Nightstruck (23 page)

Luke reached over and took my hand, and I held on gratefully as we both stood there, frozen to the floor in the dining room. Most of me didn't want to know what was going on outside. But another tiny part couldn't stand the not knowing, couldn't stop trying to piece together whatever clues could be found in the sounds that were now obviously approaching our house.

There were multiple voices, many of them laughing and raucous, taking obvious pleasure in the girl's screaming. And when Bob had to pause in his barking to draw a breath, I was sure I heard the metallic clip-clop of the goat's hooves.

Moments later, my dad descended the stairs at a brisk pace. His service weapon was tucked into a shoulder holster. He was carrying the SIG in one hand and a pump-action shotgun—something I hadn't even known he owned—in his other. He handed me the SIG.

“Get upstairs, both of you,” he told Luke and me.

My dad had an unmistakable aura of command, and Luke responded to that command just like any of my dad's underlings would. He started toward the stairs, tugging on my hand when I didn't immediately follow.

There was another scream from outside.

“What are you going to do?” I asked my dad, hoping against hope he wouldn't say what I thought—no, what I
knew
—he was going to say. The shotgun was not the weapon he'd choose to use inside our house unless absolutely necessary.

“I'm an officer of the law,” he told me. “There's a crime being committed right outside my door.” He shrugged helplessly.

I shook my head, even as Luke tugged on my hand a little more urgently. My dad was the police commissioner. He was supposed to be way past the point when he actively put his life on the line. He was supposed to be safe.

“Don't go out there,” I begged him. I knew it was an argument I was never going to win, knew that my dad was incapable of staying safely shut up inside while someone was being hurt practically on his doorstep. But if he was too tired to handle a hammer without hitting himself, then he was in no shape to handle whatever was happening outside.

“I have to, Becks,” he said simply, then looked over my head at Luke. “No matter what happens, you do not let her come after me. Understand?” He was using his command tone again, and once more Luke responded to it.

“Yes, sir,” Luke said. I wondered if he would have saluted if he weren't holding my hand. “Come on, Becket,” he said quietly into my ear. “You know a losing battle when you see one.”

My heart was pounding, and my chest felt tight with fear. I couldn't tell how many people were out there, except that Dad would be badly outnumbered. The shotgun might intimidate the Nightstruck—they were still only human, despite whatever had happened to them—but it would have no effect on the goat or any other magical construct that might be out there. A sense of foreboding just about overwhelmed me, but the screaming intensified, and my dad wasn't about to entertain any debate.

“Go upstairs,” he ordered once more, then strode toward the door, shotgun at the ready.

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Luke and I ran up to my dad's study and looked out the window at the spectacle that was being staged—quite deliberately, I'm sure—in front of the house. A group of eight or ten Nightstruck mingled about in the narrow street, right under a streetlamp, so we had no trouble seeing them. They had a pretty girl about my age surrounded. Her clothes were torn, and she was bleeding from a split lip and a nasty gash on her forehead. Her sobs were loud and panicked enough to carry over Bob's barking, and she kept whirling frantically around, trying not to let anyone come up behind her.

Piper and the goat were both there. The goat seemed larger than I remembered, and let's just say that it was very obviously male. It threaded its way through the mob, none of whom reacted to my dad's shouted orders to stop what they were doing.

The girl tried to skitter away as the goat approached, but all she managed to do was throw herself into the grip of a couple of the other Nightstruck. They shoved her back into the center of their circle. The goat rose up on two legs, and I thought it was going to gore her with its horns, but apparently that horror wasn't enough for the creatures of the night. Instead, the goat wrapped its front legs around her thigh and started humping her leg like a horny dog. Which would have been grotesque enough without all the goat's various spines and horns.

The girl screamed and wrenched herself away. I gasped and covered my mouth when I saw the long, deep slashes in her thigh, slashes that were quickly turning her jeans red with blood.

