“Either that, or searching for a weakness,” I whispered back. “It won’t find one,” I hastened to assure Piper when I heard the frightened whimper that rose from her throat. I might have been more convincing if I believed that myself.
I had no idea who or what was out there, and I had zero interest in going to a window and trying to get a look. Then again, I didn’t much like the idea of standing there cowering helplessly in the dark, either.
“I’m going to get my gun,” I announced, pulling Piper with me as I sidled toward the coffee table to grab one of the candles.
I always called it “my” gun, but technically it belonged to my dad. He’d taught me to shoot, and he’d made sure I memorized the combination to the gun safe in case there was an emergency and he and his service weapon weren’t around. I wasn’t an expert marksman, but I wasn’t a public menace, either.
I hauled Piper up the stairs while Bob continued to bark and snarl. Dad’s gun safe was in his study. “Hold this,” I ordered Piper, thrusting the candle at her as I knelt before the safe.
She held the candle low so that I could see the numbers on the combination lock. My hands were shaking a bit with nerves as I turned the dials. Bob’s barking had moved to the kitchen now, which I supposed meant whatever was out there was continuing its survey of our defenses.
As the safe clicked open, I noticed that I had subconsciously started thinking of our stalker as “whatever” instead of “whoever or whatever.” Maybe it really was a person out there, messing with us just for fun. But after encountering a fanged baby, a trash monster, and a living pothole, I found my assumptions shifting.
Dad’s SIG Sauer was loaded and ready to go, because he didn’t have it there for sport. It was meant for emergencies, and in an emergency you don’t want to have to stop to load your gun before facing the enemy. I checked it over briefly and made sure there was one in the chamber.
“You look like you know how to use that thing,” Piper said, sounding surprised for some reason.
I looked over my shoulder at her. “I’m the police commissioner’s daughter. It would be pretty lame if I didn’t know how to shoot a gun.”
From the sound of it, Bob was back at the front door. Pressing myself against the wall, I tried to peek out the study window, which looked out over the front door of the house, but all I could see was a sea of black. It was so inky black out there that I figured the whole city must be out, because lights anywhere nearby should have provided at least a tiny hint of ambient glow.
Bob’s frenzy was slightly muffled by distance, which allowed Piper and me both to hear a strange click-click-click sound. It was coming from outside, and to my ears it resembled the sound of claws on metal. It was coming from below, climbing higher.
“Shit!” I yelped, pointing my gun toward the window—which was the only possible way anything could get in this room—while moving backward away from it. “It’s climbing the drainpipe!”
Thanks to the candle Piper still held, I could see nothing in the glass except a faint orange glow being reflected back at us, but my ears followed the sound as it rose, and I was tempted to fire blindly in that direction.
Not so tempted that I would actually do it, though. A gunshot would shatter the window, and if it didn’t hit our stalker, then I’d be giving it free access to the study.
Bob had finally realized his prey had moved, and I heard the thump of his paws as he bounded up the stairs. He blew past Piper, then threw himself at the window. I half expected the thing to shatter on impact, but it didn’t. His claws scrabbled at the glass—our house was going to be a wreck by the time this was all over—and he continued his furious barking.
I was torn between wanting to get as far away from that window as possible and wanting to be there and ready if whatever was out there broke through. I stood hesitating near the door, gun still held in a classic two-handed grip and pointed at the window. My finger wasn’t on the trigger, though, because Bob kept leaping into my line of fire.
“We should go to a room with no windows,” Piper suggested, tugging on my arm.
PSA: never tug on the arm of someone who has both hands on a gun. I was lucky my finger wasn’t on the trigger, or I might have fired by accident.
“Careful!” I snapped at Piper, glancing at her in my peripheral vision and nodding toward the gun.
“Oops, sorry.”
Whatever was climbing the drainpipe should have made it to the window by now, but if it was making any attempt to get in, I couldn’t hear it over Bob. His desperate barking was getting on my nerves, making me even more tense, and I wished he’d give it a rest. I knew better than to try to silence him, however.
