Noctivagant

[Patricus I]

He kicked harder. He yanked his leg up and tried to dislodge the attacker. He thought to hit it with the object in his hand, but just as he realized he might actually drown, Philip remembered this was a dream. Wake up! He repeated it to himself over and over. Usually it worked fine, but that grip held him there. Then for no reason at all, he was freed. He swam for the surface, shiny object fallen into the depths with careless abandon. At the surface, he coughed and rubbed the pressure from his eyes just as he realized there was a figure at the edge of the water. He tried to say her name but his coughs erupted more water from his mouth. He found the edge instead. When he pulled himself up, he was shocked to find it wasn’t Nimeda who watched over him.

He looked behind him just in case something was about to lunge out of the water. There was nothing, but that didn’t stop him from moving a safe distance aside and sliding down the wall to catch his breath.

He wished for a towel, but a curious voice echoed a distant memory: why would you need one? and with a thoughtful furrow of his brow, he was dry a moment later. That did nothing for his hair, he was sure, so he took great care to smooth it properly back into place.

Meanwhile, the girl watched him like a curious insect. That distant look in her eye reminded him so strongly of Nimeda, he almost wondered if she was an elaborate disguise. Until he glimpsed something he hadn’t till then. It had the deepest black fur and slunk around the girl’s ankles. Actually, there were two of them.

“Cats?” He’d not dreamed of animals before. Tuuru qualified more as a plant than a creature. The longer he watched, the cats moved with such strange sways that he wasn’t altogether sure they were cats.

The girl still hadn’t spoken. “Do you speak English?” he asked her. She seemed of Chinese descent. Her age was indeterminable. She may be thirty plus or minus a few decades for all he knew. She had the same innocent carelessness that draped Nimeda, and the same lack of care for modesty, and so he tried to fix the point of his eyes upon hers or the beady globes of those cats when all of a sudden another one was rubbing up against his leg. He didn’t react beyond watching it to make sure it didn’t snag the cashmere fibers of his pants, but he noticed it didn’t have the languid flow of a cat. It moved like a predator testing its prey. Upon looking around, he realized there were more moving out of the shadows.

Circling.

And he wondered if he’d narrowly escaped one danger just to find himself snared by another.

Wake up.

This time, when he stayed fixed in the dream, he realized it wasn’t the monster in the water that tethered him here.  It was her. 

He rose to his feet swiftly. ”Let me wake up.”

The girl didn’t say anything except to scoop up one of the black cats and nuzzle it in her arms. 
If he couldn’t wake, Philip tried to shift elsewhere. Anywhere.