of understanding why Hob would make such horrible frightening unexpected sounds. Hob could not explain to her that it wasn’t him, but a talking raven returning a book.
“Did he like it?” Hob asked, sliding the screen up high enough to let Matthew in. Ravens were surprisingly large.
“He said he did,” Matthew said. Hob got the impression that, if he could, he would be frowning in confusion. “He sounded… mad about it, though? Loosh asked if he wanted the next one but he told me to ask if you have a copy.”
“’Course I do,” Hob said, and went to fetch Murder on the Links . “Can I get you anything for breakfast? I could do you a rasher.”
“Don’t fry it,” Matthew requested.
Hob laid out a few strips of raw bacon for Matthew and picked up Turtle when she poked her head around the corner to eye the massive bird on the counter. He didn’t want her getting any ideas.
“Oh!” Matthew said. He had the same peculiar ventriloquist skill that Dream sometimes displayed, of talking while his mouth was full with no apparent use of lips or voice. “Dream told me about her. My wife had a cat. Got big into therapy animals when she was working with kids on the spectrum.”
This last gave Hob context clues sufficient to erase the mental image of two American ravens co-parenting a cat together. “I had a dog after the war,” he offered. “It helped.”
“Yeah, that woulda been the way to go,” Matthew said cryptically, and swallowed the last of his bacon. “Thanks! I might be back for the next one.”
It seemed physically unlikely that Matthew could fly off with a paperback, but, watching him, Hob concluded he did not understand the velocity of a laden raven.
Matthew did indeed come back for the next several books in the Hercule Poirot series, muttering about passenger pigeons. Hob took Dream to see The Mousetrap . The entire time, Dream sat with his arms folded and a faint scowl on his face. He only broke the posture when Hob leaned over to whisper that the clock was original to the first showing in 1952.
“It was excellent,” he growled, waiting in line to get their picture taken beside the wooden counter. “I believe the title was taken from Hamlet .”
Hob, incapable of understanding why Dream was so visibly distressed by the longest-running play on the West End while claiming to have enjoyed it, gritted his teeth at the mention of Shaxberd. “Your little protégé is inescapable in the Western canon,” he said tartly.
Dream’s face puckered in a different way, brow furrowing in confusion. “I had nothing to do with Hamlet ,” he said. “That was someone else.”
“It had to be someone else, because Will Shaxberd was a bloody thief and if anyone else had thought to write down—” He stopped and plastered a smile for the photograph. Dream looked at him, then turned a blank face toward the camera.
“Yes,” Dream said dryly. “You may be comforted by Ms. Christie’s originality.”
Dream declined to visit Hob’s home that night. Hob sat on the couch and ground his teeth until Turtle jumped on his chest and purred.
“I have received a film recommendation,” Dream announced, showing up unexpectedly at Hob’s door one night while he was grading.
Hob looked over his shoulder. Turtle was standing on the unread essays, and if she spooked when Dream appeared she would likely knock them all off the table. “Yeah, we can do that,” he said, taking a step back to let Dream in. “I might not be able to pay much attention, hope it’s something I’ve seen before.”
“It is a film called Meet Joe Black ,” Dream said.
Hob frowned. “Really?”
He liked Anthony Hopkins as much as the next person, but he couldn't say he’d heard anyone recommend it. He’d gone to see it in theaters, mostly because of the Star Wars trailer before it, though he had the good grace to stick around for the show. The three-hour show.
“Who recommended it to you?”
“My sister,” Dream said.
As Hob was coming to terms with a world where Dream of the Endless had a sister, Dream furrowed his brow and added, “She also recommended Mary Poppins .”
Right. Of course Dream’s sister would be a deeply weird person. Why would Hob ever think otherwise.
To Hob’s surprise, Turtle had bristled when Dream appeared but was not trying to escape. She had lain down on the essays, which would become a problem shortly but for now was fine.
Hob put on the film and was passively enjoying the sound of Anthony Hopkins acting against himself as he circled the term bagdatikos on the student’s essay and made a note to look up that in the history of paper—when Dream said, very loudly and sounding disgusted, “Really?”
Turtle stiffened. Hob looked up. Brad Pitt had emerged from behind a pillar.
“What?” Hob asked.
Dream looked not at the screen and not at Hob, but instead at Turtle. He made an odd noise in his throat, apparently at her, then turned back to the screen. He leaned all the way back on the couch—no longer perching with his knees drawn up to his chest and his toes sticking out over the edge of the couch, but reclining against Hob’s shins.
Hob very deliberately did not react. Dream was solid but not warm, and Hob was more afraid of spooking him than spooking Turtle.
