Cat's Claw by Amber Benson Read Free Book Online Page A

live with it or make the person take the curse off. There’s no dry-cleaning service, per se.”
    I shivered. It was like the woman had read my mind.
    “What’s wrong with my aura?” I asked, swallowing hard. “Is it cursed?”
    Curse or no curse, I hadn’t really had any problems with my aura recently (or ever) so maybe I could just ignore whatever was going on. The world of “denial” wasn’t a terrible place to live in. I mean, lots of other people did it every day from what I could see and they weren’t totally Looney Tunes, were they?
    “No, your aura isn’t cursed,” Madame Papillon said, “but there is something strange about it. If I didn’t know better, I would say that your soul was intertwined with another soul, but that’s really only something you ever see in twins. And even that only happens in extremely rare cases.”
    “A twin?” I exclaimed. I’d always wanted to be a twin! I had spent a lot of my childhood feeling incomplete, like there was something missing, but I just didn’t know what it was. Maybe I was a twin! Maybe that was what was missing?!
    “But you’re not a twin,” the older woman said, taking a sip of her tea. The pleasant smell of anise wafted in my direction, and I remembered that she had asked for licorice tea with her carrot cake cupcakes when she’d called me earlier. Seemed she’d brought her own tea bag.
    Smart lady.
    “How do you know? I could be a twin and not even know it!” I stammered. I was not going to let the idea of a secret twin be dispelled that easily.
    “A true intertwining of souls happens at conception, but your aura . . . has been tampered with recently.”
    How recently? I wondered. Like a few months ago recently—because if that was the case, then maybe I wasn’t a twin, after all.
    “Do dead people still have auras?” I almost whispered, trying not to let a misplaced sense of hope overwhelm me.
    The aura specialist raised an eyebrow, but there was no way she could know what I was thinking. You see, I had coalesced (intertwined souls) with someone sort of recently. Not that it had been my idea to do the coalescing. Even just the remembrance of the event made me blush.
    Let me preface this by saying that I’m not usually a lush, but when you’re lost in the desert outskirts of Hell with no means of escape, your sense of self-preservation gets all screwy and you’ll drink anything.
    I was trying to complete one of the stupid tasks that the Board of Death had given me so I could take over my dad’s job and save my family’s immortality. I was miserable, I was exhausted, I was lost . . . and that was when I found myself totally blindsided by a poisoned Midori Sour that magically appeared before me.
    Only the quick thinking of Daniel, the Devil’s protégé, had saved me from a fate worse than death: eternal hibernation at the hands of a poisoned girly cocktail.
    Ugh!
    Daniel had coalesced our bodies together—something akin to sex, but even more intimate. I mean, our bodies were literally merging together in a way that words do absolutely no justice to, all so that he could absorb half of the poison for me. We had both ended up with a couple of hangover headaches from Hell, but I had noticed no other ill effects from the poison . . . until now .
    Now I find out that there was permanent damage. Our souls were intertwined! I didn’t even know if the guy was alive or dead or what—and now we were sharing an aura?
    Jeez, Louise.
    Madame Papillon shook her head.
    “No, your aura—the visible representation of your soul—leaves the body upon death and that is what passes on into the Afterlife for reassignment. So, as long as the body still lives, the aura remains.”
    “Jesus . . .” I breathed, my heart starting to hammer excitedly in my chest.
    “An exception to the rule,” Madame Papillon replied in a surprised tone.
    “Huh?” I said, my brain only half listening to the woman now.
    “Jesus was one of the few exceptions to the