Microsoft Word - Winterborn_final-ADRoland, page 39
of sorrow that built up in her throat. Tears soaked her face, her arms. Slowly, she raised her head.
Orange light flared out of the main hall. The two men ran out the front door.
Then the woman ran out, flames clinging to her back. Tam whined into her arm. Grief ripped into
her heart.
Alarms brayed. Across the street, a porch light flicked on, and then a rectangle of light opened up
as the resident stepped outside.
Put her out, put her out! Tam clamped her lower lip between her teeth, praying hard. Please, somebody help her!
The neighbor dashed across the street, narrowly avoiding being run down by the men’s car as it
roared from the parking lot. He threw himself on the woman.
Tam sent up a silent prayer to the one God she hoped existed.
She had to get back to her car and get away, before the cops and the fire department showed up. I
am so glad I parked down the street. She had to figure out what to do next. Tomorrow was the party, and apparently the day that all hell would break loose at Wraithborne.
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Chapter Twenty-Nine
The house had that empty, lonely air about it. Tam shut the door, flipped the locks. She ran up the
stairs and peered into Kevin's bedroom.
Nothing on the walls. No sheets on the bed. No toys, no clothes, even the curtains were gone from
the windows. The slight breeze made the plastic still taped over the window suck and pop.
Wow. So Sean followed through…Tam swallowed her amazement and pulled the door shut. She
went down the hall to their bedroom.
Sean's clothes littered the floor. Rumpled sheets and the comforter hung off the end of the bed.
The photo album, their wedding album, lay on the bed, half under one of the pillows.
So maybe he did miss her. A stray bolt of tenderness poked her heart. Poor Sean. She picked up
the album and flipped it open. Several of the pictures, free of the plastic protector sheets, fluttered to the mattress and the floor.
Tam plucked one from the mattress. Sean, his arm around her, as they grinned at the camera. She
was twenty pounds lighter and he still had that fresh-faced boyish look.
She tucked it into her bag.
A loud thump floated up from downstairs. Sounded like the front door, slammed shut. Hard.
Sean?
Her heart leaped and she ran downstairs, her feet thudding on the stairs. She skidded to a stop,
wrinkling the worn old area rug. “Sean?”
The front door remained shut, all the locks turned. “Sean?” she called again, turning toward the
kitchen.
Footsteps, a slithering sound, and another, softer thump left her knees shaky.
Alarmed and growing more frightened, Tam tiptoed upstairs, to the closet in the master bedroom.
A quick check told her Sean's guns were still in place. Guns don't solve problems, some inept teacher from high school admonished, an echo fifteen years old.
“They sure help,” she muttered in reply.
She chose the handgun. It was easy to carry, easy for her to use. Easy to load. She stuffed a spare magazine into her long-strapped bag then shifted the strap so it hung cross-body. The soft envelope-style pouch molded to the curve of her hip. With the book and the bullets, the bag left her slightly off balance. She adjusted it so it hung further around her back. Better.
On the way down the stairs, she heard more thumps, more shuffling. Definitely from—
At the foot of the stairs she paused. Not from the kitchen. The back stairs.
The lights were on in the kitchen, sickly yellow, flickering. Shadows spun across the portion of the
walls that she could see from her spot in front of the stairs. Like the patterns of light and dark on the sidewalk beneath trees on a sunny day.
Tam advanced a few steps, craning her neck to see more of the kitchen. More sounds, the sounds
of a struggle, came out of the utility room.
Her breath staggered in her throat. She closed her mouth and focused on slowly inhaling,
exhaling through her nose. The air burned her sinuses. When she felt more in control, she squared her
shoulders and paced into the kitchen.
The swirl of shadows ceased the second she stepped over the threshold.
Boards crisscrossed the lower cabinets under the sink. Two boards more than the one she nailed
in place. Tam crouched in front of the thin wooden doors. Deep gouges marred the edges of the doors.
Her battle with Kevin's monster hadn't done that much damage. All that remained of the lower
edge of the right-hand cabinet was jagged, ragged wood.
Something else tried to come through those doors. Tam stared at the battered, splintered wood,
one hand over her mouth. The heat from her hand irritated her split lip. A sickly sense of anxiety,
dread, latent terror twirled through her body.
The noises came from the utility room again. She glanced at the door. The light was on in there.
“Hello?”
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A particularly loud thud rattled a gasp out of her.
She wished she had more guns. No, an army behind her.
More than anything, she wished for Sean. “Don't be at that house, please,” she whispered, sorrow
and terror mingled.
The thumps behind the door eased but didn't cease entirely. Tam adjusted her grip on the
handgun and opened the thin door. She paused at the threshold. “Who’s there?”
Of course the room was empty. The thumping sounds came from the dryer. Had it been on when
she entered the house? She couldn't remember.
