“So you beat me here for once. Good for you.”

Lori’s own smile was strained. “Good morning, Debra. Ready to get to work?”

“Yep. Not that I think it will do any good. But you already know that.”

Lori did.

Debra was in her early fifties, a stout, gray-haired, broad-shouldered woman who lived alone on a small farm outside town. She’d injured her left shoulder while cleaning out the stalls of her two horses, and she’d been coming to see Lori twice a week for the last three weeks, as prescribed by her physician. Debra believed that physical therapy was barely one step above voodoo.

I’m only here because my doctor said I have to do a month’s worth of this crap before he’d write me a prescription for some heavy-duty pain pills. I don’t expect anything I do here to make a goddamn difference, but if it gets me my meds, then I’ll gut it out.

Lori had tried to tell her that with an attitude like that her condition was unlikely to improve – especially if she didn’t follow up her sessions by doing the exercises at home. But Debra didn’t pay attention to her warning, and Lori had given up trying to convince her. She’d decided to do what she could for the woman, and if Debra ended up with a chronic injury and an addiction to pain pills, it would be her own damn fault.

Lori turned to Katie, but the woman was once more engrossed in whatever was on her computer, a sullen expression on her face. Lori would have to hear the rest of her story later. She turned once more to Debra.

“Follow me on back to the exercise room,” Lori said, doing her best to fake a friendly, enthusiastic tone.

“Might as well get this over with,” Debra said.

Lori felt exactly the same way.

Chapter Five

For the remainder of the morning, Lori worked with one client after another with barely enough time to go to the bathroom or get a soda from the break room. She normally liked being busy – it made the day go faster – and she especially appreciated it today. She couldn’t keep the shadow things, the Nightway, and the Cabal entirely out of her thoughts, but neither did she obsess over them.

When her last client, an elderly woman who’d just undergone her second hip replacement surgery, had left, she checked the time on her phone and saw it was eleven fifty-six. Almost lunchtime. She grabbed her purse and started to leave the exercise room – where some of the other PTs were still finishing up with clients – but before she’d gotten more than a few steps down the short narrow hallway that led to the front of the facility, she heard Melinda Dixon call her name.

“Lori!”

She stopped walking and closed her eyes.

Stay calm, she told herself and turned around as Melinda caught up to her. Melinda was a woman in her late fifties, tall and thin. Her hair had gone prematurely gray years ago, but she never colored it, and she wore it in a long braid down her back. Like Lori, she wore a short-sleeved smock and blue pants, but instead of sneakers – which the other PTs wore because they were on their feet all day – Melinda always wore black flats. Lori had no idea how Melinda’s feet weren’t killing her all the time. Maybe she regularly visited the foot spa next door.

“Yes?” Lori said, her tone wary.

She’d never gotten along great with Melinda. Get Moving! was Melinda’s practice, and all the other PTs who worked there, Lori included, were her employees. The woman was a good PT, and she ran the practice well. She had a doctorate in physical therapy, while the other PTs – including Lori – only had master’s degrees. Melinda had never come out and said she thought she was better qualified than her employees, but she didn’t have to. The way she treated them made her feelings very clear.

“How did your session with Ms. Foster go today?”

The PTs wrote client reports that they submitted electronically to Melinda. Everything Lori had to say about Debra was in today’s report on their session. She knew that Melinda read each and every report at the end of the day. If she spotted any typos or grammatical errors in a report, she returned it to the writer for revision. Lori wanted to tell Melinda that she had an extremely important appointment to get to, and she should go read her report about today’s session with Debra if she was so damn interested in knowing what they’d done. But she knew that Melinda wouldn’t react well to being snapped at. Who would? Besides, she was the boss, and she did have that bright shiny doctorate of hers….

“I’d say Debra took a couple steps backward today. She’s still not doing the exercises I gave her to do at home, and her shoulder is really stiffening up. Her range of motion was more limited today than it was last week, and she was in considerably more pain.”

Melinda nodded. “I watched the two of you working for a bit, and that’s what it looked like to me.”

Melinda was one of those people who it was impossible to read from facial expression or vocal tone. She could be ecstatic or royally pissed, but outside she came across as an emotionless robot disguised by a covering of human flesh.

“Did Debra complain to you about me?” Lori asked. Such behavior would be completely in character for her.

Melinda looked surprised. “Not at all. I noticed you were very low energy all morning, and at times it seemed as if you were merely going through the motions. I was wondering if there’s something bothering you.”

