Maât set up her scales and laid her feather on the tray closest to her. She raised her head, confronting the yellow glare.
“Miaow?”
Hellcat’s hair had grown back in death and, while not cuddly by any stretch of the imagination, the leopard-like cat now managed to exude a certain malevolent charm.
“Yes, you must.”
It turned away from her, curled into a ball, and fell asleep.
“Cats!” spat Anubis, waiting on the far side of the weighing chamber, ready to open the door to the soul’s deserved after-life.
“What do we do now? I need it to give me its heart – I’m certainly not ripping it out forcefully, Peta is going to come down on us like a ton of pyramids.”
The cat opened an eye, closed it, and started purring.
“Maybe it doesn’t have a heart?” said Anubis. “If you have nothing to weigh against your feather, then you have a loophole. Just send it to another judgment chamber, they can decide in which hell it belongs.”
“You know the heart is a metaphor representing the soul’s conscience.”
“Well, there you go, cats don’t have a conscience.”
Hellcat stretched out of its catnap, hissed at Anubis, and jumped on her lap. It kneaded her thigh with its big paws, making her wince at the sharpness of its claws, then sighed and laid down across both legs in a sphinx position, obviously wanting to be petted.
Maât scratched it behind the ears. “What in the afterworld am I going to do with you?” Incoherent Gods