Debra heard this warning, but she hesitated. No more than a second, two tops. But it was enough for – Kate? – to realize she was there. The woman sat up on her knees and turned to look at Debra. Her nose, mouth, and chin were slick with blood, as were her hands. She held a bloody thing that was mostly a skeleton with a few scraps of fur and flesh clinging to it. The woman – Katie! Her name was Katie! – drew the mutilated remains to her chest and glared at Debra with wide, wild eyes.

“You can’t have any, bitch. It’s all mine!”

Her voice was a high-pitched shriek and bloody spittle flew from her lips as she yelled. There were bloodstains and tufts of skin and fur on the carpet in front of the woman, and Debra knew she’d been working on the animal – a cat? – for a while.

Debra no longer gave a shit about her glasses.

She held her hands palm out in a warding gesture, and she began to back up slowly. She wanted to turn and run, but she knew better than to take her eyes off Katie, and she also knew that if she started running, she might trigger a predatory response in the woman, prompting her to attack. No, she had to go slow, regardless of how fast her heart was beating (very) or how much adrenaline was coursing through her veins (a lot).

The woman continued glaring at her, but she made no move to rise to her feet. A soft sound was coming from her throat, and while Debra wasn’t certain, she thought the woman was actually growling at her.

She’d taken three steps backward when she bumped into something. An involuntary squeal of fright escaped her lips, and she whirled around to see the clinic’s director standing there. She couldn’t remember this woman’s name, but she recognized her. She was always here, and today she’d observed Debra’s entire session with Lori for some reason. Probably some kind of performance review thing, she’d decided. Lori wasn’t bad, but she could use some improvement, that was for sure.

Debra’s first response was to enlist the director’s aid, and she hooked a thumb over her shoulder in Katie’s direction.

“Do you see what she—”

She broke off when the details of the director’s appearance registered on her awareness. The woman was covered in blood from head to toe. She looked like she’d been bathing in the stuff, swimming in a goddamned pool of it. Not a lake, an ocean….

The director smiled and held up a pair of glasses, lenses speckled with blood.

“Are these yours?” she said.

The woman’s long braid swayed behind her under its own power, as if she had a large gray snake growing out of the back of her head. The sight of the thing moving independently made Debra feel queasy. It was unnatural. Wrong. It couldn’t be and yet it was, and that idea – that something that should be impossible might be real – was more terrifying than these two women combined.

The braid whipped out from behind Melinda’s back and lashed Debra across the face. The impact stung like hell, and she stepped back, shaken. She brought her hand to her cheek as if by touching it she could somehow lessen the pain.

Katie’s growling became a snarl then, and Debra felt the woman slam into her from behind. Her shoulder screamed in agony, and a burst of white light filled her vision as Katie’s weight bore her to the floor. She hit hard, and she felt something snap in her chest. A rib? She couldn’t catch her breath, and her mouth gaped open and closed like a fish on land as she tried to draw in air. She thrashed back and forth in an attempt to dislodge Katie, but the woman grasped her shoulders tight and held on.

The director knelt in front of her face and smiled, lips sliding away from blood-slick teeth.

“I imagine your shoulder must be hurting a great deal right now. Don’t worry. We can fix it. There might be a little discomfort at first, but it’ll be over in a few minutes. You’ll feel much better afterward.” Her smile widened. “In fact, you won’t feel anything at all.”

The director dropped Debra’s glasses to the carpet and then both she and Katie went to work. As it turned out, the director had lied to Debra. She felt more than a little discomfort, quite a fucking lot, in fact.

* * *

Melinda did her best to wipe her hands clean on the carpet before she stood, but there was only so much she could do to get the blood off – there was so much of it. And really, why bother? She was covered in it, her clothes dark, sodden, and heavy. Besides, she rather liked the feeling of blood on her skin, and while she hadn’t had a chance to view herself in a mirror yet, she suspected ‘blood-drenched maniac’ was a good look for her.

When she was on her feet, she regarded Debra’s corpse. Working together, she and Katie had torn off Debra’s left arm and cast it aside. It now lay several feet from the body, fingers half curled, thumb slightly extended, almost as if Debra was signaling approval of their work from the great beyond. They’d removed most of the muscle in her left shoulder and had discarded it, too. Katie had taken a couple bites of it, but she found the meat too tough and chewy, and she was now hunkered over Debra’s remains, gnawing on a length of intestine. While this admittedly drastic therapy was quite messy, Melinda thought it fast and effective. Debra’s shoulder pain had been thoroughly and completely resolved.

As she stood watching Katie work on her grisly meal – it was lunchtime, after all – she pondered what to do next. She’d killed Dennis – torn the business manager’s throat out with her teeth – before coming out to the reception area to help Katie deal with Debra, and there was no one else currently in the clinic. The other PTs were at lunch, and no clients had been scheduled for this time. People would soon be coming, though. Her employees would return from lunch, and the afternoon clients would begin to arrive. She supposed she and Katie could attack them as they entered, and while that would be fun, she couldn’t escape a nagging feeling that there was something else she should do. Something important.

It had been a strange day so far. She and Katie were always the first to arrive, and while Melinda usually beat her to the office, today had been one of those rare occasions when Katie got there before her. She had been seated at the reception counter when Melinda entered the clinic. Melinda wasn’t much for empty pleasantries at the best of times, and today she especially wasn’t interested in chatting with Katie. She and Carlo had had a fight last night, a real knock-down-drag-out that had come close to ending their relationship. Things had been better between them this morning, if still strained, and while she was hopeful they would return to normal soon, she was worried the fight had been a symptom of deeper relationship issues that needed to be addressed.

