The one sleeping in the bedroom down the hall. His bedroom. The woman he had married.
For the thousandth time, she felt like crying. Her father had always been so wise. What had made him choose to marry such a tramp? She wished she could believe that Amanda was as harmlessly stupid as she seemed. The quintessential dumb blonde. No, that wasn’t fair; that was giving offense to blondes everywhere. But honestly…Her father was a smart man, one who loved culture and books. She wasn’t sure Amanda knew that books came in any form other than a shopping catalogue.
Suddenly her attention was arrested by movement along one wall. It was as if a giant black creature with huge bat wings had descended and was spreading its evil shadow over the room. She felt pure, icy terror grip her. She didn’t dare to breathe.
Flap, flap, scrape.
Relieved, she let out the breath she’d been holding. It was just the old oak outside her window. The wind had pressed a branch against her window, and that had been silhouetted by one of the outside lights, creating the shadow she had seen. Even now, the oak was moving in the wind.
Why didn’t the shadow move?
That question was playing through her mind when she heard the creaking on the staircase.
She burst out of bed. Someone was in the house. Eddie was dead, her father had been poisoned, and now someone was in the house.
She couldn’t just stand there, shivering in the night. Zach was down the hall, and he was licensed to carry a gun. She needed to get Zach, and quickly.
Weighed down by dread and a sense of terror greater than any she had ever known before, Kat found herself unable to run, but she forced herself to move, albeit slowly, despite the icy tentacles of fear wrapping around her limbs. She finally reached her door and started to open it. The old knob felt icy, and she could have sworn that there wasn’t just darkness around her, but a mist. As if something huge were breathing nearby. She swallowed hard and finally opened her door.
Inch by inch, forcing herself to move, she made her way down the hallway. It had somehow gotten longer, and it was frigid and filled with the same mist, as if someone were exhaling hot breath into the cold air. She could hear it inhaling, exhaling. Almost like laughter. She was moving down the hall, and it was moving after her.
Or it was in front of her. She wasn’t sure.
She fought the rush of terror that attacked her at the thought of being stalked by some dark, amorphous danger. She didn’t believe in ghosts, didn’t believe in banshees, voodoo or vampires.
But…
She could feel the evil, the menace, cold as ice, like the touch of the Reaper’s hand, coming out of the dark and slipping around her neck.
She wanted to close her eyes. She was terrified that a death’s head would suddenly appear before her, out of the mist, laughing in silent glee.
At last she reached Zach’s door.
The minute she grasped the knob, she felt stronger.
She pushed the door open, feeling almost normal. She wasn’t going to get hysterical, she told herself. Wasn’t going to blurt out that the banshees had been crying outside her window, or that the Grim Reaper had been breathing down her neck in the hallway. She would tell him the truth, plain and simple.
Someone was on the stairway.
“Zach?” she called softly.
No answer. For a moment, panic filled her again. It had already been here. It had gotten Zach.
She rushed over to his bed before she could flee back to her room and hide in her closet. Somewhere out there, she knew, real danger lurked. A danger to her father.
She reached down, trembling in fear at what she might find.
And then she knew.
Nothing had gotten Zach.
He just wasn’t there.
Eddie had been to dozens of Revolutionary War sites, and he had studied literally hundreds of maps. Nothing surprising in that, Zach thought. Eddie and Sean had spent days on end rehashing the Revolutionary War and participated in numerous reenactments.
Zach followed Eddie’s online trail for an hour, until he realized that the words were blurring on the screen.
He left the office, moving carefully down the steps.
They were icy by night.
He heard the crashing of the waves, the tinkling of the bells and mooring chains on the boats, and the whipping of the wind. Security lights blazed from nearby businesses, but beyond their reach the sea was pitch dark, except when the rolling waves lashed up and the whitecaps were caught in the multi-colored glow of the Christmas lights someone had strung along the docks. What should have looked cheerful instead created a miasma of eerie confusion across the surface of the water.
It was cold. He wrapped his scarf more tightly around his neck, pulled his cap low over his ears and hunched his shoulders as he headed toward the car.
As he moved, listening to the moaning of the wind as it rose and fell, echoing like a screaming harpy in the night, he was startled to hear something else.
At least…he thought he heard something else.