YOUR CAT HAS been in my garden, the note read. Get control of your animal or there will be consequences. This is your last warning. It was signed, A Concerned Neighbor. As if Marjorie Field didn’t know who the neighbor was. She glanced out the window and caught Kenzie Taylor mincing down Yancy Lane, her bottle-blond hair gleaming in the August sun. That woman was the first woman who had ever lived on Yancy Lane that Marjorie actively disliked. She’d blown in from California three summers ago, newly divorced and absurdly wealthy. Why she’d decided to live here on Yancy Lane was beyond Marjorie; the woman could have lived anywhere. But no. Kenzie had decided that Yancy Lane was where she wanted to put down roots, and Yancy Lane was where she wanted to make the first real trouble the street had seen since those package robberies two Christmases ago.
Marjorie picked up the note again, crumpled from having been angrily stuffed through the mail slot. Your cat has been in my garden. There was only one problem with that: Marjorie Field didn’t have a cat.
“I got the same note,” Kenisha Cerritos said, settling into her chair by the bay window and picking up her coffee cup—bone china that only came out when there was serious discussion afoot. Kenisha did have a cat, a sleek indoor tabby named Harris that had never been within yards of Kenzie Taylor’s garden. “I don’t care for the tone.”
“Nor the implication!” Marjorie agreed. “‘This is your last warning.’ What does that even mean? She’s going to go to the police? They’d laugh themselves silly.” Marjorie watched Kenisha; they’d had more than one discussion about what happens when white women cry to the police about Black women’s misdeeds. If her friend was ruminating on this, though, Kenisha gave no sign.
“I don’t like it, is all. Harris is a good cat.”
“At least Harris is a real cat.” At the sound of his name, Harris suddenly appeared by the side of Marjorie’s chair, arching his back toward her palm. She stroked his fur indulgently, and he purred in kind. “I don’t even know why I got this note.”
Kenisha sipped her tea. “Unless she means Rufus.”
“Kenisha, I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere if we try to apply logic to the stringently illogical.”
“You do feed him.”
Well, she had a point. Rufus was a neighborhood cat, a grey American shorthair with dark black stripes running across his lean body. For a stray, he didn’t seem particularly scuffed or battered, and was positively friendly when he strode boldly up to her covered porch and made his presence known. Marjorie had taken to keeping a bag of Kitty Treats by the side of the door should Rufus decide to stop by. But that had been gradual. For years, the cat had come by the house—had come by every house on Yancy from time to time—seemingly just to check in. A feline neighborhood watch. In all that time, her garden, riot with astors, cornflowers, and bee balms, had gone unmolested. As far as Marjorie knew, the same held true for Kenisha, whose lamb’s ears were the envy of the neighborhood.
“You feed him, too,” Marjorie reminded her. “I think everyone feeds Rufus.”
Kenisha’s phone buzzed. It was Kyle O’Brien from three doors down. “I got a note,” he told them after Kenisha put him on speaker.
“I think we all did,” Marjorie said.
“Should I be worried? Calico’s just a little thing. She’d never hurt anyone’s garden.” Kyle was wonderful—maybe Marjorie’s favorite person on Yancy Lane after Kenisha—but the fact that he’d named his Calico cat Calico was alarming ... and she hadn’t been a little thing for years. Kyle enjoyed feeding her, letting her have her lethargic run of his place. An absolute unit, was Calico, in no shape to be destroying anyone’s garden.
“Well, when it comes to Kenzie Taylor,” Kenisha said, “I think a good, healthy worry isn’t a bad idea.”
“Could I come by? How many other people do you think got the note?”
As it turned out, nearly everyone on Yancy Lane got the note: Tamara Spheeris, who lived next door to Kenzie Taylor but whose cat Tomlinson didn’t go anywhere without a leash; Georgie Carmichael, who had a gated yard and whose cat Trinity never went beyond the walls; Ted Nedry, Samira Ahmadi, Wendy Spring. All gathered in Kenisha’s dining room with cups of coffee and madeleines Marjorie had brought over. There hadn’t been a gathering of Yancy Lane denizens like this in years.
“Maybe we should go to the police,” Wendy ventured. “I mean, these notes are threatening.”
“They’re vague,” Samira countered. She’d brought her cat with her, a fluffy ragdoll named Blueberry. Samira rarely went anywhere without Blueberry, who she seemed to think was a purse cat even though she was nearly as big as Calico. “They won’t take them seriously.”