Sounded like shoes. Heavy, rubbery thumps made the dryer shake and rock with every cycle. Tam
jerked open the dryer door, terrified she would see somebody's severed head rolling around in there,
like in that movie Identity. Real or just a hallucination, a friggin' head in the dryer would undo her tentative hold on her senses.
It was just shoes. Sean's sneakers settled into the bottom of the drum. Tam plucked them out and sat them on the bottom stair.
She laughed softly, relieved. Shoes. No monsters.
Sean only had three pairs of shoes. No amount of nagging could get him to buy a new pair, or
wear new ones she bought. He had the sneakers, worn to shreds, a pair of stiff, uncomfortable leather
ones, and his old uniform shoes. The leather shoes he wore to church or anything that had a dress code. The uniform shoes were banished to the depths of his closet. Chances were they would never see
the light of day again, not until Tam cleaned out for Goodwill donations.
And the sneakers were there, on the stairs.
Perplexed, she put the gun down on the still-warm dryer and leaned over, reaching for the shoes.
Hands shot out from the space between the risers and locked on to her wrists. Slimy, clammy
flesh smeared unmentionable discharge on her skin. Tam stared at the hands, frozen,
uncomprehending. The hands led to discolored, death-mottled wrists. The wrists widened into thickly
muscled forearms.
She screamed, finally.
The hands jerked back, still holding tight to her wrists. Inhuman strength snatched her against
the risers, sucking her arms out of sight into the dark recesses beneath the stairs. The hard edge of the risers dug into her chest and shoulders. Grit on the floor grated her knees through her jeans. Tam
ground her teeth and hauled back with all her might, tearing one arm loose from her captor.
Fingernails tore into her other arm and something growled, low and terrifying, from the black behind
the stairs.
She braced her free arm on a riser and shoved backwards, screaming as fingernails ripped strips
of skin off her arm. The grasping fingers caught on her fingers, gouging skin, tearing flesh. She
sobbed, staccato screeches.
The thing wasn't letting go! The other arm, grayish-green in the faulty dangling light bulb, flailed
about, scratching up splinters of wood. The growls became fierce, hungry. A shoulder, a section of a
thick neck, the hint of a jaw and side of a head tried to force through the blessedly narrow space
between the risers.
Tam uttered one more shriek and used her feet to push herself backwards, hard, so hard she felt
the skin at the base of her little finger rip away from the palm of her hand.
But she was free, and the pain, the blood, mattered little to her. She flung herself at the dryer,
grabbed the gun and scooted back against the wall by the door.
The thing under the stairs bashed itself against the underside of the risers a few time, hard
enough to make the stairs shake. The rotting risers gave way and the thing that burst through at last
sent her heart into overdrive and her mind to a place she wasn't sure if she could come back from.
At one time it had been a man. It struggled free from the broken stairs, born from the shadows as
surely as evil itself. Greasy gray-white skin, splotched with dark, wet lesions, split and hung in ragged flaps from his shoulders and ribs, oozing thick black blood. Dingy ivory bone poked through
gelatinous pulpy muscle. It was naked, and once he freed himself from the stairs, he crouched, the
bulky muscles twitching, tense. The thing's mouth pulled into a silent snarl, looking all the more
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horrible because the eyes sagged beneath a Neanderthal brow within puffy, inflamed sockets that
dripped dark mucus. As she watched, the thing reached up and clawed gashes down his own cheeks.
Tam screeched when it took an awkward, shuffling step toward her, still crouched. The ghoul
bounced up and down on his haunches, gnarled fat toes splayed on the warped wooden floor. Crooked
teeth clacked closed.
It gave no warning and lunged for her, smacking the gun out of her grip. Tam reacted with
lightning speed that startled her as much as it saved her. She rolled out of the utility room. Mid-
tumble, she snagged open the drawer by the sink. It flew off the track, scattering knives and grilling
implements all over the kitchen. Her hand closed on the wooden handle of a steel two-pronged fork,
just as the ghoul launched himself directly at her.
The monster landed on her chest in a splatter of dark fluid that reeked of sickness and the grave.
Clammy limbs flailed and twitched, scratching at her, kicking ineffectively.
Then he laid still, cold, damp flesh pressed against her like an obscene lover. His head rested on
her chest. Her heartbeat so hard his head bounced ever so slightly. Fluid ran down her ribs and
pooled beneath her back.
“Get off, get off,” Tam moaned. She pushed at the dead weight. It shifted and she managed to roll
it off of her.
Unable to silence the whining sobs that hurt her throat and chest, she huddled against the barred
cabinets, arms around her knees. The steel post and prongs of the fork protruded from the ghoul's
back.
Right through the heart.
Tam buried her face in her soiled hands and cried.
This was ridiculous. Insane. She needed to leave. Get away. As far away as possible.
She howled into her hands because she knew she was stuck. “Why did I come back?”
Why? That was the million-dollar question. Hell's gates were open, and she stood at the brink,
inches away from falling in. “And I came back. I. Came. Back.”
She should have run.
