Then she saw Orange Lump. His head was low, his back bowed in a sloppy stance - his face slick with the juices of the fallen fruit he was eating. All around him were the remnants of apples, just their cores, messily chewed. Black Velvet stormed up to him and gave him a shove with her head, but he hissed at her, and hit her with an open-clawed paw across the face. She felt its sting, felt blood run into her eye, onto her teeth. The shock of this betrayal shook her. Orange Lump was no scrapper. Farm cats were scrappers. This house cat was a lazy river, not a roaring storm. Black Velvet could see that his eyes had changed, too. They'd always been the color of frost-flecked leaves, with big wide pupils - the eyes of a baby, a dopey human baby, taking it all in and understanding so very little of it. But now the eyes were brighter, sharper, crueler. And the pupils were down to the thinnest slits. Like the eyes of a serpent. Black Velvet knew when she was staring at a predator. Orange Lump had never been a predator. He had always, always been prey. But that had changed. Black Velvet pled with her friend one last time with no more than a searching, plaintive look - a rare moment of vulnerability for the farm cat. But the house cat only hissed in response. A messy, wet, gargled hiss. Spraying juice and spittle. As the other cat went back to busily chewing an apple, resuming his swaying, drooping stance, Black Velvet fled. This place was a bad place. Whether it had always been bad or had simply gone bad, the farm cat could not say, but it was haunted now haunted by what, she didn't know. But something clung to it like a burr, a tick, something crawling upon it like blood-drunk fleas. And she feared that something clung to Orange Lump now, too. Later, she would come back to see what had become of Orange Lump. And there she found him leaner, hungrier, meaner. Sometimes she saw him down near the creek, stalking the thicket with a blood-greased muzzle. She found his kills: They were messy and cruel, guts strewn about, feathers and fur spread wide, bones pulled out and arranged. Mostly, though, he kept to the orchard, where she would not go.