Page 9 of Of Socialites and Prizefights

Anxious, Deepa thumped her tail against the floor. The thought of going out in public as a leopard, even secretly, didn’t fill her with confidence.

Suddenly, Aaliyah snapped her fingers, and Deepa twitched. “Elizabeth,” Aaliyah said. “She might know her way around curse-magic.”

Elizabeth Turtledove was Deepa’s friend and seamstress, specialising in good-luck charms and simple illusions meantto disguise or flatter the wearer. Good-luck charms and curses were tangentially related, as much as most curses were a manifestation of bad luck. Though she could follow Aaliyah’s train of thought, Deepa suspected that her specific curse was rather more complicated than that, as full-bodied shapeshifting seemed a hair more drastic than mere bad luck.

Still, it was worth a go.

“We can go home, get the car, come back here to pick you up, and drive you straight to Elizabeth's,” Aaliyah said. “Have you got a phone? We can call ahead to give her fair warning that we’re on the way. No? That’s alright. I’m sure she won’t mind being woken for such an emergency.”

Deepa, who didn’t share Aaliyah’s faith that Elizabeth would take a leopard showing up on her doorstep in the middle of the night in stride, growled in a panic and threw herself between Aaliyah and the front door.

“Or not,” Aaliyah said quickly.

Deepa had a new dress to collect from Elizabeth on Monday morning anyway, not that she could say so. Frustrated, she paced the length of the flat once, back and forth, before sitting down by the door and uttering a pathetically plaintive meow.

“It’s alright,” Aaliyah offered. “One way or another, we’ll get you out of this. In the meantime, is it very rude to ask if I can touch you?”

Deepa thought it over for a few seconds before deciding that she probably didn't mind. If anything, it might be nice. Trying to signal friendly passivity, she approached Aaliyah from an angle, and, like a giant housecat, butted the top of her head against Aaliyah’s leg before dragging herself longways around her friend’s knees, twining between the two women to do the same to Jasmine. One by one, they dropped their hands to her back, sinking their fingers into her dappled fur.

“That's so plush,” Aaliyah breathed reverently.

“You are very beautiful,” Jasmine told Deepa in a soft voice.

With a rumbling growl that was as close to a purr as she could manage, Deepa soaked up the compliments, each one serving to calm her down and warm her up. It wasn’t that she was shallow, but she put a tremendous amount of effort into her appearance, and she enjoyed having that effort validated. Apparently, that carried over to her leopard form as well, though she had far less input into what she looked like as a cat versus a woman. If she was forced to spend her nights as a leopard, it helped to know that she was beautiful.

???

At dawn, she woke a woman once more, laying on the kitchen rug under a blanket. On the loveseat, Aaliyah and Jasmine slept, slumped against each other.

Although each transformation was gentler than the last, it wasn't something Deepa wanted to continue indefinitely. With Phillip having fled town, at least temporarily, and true love being a notion even more fanciful than shapeshifting, Deepa turned to research. If she couldn’t compel Phillip to break the curse, then she would find a means to break it herself.

Unfortunately, she was no academic, and her access to scholarly texts was minimal. Furthermore, she had little knowledge of English magic practices, which differed considerably from the Indian magic taught to her in childhood by her mother. In that regard, Aaliyah and Jasmine, both immigrants themselves, were little help.

“You need to break into a university library or something,” Aaliyah said, once they were all up and breakfasted.

It wasn’t an outlandish suggestion. Deepa had stolen things before, a fact of which Aaliyah was well aware, seeing as her last and most impressive theft had been to procure a birthdaypresent for Jasmine on Aaliyah’s behalf, stealing a rare magical plant from Kew Gardens for Jasmine’s flower collection.

In that case, Deepa had hired someone to carry out the task. She wasn't a professional thief or a cat burglar, and saw no need to invite that kind of risk when she could more easily outsource the job to someone who knew what they were doing.

But the thief she’d hired last time had recently absconded to America with a diamond necklace of truly staggering worth, and as such, was no longer available to work for her.

Sneaking into a university library to peruse a private collection of magical tomes likely wouldn't land her in prison the way stealing a highly regulated magical plant might, but still, she had no confidence in pulling it off without getting caught. She preferred to sweet talk other people into doing favours for her. Failing that, she generally had the means to buy their services.

With neither option available, she, Aaliyah, and Jasmine spent their Sunday staking out London’s college campuses, of which there were many. Too many, in Deepa’s opinion.

“Do you know where Phillip studied?” Aaliyah asked. “The books at his school should give you the most useful information on curses, assuming that’s where he learned his craft.”

“I don’t know,” Deepa said, frustrated. “Oxford or Cambridge, I should imagine. He’s a pretentious twat.”

After being chased off the third campus by overly suspicious groundskeepers, Deepa was ready to abandon her research efforts and book travel to France to hunt down that vermin and make him fix her. Wherever he’d studied, she was sure he and his professors deserved each other. English universities might allow women to earn degrees, however begrudgingly, but they favoured a certain look of woman, the criteria of which Deepa, Aaliyah, and Jasmine did not meet. Deepa couldn't be sure whether it was their colouring or the shortness of their skirts, but either way, she didn't appreciate being barred access.

“This is why I go out with men,” she told her friends, infinitely annoyed as they stalked away from their last attempt. “Put me on the arm of the right man, and I can go anywhere.”

“You wouldn't rather get around on your own merit?” Jasmine asked.

“What I'd rather do is irrelevant. I’m working with the choices available to me.”

“And, in general, you’re doing a marvellous job,” Aaliyah assured her. “This leopard situation is a minor setback. Elizabeth will be able to help. If she can't break the curse, she should be able to point you in the right direction. She's very resourceful.”

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