Abruptly, Bob turned away from the front window and leaped to the side window.
“Please, let’s go somewhere safer,” Piper begged.
I licked my lips, doing a quick mental inventory of the house. There were no rooms without windows, but the windows in the basement were only a few inches high, barely peeking above sidewalk level. However, we used our basement like many people use attics, meaning the place was crammed with boxes of junk, broken furniture, and stuff we plain didn’t know what to do with. There wasn’t much room to move around, and it was about the creepiest place I could imagine hiding from some unknown creature that was toying with us in the dark.
“The windows are all locked,” I reminded Piper yet again. “And if it could break through one, I think it would have done it already.”
“Right. So you should put the gun away and we should go downstairs and play cards.”
I gave her a dirty look but didn’t reply.
Apparently our stalker moved again, because Bob almost knocked Piper and me down as he charged past us, this time heading for what used to be my sister’s bedroom. I lowered the gun and took a deep breath.
“It’s not going to get in,” I said, trying to reassure myself as much as I was trying to reassure Piper. “If it does, it’ll have to go through Bob to get to us. And if it goes through Bob, there’s always this.” I held up the gun. “I’m not saying we should go play games, but I think we should both try to chill a bit.” Ha-ha. Like that was going to happen. “Let’s go downstairs, where we’ll have more than one candle.”
The light from the single candle Piper still carried was barely enough to penetrate the darkness, and the flickering shadows it cast made me want to jump out of my skin.
I don’t think Piper was convinced of our safety—I know I wasn’t—but she allowed me to coax her back downstairs, where we hastily lit even more candles. No amount of candlelight could equal the power of electricity, but it was better than nothing.
It wasn’t long before Bob came flying down the stairs, once more in pursuit of something we couldn’t see. I would have thought he’d be getting tired by now, but he showed no signs of slowing down as once again he took up his post at the front window. The shutters were broken, crooked, and scratched all to hell from his last frenzy, but not enough to allow us to see outside.
I stood at the ready. I didn’t point my gun, because I didn’t want my arms to get tired, but I made sure that both Piper and I were far away from the window Bob was attacking so that, if it came to it, I’d have enough time to point and shoot before whatever was out there got to us.
I won’t say I was relaxed—my heart was still pounding in my throat, and I still felt the occasional tremor in my knees, but I was beginning to feel vaguely secure. The thing outside continued to move from window to window, driving Bob out of his mind, but I had seen no sign that it could break in and get to us.
Our neighbor, a nice little old lady who always doted on Bob when she saw him, started pounding on the wall between our houses, complaining about the noise. If I hadn’t been so scared, maybe I would have laughed about it. Short of shooting him, there would be no way on earth to silence Bob—even if I had wanted to. If nothing else, he kept us apprised of the creature’s position, and he was a wall of fur and muscles and teeth between us and it.
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The would-be intruder continued its leisurely course around the perimeter of our house, apparently interested only in us, not in any of the other houses in our row. It led Bob to the kitchen, where he threw himself against the door that led out into the courtyard. Mrs. Pinter, next door, banged on the wall once more, this time harder and louder.
Piper and I stood within the circle of candlelight in the middle of the dining room, neither of us speaking as we continued to track Bob’s progress. Only the barest flicker of light reached into the kitchen, and the only visual evidence I had that he was in there was the occasional hint of movement as light glimmered on the lighter portions of his coat.
There was another exasperated bang on the wall, which I rolled my eyes at, but shortly afterward there was another sound that filled me with dread: Mrs. Pinter’s back door slamming shut.
Our house was on the corner of the block, which meant that Mrs. Pinter couldn’t see whatever was still keeping Bob busy at our back door, which opened on the side of the house rather than the back. I knew that Mrs. Pinter was stepping outside, either to investigate the source of Bob’s distress or to come bang on our door and insist we make him stop barking.
