Bluma started to panic, her vision beginning to whiten at its edges. The dark woman’s feet were not six inches from her face, and if she didn’t breathe soon—well, she didn’t know what would happen.

Above, there was a sound of plashing and plinking, as if…

Yes.

The stranger had begun to wash up.

Bluma herself had fetched that water in.

And, all of a sudden, the water stilled.

Something was moving nearby.

The dark stranger had heard it.

Bluma’s thirst for breath had grown so intense that she had to gnaw at the inside of her cheek to distract herself with pain. And now the Dark Messenger stood above her, listening hard for any sound of life.

“Who’s there?” said the stranger in a hoarse whisper.

Silence.

A creaking floorboard.

Outside, a half-hearted shift in the wind.

Bluma was dying for breath.

And then, all at once, a screech, a yowl, a streak of gray fur—Bubbe’s ancient toothless cat leapt out of the darkness, and, out of surprise as much as necessity, Bluma’s bottled-up breath broke through her lips, and she gasped sharply. The stranger cursed and stumbled backward at the cat’s ambush, and, just as Bluma remembered to stifle the sound of her panting breath, the instrument that the stranger had been cleaning in the water bounced to the floor with a clang.

In time to come, she would look back and ask herself: Had there been some intention in it? Had Bluma meant, on some level, to start what she had started?

But the plain fact of the matter is this: Bluma reached out and laid her hand over the fallen metal instrument because it was clattering against the floorboards and she was convinced—for good reason—that it would draw attention to her.

But now her arm was protruding from beneath the bed.

Now she was out in the open.

Bluma held absolutely still.

Gradually, the dark stranger above found equilibrium between her two feet. Again, she cursed softly to herself.

“Cats,” she said. “I hate cats.”

Flinging the water from her fingertips, the dark stranger turned and made her way to the head of the stairs.

Wearily, she began to descend.

The front door bumped, jostled, swung outward, and then shut.

She was gone.

It was over.

Slowly, Bluma pulled the stranger’s instrument into her tiny hiding place beneath the bed.

And she was surprised. She had assumed it to be a knife or a dagger of some kind—a weapon—but it wasn’t.

The Dark Messenger’s forgotten instrument was a spoon.

And the spoon was strange—preternaturally cool, or even cold. What little moisture had been left on its surface in the washing was beginning now, bit by bit, to transform into tiny pine needles of crystalline frost.