THE MINERVA MINK STORY
"Fangs, Claws, and Stiletto Heels"

Chapter 7


     Sunday:

     Morning sun made it’s slow crawl up over the horizon and began to shed light into the windows of sleeping peoples of all race and gender. Soon, many would be up and about, starting morning rituals and getting ready to ‘join the rat race’. (‘No offence Paul.’ ‘None taken.’)

     Others still would herd their children, bleary eyed and sleepy, into the tub and then into dress clothing so they could be farmed out to various houses of faith and early Mass.

     However, this particular morning finds Minerva Mink still very much asleep, sprawled out on her big bed with Stephanie wrapped up in her favorite wool ‘Care Bear’ blanket, nestled up next to her Aunt for warmth. They would remain this way for several more hours, their stomachs filled with ice cream from that night’s activities, and their eyes weary from too many movies.

     Across the pond, Trudy was in a similar position, curled up on her couch, feeling far to sleepy to try and make it the stairs to her bedroom. She knew she would wake up with a bad case of stiff muscles, but at the time it seemed like a good idea. ‘I’ll deal with it in the morning. Besides, it’s just another lazy Sunday, so maybe I’ll sleep in.’

     Terry and Dee Dee were in no such predicament, as they had gone home early and not eaten so much. At this moment, the young couple were spending a pleasant morning alone in their room, drifting in and out of sleep and enjoying the simple pleasure of one an others company.

     But in a posh three floor apartment in LA, Vanessa Augustine was very much awake and equally busy.

     Her bed had gone cold long before the sun had come up, and though it was Sunday, a good ‘entrepreneur’ never really takes a day off. There are palms to grease, bills to pay, people to manipulate...... The last thought made her grin evilly.

     In all truth, she had spent most of the previous night manipulating someone. From a hard leather seat on one of her many exercise machines, she cast an eye on a poster picture of her and a large, young male lion with a trim mane that had been taken at some frivolous fashion event a few years back, hanging from the wall. They were both smiling for the camera, her in a skimpy dress with her best jewelry dangling from her ears and neck, and his arm around her waist. “ Augustine Fashion’s are #1 in 99`!” It screamed in big red letters, and she gave the pull bar on her machine a hard tug sending the weights behind her up in the air.

     ‘Your arm around me dear Angelo, and me squeezing you...” Again she flashed a wicked smile, her pearl white teeth making a starling contrast to her dark figure. ‘It’s all about the power baby, and don’t you forget it.’ It never hurts to have one of the most influential lawyers in California wrapped around your little finger now, did it?

     Vanessa had spent most of the morning in the buff as was her custom. Making early morning phone calls from her room, getting Angelo out the door to work with her usual fake pleasantness, and her morning exercise regiment, were all done au`natural. ‘Getting back to nature’ or ‘getting in touch with your feral side’ was what her health instructor called it, and claimed that it was good for her mental and physical health to spend some time each day out of the confines of her clothing.

     ‘Whatever.’ The way she looked at it, she had spent way to much money on her body to let it all go to flab. Thus, she would find a way to afford the time to work out, buy all the tasteless health food, sit in big stinky pools of muck at the spa, and if that failed, there was always the scalpel.

     Letting the weights fall back and pulling herself off the machine, she took a pink towel from a hook on the wall and preceded to wipe the sweat from herself. Finishing with that, she folded the towel up and hung it across her neck, the long ends falling down over her breasts in a mocking coquettish way.

     Her huge apartment took up the 34th-36th floors of the ‘La`moure Building’ and would have cost her a small fortune a month in rent, if she didn’t already own the place herself. Rather, the office space below her and the restaurant that occupied the top floors had the privilege of paying her for the space in ‘her’ building.

     The bottom floor was her recreation area and gym. (For the thought of sleeping under several tons of equipment unnerved her. Not that she cared if it hung over the heads of the peons working on the floor below.) Just one large, white room with various machines scattered about it and a flat screen plasma TV mounted on the wall so she could watch the news or whatever video accompanied her work out. Last month was kind of Tie-bo thing, the month before that it was some odd variation of crunches that had made her sick to her stomach after the first week, and advanced Yoga the month before that. This month was some new craze, Poloties or some thing close. It had cost her several hundred grand for the whole set up, but that was chump change to her.

     Then came the office area on the next floor, where she did all her ‘work away from work.’ This floor consisted of four rooms, her personal office, her study, the Den, and her illustration room. This floor was off limits to everyone, all of the doors shut off with electronic locks and key card slots. Even Angelo wasn’t really allowed down there, though she often let him watch TV and smoke his foul smelling cigars in the den if she felt generous. A great deal of her utmost private, (and probably damning) information was locked up in her office wall safe. The rest was in a lock box in Angelo’s office safe, counting as double insurance in a sense.

     Not that Vanessa Augustine was any kind of a criminal. Good heavens no! But everyone had there under that table deals, not to mention their fingers in a many another man’s dinner pot. This was simply information that she didn’t want the general public to know about, hardly illegal in any way. Hardly that.....