I started running toward the back door, knowing there was no way I could get there in time to do anything useful. Sure enough, before I even made it to the kitchen, there was a shrill scream outside. Piper screamed, too, but I couldn’t worry about her, not now.
Mrs. Pinter screamed again, and this time there was the unmistakable sound of pain in that scream. Bob was going even more nuts, and he was between me and the door.
Mrs. Pinter was still screaming, but her voice was noticeably weaker.
“Bob, at ease!” I shouted as loud as I could. I wanted to reach out and grab his collar, which is what Dad and I would usually do to get him out of attack mode, but he was in such a mindless frenzy I was afraid I might get my arm chewed off for my troubles. Not to mention that it was so damn dark in the kitchen—Piper had not followed me with her candle—that I was as likely to put my hand straight into his mouth as grab his collar if I reached for him.
Not surprisingly, Bob completely ignored my command. Mrs. Pinter let out a ululating wail that was abruptly choked off and followed by something thumping hard against the window. Bob dropped down to all fours, no longer scrabbling at the door with his claws, although he was still barking, snarling, and bristling.
“Bob, at ease!” I tried again. He glanced at me as if to say, Are you crazy? before returning his attention to the door. But he seemed more normal now, less frenzied.
I remembered that there was a flashlight in one of the kitchen drawers, and I dug around for it with my left hand while I kept my gun at the ready. Piper was still standing in the dining room, where we had been when Mrs. Pinter’s door had first slammed. Her hand was clamped over her mouth, and her shoulders were shaking with sobs. The hand holding the candle wasn’t too steady, and hot wax dripped onto the floor. It looked like it was all over her fingers, too.
I wanted to take the candle from her, sit her down on the sofa, maybe give her a hug. But there wasn’t time for that. I had to see if Mrs. Pinter was okay. (I kept mentally telling myself that, but really what I wanted to know was if Mrs. Pinter was alive. Those screams…)
My probing fingers found the flashlight, and I was relieved to discover the battery wasn’t dead. I shined the beam on the door, wincing when I saw streaks of blood on the white paint. Apparently Bob had broken a nail or two with his frantic efforts to claw his way through to whatever was outside. He was definitely beginning to calm down now, no longer jumping up or looking quite so intense. I had to hope that meant whatever had been stalking us was now gone.
“Come on, Bob,” I said, “back off.” I reached for his collar, and he put up only halfhearted resistance as I pulled him away from the door. I put the flashlight on the kitchen counter, pointing it at the door so I could undo the locks while holding the gun.
“What are you doing?” Piper screamed at me when I unlocked the first lock on the back door. She hurried toward me, her candle still dripping all over the place.
“I have to check on Mrs. Pinter,” I explained. “She might need help.” Which, frighteningly, was a best-case scenario.
“Who cares?” Piper responded, her voice high and shrill. “You can’t open that door!”
I told myself her callous indifference to the fate of a nice little old lady was merely a side effect of her state of near panic. I shouldn’t expect her to pick her words carefully under the circumstances.
But really, who would say “Who cares?” about something like this?
“I think it’s gone,” I said.
“You think it’s gone? That’s not good enough.” She was in the kitchen with me now, and though she was obviously still frightened, there was a spark of anger in her eyes, too. “After all the effort that thing made to get in here, you are not just going to open the door for it.”
I was reaching for the dead bolt, and Piper grabbed my hand to stop me. Bob didn’t appreciate her tone or the gesture, and he turned his snarl her way.
“Let go of me,” I said in as calm a voice as I could manage. “Bob’s temper is on a hair trigger right now. This is my house, and I’m going to check on Mrs. Pinter. I have to open the door to do that.”
Reluctantly, Piper let go, and when she saw I was not going to listen to her she retreated to the living room, leaving me to face whatever was out there, alone. Bob was still tense and agitated, but nothing like he had been before.