She should have never gone to that church. Thoughts of the pastor, the burning church, pulled her
deeper into despair. Everyone she touched became tainted by evil, darkness.
Voices sang on the wind, discordant sounds that raised the hairs on the backs of her arms and
prickled the back of her neck. “Go away,” she whispered into her crusty, sticky hands.
Rough scraping noises startled her, and it wasn't until cold fingers probed the exposed strip of
flesh between the hem of her pants and the hem of her shirt that she realized what the sound meant.
Tam shrieked and flung herself away from the creeping digits.
She rolled over the corpse and came up with another grilling tool, some sort of spatula with a
serrated edge.
Tiny hands the same gray-green shade of death as the adult on the floor poked through the
missing three-inch section of broken cabinet door. Tiny hands. A child's hands. A child so small the
rest of the arm could ease out all the way to the elbow.
A keening moan worked its way up Tam's throat.
A child.
This evil took the innocent, now.
Tam dropped in the corner formed by the fridge and the little bit of wall. The tiny hands kept
probing, reaching, feeling. They withdrew. A tiny mouth and chin, a nose, pressed against the broken
section. The mouth opened and closed like a fish gasping for air. Tiny, bloodless rosebud lips.
The loneliness of the house wrapped around her like a familiar blanket.
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Chapter Thirty
The safest thing I can do is lock myself in the bedroom.
She paused. Or leave. Duh.
The body remained on the kitchen floor. It hadn't disappeared, unlike all of her hallucinations.
The body remained, but it changed. Instead of the zombie-like corpse, a man lay face down, red
blood spread around his upper body. Red blood stained her hands and chest. Red handprints—hers
and his—stamped the walls, the stove, the cabinet.
God, so much red!
“Oh crap.” Tam dropped to her knees next to the body and nudged his shoulder. “Dude?” She
jumped back, remembering this guy just tried to kill me.
Confusion twisted her mind. Try as she might, she couldn't wrap her brain around the body on the
floor, dead, bloody. Forked through the heart.
Tam stifled a crazy giggle. Forked through the heart, and you're to blame.
“You give lo-oo-ove a bad name.” Out of tune and with a cracking voice, Tam sang the last line of
the chorus. However modified, the song seemed to fit. “Forked. I forked him.”
The dark behind the cabinet doors looked dense. She wondered what it would feel like. Like
water? Mist. Clouds. Soft and gentle.
She rose and stepped over his body, going for the open utility room door. Shards of age-softened
wood, spongy and rotten, littered the floor, all that remained of the three bottom steps. The entire
stairway leaned toward the right precariously.
Her mind tried to piece together the events that led to the stranger’s forking.
Already waiting for her, he turned the dryer on to scare her, to lure her in. He hid under the stairs
and grabbed her when she got close.
From there, things got foggy.
He hid. He grabbed her. When she fought him and got away, he couldn't get out of his hiding
place fast enough. The guy was huge, bulky-muscled and strong. Destroying those rotten stairs would
have been a piece of cake. She could stomp right through in places.
That made sense.
Had to make sense.
There wasn't another option. Did Darien tell him to wait there?
Her mind just twisted it, she decided. Told her she was fighting a monster, a zombie.
She pulled the door shut, locked it. For the first time she noticed the pieces of wood over the back
door.
What in the world?
Things bumped under the cabinets again. Pale little fingers quested around the floor.
Tam sighed, watching. “It's not real. You're not real.” She kicked the cabinet door. The hands
snapped back into the darkness.
She needed a shower. Needed to sleep. Needed...
For the first time in a few weeks, she craved the chemical peace of her pills.
Her phone rang. She jumped, startled, and fumbled for the phone. Darien. A cold measure of fear shot through her gut.
“Hello?” She hated the way her voice sounded. Weak, vulnerable. She cleared her throat.
“I need that book, Tamsyn.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“A woman died tonight because of you.”
“No.” She survived. I saw the guy put out the flames.
“Unfortunately, yeah. Tam, I want to show you something tonight. At the party. Bring the book
and meet me at the Estate. No one is going to hurt you.”
“No way! I’m done. I’m leaving for good.”
He grunted, “Mm-hmm. All your stuff is still at my house.”
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“I don’t want it.”
Darien’s voice lowered to a pitch that got under her skin. “Tam, I like you a lot. I think we could
have something great…”
“You…what?”
“Since the day I first saw you, you’ve been stuck in my head. I wanted to bring you into everything
slowly, but time is short, and we’ve only got tonight to show you.”
“To show me what, Darien?”
“How you can be free.”
“Free.” What the hell did that mean? The cuts on her arms stung suddenly. Blood ran like water
and dripped on the floor. Tam watched it fill the grain of the wooden floor.
“Yes. Free from the asshole that treats you like you’re worthless, free from everything that holds
you down. I can show you your real potential. Just bring that book and meet me at the Estate tonight.”
He paused. “Haven’t you ever wanted to be the one in control? To have him crawling back to you,
