Page 74 of The Forest of Lost Souls

The cat sits just inside the doorway, a change of posture that makes it seem bigger than when it was standing, because its proud head is lifted higher and its powerful chest revealed.

“Azrael, angel of death,” Regis says, not because he believes such nonsense, but because the creature—by its size, color, and commanding stare—is so impressive that he understands how others might believe such a legend, especially the yokels who live in this benighted county.

“I wonder who started that silliness,” Wendy says.

“Oh good, you don’t believe it. I knew you wouldn’t,” he says, as if her dismissal of the superstition will cause the intruder to evaporate like a threat in a dream.

The cougar remains as solid as the refrigerator.

Some bacon is left on a serving plate. Maybe the lion will like the bacon. Or maybe the bacon will only whet its appetite.

“I’ve seen her a lot,” Wendy says, “and her appearance has never been related to anyone’s death, at least not any I knew of.”

“How many is ‘a lot’?”

“Oh, three or four times a year. The first was twenty-four years ago when I was six years old.”

Something about that statement is peculiar, but the stress of the moment has rendered his thought process slower than his heart rate. Regis looks from Wendy to the cat to Wendy before he knows what sounded wrong and can shape his puzzlement into a sentence. “Twenty-four years ago? Do mountain lions live that long?”

“No. Maybe twelve to fifteen years in the wild.”

“Then this must be the offspring of the albino cat you saw twenty-four years ago. Azrael Two.”

“She’s the same one,” Wendy says with the quiet confidence of an anime girl who has scaled mountains and faced down dragons. “But she’s not Azrael. She never was. And she’s not just a cougar. She’s here as Rhadamanthus.”

The lion lifts its chin and assumes an even nobler look than the pose it took when first sitting this side of the doorway, as though confirming the name Wendy has attributed to it.

“Randa who?” Regis asks.

“Rhadamanthus,” Wendy says, and she spells it. “A lesser known figure in Greek mythology.”

The behavior of the mountain lion is so strange that Regis is beginning to feel, if not safe, at least not in immediate peril in its presence. That is the upside of this odd moment. The downside is that he’s beginning to wonder if Wendy is in fact the wise and true and always reliable anime heroine that he wants her to be, or if she is instead so far down the river of eccentricity from him that they will never be in the same boat together.

“Lesser known figure,” he says.

“He was a divine judge who lived—lives—in the underworld.”

“Judge.”

“It was said that Rhadamanthus judged souls when they were sent to him.”

“And now he’s a female albino cougar?”

“No, you silly. Be careful about mocking forces you don’t understand. Anyway, what you see isn’t a real cougar. The creature here before us is an avatar of Rhadamanthus.”

“And you know this—how?”

“The fortuneteller enlightened me eighteen years ago, when I told her about the lion that people called Azrael.”

“So when Rhadamanthus goes on vacation from the underworld, he takes the form of an albino mountain lion.”

“Now you’re getting even sillier,” she says, and she pauses to eat a piece of cinnamon roll that remains on her plate. “He’s not here on vacation.”

“What’s he here for?”

“The seer didn’t say anything about that, but I figure he’s collecting evidence for the trials ahead.”

“What trials?”

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