Slowly, quietly, Bluma edged away, heading in the only direction the cats had left open to her. When she looked back, still they sat, staring, waiting, their cold, bright eyes shining out in the darkness.

They were herding her.

Twice more a cat loomed up beside or before her, correcting her course, keeping her moving in the direction they desired. Only when Bluma finally arrived in the moonlit clearing could she count their full number: six gray cats on six crumbling headstones.

And in their midst stood a woman all in white, neither old nor young, short nor tall, plain nor beautiful. Her thick curls hung loose and free, studded with flakes of fallen snow, and her cheeks were rosy with the cold.

Her eyes never once blinked.

“Hello there,” said the woman.

All around her, the cats began to smile.

“H-hello,” stammered Bluma.

The lady’s gaze seemed endless. It made Bluma feel very warm and very cold at the same time.

“My Sisters told me there was someone abroad in the cemetery,” she said. “But I did not imagine it would be someone like you.”

Bluma wanted to swallow but couldn’t manage it. What did she mean, someone like her?

“You must take care,” said the lady in white. “It is long after midnight now, and the cemetery is a dangerous place for even the best prepared of us. How did you come to be here?”

Bluma’s mouth felt impossibly dry. “I—I was chased.”

The lady in white sighed, stepping forward, and for the first time, Bluma noticed that her feet were bare in the snow. Bluma’s own feet felt completely frozen, and they were safe within boots and thick knit stockings.

Now the lady in white took a moment’s silence, tilting her head to the side. Her unblinking eyes traveled down to Bluma’s toes and back up again. The tails of the cats behind her twitched in the moonlight.

“Yes,” said the lady in white. “Yes, there are many things in the cemetery that might like to get their claws into you.”

Now she turned to face the cats. “Sisters,” she said, and in the blinking of an eye, the six gray cats were six gray ladies, each leaning back against a headstone. “I do not think it right to allow this girl to wander the cemetery alone. How say you?”

And now the gray ladies began to consult one another in silence, a system of blinks and glances passing between them so complex that Bluma could not begin to follow it.

But Bluma found herself distracted. There was a cold, lurking thing in the pocket of her apron, something that would not go away, would not leave her alone.

She wanted nothing more than to be rid of it.

But if she could not be rid of it, then she was desperate that it should remain hidden.

And, to her horror, she thought she felt it moving.