Cole didn’t answer. His focus was on the gray tabby cat looking back at him with mismatched eyes. One eye was black, the other blue—just like the eyes of the cat he had fed at his bedroom window that morning; the cat whose guts had been spilled over his yard soon thereafter.

Cole would have chalked it up to coincidence were it not for the blood. The cat’s chest was caked with it. And yet there was no sign of the wound Cole had seen on the cat that morning.

“Logan? Excuse me? Hey, asshole.” Savannah snapped her fingers. “You still with me?”

“It’s not possible,” he whispered.

“That you’re an asshole? Believe me, it is.”

He moved past her and crawled slowly toward the cat. Its
tail went rigid and its ears folded back with caution, but it didn’t run away. Cole reached out and delicately stroked the animal’s head.

“What’s that stuff all over it?” Savannah asked.

“Blood.”

“God, is there anything around here that’s not bleeding?”

“It isn’t bleeding.”

“But you just said—”

“It’s got blood on it. But it’s not bleeding.” He spoke more to himself than to her. “There’s … there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“Well, get away from it. It might be rabid or something.”

The cat inched closer. Cole read the tag suspended from its plaid collar. The tag was smeared with red, but the letters were legible: coodles.

“Impossible,” he whispered again.

“Why do you keep saying that? Come on, get away from it. It’s just a mangy stray.”

“It’s not a stray. It belongs to Mona.”

“Mona? You mean Black Mona, the crazy Gypsy witch-lady everyone’s so afraid of?”

“She’s my next-door neighbor.”

“Why does that not surprise me?”

Cole peered through the foliage toward Mona’s trailer in the distance. He reached under the cat and brought its forepaws off the ground. Aside from the blood, he saw nothing that would indicate the animal had ever been harmed. He tucked the cat into the crook of his elbow and stood.

Savannah rose beside him, brushing wet leaves off her jeans. “So are you gonna tell me what’s got you looking so freaked-out?”

“Come on.” He started down the hill.

“Where are we going?”

A distant roll of thunder cut off his answer. The drizzle graduated to a light rain. Cole moved Coodles under his shirt and quickened his pace. They jogged to the bottom of the hill, then turned onto Mona’s property. The old woman was sitting in a rocking chair on the corner of her covered porch, a narrow trickle of cigarette smoke rising above her head.

“Sorry to bother you,” Cole said when they reached the base of the porch, “but I think we found something that belongs to you.” He presented the cat.