BILLIE

    

    They walked home past the Sunset Bar, the windmills in the distance. Water slapped at the rocks beside them. The waves were still high. They had to wait for one to break over the concrete platform where the carpenter used his saw horses during the day. They watched it recede, then they splashed across the platform to the higher ground behind the Caprice. They walked toward Spiro’s past the little stretch of sandy beach that was now almost entirely under water. The moon passed behind a cloud. It was very dark.

    She could barely make out the little boat in dry dock there. Until the cloud passed by.

    And then she saw the eyes. Watching them from beneath the hull.

    Watching them from behind the piled-up tables and chairs of the darkened open-air restaurant ahead.

    Cats.

    Dozens of cats.

    She stopped. She clutched Dodgson’s arm.

    She felt his puzzlement, then felt it turn to awareness.

    The eyes stared. Neither moved nor shifted. She could see the huddled bodies.

    And she thought what a dozen cats could do all at once, because she knew what one could do-she felt it again very vividly.

    Ten pounds of claws and teeth and speed and hard muscle that had ripped at her like some mad otherworldly weapon…

    “Dodgson.”

    “Billie, she can’t command the animals.”

    Can’t she?

    Go back, she thought.

    She turned. But now there were more behind them. Sitting there silent, waiting in the dark by the Sunset Bar.

    She shuddered-it gripped her and continued, turned to a trembling that was uncontrollable and had nothing at all to do with ocean breezes.

    “Walk,” he said. “Go slowly.”

    She held back. He tugged her gently forward.

    The eyes followed them, rippling reflected light as though in a prism.

    They passed the boat. The eyes followed.

    Nothing moved.

    The blood hammered in her face, her head.

    They moved through the tables and chairs, the stillness of the empty restaurant like a single sentient claw poised and waiting for the first show of panic. She felt the wildness of them. Cats just inches away. Cats no one had ever tamed. They walked in the shallow stillness of their own breathing.

    Past them.

    They did not look back.

    So they could not see the bodies that scampered into full moonlight along the path they had taken, that stopped and continued to watch them with a concentration normally reserved, in their species, for smaller animals. For prey.