“Well. He’s rather… unimpressive.”
Hob couldn’t help it; he leaned back and laughed, and Turtle leapt off the table and ran out of the room, scattering essays on the carpet. “You find Brad Pitt unimpressive?”
“They were doing so well,” Dream said. “Perhaps Bill Parrish might come into contact with Death in the shape of himself, as his voice suggested.” He folded his arms.
From over his shoulder, Hob couldn’t see whether he was working into a proper sulk. He leaned down to pick up the essays Turtle had given her remarks on. “Might make the rest of the movie a bit weird.”
In a tone of sudden disdain, Dream asked, “Do you find him impressive?”
“Compared to Anthony Hopkins? In this film? Not particularly. Wait until he does the Cajun accent.” Hob stacked his papers. “Have you read the play it’s based on?”
Dream tilted his head all the way back. His expression was smooth; his hair fell back from his forehead and touched Hob’s knee; his Adam’s apple made a prominent angle in his pale throat.
“It was based on a play?” he asked.
“Loosely,” Hob allowed. “An Italian one.”
Dream turned back to watch the screen. He made no more comments during the film, but when it became clear there was a romantic relationship between Joe and Bill Parrish’s daughter, Dream let out a “Tch.” Hob assumed he’d finally understood what Hob had meant by making it a bit weird to have Anthony Hopkins playing both roles.
Turtle crept back to the couch and perched imperiously over Hob’s shoulder. She sometimes batted at the end of his pen, but when he shooed her off she sat huddled on the couch, looking suspiciously at the back of Dream’s head.
At the end of the film Dream stood—Turtle sank her claws into the leather but held her ground—announced, “I must have words with my sister,” and promptly strode out the door.
Hob turned to look at Turtle, who was slowly relaxing on the back of the couch. She appeared to be visibly deflating. “I don’t get it either,” he admitted.
Hob was making empanadas for a faculty potluck—Wilson kept bringing in egg mayo sandwiches, and Hob was both repulsed and determined to offer something with actual flavor for his coworkers to eat—when the knock came on the door. Since he hadn’t had to buzz anyone in, he knew it was either Dream or a neighbor. Either way, he shouted, “Hang on, I have beef hands!” and went to the sink to scrub off the blood before answering the door.
It was Dream, to Hob’s pleasant surprise. “What are beef hands?”
“Hands that have touched raw beef,” Hob explained. “I’m cooking. Come on in.”
With his ground beef spinning in the microwave to thaw, Hob set up his cutting board and began slicing cucumbers. “What did your sister think of your film review?”
Dream scowled. “I will not be watching Mary Poppins .”
“I think you might be a bit outside of the general demographic.”
One of the Persian cucumbers came out white and crunchy when he chopped it. The other was oddly translucent. Hob frowned and popped a slice into his mouth. It was squishy but inoffensive.
“I think this one froze,” he mused. He held a slice out for Dream. “Does this taste okay?” It was mostly a joke. Dream drank when Hob offered him beverages; he had never expressed interest in food.
Instead of reaching out and taking it, Dream ducked his head and accepted it with his mouth. Just a quick brush of his lips against Hob’s fingers, and then he stood. Hob, for his part, went absolutely rigid in place and did not look up.
He could hear Dream chew, and then swallow. “It tastes of time but not of decay.”
Hob was torn somewhere between is he flirting with me or does he think that’s a normal thing to do? and is the first food he accepted from me really a questionable cucumber slice?
“Great,” he said. His voice was too low. He cleared his throat and moved on to slicing the tomatoes.
“I have come to pay my respects to Turtle Soup,” Dream announced.
Hob set down his knife. For a moment he worried that this was Dream’s very roundabout way of breaking it to Hob that Turtle had died, somewhere here in the apartment while Hob was cooking, because it had been decades since Hob had heard the term used in any way other than the funerary. Then he remembered that Dream probably meant it in the old way—he was here, in Hob’s home, and he wanted to declare himself to Turtle.
“What is going on with you and my cat?” Hob asked.
Dream was not looking at him. Hob followed his gaze and found Turtle, poking her head around the corner of the butcher block into the kitchen. For a moment they all looked at each other, and then Dream slowly leaned forward into Hob. Hob had enough time to consider whether or not Dream was about to kiss him and moved the vegetable knife to the other side of the counter.
Instead, Dream dragged his cheek across Hob’s.
Hob had lived a long life. At least once, someone had hit him in the face with a cream pie. This, Hob thought, was what he would do if there was something on his face that he wanted to transfer to someone else’s. It was not a nuzzle. It was not particularly affectionate. It was most certainly not a human gesture.