Lori’s eyes caught a flash of movement, and her gaze was drawn to Melinda’s shoulder. She’d thought she’d seen…. But she couldn’t have. For an instant it had appeared that Melinda’s braid had flicked to the side, as if she’d jerked her head to make it move. But Melinda’s head had remained steady the entire time. Was she seeing things? If this had happened yesterday, she’d have said yes. But after everything that had happened since FoodSaver? She wasn’t so sure.

“I appreciate your concern, Melinda, I really do. But I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

Good job, she thought. That sounded really convincing.

Melinda’s eyes narrowed, and Lori had the sense the woman was scrutinizing her, trying to peer into her brain to determine if she was lying. Melinda must’ve been satisfied with what she saw, for her eyes relaxed and she gave a thin-lipped smile.

“I’m glad to hear it. If you were unhappy, as your boss, I’d be required to do something about it.”

Now it was Lori’s turn to frown. “Such as?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Tear off one of your tits with my teeth, or press a hot steam iron against your cunt and hold it there until the flesh has melted into a solid, charred mass. Something along those lines. I’m glad neither of those things will be necessary, though.” She smiled. “Have a good lunch.”

Without another word, Melinda walked past her and entered the billing office to speak to Dennis, the practice’s business manager, her braid swaying as she walked.

Lori stared after Melinda. What the actual fuck?

She walked to the reception area, unable to believe what had just happened. She and Melinda might not exactly have been best friends, but the woman had never come close to speaking to her like that. What the hell had – and then it came to her. They had gotten to Melinda somehow. The Cabal. They’d done something to her, something that had made her say those vile, disgusting things.

All she wanted to do now was get the hell out of there and talk to Reeny. Her little sister was clear-headed and pragmatic. Being a wife and mother teaches you to cut through a lot of bullshit, Reeny had once told her. She hoped Reeny would be able to lend her some of that clarity. She sure as shit could use it right now.

She was so intent on leaving that she barely noticed Katie still working at the reception counter, typing away at her computer. She would’ve walked right past her and dashed out into the parking lot if the woman hadn’t suddenly spoken.

“Do you want to hear the rest of my story or not?”

She sounded irritated, almost angry, and it was so unlike the Katie Lori knew that, despite her near frantic desire to be out of this place, she stopped. Katie took this as a sign to continue speaking, picking up the thread of her story exactly where she’d left off several hours ago.

“Like I said, I thought the guy in the sunglasses was going to pass me, pull in front of me, and hit his brakes. But when his car was even with mine, he rolled down the passenger-side window and threw something out. It hit the hood of my car with a loud thump, and I was so startled I slammed on my own brakes and swerved to a stop along the side of the road. I was damn lucky nobody rear-ended me, though I got a lot of dirty looks, raised middle fingers, and angry honks. The sonofabitch in the black car just kept on going. Fucker didn’t even slow down.”

The longer Lori stood there, the more she became aware of a sour-sweet odor hanging heavy in the air. She didn’t know what was causing the stink, but it turned her stomach.

She knew she shouldn’t ask, knew she’d regret it if she did, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“What was it? The thing that he threw at you?”

“It bounced off my car and fell onto the road before I got a good look at it. But once my heart stopped racing, I hit my hazard lights and got out of the car to see what it was. I found it lying next to the curb about ten feet behind my car. It was a cat. A tabby. I figured it had already been dead when the guy in the sunglasses threw it out of his window. Its head was twisted all the way backward. That’s not the sort of injury that could happen on impact, right?”

“I don’t know.”

Lori tried to keep from imagining the details of Katie’s story, but she couldn’t help it. She saw the blurred orange form of the cat fly out the window of the Driver’s black car, heard the dull thump as it struck the hood of Katie’s car and bounced off, saw it lying next to the curb, head twisted, neck broken. She felt weak, lightheaded, dizzy. She needed to get out of here, get out into the fresh air. She lurched toward the door, but before she could grab the handle, Katie said, “And do you know what the worst part was?”

Don’t look back, don’t look back, don’t look back….

But of course she looked.

Katie had reached down and from somewhere behind the counter she brought up a ragged mass of blood-soaked fur. It was the cat from her story – part of it, anyway. Its lower half was missing and entrails hung down loose from the opening, the organs wet and glistening. Lori now understood what caused the foul order that was stinking up the reception area.