Georgie spoke up. “But what does she mean, This is your last warning? Isn’t this our first warning?”
All murmured agreement, and Marjorie held up her hands. “I think we need to address the elephant in the room. Could any of your cats have been at Kenzie’s lawn?” A mild uproar erupted. “I ask only so we have a good defense. If she starts targeting one of us, I want to know where we stand.”
They all discussed this. Ted Nedry, whose cat Monadnock was a hairless sphynx, wrinkly and terrifying, spoke up. “I don’t know if I’m being naïve here, but I believe all our cats are well-behaved. I know Mondny wouldn’t go after that awful woman’s garden … which, confidentially, is probably better now than before.” Nervous titters and murmurs of agreement followed this.
“Now, now, enough of that. If our cats are innocent, we have nothing to worry about. This will pass.”
But she was wrong on both counts.
MARJORIE WAS JUST opening the door to offer Rufus a Kitty Treat out of her palm when she saw Kenisha running up the sidewalk. She was in her yoga clothes—sweatpants and T-shirt with the legend #WARRIOR on the front—and that shocked Marjorie almost as much as the expression on her friend’s face. When was the last time she’d seen Kenisha look frantic? Kenisha mounted the steps and before reaching the porch, she screamed, “That bitch has been at my garden!”
Rufus, unmindful of the sudden shift of mood, purred against Kenisha’s leg; distractedly, Kenisha bent and scratched him behind the ears. He purred louder, and some of the frenzy went out of Kenisha’s face.
Marjorie said, “Slowly, tell me what happened.”
Seemingly calmer now, Kenisha followed Marjorie inside and accepted tea, relaying the story in fits and spurts. She’d been waking up earlier than normal to indulge in her jigsaw puzzle hobby in her basement rec room. “Everyone’s asleep and it’s me time,” she said, her teacup barely shaking now. “An hour of that and then it’s upstairs on the Peleton. And you know how I have the bike facing the window so I can look out at my garden. I think I sensed something was wrong immediately, but I was so focused on my workout. Halfway through, I figured it out. My lamb’s ears were gone. My lamb’s ears, Marjorie.”
There was never any official competition to decide who had the best garden on Yancy Lane, although Marjorie knew—and experienced—the normal pride and covetousness that comes with a well-thought-out and -maintained garden. To have the knack with zinnias that Tamara Spheeris did, while Kyle openly envied her Hawaiian pink peonies. But no one else on the street had even attempted lamb’s ear. Many of the gardens had signs saying, “Enjoy with eyes only, please!” but not Kenisha’s. The lamb’s ears bordered the whole garden, and they were meant to be appreciated by touch—the silky, indulgently soft feel that offered a whole different dimension to a garden. The beauty of the lamb’s ears on the border is that they enticed you to spend longer looking at the rest of the garden, as much a feast for the eyes as the lamb’s ears were for the touch. Delicate pastel hues spread across Kenisha’s lawn and ended just before the border hedges in front of the house. The sad fact everyone on Yancy Lane knew was that if there were a competition, they would all be angling for second place. Kenisha Cerritos would take the gold every time.
Until now.
“What if it is a cat?” Marjorie asked. “Like it or not, doesn’t this give credence to what Kenzie said?”
In response, Kenisha took Marjorie by the hand and dragged her next door. Immediately, Marjorie saw why her friend had looked so harried, and so sure that a person had done this. Only the lamb’s ears, the pride of Kenisha’s garden, had been torn up. And not just torn up, but dug up. That was only the insult; the injury was the clods of sod thrown across the lawn and across the backyard, the lamb’s ears still clinging to some of them. One had been hurled at the back of Marjorie’s house, leaving an ugly brown stain like a bruise against the pale wood. None of the lamb’s ears were salvageable; all had been mashed and crumpled to bits in hands that were not feline.
“She did this,” Kenisha said, pacing. “She’s gotten it into her skull that Harris tore up her garden.”
Marjorie, agape at the blatant destruction, tried to think. “We have to talk to her,” she said.
“If by talk to, you mean murder, then I’m your right-hand woman.”
“No one’s murdering anyone just yet, Kenisha. Get showered and changed, and then we’ll go over there together and talk to her. Not confront her. Just talk.”