     The third floor was really her ‘home’ in all reason. Her spacious bedroom took up most of the floor, along with a large kitchen and almost sinfully large bathroom. The rest of the floor consisted of a laundry room and sun room where she went to look down on the other human ants she occupied this world with and grin to herself. ‘Look what I have you losers. Money and fame beyond your wildest dreams, or those pathetic movie stars you gawk at all day. Who do you think they admire?! Ha!’

     Checking the clock on the wall and noting the sun starting to rise, she slipped into her private elevator and pressed the third floor button. ‘Time to spruce up for the day.’ The chrome colored lift moved slowly past the second floor and stopped with a soft tone at the third. Doors parting, she walked out into the thin hallway that would lead to her bath, her bare feline feet sifting through the plush carpet on the way.

     It had been a good week, all things considering. She had managed to pull off several risky business deals, allowing her to absorb three textile companies and add them to her already growing army with no ‘federal’ red tape. The deals had gone off without a hitch or the use of the ‘M’ word.

     “Monopoly” she whispered to herself and shivered as if an invisible hand had run up her bare back. Pushing open the bathroom door she grimaced, ‘Why did I say that?’

     The bathroom was dark and smelled of perfume and chlorine. Flipping on the light switches, ten in all, the huge room illuminated, and sported a indoor pool that made Minerva’s look like a kiddie wading pool at the park. She tossed to towel onto the floor making ready to jump in, when she spotted her reflection in a full length mirror that hung by the door.

     Stopping, she posed in front of the mirror and examined herself. Twisting and turning before it, she bent her arms over her head and stuck out one knee in a body builder stance. A mass of small female muscles rippled and danced under her black fur, running along her shoulder blades, under her arms and around her sculpted breasts. Her legs and arms also bulged with muscle, no where near the way the female body builders at muscle beach did, but still very impressive. “Worth every dime.”

     ‘The fur does a good job of covering the scars, huh?’

     She hissed at herself, dropping the pose and turning away from the mirror. A flutter of platinum hair swung around violently and slapped her in the face.

     Making a short sprint to the edge of the pool she dove in, cannonball style, sending waves of warm water over the edge of the pool and into the troughs around the sides. Rising to the top, she flipped the long locks of wet hair out of her face and opened the little metal door on the pool’s wall that held the controls.

     Vanessa pressed the ‘sauna’ button down and slapped the door shut, just as the lights at the bottom of the pool came on and the room lights went out. Jets opened on the pools walls and started to circulate the water about in compressed streams.

     She splashed over to one of the jets and sat down on the carved steps in front of it, letting the stream for forced water massage her back. Looking down into the rippling water all about her, she saw a mask of a frowning woman she knew to be herself and sighed. ‘What the hell is wrong with me? I should be happy, but that annoying little voice is getting louder, and I don’t care for what it’s been saying.’

     She sighed again and leaned back, letting her head lay on the padded edge of the pool. She knew damn well what the problem was, and she wasn’t fooling herself with that line of questioning. ‘Duh Vanessa. Your still mad about Minerva and you know it. That whole meeting when completely out of your control at the end and your still pouting about it.’

     Perhaps this was true. She had been sporting a ‘PMS’ attitude all week, but it was hard to believe that one woman from her old school days was responsible for that. It was just silly..... wasn’t it?

     It had to be something else. Surely, it would take more than the likes of Minerva Mink to put a kink in tail of ‘Vanessa the Great and Powerful’. Yes, it must be close to her menstruation and she was just feeling a bit grumpy as some girls do....

     Suddenly a phone rang out in a sharp electric tone, echoing across the sky blue tiles of the bathroom and making Vanessa jump. And not only jump, but slide off from her underwater perch and almost fall to the bottom of the pool.

     Lurching back up out of the water she made a feral scream, whipping her wet hair behind her head and scrambling for the cordless phone that hung on the far wall.

     Feeling her nails clack across the plastic surface, she homed in on it’s shape in the inky darkness and yanked the phone from it’s cradle. “WHAT DO YOU WANT!?” She shrieked into the mouthpiece and imagine for a second that she could see the quivering form on the other end.

     “M-miss Aug-Augustine? This is Patty at the office. You t-tt-told me to call you when the new samples came in.” The voice seemed to plead with her as if Vanessa had just discovered her embezzling from the company.

     “What of it?!”

     The female hare on the other end continued. “T-they just came in Fed-Express. I signed just l-l-like you told me and put the copy on your desk.” Vanessa rolled her eyes. She could see Patty, sitting at her little desk with pictures of her bratty kids sprawled over it and her clout ugly husband grinning up from one of them.

     Hopefully, the hare woman would be sitting I a pool of her own sweat, twirling her idiot glasses back and forth by the handle as she did when she was nervous, worried if she would even need to bother coming into work tomorrow.

     “Well good for you Patty! It looks like your able to preform basic human functions!” Vanessa mocked a cheerful tone, but it quickly became bitter and angry. “Now if your done wasting my time, get back to work and DO WHAT I PAY YOU TO DO!”

