I did billings until just before sunrise, then made coffee.

While I was waiting for the machine to chug its way through the usual cycle, I took a shower with the curtain most of the way open, taking care not to get the bandages on my right shoulder wet. A little floor-swabbing after the fact seemed a small price to pay for a non-Psycho experience.

I found Chester lying across the foot of my bed. I’d searched the apartment for him after the police left the night before, but to no avail. He’d vanished, along with Nick.

The bloodstains on his coat had disappeared, but he looked less substantial somehow, and I knew he’d undergone some kind of severe energy drain, attacking Heather the way he had.

My heart ached, and tears were imminent.

Seeing me standing there in my after-shower underpants and T-shirt, complete with bandage-bulge, Chester lifted his head and gave a soft, almost apologetic meow.

I blinked a couple of times, trying to compose myself, and stretched out beside him on the mattress, shimmying as close as I could get. I stroked him lightly, and he purred, content.

“Cat Avenger,” I said, with a sniffle. “That was some kind of last hurrah, wasn’t it, pal?”

“Meow,” Chester replied sadly, and butted my chin a couple of times with the top of his head.

My vision blurred. “God, Chester, I am going to miss you so much.”

“It’s not as if he’s dying,” Nick put in.

By then, I was so used to my ex’s sudden appearances that I didn’t even start. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, a watery image leaning against the dresser in front of the bedroom window. Sunlight rimmed his lean frame and cast his features into shadow.

“But he’s going away,” I murmured.

“Inevitable,” Nick said, not unkindly but with a quiet matter-of-factness that I didn’t even try to understand. I think a person would have to be dead to follow ghost logic, and I wasn’t ready to empathize quite that much.

“Will I see him again, Nick?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart.”

I looked up at Nick. He could have taken the easy way out, said Chester would be waiting to wrap himself around my ankles when I croaked and stepped out of the tunnel, into the Light, and I wouldn’t have known the difference. But he hadn’t.

“Don’t call me ‘sweetheart,’ you coward,” I said. The fur at the back of Chester’s neck was matted with my tears. “Chester saved me. You just stood there, like a big lump. Never send a man to do a cat’s work.”