I sat up straighter, listening, wondering what I should do. Run out and find them? And then what? I was useless in a direct confrontation; at best, I would give myself away to Attina, letting him know exactly who was hunting him and ruining all my future attempts to gather information. At worst, he’d kill me too.
And it had to be Attina causing the screaming, right? This town had gone for decades without a violent attack, and now they’d had two in less than a week. There was no way that was a coincidence. But Derek Stamper had been killed slowly and in private, and no one had known until the body was found more than an hour later. Did that mean this was a different killer? Or a different situation? What had changed in the circumstances to prompt such a marked changed in the Withered’s methods?
I stood up, shucking the blankets I’d been wrapped in and walking to the window. The floor creaked under my feet, but only softly. I moved a slat in the blinds and looked outside; the world was empty and dark, colorless in the moonlight. I saw trees and houses and parked cars, all motionless in the silence. There wasn’t even wind. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, certainly not some transformed demon killing someone right in front of the—
Another scream, longer than the others. Was the pitch different? I couldn’t tell.
What if it wasn’t a Withered at all? What if it truly was a coincidence, two attacks in less than a week, and this one was just a mugging or an assault, and I could stop it and was too afraid to do so? But I had reason to be afraid, maybe more than anybody else in the town, because I knew what could happen if I was right. I’d seen Withered kill. I’d seen the aftermath, and I’d seen it up close. Worse than the violence, I’d seen glimpses of the minds behind it, tortured by time and warped over ten thousand years. I’d seen them not just take lives but take them over, stepping into people’s shapes and faces and living their lives for them.
Stopping them was what I did. It was my entire life. But running out headfirst was not how I did it.
I waited by the window, watching and listening, but the screams were done. Three short cries, and a life was over.
A few minutes later I heard an engine, then two, three, and who knows how many more. I could see red-and-blue reflections on the houses across the street, but not the lights themselves. Voices shouting. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. A light came on in the house across the street, and then another in the house next to it. I looked at the round clock face on the bedroom wall, squinting to see it clearly in the dark. 1:30 in the morning. There’d be hours before we knew the truth.
Was it worth it to go out and look? Now that the police were there the danger—probably—was gone. And I knew I wouldn’t be the only one stepping out in the middle of the night to rubberneck whatever grim cleanup the police were trying to do. It might even serve as an alibi, in case suspicion ever turned to us—obviously I didn’t do it, I was right there with you instead of running away. Or it might just as easily create suspicion where none had existed, causing the police to remember me when they thought about the crime scene. Guilty parties showed up at their own investigations all the time—not enough to make it suspicious, but certainly enough to remove it as an alibi. More than anything, though, if I went I’d have to take Brooke with me, or risk her waking up in confusion and wandering away. She needed sleep, especially now that she had a real bed for the first time in a week, and she needed to not be traumatized by the sight of another dead body. Better to stay here and wait.
I waited by the window, watching for any new information.
All night long.
*
Brooke was still Marci when she woke up the next morning. I explained what had happened, as briefly as I could, and she said I’d made the right decision to stay inside. I don’t know if she believed it or not, but it was kind of her to say. We got dressed, staring at opposite walls in the pink, fluffy room. When we got to the kitchen to help with breakfast, Ingrid was already there, in her bathrobe and curlers, holding the phone and crying.
“Mercy,” she said. “Mercy, mercy.”
“Is everything okay?” asked Marci. She glanced at me, both of us knowing what the phone call was probably about.
Ingrid shook her head.
I stepped closer, trying to sound helpful instead of curious. “Is there something we can do?”
Ingrid looked at the phone in her hand as if were a museum curiosity, a bizarre object that had somehow transported itself magically into her hand. I saw that the screen was blank and black; whatever call she’d gotten was long over, and she’d been too shocked to put it down.
Marci sat next to her at the kitchen table. “We heard something last night,” she said. “Police cars, some kind of trouble. Did someone tell you what it was?”
I would have asked the same question by saying that I’d heard screaming, but I could see instantly that mentioning the police cars was the smarter move. Marci was filling Ingrid’s mind with the most acceptable, approachable part of the story: someone trying to fix it. Mentioning the screams would only have made the story more horrible.