“What are you waiting for?” I yelled. “Didn’t the old man order you to kill me? You want to pose for a picture first?”
There was no way to tell whether it understood. I kept throwing hunks of wood at it. One grazed the bottom edge and landed, burning, on the ground outside. The others never made it all the way through.
After the sixth piece of wood, it ducked under the lintel and floated into the room. It must have decided I didn’t have anything more dangerous than slices of Christmas trees.
I took the ghost knife from my pocket.
The shadows receded as the floating storm entered. Tucked back into the corner on the right, I saw Catherine against the wall. She had a long wooden pole in her hands.
As the predator moved by her, she dropped the pole and something heavy swung out of the ceiling—chains, it was chains. They fell against the floating storm’s body and splashed into the water.
What happened next happened without a scream or a moan or any of the sounds you would expect from a living creature. It seemed to bleed light and heat into the hanging chains. The water below boiled. That lasted a few seconds until the creature’s core had deformed into a teardrop shape as the power flowed out of it.
The glowing chains melted apart and dropped into the boiling trough below.
The predator flew erratically for a few seconds, seemingly disoriented. It was very much reduced in size, but for a split second I was sure that Catherine’s trap would have killed it if I hadn’t let it drink so much power from the electric lines.
Then the water sprinklers turned on.
Steam blasted off it. The floating storm sank toward the ground and passed near the door on the left side. Sparks shot out of its body onto every metal object within ten feet—door handle, hinges, nails in the wood, even the still-glowing chains.
A wave of flame billowed up the wall. The predator struck a pair of metal trash barrels, releasing the last of its life and energy in one sudden blast. I was knocked flat near the rear wall, my ears ringing. Aside from the flickering firelight of the burning doorway, the room was dark.
The predator was dead.
Flames climbed the walls on either side of the door, and even the trough was on fire. I wouldn’t be getting out that way. I couldn’t see Catherine anywhere.
I hopped up onto a table saw and cut a circular slash in the wall above it with my ghost knife. The flames had already covered both side walls and had spread to the loose pine needles and sticky pitch on the ground. The sprinklers were not going to stop this fire.
I pushed the cut section and jumped out, running far away from the building. My scalded skin cooled quickly in the night air, and I knew that soon my wet clothes would be stealing body heat.
But I was alive. A predator had chased me halfway down a mountain, and I had survived.
Catherine came around the edge of the building, giving it a wide berth. We jogged toward each other.
“Thank you!” I said.
“No one has come out of the farmhouse,” she said, ignoring me. Her expression was blank, but her hands were trembling. “Either they’re really deep sleepers or there’s no one home. Normally, I’d suggest we knock and ask for help, but since we just burned down their barn, I think we should get the hell out of here.” She was still all business.
“Fine.” About fifty yards away, I could see a line of streetlights. We headed for it. She took out her cellphone, scowled at it, and put it away. No reception.
“It looked bigger,” she said.
“It was,” I said. “While I was leading it away, I came to a power line—one that led to the mansion up on the hill, I think. It fed from that before I could stop it.”
She didn’t respond. The closer we got to the road, the stronger the wind became. I began to shiver.
“We need to get out of this wind,” I said.
“Good idea,” she snapped. “Let’s chop down some trees and build a log cabin.”
We didn’t say anything else for a while.
On the road, we came to a sign that read WASHAWAY 2 MILES. We headed in that direction, jogging along the shoulder. The wind was strong at my back.
The road narrowed ahead, and the wide, gently sloping area where the trees had been planted gave way to steeper ground. People lived here, although we could only see their mailboxes and driveways.
A pair of headlights came up behind us. Catherine moved to wave the car down, but I grabbed her elbow and pulled her to the drainage ditch. We crouched behind a tree, watching.
Two black Yukons passed. Both had red-and-white cards in the front window. They were bidders, but which ones?
“Don’t grab at me again,” she hissed.
We kept going, moving more carefully now. We stayed off the road when we could and hid whenever we saw a pair of headlights. After about ten minutes, a fire truck came toward us from town, lights flashing. We ducked behind a thicket of blackberries just as it rounded the curve and drove by.
We started walking again. I was shivering and my legs were chafed from the drying mud on my pants. My ears were burning cold, and I squeezed my hands in my armpits to keep them warm. Still, I felt elated. I’d faced a predator and survived. Again.
I wanted to thank Catherine in a way that broke through her anger, but I couldn’t see a way to do it. She made