Luke made an attempt to draw me away from the window, but we'd spent enough time together by now that the attempt was halfhearted. He knew there was no way to stop me from watching, short of tackling me to the floor and sitting on me. He settled for taking my left hand in his—leaving my gun hand free—and giving me a squeeze.

If I ended up having to shoot, I would need both hands, but for now I was grateful to have the anchor of his touch. Dread coursed through me, and I might have drowned in it if I didn't have his hand to hold on to.

There was a deafening boom as my dad fired the shotgun. He was still standing right on our doorstep, I guess, because I couldn't see him even when I pressed myself as close to the window as the motley array of towel rods would allow. One thing I did know was that he hadn't fired the shotgun
at
the Nightstruck, because none of them went down. I supposed he couldn't, when they had an innocent victim in their midst. Shotguns are not precision weapons.

Most of the Nightstruck turned to look, as if they'd noticed my dad for the first time. Piper, however, was looking straight up at me, making eye contact through the window. She was smirking and confident, not remotely rattled by the shotgun blast. She crooked a finger at me, beckoning, but I sincerely doubted she expected me to respond.

Dad pumped the shotgun loudly, and I finally caught a glimpse of him as he advanced toward the gathered Nightstruck. Thanks to the injured victim, he still couldn't afford to shoot. I didn't know if the Nightstruck had enough brains or sense of self-preservation to figure that out.

For a moment it looked like they were going to call his bluff, like they were all going to stand there like statues until he was close enough that they could grab him. I willed the victim to make a run for it while her captors were distracted, but she had collapsed to the pavement and curled up in fetal position—maybe from pure terror, or maybe because the goat had hurt her so much she couldn't stand.

Dad bellowed at the street people to back away or he'd shoot, and he finally seemed to get through to them. The circle surrounding the girl dissolved as the Nightstruck slowly, casually backed away. All except Piper and the goat, who stood side by side.

“Don't think I won't shoot you, Piper,” my dad called. “Back the hell up.”

“Here's the problem, Mr. Walker,” she responded, with no hint of concern. “If you shoot me, you might shoot the poor, innocent victim you're trying to save.” She smiled. “You could put the shotgun down and go for your handgun, but there are kind of a lot of us, so that might not be a good idea.”

“She can probably survive a few stray pellets,” my dad said as he continued to inch closer. The rest of the Nightstruck continued to back up, but Piper just stood there like she thought she was invincible. “I'm sure she
can't
survive whatever you've got planned for her, so I'll just have to take my chances.”

I bit my lip and squeezed Luke's hand so tight I was probably hurting him, but he didn't complain. If Dad could get close enough, he could direct the spray of pellets so that they wouldn't hit the victim—it takes distance for them to fan out and scatter, which is why sawed-off shotguns are illegal. I wondered if Piper knew that was what he was up to.

“Back away, Piper,” I prayed under my breath. I knew the person standing out there in the dark was no longer the Piper I knew, was no longer my best friend. I also knew the chances of her coming back to herself were slim. But the thought of seeing her die right in front of me—at my father's hands, no less—was too terrible to contemplate.

“And what do you plan to do about Billy here?” Piper inquired, giving the goat a very careful pat on the head, avoiding the spines. “The shotgun won't be much use against him.”

That was my concern, too, and I stood in agonized tension, thinking the goat might charge at any moment. But it kept standing quietly at Piper's side. It seemed to me almost like the two of them were waiting for something.

I wrenched my gaze away, quickly looking down the street behind my dad, sure someone or something was sneaking up on him, but there was nothing. When I looked back at my dad, he was almost close enough to have a relatively safe shot. He'd already fired a warning shot, and I didn't know how many shells his shotgun held. If the Nightstruck decided to take their chances and rush him …

I didn't want to follow that line of thought.

Piper, the goat, and the injured victim were on the sidewalk across the narrow street from our house. Dad had been approaching them on a shallow diagonal, slowly inching his way across the street. He was now only a few steps from the curb. If he continued on his current line, he would have to step over a storm drain to get onto the opposite sidewalk.

