“She deserved better.” His voice cracked on the last word. “I didn’t mean to… I was just so hungry.” Chill bumps stood out on his arms, but he didn’t seem to notice the cold.

Titus hesitated with the first shovelful of dirt. “Do you want to say anything to her?”

Leland nodded, and light from the waning moon shined on his dark hair. He stepped forward until he could see into the hole, wincing when his heel snapped through a twig. “I’m so sorry, Ivy,” he whispered. “If I could take it back, I would.” Then he stepped away with a somber nod, and Titus began shoveling dirt into the grave. After a few minutes, I grabbed the bottom half of the broken shovel from the shed and began to help. Then Leland pitched in with his bare hands.

By the time Ivy was properly buried, we were all three covered in dirt and sweat.

Titus took the broken shovel from me and set both of them inside the shed. “Come on, Leland…what’s your last name?”

“Blum. Leland Blum,” the naked stray said.

“Come on, Leland Blum.” Titus gestured for him to come with us into the cabin. “Let’s get cleaned up and find you something to wear. I think I have some spare clothes in my backpack.”

“Do you always travel with extra clothes?” I asked as we rounded the side of the cabin, headed for the front door.

“I started carrying a spare set after I was infected, because I tended to lose track of where I’d left my clothes after I shifted.” He glanced at Leland, clearly eager to begin…mentoring. “That’s what we call the transformation from human to cat, and vice versa.”

Leland rolled his eyes. “Wow. That’s not cheesy at all.”

“Right?” I said, surprised by his sarcasm. Frankly. I was impressed that he wasn’t curled up in a corner, whimpering, considering what he’d been through.

Inside, I found rags in one of the kitchenette drawers, then wet them at the sink and passed them out. “This would be a lot easier if there were a bathroom,” I said as I scrubbed dirt from my forehead. “Or a mirror.”

Titus grunted as he brushed loose earth from the front of his jeans.

“This place pre-dates indoor plumbing.” Leland rinsed his dirty rag, then began scrubbing his left arm. “Ivy said her grandparents put the kitchenette in, but her grandfather refused to add a bathroom, when he could just pee out the back door.”

“I wonder what her grandmother thought of that?” I mused as I ran my rag over my throat and the grimy skin exposed above the collar of my shirt. For a couple of minutes, we worked in silence. Then Titus rinsed his rag again and turned to Leland.

“How long were you and Ivy together?” he asked, and though Leland probably didn’t pick up on it, I could tell how much the answer meant to him by the too-casual tone of his voice. By the tension in his shoulders.

“Nearly two years. Since our senior year in high school.”

Titus stiffened almost imperceptibly. Ivy was cheating on her boyfriend with Justus. Titus’s brother was the other man.

I rinsed my rag under the faucet, then draped it over the divide in the sink to dry. I was as clean as I was going to get without a shower. “Leland, can you tell us what happened the other day? The night of the attack?”

The new stray frowned first at me, then at Titus. “I thought you already knew.”

“Corey Morris gave us the broad strokes, but he only knew what happened to him.” I sank to my knees next to the couch and began putting Ivy’s things into her purse. “He had no idea you and Ivy were infected. You’d be helping us out if you could give us the details.”

“What details do you want?”

“Did you know the shifter who…infected you?” Titus asked.

Blum’s bewildered expression said as much as his answer did. “I don’t know any shifters. I didn’t even know there were shifters, and I didn’t know that cat was one until you told me.” He dropped his rag into the sink without bothering to rinse it, then plucked the last clean one from the drawer. “All I know is that Ivy and I were on the couch, getting…intimate.” His gaze strayed to the couch while he ran hot water over the clean rag. “Then we heard Corey shouting from outside. I opened the door but before I could even step onto the porch, this cat was there. He was huge. Bigger than a bobcat—more like a mountain lion, but solid black.”

“Yes, we’re all black in cat form.” I set Ivy’s repacked purse on the scuffed up coffee table, and I wondered if we should have buried it with her.

“Well, he just pounced on me. He drove me to the floor, and his claws dug into my shoulders. See?” Blum wiped the dirt from his left shoulder, exposing four small puncture wounds, crusted with dried blood. “They’re deeper than they look. I thought he was going to eat my face off or something, but then Ivy screamed and ran up into the loft. The cat went after her, and I froze. She was terrified. Screaming. And all I could do was stand there.”

“She had a gun?” Titus prompted, when Leland seemed lost in the memory.

“Yeah. Her dad kept an old hunting rifle under the bed. But it wouldn’t fire, so she swung it at the cat. Hit him several times. Finally, he took off, right out the front door. I locked it behind him and went to check on Ivy.”

“She was scratched?” Titus said, when the new stray’s gaze lost focus in the direction of the loft.

Leland nodded. “On one arm. It bled a little, but it was nothing fatal. For a while, we stared out the window, trying to see if the cat was still out there. We thought Corey was dead, but we were scared to go check, and he wasn’t answering his phone.” He bent to wipe the dirt from his bare legs, without pausing in his story. “When we were finally sure the cat had left, we took a couple of knives from the kitchen and went to look for him. We found his phone, but Corey was gone. So was the car. He just…left us out here.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, gutted by the look on Leland’s face. “Corey got scratched pretty good, and he drove himself to the emergency room. But you should know that he had no idea you and Ivy were hurt.”

“Not that it matters now.” Leland wiped the last of the visible dirt from the top of his right foot, then tossed the second dirty rag into the sink. “Walking through the woods in the dark seemed stupid, with a wild cat on the loose, so we decided to stay in the cabin for the night. But by then, we were both running a fever. I tried to take care of Ivy. I brought her water from the sink and gave her some ibuprofen from her purse. But then I passed out.” Leland closed his eyes. “When I woke up, she was dead.”