For a moment, Kenisha only watched her. If this was your garden, Kenisha might be thinking, there would be more on the line. Marjorie didn’t think so, but then Marjorie knew she had only a good garden, one that could never compete with that of her best friend. If she had grown something as precious as lamb’s ear and it had been so flagrantly destroyed, maybe she would have.
Kenzie Taylor’s house was an unforgivable eyesore tucked into the apogee of the Yancy Lane cul-de-sac. The previous tenants, married women named Barb and Erica, had kept nice house and had tended a fair garden, and everyone on Yancy Lane was sorry to see them go. What Kenzie had done with their house was nothing short of criminal. First, she’d had it painted a gaudy, blinding yellow, the color of August blight. Then, unfathomably, she’d installed a second bay window, this one looking out not on the street but onto Tamara Spheeris’s side yard. The house had gained the countenance of those lizards that look in opposite directions at the same time, their eyes bulging from their faces.
“Sometimes she just sits there,” Tamara said during book club one evening. “Staring at my house and my yard. I’ve had to keep all the window shades closed on that side because you never know if she’s watching.”
It wasn’t the side window she was sitting in now; no, Kenzie Taylor watched them approach perched in the front bay window, coffee cup in hand. The cup said San Diego and was hot pink with yellow palm trees all over it. Just beneath the front window, the garden was indeed desecrated: sunflowers were a shambles, baby’s breath had gone asthmatic, and the amaranthus—once a lavender octopus crawling from the soil—was so much calamari now. But the garden itself was borderline insane: Kenzie had not only planted a corner of mint—which had already started to infest the rest—but she’d also planted row after row of gardenias. If one gets sick, they all get sick, and then you’re left with a gasping garden, invasive cats or no. Besides, the whole thing was just hideous, planted seemingly at random by a person with no concern for science or aesthetics. In Marjorie’s opinion, Kenzie would be better off if all the neighborhood cats came and put the garden out of its misery. Or, she thought sneakily, if one of the wild bobcats came out of the woods and laid apocalyptic waste to it.
She stifled a smile and sniffed the air. Some unpleasant odor was coming off the lawn but she couldn’t quite detect it. “What’s that smell?” she asked Kenisha, who, even in her rage, took a moment to inhale. She wrinkled her nose. “It smells like swamp. Is there a broken sewer line somewhere?”
Holding her breath, Marjorie rang the doorbell. Though they could clearly see Kenzie sitting in her window, the woman didn’t get up immediately. “Oh, she’s savoring this,” Kenisha murmured.
When the door finally opened, Kenzie—in a scoop top and skinny jeans—looked surprised to see them; the problem with that was she was about as good an actor as she was a gardener. “What a pleasant surprise. What brings you ladies to the homestead?”
“Cut the shit, Kenzie, I know what you did to my garden,” Kenisha said, attempting to storm up the steps past Marjorie. Marjorie held her back. Kenzie’s face never changed.
“Why, I’m sure I have no idea what you mean,” she said, her tone dripping burnt caramel. “Maybe your cats finally got tired of tearing up my garden and turned on your own.”
Marjorie said, “That would only prove they were elevating their taste.” For the first time since they’d gotten there, Kenzie’s placid expression fell off, twisting momentarily into something hard and brutal, like a sledgehammer coming down on a cat’s back.
“My cat never touched your garden, you psycho,” Kenisha said, then repeating, “I know what you did.”
“The only thing I did was plant a beautiful garden, only to have it destroyed by neighborhood pests.” There were so many things wrong with that sentence that Marjorie couldn’t respond. “Maybe now you’ll think twice before giving your dirty creatures the run of the street.”
“We know you did it,” Marjorie said, but her voice was shaky. She’d come here stressing calmness and now all she wanted to do was slug this woman in her smug San Diego face.
“Prove it,” the woman said, unaware of the irony. That sugar-sweet demeanor dropped entirely. “Because if you can’t, I’d suggest you toddle on back home and lick your wounds. And keep your animals off my property.” With that, she slammed the door in their faces.
A long silence hung between them. Then Kenisha said, “Can we break in and strangle her?”
“Trust me, I’m considering the same thing.” Marjorie, who wasn’t thinking exactly the same thing, maneuvered them back out onto the sidewalk. “What’s your surveillance system like?”