Dream smelled cool and sweet. There was no stubble on his face to catch on Hob’s. When he straightened, there was no scratch of beard burn on his ivory cheek.
He was still looking at Turtle. Hob, completely baffled, looked at his cat. Turtle was still staring at Dream.
“Er,” Hob said.
Very slowly, Dream knelt on the kitchen floor. Hob glanced around, looking for stray blood drops from his ground beef. He hadn’t noticed any, but now that Dream was getting up close and personal with his kitchen floor—was lowering himself onto his elbows to the kitchen floor —Hob was suddenly despairing over his housekeeping.
Dream got onto his hands and knees and just about lay on the kitchen floor. He yawned once. Turtle’s ears swiveled forward, and then back, and then forward again.
Dream and Turtle began very quietly and very slowly to play Red Light Green Light on the kitchen floor. When Turtle’s ears went back, Dream held still and yawned. When her ears relaxed, he slid forward on his belly.
He touched his nose to Turtle’s. There was a moment where they both held very still, and blinked at each other.
Then the microwave went off. Hob turned to yank the door open, but it was too late. Turtle skittered out of sight.
Dream sat up onto his heels. “That went well.”
Hob hauled his plate of raw beef onto the counter and plunged his hands into it to be sure it was thawed. “And, er—what, exactly, was ‘that’?”
“She spoke back this time,” Dream said. He sounded pleased.
Hob paused with his hands in the meat. He opened his mouth, then closed it. Then opened it again.
“You were… talking to my cat?”
Dream looked up at him, his expression smooth and serene. “Of course.”
Having Dream’s head at about chest level was distracting for Hob.
“All right,” he said stupidly; and then, with the proud curiosity of any devoted pet owner, “What did she say?”
“We introduced ourselves,” Dream said. “I told her that I am the Dream of Cats, and that you had introduced her to me as Turtle Soup, and explained the value and rarity of the delicacy when you were introduced to it.”
“I—” Hob was forced to contend with the fact that he had done the pet owner’s equivalent of naming his child Tiffany, or Diamond, or Bentley. Yes, he had eaten turtle soup in the 1750s and ’60s. Yes, he had also eaten mock turtle soup when it was introduced after overfishing, because if he had eaten calf’s hoof jelly of course he wasn’t going to turn up his nose at calf’s head.
He blinked, once or twice, and realized that he was still standing with his hands full of ground beef. That seemed of very little importance compared to the fact that his friend could apparently talk to his cat, and translate .
“She knows her name?” he asked in a voice that perhaps wobbled more than he wanted it to.
“I attempted to explain the significance,” Dream said. He seemed perfectly at home kneeling on the floor. “There are… cultural differences.”
Yes. Cats don’t eat soup. He suspected that Turtle would probably attempt to eat turtle meat, if he ever presented her with it, which he wouldn’t.
“What did she say?” he asked.
Dream stood straight up without bracing himself on anything. In a human his apparent age and size it would have been a display of pronounced athleticism; instead it underscored that Dream was very much not human, and did not have wear and tear on his joints. “She recognized that mine is the prior claim on you, and granted me permission to visit, so long as I do not try to steal you away.”
Hob gave up, washed his hands, and thumped the saute pan onto the stove. “Of course you can talk to cats. Of course. Why wouldn’t you?” He pointed at Dream. “You know what happened after I met you? Cats started to seek me out to give birth on my stuff. Didn’t mention that as a side effect of immortality.” He tipped a splash of cooking oil into the pan.
“That is not a side effect of immortality,” Dream said. “That is a side effect of my company.”
Hob set the heat for the pan. “Yes, what did you call yourself? Dream of Cats?”
“Cats dream,” Dream said, as though it were obvious.
This was true. Hob had watched Turtle’s nose and paws twitching in sleep, and cooed over it quietly.
“I thought you were Dream of the Endless,” said Hob, though he barely understood what that meant.
Dream stood quietly, as though waiting for Hob to say more, and then said, “I am. Of all things that dream. Cats visit my kingdom as often as humans. More often.” He gave an odd one-shouldered shrug, awkward, as though the gesture was not quite natural for him.
Hob waited for his oil to heat and spread. “So if cats like you, and that’s why cats like me now, why doesn’t Turtle like you?”
Dream blinked once, and then said, “Hob Gadling, you understand that I am not human, correct? That I appear human to you, because you are human and because I choose to appear so?”
In light of Dream’s awkward stillness and his Bela Lugosi-level muscles to stand straight up from a squat, this was very fresh in Hob’s mind. “Yes,” he said. He flicked a few droplets of water into the pan, testing the heat. Still too cool.