My hands were shaking as I twisted the doorknob and cracked the door open. It was still pitch black outside, and I didn’t dare open the door any wider without the flashlight, so I held it in my left hand, the gun in my right, as I used my foot to nudge the door open. Bob gave a soft whimper but didn’t seem inclined to dash off into the night. I ordered him to stay, just for good measure.
And then I stepped through the door and saw what had happened while Piper and I had cowered in the house.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mrs. Pinter was definitely not okay.
The first thing I saw when I shined my flashlight onto our patio was a spatter of red droplets on the flagstones. I gulped in trepidation as I let the light play over the entire area. I’m not a blood spatter expert, but it wasn’t hard to tell that the blood on our patio floor had come from a source around the back corner of the house. And my flashlight couldn’t reach that far unless I actually stepped outside.
I hesitated on the threshold. I did not want to see where that blood had come from. I did not want to step out from the relative safety of my house. But just because there was blood didn’t mean Mrs. Pinter was dead, and I had to make sure she wasn’t lying there desperately in need of help.
With a deep, shaking breath, I let the back door close behind me, training my flashlight beam on the surrounding walls and above, making sure our stalker wasn’t just waiting for fresh meat to present itself. I saw nothing that didn’t belong, nor did I see any sign of movement. Also, Bob was still quiet.
“It’s gone, Becket,” I told myself under my breath, but that didn’t make me feel much better. Not with the blood on the patio or the sea of darkness that lay beyond.
I would have liked to hold the gun in both hands. It was heavy, and the grip was uncomfortably big for my hands. But I needed the flashlight, and I kept assuring myself that there was nothing to shoot.
I picked my way over the flagstones, avoiding the droplets of blood. A part of me couldn’t help worrying that I was disturbing a crime scene, hearing my dad’s voice yelling at the TV when some dumb cop show got it all wrong. I think that part of me was just trying to talk me into going back inside without investigating.
The darkness pressing in all around me was oppressive, and there was no traffic noise to help ground me in reality. Nothing but the occasional distant wail of a siren, nowhere near close enough to help.
Moving at the speed of about an inch per minute, I made my way
to the corner at the end of our patio. The spray of blood droplets was denser here, and I could now smell its faintly metallic stink. My stomach turned over. I was pretty sure it took a lot of blood to make it smell that strongly.
Finally I forced myself around the corner, my breath coming short and steaming in front of my face, my light darting around the courtyard, trying to see everywhere at once.
Mrs. Pinter lay in a heap just a few feet from her back door. There was a pool of blood at the base of our house, just around the corner of the patio, and streaks of that blood led to where Mrs. Pinter lay. Like she had tried to crawl away from her attacker, although there was so much blood it was hard to imagine she had survived long enough to crawl.
A little mewling whimper rose from my throat, and if I’d had a free hand I’d have clapped it over my mouth to try to contain my own horror. I couldn’t see all of Mrs. Pinter’s body because she was all hunched in on herself, but there was no mistaking those sensible shoes, the flowery dress, or the drab cardigan.
I was shaking so hard I could hear my teeth chattering, and I knew for certain that Mrs. Pinter was dead. No one could survive losing as much blood as I saw spattered and pooled around the courtyard.
I remembered the thumping sound on the kitchen window right after Mrs. Pinter’s screams had shut off, and I raised my flashlight to examine the window. Sure enough, there was a big splatter of blood there, though the thump had been too loud to be just the splashing blood.
Looking back, I think a part of my mind had registered the reality of what I was seeing well before I allowed myself to actually take it in. I’d already played the flashlight beam all around the courtyard, so there was nothing there I hadn’t seen yet. I just really, really didn’t want to see it. But there was only so long my subconscious could protect me.
There was a trail of blood droplets leading from the splatter on our window to the darkness across the courtyard, and with great reluctance I allowed my flashlight beam to follow that trail to its conclusion.