She lunged.
Unfortunately, the killer was closer and faster, and as soon as his hand wrapped around the knife’s black rubbery hilt, he thrust upward and sliced into her forearm.
She screamed again, stumbling backward. Suddenly, a yell arose from the landing. Ollie was barreling down to them, naked and at full speed.
Once more, the killer was caught by surprise, and Makani realized—in this millisecond—he had thought she’d been alone. Using his shock to her advantage, she slammed her body into his and knocked him to the floor. The hunting knife fell from his hand a second time as his hood flew back and exposed his face.
Makani blinked.
Recognizing him yet unable to place him.
He thrashed and kicked, and as she struggled to keep him pinned, a flailing limb rammed into her wound. She gasped. He clambered out from under her, snatched up the knife, and swiveled to attack. Ollie grabbed him from behind and hurled him aside.
A new battle cry rang out as a fourth person tore into the room.
Grandma Young launched herself at the killer. They hit the carpet together, and the knife plunged into her lower right abdomen. She cried out. The killer shoved the blade in deeper, wriggling it around. He kicked up his boots and pushed her off.
Makani threw herself over her grandmother’s body.
Ollie chased after the killer, who was already running. The killer sidestepped and smashed into the grandfather clock. It crashed to the floor in a violent explosion of brass and tinder and glass. The carpet absorbed the cacophony into a swallowed silence.
Makani was perched on her hands and knees, panting. Blood coated the skin of her palms. It seeped through the legs of her jeans. Beneath her, Grandma Young’s breathing was shallow and strained. Makani lifted her head cautiously.
Ollie and the killer were both still standing.
With a glance from Makani’s narrowing eyes to Ollie’s tensing muscles, the killer reassessed the situation. And then bolted out the front door.
Ollie shot off—straight through the shards and splinters—to lock it behind him as Makani leaped up and flew to the front window. “He’s running left,” she said.
“Where’s your phone?” Ollie asked.
“Upstairs!”
“Mine too.” He sprinted away. “Watch him!”
The hooded figure vanished behind a neighbor’s detached garage. Makani moaned as she scoured the landscape for movement, any hint of movement. Her legs jiggled. Her arms trembled. There was a landline in the kitchen, but she didn’t remember it until Ollie was already thumping downstairs with a phone at his ear.
“Ken,” Ollie said to the dispatcher. He was still naked. “I’m at Makani Young’s house on Walnut Street. The killer was just here.”
Makani motioned for him to take the window. “He went that way! Around the corner of the garage.”
“We need an ambulance. Her grandmother is seriously injured. She was stabbed in the stomach, and she’s losing a lot of blood.”
“Grandma? Grandma, stay with me!” Makani grabbed the nearest throw pillow and propped it beneath her grandmother’s head. Her eyelids lifted open weakly.
“I’m fine,” Ollie assured the dispatcher. “Makani is, too, but her arm was cut pretty badly. She’ll need stitches.”
Grandma Young’s eyes grew worried.
“I’m okay. You’re okay.” Makani unbuttoned the bottom of her grandmother’s blouse to get a better look at the wound. The shirt was heavy and wet.
“It’s David Ware,” Ollie said into the phone. “The killer is David Ware, and he’s running in the direction of the school right now.”
Makani peeled back the fabric, which shucked against her grandmother’s stomach. Grandma Young inhaled sharply. Petrified, Makani lowered it back into place as Ollie raced past her and up the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Makani shouted.
His voice carried down from her bedroom, and she realized he was standing at her window. “No, I can’t see him anymore. . . .”
Ollie’s phone call morphed into an unintelligible buzz. Makani’s heart pounded with fear and adrenaline as she grasped her grandmother’s hand, their skin slick with blood. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how to help. The front window taunted her. At any moment, the killer might jump out from behind the bushes.
A gray shadow fell over her.
She shrieked.
“It’s okay,” Ollie said. But his eyes widened when he saw her arm.
She glanced down to discover that her left sweater sleeve was also soaked with blood. A diagonal slash had ripped open her flesh from elbow to wrist and exposed a throbbing gash of muscle. Her arm didn’t seem like her arm. She barely felt the cut.
Getting on his knees, Ollie pressed a clean hand towel from the upstairs linen closet against her grandmother’s wound. He nodded toward a second towel beside Makani. “Can you wrap that around your arm?”
He’d thrown on his clothes, but his feet were still bare. They were shredded from the glass. Frenzied trails of crimson footprints revealed his path across the carpet.
Blood. From his feet, her arm, her grandmother’s stomach. It was everywhere.
“Here.” Ollie gestured for Makani to take his place and to keep applying pressure.
Grandma Young’s eyes were closed again. The instant Makani had instructions, the instant her grandmother’s life was in her hands, her mind sharpened into focus. She held the towel in place as Ollie wrapped the other one around her forearm. She hissed with unexpected pain. A terrifying flash, a vision, accompanied it—a plain face with a dead expression.
Grandma Young tried to speak. “What did you say . . . his name?”
In the distance, the emergency sirens wailed their approach.
“David,” Makani said. “That was Rodrigo’s best friend.”
David. David Ware. Had she even known his last name?
He’d never been mentioned in the speculation. Not once. He was someone who she and her friends—and Rodrigo—had even speculated with.
Who do you think did it?
He’d asked her that in physics class.
His pleasure must have been so perverse, asking when he already knew that he was going to kill her. Already knowing that he was going to kill his best friend.
The serial killers in her imagination, the fictional centerpieces of innumerable movies and television shows, were colorful and fascinating and impossible to keep her eyes off of. But her eyes had always glossed over David.
Who do you think did it?
She’d looked past him, even when he’d asked her.
She’d looked past him, even when he’d been sitting right in front of her.