Dream inclined his head slightly, and his tone was perfectly level, but his gaze under his dark brows suggested that Hob was probably a bit of filling short of an empanada. “And you understand that to stars, I appear as a star; and to drosophila, I appear as a fruit fly.”
“Wait, fruit flies dream?” Hob asked, and then shook his head hard. “Never mind. Yes. You are not human. You just look like one.”
Dream waited, as though he had given a perfectly adequate explanation, and when Hob continued to stare blankly at him, he raised one eyebrow. “And how would you expect Turtle Soup to react, if you were to bring a large and strange cat into your home?”
Hob blinked once, twice. Dream’s eyes looked back levelly.
“But I didn’t bring a cat,” Hob said. “I brought you. And you—” He gestured to Dream’s whole… Dream-ness.
Dream inclined his chin further, staring at Hob. “And I?” he prompted.
“Look like a human.” That was indisputable; Dream was a very unique -looking human, but he definitely looked like a human.
Hob had never seen such a straight face tell him he was a total idiot, and he had over six hundred-fifty years of experience being told that he was a total idiot.
“To you,” Dream said pointedly.
Hob stared at him, and thought about the laws of physics, and thought about the moment that he’d genuinely thought that Dream was going in for a kiss, but instead he had rubbed his cheek on Hob’s. And then he thought about what it meant if a cat rubbed that part of their face on you, and how much Turtle liked her chin scritches and for Hob to drag his fingers along that part of her jaw.
“Did you just scent-mark me ?” Hob asked, incredulous; but he was recontextualizing fast—Turtle’s growls the first time Dream had come into the apartment, and the way he had sat at a respectful distance on a cushion, and the fine black hairs he’d found on the green pillow later. “And what do you mean, you have a prior claim on me?”
“Hob,” Dream said, and it was almost startling to hear just his nickname without the family name behind it; it was informal. “If you have the approval of my family, why would I not seek the approval of your family before attempting to court you?”
Hob had a moment to be intensely grateful that he had set aside the knife, because that was the kind of thing that would make him accidentally chop off a finger, and holding the severed finger back on his hand and waiting for the bone to grow back together would really throw off his cooking schedule for the evening.
“Attempting to what?” he asked. “I have the approval of who ?”
“Whom,” Dream corrected.
“You—”
Hob grabbed for the kitchen towel and wiped his hands, just in case; then made sure that Dream was clear of the plate of raw beef before he hooked his fingers through the loops on his black skinny jeans. Dream never wore a belt. What did he need belt loops for? He stood very close to Dream, almost nose to nose, and held him there against the counter. Dream, for his part, had let his eyes go half-lidded and looked more than his usual default level of smug.
“Did you bring my cat a toy banana instead of making a move on me?” he demanded.
“Not instead of,” Dream said. His hands were on the counter; he seemed perfectly content to let Hob keep him in place. “Before.”
Hob tried to process whether the move had happened yet and, if so, what in the last ten minutes constituted said move.
“Were you fucking with me, with the cucumber thing?” Hob asked.
Dream blinked slowly, catlike, heavy with irony. “I was not, but I could be fucking with you, if you were interested.”
“Christ’s nails,” Hob muttered, and kissed him.
Dream’s lips were as cool as expected, and he was breathing, but his breath smelled like rain—good clean rain, rain as Hob had first known it. It made saliva flood under Hob’s tongue, but he kept it chaste. He had learned the consequences of getting distracted with a pan on the stove one or two housefires ago. Dream leaned forward into him and let out a long sigh through his nose, as of satisfaction. When Hob opened his eyes, he found that Dream was looking at him through faint slivers of blue and black.
Hob thrust a dishtowel into Dream’s hands. “Fuck Wilson and his egg mayo; you’re helping me cook, I did not spend all this time thawing this fucking meat for it to go to waste. Can you eat empanadas? If you want to court me, you have to let me cook for you. Cooking together is terribly sexy.” He glanced over Dream’s shoulder. “Not so much the raw meat aspect.”
Dream reclined slightly against the counter, his head tilting back in the same casually masculine way it had that first time he’d come to him in this century, unexpected and decades late. “I will allow you to feed me,” he conceded.
“Oh, there, I see it. The Dream of Cats thing.”
Hob’s pan was spitting. He tipped the meat into it, and pushed it around with the spoon to break it up. When he set it down, he asked, “What does Turtle call me?”
Dream tilted his head to the side, his gaze flicking upwards the way that people’s do when they’re translating in their heads. “Hob-of-Many-Lives.”