“Just the porch.” After the Christmas robberies, everyone on Yancy Lane had had doorbell cameras installed, and still the police had never caught the culprit. “Nothing for the garden. She’s right. We can’t prove it.”
But Marjorie was thinking. “She probably doesn’t have one installed, either,” she mused. “What if we could get proof?”
Kenisha, still likely distracted by the thoughts of her destroyed lamb’s ear, didn’t follow. Marjorie filled her in, and a slow smile crept across her friend’s face. “That might work,” she said. It would, and Marjorie was only astounded that Kenzie hadn’t considered it herself first. Facts had a way of dissipating even the most lunatic theories. Maybe a dose of reality would even bring Kenzie into the fold a little more. Stranger things had happened.
Marjorie knew one thing: her friends and neighbors on Yancy Lane had always stood with one another. If that meant standing against someone else, well. It wouldn’t be the first time.
KENISHA SCRUBBED THE video back again, holding the iPad out of the light so that everyone could see. Kyle threw back his head and laughed theatrically. Marjorie might have shushed him if the entire neighborhood wasn’t crowded onto her porch. He held Calico like she was a sleeping baby, her head on his shoulder and his hand supporting her bottom. Marjorie wasn’t here to judge. “It’s too much!” He’d repeated this several times, but was he wrong?
The answer had been so obvious. The night before, Georgie Carmichael and Samira (who had been reluctantly convinced to leave Blueberry at home) had joined Marjorie and Kenisha in staking out Kenzie’s house after dark, all dressed in black and sharing cocoa out of Thermoses. Talk had been at a minimum, even given Samira’s continual laments that Blueberry probably felt abandoned, unconvinced that bringing along a cat to a mission that would hopefully exonerate cats was self-defeating. Marjorie only hoped she wasn’t wrong about Rufus, who she couldn’t picture tearing up any garden. She’d held her tablet in hand, more than halfway convinced that the feral bobcats that lived in the woods had finally gotten tired of suburban development and had decided to start moving into their yards.
The truth was far more mundane. Racoons, of course. They burst out of the woods behind Kenzie’s awful yellow house with the bulging lizard-eyes, trundling along in twos and threes. They avoided the mint entirely; racoons didn’t like mint. Before making sure her tablet’s night mode was on, Marjorie reflected that the most invasive plant in Kenzie’s garden was the only one the pests wouldn’t touch. The woman couldn’t have planted a more nonsensical garden if she’d set out to do it.
Now on the iPad, the racoons swarmed the garden, pulling up flowers by their roots, digging nasty furrows and destroying root systems. The bandits gnawed and yanked, destroying Kenzie’s garden with a somehow prim efficiency, their little hands articulate and purposeful. It really did seem as if the garden was being targeted specifically; next door, Tamara’s prized roses remained unsullied. Alice Spring’s riotous garden to the right, always threatening to overgrow but kept in check by Alice’s sure hand, was similarly intact. All you could do was laugh.
“What’s so funny?” said a voice. All of them looked around and there stood Kenzie Taylor, her jeans splotched with mud and her shirt smeared with something undefinable. Hectic color was in her cheeks.
“Nothing.” Marjorie felt like a girl who’d been caught shoplifting. “Everyone, I invited Kenzie over to show her what happened last night. It’s not cats, Kenzie.”
She scrubbed to the moment right before the racoons came and handed the iPad over. For a grim few moments, the woman simply watched the screen, her face as tight as a blistered pepper. “You filmed my house?”
“Just to prove it wasn’t our cats,” Georgie, whose Fluffzilla was safely in her basket swing at home, explained.
Never taking her eyes from the iPad, Kenzie Taylor mused, “These bitches really filmed my house.”
Marjorie said, “But see, it’s not cats at all. It’s the raccoons. They’re attracted to your garden. Well, not the mint. You really shouldn’t plant mint. It takes over everything. You—”
Kenzie smashed the iPad against one of the porch’s columns. The screen shattered into hundreds of shards. Then she hurled the husk of the device down into Marjorie’s own pretty garden, crushing a swath of azaleas in the process. “I don’t know what kind of CGI bullshit that was, but it’s not convincing. You’re all covering your asses. And filming my house.”
“You dug up my garden, you crazy bitch!” Kenisha shouted.
Kyle took up the charge. “And you broke Marjorie’s iPad! What’s wrong with you?”
Marjorie couldn’t even process the iPad just yet. “Wait, do you really think we created racoons out of thin air to attack your garden?”
