Nightstruck (18 page)

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.

I couldn't stop the scream that tore out of me like a demon trying to escape.

Propped up against the far wall, where it had come to a stop after bouncing off the window of our house, was Mrs. Pinter's head.

I forgot all about my crime scene protocol worries, forgot about moving cautiously in the dark, forgot about making rational decisions. Forgot everything, basically. My mind filled with white noise as I turned and ran for the kitchen door, desperate to get inside. My feet skidded through blood, and I fell down hard on my hands and knees. I managed to keep hold of the gun, but the flashlight was jarred from my grip, and I was too panicked to reach for it.

Maybe it was just as well I ran the rest of the short distance in the pitch dark. I'd seen enough horror to haunt my nightmares for years already. I skidded and slipped and half-crawled, but I made it to the kitchen door and flung myself through, slamming it shut behind me and throwing all the locks. Then I collapsed in a shivering, hyperventilating heap on the floor, with my back propped against the door.

Bob whimpered softly at me in the darkness, coming over to nose my hand and then licking the skinned area on my palm from when I'd fallen.

“Stop that,” I told him, then buried that hand in his thick, warm coat, clinging to him like I used to cling to my stuffed lamb when I was five.

I don't know how long it took—maybe five minutes—before I realized that unlike Bob, Piper hadn't come in to check on me. Surely she had heard me scream, and though she obviously wasn't the white knight type, once she heard the door close behind me she had to have known she wouldn't be running straight into danger if she came into the kitchen.

“Piper?” I called out, but there was no answer.

I had a brief, horrible thought that the creature had somehow gotten into the house while I'd been outside, that I would find Piper torn apart just like I had found Mrs. Pinter, but I quickly rejected the thought. I would have heard something, and Bob would have sounded the alarm and thrown himself into the fray.

I forced myself to my feet, keeping hold of Bob's ruff for comfort as I called out to Piper once more. And once more received no answer. Figuring she must have run off to hide somewhere, I searched the house, room by room, calling for her repeatedly, but I couldn't find her anywhere.

It wasn't until I'd gone through the whole house a second time with no success that I thought to check the front door—and found it unlocked. While I'd been out finding the horror in the back courtyard, Piper had up and walked out the front door.

She had been adamant that I not open the courtyard door, but then she'd just strolled out the front door herself? With no warning? With no
car
? Where could she possibly have thought she was going? You couldn't
pay
me to leave the house in anything but a dire emergency at a time like this.

I tried her cell phone, of course, but it would take luck and hours of trying before I had a hope of getting a real live connection. I gathered up every last scrap of courage I could find and stepped out the front door to call her name, but I wasn't surprised she didn't answer. It had taken me too long to realize she was gone, and I'd spent so much time searching the house for her that she could easily be a mile away by now. Assuming she was all right. I couldn't for the life of me imagine what she'd been thinking. The part of me that was terrified for her battled with the part of me that was furious with her, leaving my emotions tangled and confused.

Struggling to keep all of the pieces of myself together, I sat down once more on the kitchen floor—I feared I would leave blood stains if I sat anywhere else—and started repeatedly calling my dad's cell, hoping that somehow, miraculously, I would get through.

*   *   *

The cops showed up before I managed to get through to my dad on the phone. Apparently, most of the people who lived around the courtyard had seen what happened to Mrs. Pinter—or at least the aftermath of it—and had been frantically trying to get through to the police. One of them got lucky at phone line roulette before I did, and soon there were red and blue flashing lights everywhere.

Even though I hadn't reached my dad on the phone, he showed up about five minutes after the first police car arrived, having been notified about a grisly murder happening right behind his house. When he came through the door, I practically threw myself into his arms, hugging him with all my strength and unable to suppress my sobs. He held me and murmured assurances that everything was going to be okay, and for a brief moment I felt like daddy's little girl again.

Eventually I got hold of myself and managed to stop crying, though it was much harder to stop shaking. I had blood on my clothes from having slipped and fallen in the courtyard, but I assured my dad I was unhurt except for my skinned palms. He was on the verge of insisting I let an EMT look at me anyway, but he relented.

