Page 13 of Paws & Order

Logic says memo.

Logic says meeting reminder from the mayor, who has a well-documented fondness for anonymous correspondence as a form of personal enrichment.

Logic is doing its best.

I pick it up.

It's heavier than it should be.

Inside is a single sheet folded into thirds with the kind of precision that takes practice.

No letterhead. No sender.

Just a paragraph of text, center-justified, typed in the same font as my name on the front.

Liza Morales,

I hope you enjoyed the flowers. I picked them myself.

I saw that you liked cats; your Gomez is beautiful. I hope he wasn't too frightened by my visit last night. Did you know he gets the zoomies at exactly 2:32 a.m.? For a minute, I thought he'd wake the neighborhood.

I would like to meet you soon.

I read it twice.

Then three more times, the words blurring together until all I can see is that line about the cat.

My hands are shaking, and the coffee nearly sloshes out of the cup.

Gomez had woken me at 2:30, yowling at something unseen, streaking circles over the kitchen table, and scattering the coins across the linoleum.

I'd written it off as another round of Hyperactive Cat Olympics, but someone else—someone outside my apartment—had watched it happen.

My first instinct is to throw the letter away.

My second is to call the police station, which would mean stammering at the dispatcher witch until she puts me on hold and plays something with a pan flute.

But this is Blackthorn, and I am a professional, and professionals do not visibly unravel before ten a.m.

The letter goes back in the envelope.

The envelope goes in the bottom drawer, under the coins, under last year's bullet journal that never made it past February.

Out of sight, almost out of mind.

The day does its best.

I shuffle forms, route festival permits, and talk a retired banshee and a brown owl shifter down from what was apparently a very serious noise dispute.

The staff meeting runs a full hour of Zadok at his most theatrically menacing, and somewhere in the middle of it, I realize I've stopped checking over my shoulder.

A whole hour.

I don't check my phone once.

But at lunch, the phone starts ringing.

The first call is just breathing and static.