“Back up!” Michael ordered her, and she retreated to the stairs. She could hear Shane fighting in the hall again. “Claire, you and Eve need to find a way to block everything. Seal it up. Don’t let Shane—”
She wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but just then he gasped and doubled over, and she knew that it was lost. He looked pale. Paler.
Mist.
Gone, along with a fading ghost of a scream.
Eve skidded to a stop beside her, eyes wide. “He’s gone,” she whispered, as if she really couldn’t believe it. “He left us.”
“He couldn’t help it.” Claire took her hand. “Come on, Eve, let’s get the bookcase down the hall. We need to wedge it in the doorway.”
Eve nodded numbly. It was like all the fight had gone out of her, and Claire understood why…. What hope was there now? Michael had been handling things, but without him…?
“Help me,” she said to Eve, and she meant it in every way she could.
Eve gave her a tiny little smile and squeezed her fingers. “You know I will.”
Between the three of them, they managed to block the front door pretty thoroughly, wedging the bookcase in place and bracing it with two more at an angle. Sweaty, panting, scared, they looked at each other.
It got quiet. Weirdly quiet.
“Well?” Eve looked around the corner. “I don’t see anything….”
“Can we get to the pantry?” Claire asked. “I mean, I don’t hear anybody….”
“Too risky,” Shane said. He grabbed the phone from a pile of debris and started dialing on the fly, then dropped it. “They cut the line.”
Eve pulled her cell phone out of a holster on her belt. Shane grabbed for it, checked the signal, and held up his hand for a high five. He was already dialing when they smacked it. “Come on,” he muttered, pacing, listening. “Pick up, pick up, pick up….”
He stopped in midstep. “Dad? Oh, damn, it’s the machine—Dad, listen, if you get this, it’s Shane, I’m at Michael Glass’s house in Morganville, and I need shock and awe, man—come running. You know why.”
He flipped the phone shut and threw it to Eve. “Upstairs, both of you. Get in the secret room. Michael? Are you with us?”
Claire shivered in a sudden cold draft. “He’s here.”
“Watch out for them,” Shane said. “I–I kind of have a plan.” He said it as if he was half surprised. “Girls. Upstairs. Now.”
“But—”
“Go!” He’d learned how to yell orders from Michael, and it seemed to work, because Claire was moving for the stairs without any conscious decision to do it. The cold chill stayed around her, and she saw Eve shivering, too.
The upstairs was quiet, as well, except for the distant knocking sound of Miranda hammering on her door. “I don’t like this,” Claire said. “Oliver knows Michael can’t do anything after dawn, right?”
“I don’t know,” Eve said, and chewed at her bottom lip. Most of her makeup had sweated off or gotten wiped away; even her lips were normal lip color now, for nearly the first time Claire could remember. “You’re right. It’s weird. Why would they just give up now?”
“They haven’t,” said a voice that Claire’s tingling spine recognized before her brain. Michael’s bedroom door opened, and standing there, smiling, was Monica Morrell. Gina and Jennifer were behind her.
They were all holding knives, and that was a hell of a lot scarier than Miranda, no matter how crazy she might be.
Eve got in between Claire and Monica and began backing her away, down the hallway. “Get in your room,” Eve said. “Lock the door.”
“Won’t do you any good,” Monica said, leaning around Eve. “Ask me why. Go on, ask me.”
She didn’t have to. She heard the door open behind her, and whipped around to see a man in a police uniform stepping out into the hallway with his gun drawn.
“Meet my brother, Richard,” she giggled. “Isn’t he cute?” He might have been, but Claire couldn’t look anywhere but at the gun, which was big and shiny and black. She’d never had a gun pointed at her before, and it scared her in ways that even knives didn’t.
“Shut up, Monica,” he said, and nodded toward the far end of the hall. “Ladies. Downstairs, please. We don’t have to make this bloody.” He sounded harassed more than anything else, like mass home invasion was just something standing between him and morning coffee.
Claire backed up, touched Eve, and whispered, “What do we do?” She was asking Michael, too, for all the good it would do.
“I guess we go downstairs,” Eve said. She sounded defeated.
The chill swept across them stronger than ever. “Um, I think that’s a no?” Warm air flooded in. “That’s a yes?” More warm air. “You’re kidding me, Michael.
Eve fainted. She did it convincingly, too, so well that Claire wasn’t totally for sure that she wasn’t really out. Monica, Gina, and Jennifer looked down at her, frowning, and Claire bent over her, fanning at her face. “She got cut,” she said. “She’s lost a lot of blood.” She hoped that was an exaggeration, but she wasn’t too sure, because the black towel had fallen away from Eve’s arm and it looked soaked.
“Leave her,” said Monica’s brother. “We only need you, anyway.”
“But—she’s bleeding! She needs—”
“Move.” He shoved her, and she nearly ran into the knife Gina was holding out. “Monica, for God’s sake, back the hell off, will you? I think I can handle some little girl!”
Monica frowned at him. “Oliver said we could have her when it’s over.”
“Yeah, when it’s over. Which isn’t now, so
She shot him the finger, then stepped back to let Claire move past her. Claire did it as slowly as she could, manufacturing a crying jag and some shaking that, once started, felt too real to stop.
“See?” Monica said over her shoulder to Jennifer. “Told you she was a punk.”
Claire doubled over, moaning, and very deliberately puked all over Monica’s shoes. That was all it took. Monica screamed in horror and slapped her, Gina grabbed her, Jennifer stepped away, and Richard, confused by all the sudden girl fighting, took a couple of steps back so he wouldn’t put a bullet in the wrong one.
“Hey!” Shane’s voice, loud and angry. He was on the stairs, looking through the railing at them. “Enough already. I’ll give you the damn book. Just leave them alone.”
“Not fair,” Monica muttered, glaring at him. He glared right back, looking like he’d take back that hitting-a-girl rule, just once. Gladly. “Richard, shoot him.”
“No,” Richard said wearily. “I’m a
“Well, I will be. One day.”
“Then I’ll shoot him when you are,” he said. “Shane, right? Get up here.”
“Let them walk out of here first.”
“Not going to happen, so just get your ass up here before I decide I don’t need either one of them.” Richard cocked the gun for emphasis. Shane slowly came up to the top of the steps and stopped. “Where is it?”
“The book? It’s safe. And it’s someplace you’ll never get it if you piss me off, Dick.”
Richard fired the gun. Everybody—even Monica—screamed, and Claire looked down at herself in shock.
He’d missed. There was a smoking round hole in Michael’s door.
Oh. He
“Kid,” Richard said wearily, “I am
“Hey!” Monica protested.
“—and you’re not
“He is