His entire focus since he'd walked in the house had been on me, and when his officers tried to talk to him he was abrupt and dismissive with them in a way I knew wasn't like him. But despite his focus on my safety, he wasn't blind. He had to have seen all the damage Bob had done during his protective frenzy.

“What happened here?” he asked gently, like he was talking to a wounded animal.

“It's a long story,” I told him between sniffles.

“Then let's sit down.” He guided me toward the couch, but I balked.

“I don't want to get blood on it,” I explained.

“I don't care about the damn couch,” he said, his tight voice betraying his fear and protective anger. “We can get a new one or get it cleaned. Now sit down.”

I knew the anger in his voice wasn't directed at me, so his tone for once didn't get my back up. I collapsed onto the couch and wondered if I could face the ordeal of recounting tonight's nightmare to my dad. Not that I had much of a choice.

“Promise you'll believe me,” I begged him before I started, and he promised without hesitation.

And so I told him. Everything. Including Piper's attempt to set me up with Aleric, the attack of the living pothole, and the unknown, unseen creature that had tormented us so badly before it had finally killed Mrs. Pinter. I ended with Piper's baffling decision to leave the house while I was finding Mrs. Pinter.

Dad asked me a dizzying number of questions, and I belatedly realized I was making my formal statement. I suspected having my father do the interview broke about a million rules of protocol, but none of the officers at the scene was inclined to argue with him. Each and every one of them had a haunted, exhausted look that said the night had already stretched them to the breaking point. Big city police officers see amazing amounts of terrible stuff, but nothing like what had been happening tonight.

If Mrs. Pinter's death had been a normal murder, we would have had cops and detectives and crime scene technicians crawling all over the place for hours, meticulously documenting every detail, taking a zillion photographs without disturbing the evidence. But tonight the city was so overwhelmed with mayhem—and the mayhem was of such an impossible nature—that the authorities just didn't have the time to spend hours on the scene. They took plenty of photos and interviewed everyone whose house had a view of the courtyard, and then they packed the body into a medical examiner's van and were done.

The cops left, but my dad stayed. Feeling safe with him in the house, I finally changed clothes, dumping the bloodstained outfit in the trash, and took a shower. It was late enough that I could have fallen into bed directly afterward, but I was far from ready to face the specter of my dreams yet, so I went downstairs, where my dad was doing his best to tend to the wounds on Bob's paws. Our heroic dog had not only nearly torn the house apart, he'd also broken two nails and shredded the pads of his feet.

I was pleasantly surprised when the lights came back on just as Dad was finishing up with Bob and telling him what a good, brave boy he'd been.

“Keep the candles in easy reach,” Dad warned as we went to work blowing them out. “I'll get us some extra flashlights and a couple of Coleman lanterns tomorrow.”

I shuddered. “So you don't think we've seen the last of this.”

He glanced at me and raised his eyebrows. “Do you?”

No, of course not. I had no good explanation for what was going on out there, but it seemed overly optimistic to hope it would just stop of its own accord and everything would go back to normal.

The next words were out of my mouth before I even realized I was going to say them. “Mom wants me to come live with her in Boston until all of this blows over.”

When I'd talked to my mom on the phone in the afternoon, I had instantly rejected her suggestion. Funny how a few hours, an attack by a fang-filled pothole, and the decapitation of the nice little old lady next door had changed my perspective.

“Maybe that's not such a bad idea,” I concluded, though I still hated to say it.

Dad's face looked grim, his eyes unhappy, as he turned to face me fully. “I would love nothing better than to have you out of danger,” he said. “But I'm afraid that isn't possible.”

I frowned. “Why not?”

“Because the city is now officially under quarantine.”

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“What?” It came out as a high-pitched bleat, loud enough to alarm Bob, who rose gingerly to his wounded feet and started looking around for the threat.

Dad blew out a loud breath and rubbed his face. “No one knows why this is all happening, but the federal government is worried the city may be having some kind of outbreak. We can't capture any of the bizarre happenings on camera, so people who haven't personally witnessed something think we must be hallucinating. Until someone is able to prove that we don't all have some contagious disease, no one's going to be allowed in or out of Philadelphia.”