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“My daughter has dreamed of some cat,”Mammy told the sister. “I’m afraid she’s been a lonely little girl, but things are going to be different when we get her home.”

“I didn’t dream it!” Nuala protested. She was surprised at herself for being so bold. “It’s a cream-colored cat with green eyes. I ran outside to save it.”

“Then I think the cat saved you,” said the nursing sister. “From what I understand, going outside is all that kept you from being mutilated by a shattered window.”

Nuala’s mammy thrust her fingers into her mouth. Her eyes were very large and shiny with sudden tears.

Nuala’s father did not come back until visiting hours were almost over.

When Mammy heard his footsteps she looked up. For just a moment Nuala saw the old worry in her eyes, but there was no smell of drink on him. He only looked tired.

“I searched through every inch of that garage and shifted all the debris,” he told Nuala. “I didn’t find even a bit of fur, and no blood. If there was a cat, it must have run away after the garage collapsed. But I still think you made it up. You always did have an active imagination.” He did not seem angry, though. He did not hit her.

“There was a cat,” Mammy said softly. “Except I think it was an angel.”

Daddy drew up a second chair beside Mammy’s and sat down with one arm around his wife’s shoulders.

A rosy glow seeped into the hospital ward.

“What a beautiful sunset,”Nuala said in her rusty voice.

Pushing a strand of hair out of her eyes, her mother glanced toward the nearest window. “It is beautiful,” she agreed, sounding surprised. “I had forgotten about sunsets.” She lifted the child higher onto the pillow so the three of them could watch together, with the glow reflected on their faces.

WHEN NUALA WAS WELL ENOUGH to go home she looked everywhere for the cat.

Her parents had promised her she could keep it; she could even let it sleep on her bed. She made out a list of possible names and carefully selected the very best one to give to the cat when she found it. She looked in the hollow under the cedars; she searched the fields beyond the house. She asked all the neighbors. She put up a notice in the local shop. But she never found the cat. No one in the neighborhood had ever seen a cream-colored cat with green-grape eyes.

No cat.

There was only the deep, happy purring that Nuala felt within herself when her parents smiled lovingly at her and at each other.

In the spring, the three of them planted new geraniums in the window boxes.

About the Authors

DIANE DUANE has been writing for her own entertainment ever since she could read (having written and illustrated her first novel in crayon at the age of eight). Her first novel, The Door Into Fire, was published by Dell Books in 1979. On the strength of this book, she was nominated two years running for the World Science Fiction Society’s John W. Campbell Award for best new science fiction/fantasy writer in the industry. Since then she has published some thirty novels, numerous short stories, and various comics and computer games, appearing on the New York Times Best-seller List and garnering the occasional award from such organizations as the American Library Association and the New York Public Library. She is presently best known for her continuing “Young Wizards” series of young adult fantasy novels about the New York-based teenage wizards Nita Callahan and Kit Rodriguez. Works now in progress include the last novel in her Middle Kingdoms series (The Door Into Starlight), the seventh “Young Wizards” novel (Wizard’s Holiday), and the completion of her present Star Trek/“Rihannsu” sequence of novels (The Empty Chair). In the rest of her spare time Diane gardens (weeding, mostly), studies German, listens to shortwave and satellite radio, and dabbles in astronomy, computer graphics, image processing, amateur cartography, desktop publishing, and fractals. She is trying to learn how to make more spare time.

BORN IN 1947, TANITH LEE began