My eyes caught on the innocuous-looking storm drain. It hadn't undergone any strange nighttime transformation, and it looked for all the world like a normal storm drain, and yet something about it—and about Piper's air of waiting—made the hair on the back of my neck rise. I wanted to yell at my dad to go around the damn thing, but I was afraid of what might happen if I distracted him when he was getting this close to Piper and the goat.

I should have taken that chance. I should have yelled. And because I didn't, I'll have to live with the what-ifs for the rest of my life.

My dad is not a small guy, and he cast a sizable shadow as he crossed under the halo of light from the streetlamp. That shadow fell over the storm drain, making its depths all but invisible in the darkness, so I couldn't see exactly what happened next. All I saw was an indistinct whisper of movement, and then my dad cried out in surprise.

One leg slid out from under him, and he fell awkwardly on his butt, barely having the presence of mind to hold on to the shotgun. Before he had a chance to react, something unseen yanked on his leg. His foot and lower calf disappeared into the storm drain, and he had to let go of the shotgun to fight the pull.

“Daddy!” I yelled, the scream ripping out of my throat as I wrenched my hand from Luke's and grabbed hold of one of the towel rods over the window in a death grip. Luke was yelling, too, but I could barely hear him over the pounding of the blood in my ears.

Dad wedged his free foot and both his hands against the curb as his other leg was pulled farther into the drain. There was no way he could fit into that opening, but then, he didn't have to for bad things to happen.

The Nightstruck were closing in again. Piper sauntered forward and picked up the shotgun. Whatever was pulling my dad into the storm drain kept him from fighting her for it. His face was red and contorted with the strain of fighting the pull, his teeth bared in a feral grimace.

“You should have left us alone, Mr. Walker,” Piper said loudly, but she was still looking up at me, evil green eyes boring into me. “You're not meant for the night. It's Becket we want, not you.”

“Let him go!” I shouted, banging on the window with the flat of my hand.

Piper smiled at me. “Come out and get him!”

Dad wrenched his body sideways so he could look up at the window while still bracing himself against the pull. “Don't let her out of the house, Luke!” he yelled. “Keep her safe!”

Beside me, Luke started cursing, and I had the sense of him looking all around as if trying to find a weapon or some other way he could help. But I was the only one who had any chance of stopping this.

“Open the window for me,” I ordered Luke as I double-checked to make sure my gun was ready to fire.

I was worried he wouldn't do it, that he would somehow feel that was disobeying my dad's command to keep me safe, but he didn't hesitate. He unlocked the window and shoved it open so I could take aim. The towel rods were annoying, but I could work around them.

“Let him go!” I shouted again, pointing the gun at Piper.

Still smiling, she took a quick step backward and let another of the Nightstruck—a bearded, filthy, older man who had no doubt been homeless before the night took him—stand between me and her. He wasn't big enough to cover her completely, but if I fired I would be much more likely to hit him than Piper. Which didn't matter to me in the least.

At least, not in theory. I gritted my teeth, and my finger tightened on the trigger, but I hesitated to fire. The only thing I'd ever fired at before was targets on a shooting range. I'd never even gone hunting, never shot anything that was alive. If the homeless guy were charging at me with murder in his eyes, I probably wouldn't have hesitated. But he was just standing there, no threat to me, and showing no sign of being a threat to my father.

Just over the homeless guy's shoulder, I could see Piper's lips twist in one of those smirks I was starting to hate more than anything in the world.

The goat suddenly reared up on its hind legs, then lowered its head and leaped forward. Its horns slammed into my dad's shoulder, and though he was a brave man, he couldn't help screaming in pain. When the goat backed up, its horns and the spines on its head were dripping with my father's blood. Maybe it had broken some bones, too, because my dad's arm went entirely limp. Without the use of his arm, he wasn't able to fully brace himself anymore. He screamed again as his leg was pulled all the way into the storm drain, as far as it would go, until his body slammed against the curb.