“I know what gaslighting is when I see it.”
Just then, Rufus, sensing a party he was late for, trotted up the steps toward the porch. Marjorie, still reeling from Kenzie’s insane accusation, made to excuse herself to grab her bag of Kitty Treats. Kenzie Taylor hiked back her leg and shot it out, connecting with Rufus’ face and sending him flying. The cat arced in the air and hit the sidewalk with a soft thud, bouncing once and landing half in the gutter.
Kenzie said, “Told you there would be consequences. Keep your fucking cats away from me.” With that, she left the stunned residents of Yancy Lane on Marjorie’s porch and sauntered back down the street. As one, they looked from Kenzie to the cat lying sprawled half-in and half-out of the road. Marjorie and Kenisha were first down the stairs. Already Marjorie was ticking off next steps: racing to the vet, nursing Rufus back to health, finally calling the cops on Kenzie. She didn’t know how many years of jail time this got you, but she entertained thoughts of the electric chair.
When she got to Rufus, though, all her plans tattered away. Rufus wasn’t maimed. Rufus was dead.
Kenisha looked at her. Everyone looked at her. “What do we do now?”
MARJORIE SAT IN her living room alone. Tea grew cold on the table beside her. A skein of red kept threatening to cover her consciousness, and she fought it back. Anger was no good to you if you gave into it. You had to harness it. Finally she stood, picking up the teacup. The night had come down around Yancy Lane and gloom pervaded her home. As she headed to the kitchen, she couldn’t help but notice the bright yellow bag of Kitty Treats by the door. A sharp pang twisted in her gut.
Just then, her phone dinged. The neighborhood group chat had been going since the afternoon, only recently petering out. But this one from Kyle O’Brien sent a fresh chill down Marjorie’s spine.
Has anyone seen Calico?
A string of questions clogged her screen, and Marjorie was about to respond herself when a blurry image popped up via Airdrop. Below was a choice: Accept or Decline. With terrible hesitancy, Marjorie touched the ACCEPT button.
A movie began. It was in low light so most of the color had washed out; hints of white cut through the field of brown on brown. Even in the murk, though, it was all too easy to make out what she was seeing.
Calico, Kyle O’Brien’s immense cat, sat in the middle of a wasteland of plants and flowers. A few sprigs of amaranth clung to his back, bright and purple in the daylight, bloodred in the gloaming. Marjorie’s first thought was, What, you couldn’t force one into his mouth so you settled for this? Not for a second did the implication of this shot convince. As usual, Calico looked bored, resigned, and unmoving.
Did you break into his house? Marjorie wondered, and then an even more alarming thought occurred: Did you tear up your own garden just to prove that Calico did it? That’s insane. That’s…
The camera steadied itself—as if the person holding the phone put it down somewhere—and someone walked into the scene. They were in overalls and a long-sleeved shirt, a bandana and goggles covering their face. In the half-light, it was impossible to tell who it was. They held something in their hand, and Marjorie realized with dawning horror that it was a garbage bag.
“Oh no,” she murmured. “Oh God.”
The figure opened the bag and, with some effort, lifted the placid creature and dumped her into the bag like a leftover casserole. For the first time, Calico made a sound: a plaintive, questioning meow that seemed both so distant and so horribly near. Then the person sinched the bag closed, snatched it up, and hurled the heavy end down with tremendous force onto the surface of a nearby paving stone. Marjorie heard the thump, followed by a hideous mewling, choking sound, the sound of a creature who knows it is in pain but does not know why.
With barely a pause, the figure grabbed the bag again, hoisting it over their shoulder to achieve faster velocity, and slammed it onto the earth. The only sound now was a wet splat, a water balloon bursting with pudding. Calico, like Rufus, was dead.
Then a gravelly voice muttered, “Consequences.” The screen went blank.
And even though she was three houses away, Marjorie could hear the horrible sound of Kyle O’Brien screaming.
THE ONES WHO didn’t get the AirDrop watched their neighbors’ phones and tablets. None of them dared turn the sound off. They replayed over and over: the choking meow, the deadly splat. Her mind was on overdrive. Never in her life had she felt this angry, or this out of control.
Kenisha said, “Marjorie.”
Marjorie wasn’t listening. Her mind was on the bag of Kitty Treats.
“Marjorie?”
