Truce licked her ear.

“Mmm,” Greer coaxed, mimicking a sound of ravenous hunger.

Truce waved his tail.

“All normal cats like seafood,” Greer informed him. Truce popped down to the floor and sauntered over to the counter by her purse, clearly expecting his mistress to race to the store immediately for his favorite brand of cat food.

“Whatever happened to gratitude? Can’t you even try to remember that you were a mangy, starving orphan a few months ago?” Pulling open the oven door, she reached in with pot holders for her dinner. Lasagna.

The phone rang in the living room. A shock wave shivered down Greer’s spine; she dropped a pot holder, burned her finger and turned pale, all in the space of a second. The phone rang again. Nursing her burned finger in her mouth, Greer closed the oven door with a snap and felt her heart suddenly ticking like a time bomb.

On the third ring, she took her finger out of her mouth and starting shaking it, her steps joltingly stiff as she walked to the telephone. Inches away from the receiver, her hand suddenly turned independent, refusing to pick it up. Insistently, the telephone rang again.

Taking in a huge lungful of air, Greer grabbed it. “Hello,” she rasped.

On the other end there was nothing. Just…breathing.

Greer’s fingers tightened around the receiver. “Hello?” she repeated, louder this time.

More breathing. Basically normal breathing. Two weeks ago, her caller had had a cold, and his breathing had carried a wheeze. Greer had suggested he take a cold capsule, because back then she’d still been trying to deal with her crank caller with humor and patience. Sometime in the interim, all of Greer’s normally irrepressible humor had deserted ship.

Well aware her fingers were trembling, she dropped the receiver back into its cradle. Her small apartment, so chock-full of cheery colors and familiar things, suddenly seemed to close in on her. The walls echoed silence and a forbidding emptiness. Fear licked along her bloodstream.