Then they were both hastily gone, and Scarlet was left with a box that meowed at her again, this time in harmony.
She looked at it in uncertainly for several moments while its contents protested, then sighed and carefully opened the box. It wasn’t like she could leave them in there indefinitely.
Two curious faces greeted her, with big blinking eyes in juvenile furry faces. One appeared to be a fluffy cream-colored Siamese mix, the other was a faintly striped gray tabby with white feet and ear-tips. They meowed plaintively and reached tiny, furry paws up the sides of the box at her.
“I should have told Mrs. Grant that Conall would be playing an entire charity concert for her damned wedding,” Scarlet muttered. She ignored the urge to scoop the kittens out of their box to see if they were as soft as they looked and went to investigate the boxes that Travis had indicated she would also need.
One of them proved to have cans of kitten food and a selection of toys and dishes. The other had a shallow plastic tub and several bags of scented sand. As Scarlet puzzled over the instructions printed on the side of one of the bags, there was a crash and she turned to find that the kittens had toppled the box over on her desk and were spilling eagerly out of it.
“Oh, no,” she said, rising to her feet. “There’s important paperwork...”
Clearly understanding her, the cream-colored kitten squatted down and began to pee.
Scarlet was across the room in less than a heartbeat, picking the startled kitten up and holding it up off of her desk as it squawked and finished its business over the floor and on Scarlet’s shoes.
Swearing under her breath, Scarlet carried the squirming creature to the bathroom, where it could do the least harm, and closed it in.
When she turned back to the desk, the gray kitten was walking through the pee for a pile of paperwork, leaving wet footprints behind it.
“I don’t think so...”
Scarlet caught it just as it stepped onto the latest letter from Beehag’s lawyer (though she sourly considered that urine pawprints could only improve the correspondence), and tossed her gently in to join the first.
She growled under her breath as she cleaned up the mess, already plotting out the amendment to her contract with Conall. She set up the litter box according to the directions and slipped it into the bathroom... to find only the gray kitten inside, blinking innocently up at her.
A frantic search of the small room with the gray kitten trying to rub against her ankles and twine between her feet led to escalating panic. Scarlet wondered how she was going to explain to Conall that she’d lost one of his kittens within ten minutes of their arrival.
“The island isn’t that big,” she thought fiercely, and just as she settled in to widen her search, the cream kitten launched itself from the tiny space above the cabinet onto her shoulder and alighted with a triumphant trill.
“How did you even get up there?” Scarlet demanded of it, as it purred and rubbed its tiny face against her cheek. She pulled it off her shoulder and held it at arms length while it swung playful paws in her direction. She set it down with its sibling and sidled backwards out of the room, nudging them back into the bathroom with her foot multiple times as she closed the door carefully behind her.
A single peach paw stretched out from underneath the door, investigated everything it could reach, and withdrew.
Scarlet stared, narrow-eyed, at the place the paw had been, and went cautiously back to her desk.
At first, the sound of their play—meows and pounces and scrambling claws—was distracting. But Scarlet soon tuned it out, turning to the pile of mail that Graham had dropped on her desk along with the kittens.
Much of it was to be expected: bills, advertisements, and end of the year license renewals. But there was one large manila envelope, addressed to Scarlet personally, that was a curiosity.
It had a Vermont return address, but a New York postscript, and when Scarlet opened it, it was thick and full of irregular paperwork. A glossy brochure fell out alone.
There was a letter of introduction that Scarlet read twice, growing more and more livid, and then she flipped through the rest of the material.
She was holding Gizelle’s past in her hands. An unofficial copy of her birth certificate, a xerox of the newspaper article involving the car accident that killed her parents, photographs from when she was a child, and the scientists’ records of her time in Beehag’s zoo.
She picked up her phone, now fully charged, and dialed a familiar number.
“Do you realize what time it is, Scarlet?”
“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” Scarlet snarled, not caring that it was probably three in the morning in Maryland. “I asked you to find out about Gizelle’s past, not find her a quiet little mental hospital to lock her up in.”
“What are you talking about?” Tony asked at the other end of the line after a puzzled pause.
“This little package that you had your friend at Safe Shifters send me has your fingerprints all over it.”
There was another tired and confused moment of silence on the line. “My literal fingerprints?” Tony asked. “What is Safe Shifters?”
He certainly sounded innocently befuddled.