From behind her: “Should we call the police?”
And: “We need to confront her.”
And: “We need to threaten her.”
Once upon a time, Marjorie had had her own cat. Friskers was the best indoor cat you could have ever hoped for. When Friskers didn’t come for her supper one night, Marjorie had gone out to look for her. What she found was the mangled corpse of her friend tossed unceremoniously into the bushes at the front of the house, the victim of a hit and run. Seeing the blood on her whiskers, the glassy not-there sheen in her eyes, Marjorie had vowed never to own a cat again. It was too much hurt to lose them. Too much pain.
Now that pain welled up in her. She thought she could use it. Neither Rufus nor Calico had been her cat, but that didn’t matter. On Yancy Lane, you stood with your neighbors … and if necessary, you stood for their cats.
“Marjorie,” Kenisha repeated a third time, and now she turned.
“She will keep doing this,” Marjorie said.
“I know.”
“I’m going over there.”
“To talk to her?”
“No, Kenisha. Not to talk.”
After a very long pause, Kenisha said, “Good.”
Kyle O’Brien stood behind Kenisha, nodding. Marjorie took in all their faces, grim but determined. Her mind was on the thief who had stolen all those Christmas presents from their porches that year. After installing those porch cameras, it was easy to figure out who it was. The neighbors of Yancy Lane took care of the problem, because that’s what good neighbors did. The police never found him. The police never would.
This was a good place. A safe neighborhood. Marjorie was damned if some lunatic from San Diego was going to destroy her peace of mind.
“Everyone ready?” she asked, and as a one, they were.
KENZIE TAYLOR AWOKE three hours later, her head pounding, her brain frenzied. All of it flooded back to her: that bitch Marjorie Fields showing up at her door, barging in before she could lock it. The Cerritos woman with the hypodermic needle, bearing down on her with staring eyes. The rest of them, all against her since the moment she moved into this awful neighborhood, some of them holding their cats, their fucking cats.
Then the darkness had come and tucked her into itself. Her living room drifted away, and now…
She could see the tops of trees. Beyond them, a bruise-purple sky pinpricked with faraway stars. The perspective was off. Was she on the ground? Lying on the ground? Somewhere nearby, there was a noise. Something she recognized but couldn’t reconcile with the idea of her suburban home.
It was then she realized she couldn’t move.
Just then, a pair of legs tucked into slender jeans came into her point of view. Then Marjorie Fields crouched down, coming into her line of sight. “Kenzie,” she said. “I was so hoping it wouldn’t come to this.”
Kenzie opened her mouth to speak, but her tongue wouldn’t work.
“Oh yes,” Marjorie said. “You’ll find you’re quite paralyzed. The effects should wear off in a few hours. By daylight, if not before. But I doubt you’ll notice.”
That sound again, and closer. A wild sound. Kenzie placed it now, and wanted—tried—to scream. No sound came out.
Marjorie turned toward it and said, “I wonder if you can hear them, too. The bobcats have lived in these woods for centuries, I guess. And then the people came in to destroy their habitat. Poor things. I can empathize. After all, I know what it’s like when people destroy your habitat.”
Kenzie tried to scream again. A muffled grunt escaped her. That was all.
“Their food sources have become limited—that’s the big problem. The other problem is that some of them go rabid out here. Occasionally we have to call animal control, but I don’t think we’re going to do that tonight. What do you think, Kenzie?”
Another grunt, just as weak as the one before. For the first time, she realized she’d been stripped naked out here, and there was something on her skin. Something sticky, like honey or oil. The smell was coppery, high and sharp. Was it blood? Was it her blood?
“We love our cats on Yancy Lane, Kenzie. We love all our cats. Maybe you’ll learn to love them, too.”
Then Marjorie stood and sauntered off. Some unknown time later, Kenzie heard the soft pad of feet approaching, and cold sweat broke out all over her body. Gooseflesh twisted her skin. It would be Marjorie, come to stop this madness, and if she thought she was going to get away with what she had done to her—
And then the sound: the low, chuckling growl Kenzie had never heard outside nature programs. Not just one but several. And then she saw the eyes: yellowy, floating above the ground like will-o-the-wisps; the shape of a face, feline and horribly large, loomed behind them.
She tried to speak, and when the first claw shot out and sliced her across the face, she tried to scream.
She was still alive when the cats began to eat her.