     She flung the phone across the room and hit the tile floor with a fury of shrill tones and pitiful beeps. It struck the far wall and flipped end over end into a dark corner like a scolded child trying to hide from a parent.

     Vanessa let out a rush of air she had been holding and slunk back down into the pool. This time she sat backward on the block and let the water push on her stomach muscles. She crossed her arms on the edge of the pool and let her head rest on them. The room fell silent.

     ‘You are still mad about Minerva aren’t you? It all boils down to that.’

     And naturally it did. Vanessa had built her empire on the foundation of her ability to make people do just what she wanted them to. From business men, to CEOs, to even the minimum wage workers at her textile factories, they all danced to her whims and she knew exactly how to keep them dancing.

     Her father, every worthless inch of him, had been good for very little, but he had known the secret. And she had learned it well....

     “Big ta-tas mean big success for women. So that means you’re already got a strike against ya.” She could almost here him saying, in one of his drunk rambles. “Your so skinny I’m afraid to fart around ya for fear it’ll kill ya! Ha Ha!” Vanessa drew her claws in and out and clenched her fist so hard her knuckles showed white under her fur.

     But then he had spilled the real secret. “You can spend you life either following people and eating the crap they throw at ya, or you can lead them and be the thrower! All that matters is that you get them to think they are in charge, don’t matter how you do it, but you know you got them dependant on you and that’s the real game!” He crunched his beer can and threw it at her. “Ah, your probably to stupid to even understand what I saying.” His words started to slur and she knew he would be asleep at the table in five minuets flat.

     ‘So how now dad? Your worthless flat chested daughter, who you felt you could leave around your drinking buddies because she was too ugly to interest them, is now one of the richest, most successful, and beautiful women in the country. I hope they have news coverage in hell so you can see each and every time I dominate a fashion show and you’ll know just how stupid you really were.’

     If someone had walked into the room at this moment and saw the look on Vanessa’s face, one would almost think she was the reason the water in the pool was boiling and not the jets.

     She kicked off the sauna, and the room lights came back on. The soaking wet panther woman pulled herself out of the pool and leaving a water trail behind her, slipped into the stall shower to bathe.

     As she washed, she came face to face with what had really been bugging her, but then she had really known the whole time.

     Minerva hadn’t bent to her will. She had invested the extra time to dig those pictures up from the dark corners of the internet, to set up just how she was going to offer the mink a lesser job, even rearranged her office to make it more intimidating, yet she had refused.

     And not only refused, but had dared to threaten her! HER! Vanessa Augustine! This is what had put her in a bad mood. She had even dared to talk back to her! Impossible.....

     Yet it wasn’t. Vanessa had spent the rest of that day trying to find out if there was anything she could do to show dear Minerva the err of her ways, but had not been able to come up with a thing.

     She was a normal, average citizen, no business connection, no public office, no big social clubs, and this was probably the best protection a person could have. She for now, was out of Vanessa’s reach.

     ‘And so what? She’s a washed up nobody. It’s best to just forget all about it Vanessa.’ She rinsed the soap from her hair and then shut off the shower.

     Nabbing a fresh towel from a near by shelf she toweled off, and stepped through a hidden side door and into her bedroom. She dressed and sat down in a big plush chair in front of the window to watch the sun make it’s final last pull above the horizon.

     ‘Besides, it’s not like your probably ever going to see her again anyway.’

     **************************

     Minerva woke up to Stephanie landing on her stomach with a bounce. “Wooofah!”

     “Wake up Auntie Nerva! It’s Sunday morning! Time to get up! Days a wasting!!” The little girl bounced up and down on Minerva stomach trying to get her awake.

     Minerva reached behind her head and pulled out her pillow, swinging it at Steph, and managing to knock her off. “Back fiend!”

     She rolled away clinging to the pillow and giggling wildly. Minerva took the opportunity to pin the little girl down with her own weight, pretending to fall asleep again, and then smother her in kisses. “I’m up you little stinker!”

     “Lets go! You said we could go to the mall today! Hurry hurry!” She tossed the pillow away and squirmed out from under her still sleepy Aunt.

     “First you need to hit the tub young lady. Hop to it. Faster you get scrubbed the faster we can go.”

     Setph looked like she wanted to argue but then decided not to. She headed off to Minerva’s pool, stripping off her night shirt as she went. “And scrub behind your ears!” Minerva called after her, resulting a little groan.

     She fumbled across the bed to grab her clock from the night stand and wasn’t totally surprised to see it was about eleven. Putting the clock back she sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. ‘What a morning, or like afternoon now!’ Her mouth tasted awful and she felt a little sea sick thanks to Steph’s body slam.

     She heard the little girl splashing happily in the pool and decided she better grab a quick shower too, when the phone rang. Crossing the room, she slipped her hand under the neck of the princess style phone and lifted it off the cradle.

     “Hello?”

     And then she smiled as she recognized the voice on the other line.