The fight had started because Carlo had said he was too tired when she’d wanted to make love last night. He’d been putting her off sexually for a while now, but when she’d confronted him about it, he’d said she was making something out of nothing. He still loved her, still wanted her. He was simply tired. He ran his own construction company, and he put in long hours, often doing physically demanding work alongside his employees. Of course he’d be too tired for sex sometimes. Melinda knew that. But every time she wanted to fuck? She was starting to worry that he was having an affair.

So when Katie greeted her as she entered the clinic, she hadn’t bothered smiling, only nodded and hoped Katie would get the message and leave her alone. But Katie hadn’t taken the hint.

“I’ve got something cool to show you,” she’d said. “Really cool.”

Melinda had intended to ignore Katie and keep on walking until she reached her office, which was located across the hall from Dennis’s. She’d enter, close the door behind her, and try to get it together before her first client of the day arrived. But she didn’t do that. Instead, she walked over to the reception counter to see what Katie wanted to show her. Why she’d done this, she wasn’t certain. Maybe, despite her determination not to interact with anyone this morning, she needed some positive human contact. Or maybe she’d decided that just because she felt shitty was no reason to treat Katie poorly. Whatever the reason, she was at the counter, and she waited for Katie to reveal whatever it was she wanted to show her. It damn well better be cool, she’d thought.

Katie had something inside a plastic shopping bag sitting on her desk area behind the counter. She stuck her right hand inside the bag, but instead of pulling out whatever object it contained, she quickly withdrew her hand, reached out, and rubbed her fingers rapidly back and forth over Melinda’s lips.

“What the fuck?” She stepped back in alarm, raised a hand to her lips, touched them, looked at her fingers, saw they were smeared with thick, sticky red.

“It’s cat blood,” Katie said. “Awesome, right?”

Melinda was beyond horrified. She had two cats herself – Puddin’ and Lightfoot – and the idea that Katie would smear ketchup on her and claim it was cat blood for some sick fucking joke was….

She heard the plastic bag rustle, then watched as Katie lifted a dead cat – half a dead cat – up for her to see.

It’s out of the bag, Melinda had thought. The cat. Is out. Of the bag.

The blood (definitely not ketchup) felt warm and tingly on her lips, and she had the sensation that her skin was absorbing it somehow, pulling it into her. Or maybe the blood was forcing its way in, invading her. Either way, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that it felt good. Felt fucking great, in fact.

She’d started laughing then, and Katie joined in. They both looked at the cat’s head – open staring eyes, small blood-flecked tongue sticking out of its mouth – as if they expected it to say something. It remained silent, of course, but the look on its dead face was so ridiculous that the women’s laughter intensified, becoming shrieks of hilarity.

That had been hours ago, and while Melinda still felt fantastic, as if she was flying high on the greatest drug ever created, she felt unsettled as well. Restless. There was something she needed to do, she and Katie both, but she couldn’t—

And then the dark infection that had entered her body via tainted cat blood began whispering to her. She listened intently for several seconds, and when the voice fell silent, she smiled. She knew what they had to do.

“Lunch is over, Katie. Time for you and I to get back to work.”

Katie spat out the length of intestine she’d been chewing on and stood, giving Debra’s ravaged body a last regretful look, as if she felt guilty about wasting so much food. Then she turned to face Melinda, her stomach bloated, full to bursting with cat and human meat. Melinda noticed the woman’s face had changed. Her eyes were now amber and larger than before, and tufts of downy hair covered her cheeks. No, not hair. Fur.

They say you are what you eat, Melinda thought. In Katie’s case, it seemed to be you become what you eat.

“You want me to take the rest of her out back to the dumpster?” Katie asked. There was a soft, fluttering hum to her voice, almost a purr.

“I don’t think so. Her corpse livens up the place – so to speak. No, you and I are going to take a little trip to pick up a new friend.”

She felt her braid quiver against her back. It was excited, ready and raring to go. She reached around to the back of her head and stroked the base of the braid.

In a moment, she thought. Be patient.

“Okay,” Katie said. “But can we maybe stop and get some snacks along the way? I’m starving.”

Melinda smiled. “I think that can be arranged.”

* * *

It was beginning to rain by the time Lori pulled into Woodlawn Cemetery. The rain wasn’t heavy, but it was steady, and Lori activated her windshield wipers. What a cliché, she thought. Rain in a cemetery. She might’ve thought the Cabal had arranged the rain in order to provide a suitably gloomy atmosphere for her, but from what she’d experienced so far, the Cabal wasn’t this unoriginal.

If I have to be stalked and harassed by fiendish otherworldly mystics, at least they’re creative ones, she thought.

She hadn’t been here in almost fifteen years, but she remembered the way so well, she thought she could drive it with her eyes closed. Woodlawn was one of only a handful of cemeteries in town, and it was smaller than the others. It was enclosed by orange brick walls all the way around, and its only entry and exit point was through a pair of black wrought-iron gates, which were left unlocked and open every day from nine a.m. to nine p.m. The ground here rose and fell in modest hills and dips, and there were few trees. Those that were present were young, with thin trunks and even thinner branches, leaves still mostly green, but some edging toward fall colors. She remembered more trees, much older and larger than these, and she wondered if they’d been cut down and replaced by younger ones since the last time she’d been here. Probably. Cemeteries were depressing enough as it was. Who wanted to be greeted by a bunch of dead and dying trees?