“Jasmine, no!” my mother shouts, clambering over the barrow after her. “Rhett, stay here,” she says through a mop of unkempt blond hair.
My entire family is running toward the danger and I’m frozen, glued to the floor, unable to speak, unable to act.
There’s a roar of agony from somewhere downstairs, another gunshot, and then my sister’s scream, a wail of fear and terror. Something snaps inside me and I can move again, charging through the opening, leaping over the barrow, rebounding off the wall, half-stumbling down the hall. I take a sharp left and bound down the steps two at a time.
A cool breeze hits me in the face, unimpeded by the front door, which is wide open and hanging awkwardly by a single hinge. To my left the couch is overturned, splinters of ceramic from a broken vase littering the wooden floorboards around it.
Where’s my family?
I glance into the yard, where the rosebush is nothing more than a glowing pile of ash. The moving, bright-eyed shadows are gone. Are they inside?
“Mom?” I say, surprised when my voice comes out more than a whisper. “Dad? Jaz?”
No answer. Silence. Silence. And then…
A scream. Not inside—but somewhere else, down the street perhaps. Another house. Can’t worry about that now. Have to find my family.
I tiptoe into the living room, stubbing my bare toe on something hard. My father’s gun skitters away, clattering across the wood as more screams fill the night. Screams of terror and pain. Neighbors, friends…what’s happening?
I bend down and reach for the gun, my brown skin appearing even darker in the shadows…
“Death finds you,” a voice says from behind.
My heart skips a beat as I whirl around, instinctively taking a step away toward the tipped-over couch. Fluorescent bulbs stare back at me, too bright to gaze at directly. I shield my eyes with a hand, trying to discern who or what is connected to the blinding light. “Where’s my family?” I say. A black cloak, thin at the top and flared out toward the bottom, sits below the eyes.
“You won’t need them anymore,” the eyes say.
I reverse another step, feeling the gun clatter against my heel.
I crouch down, watched by the animal eyes the entire time. Blindly grab for the gun. It’s warm and soft. For a moment, I risk tearing my gaze from the black-cloaked menace standing before me.
I’m holding a small, dark-skinned hand.
Screaming, I drop it and fall to the side, my breath coming in ragged heaves, my heart in my throat, my brain finally catching up to my senses.
“No,” I breathe. And again: “No.”
Jasmine watches me with wide, white unseeing eyes. Her neck is wet and glistening with spilled life.
Tears blooming like dewdrops, I wail at the presence, at my sister’s body, at the empty room, my cries joining the screams and shouts that seem to be everywhere now, a cacophony of despair. “What have you done?” I cry. I’m dreaming—oh please let this be a nightmare. Pinch myself. And again, harder. A groan gurgles from the back of my throat, a cry of rage and hurt.
I jump to my feet and charge the shadow, forgetting my father’s gun because I don’t need it, don’t need anything but my own two fists and unbridled anger.
I blink and it’s gone.
Ohcrapohcrap.
“You can’t fight me,” the voice says, behind me again.
I whirl around to face it, my heart stuttering in my chest, my every instinct urging me to get the hell out of the house. The shadow is hovering over my sister’s dead body.
It’s a woman’s voice. I only now realize it. What is she?
“Get away from her,” I growl through my teeth.
A laugh. How could she be laughing when Jasmine is broken beneath her? Who is this psychopath? “I’m afraid I can’t do that. Your family”—she points at the couch and it flips over as if it weighs no more than a feather, revealing the still bodies of my parents—“is waiting for you in hell.”
They’re not moving, not breathing: dead like Jasmine. Just like before. Not again.
I clamp my eyes shut as a flash of pain sears through my skull.
When I open my eyes, they’re still there. My newest family, the first one I’ve felt comfortable with in a long time—since after I lost my first foster family—gone to a place I can’t follow. The glowing eyes are still there, too, still staring. I run at the she-demon, and this time she doesn’t vanish, and I hit her so hard, like I’m hitting the tackling machines at football practice, but it’s like crashing headfirst into a stone wall. Her icy hands clamp around my throat and she picks me up like I’m not big for my age and over six feet and a hundred and ninety pounds. Like I’m the size of one of the dolls Jasmine will never play with again.
“Guess we’re doing this the hard way,” she says, and I can see her teeth, straight and white and in perfect little rows above and below her lips, not rotted and sharpened into fangs like I expected. She squeezes my throat and I can’t breathe and I’m surprised when I realize:
I don’t care.
Breathing doesn’t matter. The sharp rap of the heartbeat in my chest doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now that they’re gone.
And then something hits me, and at first I think it’s the demon, but we’re both flying backwards, and her grip loosens and she releases my neck. I crack the back of my head against the fireplace before slumping to the floor, my skull aching, acutely aware of the writhing presence beside me. A flash of metal cuts through the darkness and she disappears, like before.
Three dark-skinned faces appear, each identical and framed by well-trimmed gray hair and webs of wrinkles. I shake my head and the three faces become one.
“Mr. Jackson?” I say, glancing at the long sword my neighbor’s carrying in his left hand. Hastily, he shoves it into a loop on his belt.
“She’s gone, son,” he says, bending over and picking up my body as easily as the demon did, surprisingly strong.
“So are they,” I say through the tears and the wave of dizziness that assaults me, and he nods with sad eyes.
“Salem’s Revenge has begun a day early,” he says gruffly, just before my vision fades and I lose consciousness.
BREW by David Estes, available NOW!
David Estes, Grip (The Slip Trilogy Book 2)
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