What the Night Knows (48 page)

“You think someone’s in the house already?”

“The alarm is set, but it didn’t go off when the door opened. Maybe someone came in earlier and it didn’t go off then, either.”

He had never seen her face this grim. She looked at the pistol in her right hand and said, “There’s no way we can call the police, someone you know.”

“I knew Andy Tane. The only cop you can trust is me—and maybe not me, either. After we’ve got the kids safe with us, we’ll bar the doors or nail them or something—then sweep the house room by room. You with me?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember—stay behind me. Two targets, not one.”

He climbed three stairs, glanced back, and saw her surveying the foyer ceiling as if this were not her home but instead a cave unknown to her, in which hung bats and other rabid threats.

Ridden again, Preston thrills to the vicious rage of his demon master, a hatred so exhilarating that it’s like an infinite roller coaster without rising inclines, only breathtaking plunges, one after the other, allowing but a moment to shudder in anticipation of the next free-fall into fury.

He quietly opens the closet door, steps into the foyer, and sees John
Calvino climbing the stairs, his attention on spaces above, and Nicolette turning away to follow her husband. Just a rich-bitch, tight-assed, art-school phony, vomiting her pretentious swill onto canvas after canvas, a baby machine pumping out more little phonies to live in this oh-so-precious fantasy life of hers. She needs to be taught how the world
really
is, needs to be brought down and broken and forced to admit she’s just filth like everyone else.

Preston’s rider finesses from him a stealth and swiftness that he—always awkward and so long enervated—has never shown before. The woman doesn’t hear him coming. He raises the hammer as he closes on her, dismayed that he is going to be allowed only to kill her. But the dismay lasts just an instant, because he is
in the game
, in it as he has never been before, no longer merely a player sitting in an armchair. Although ridden by Death and a demon, Preston feels more alive now than ever before, and he knows that when the claw end of the hammer cracks through the top of her skull and gouges the art out of her brain forever, his pleasure will be an order of magnitude more intense than anything he has felt before, orgasmic.

He swings the hammer down.

If Nicky heard the squeak of a shoe or the rustle of clothing behind her, she didn’t consciously register it, but she smelled bad breath—garlic, beer, rotten teeth—and strong body odor, and she instinctively ducked her head, hunched her shoulders. Something cold and curved brushed along the nape of her neck and apparently hooked in the collar of her blouse. She was jerked backward. Off balance, she fell against her attacker.

“
… ignorant little bitch.
”

Roger Hodd of the
Daily Post
didn’t have the voice of the thing who spoke to Naomi from the mirror back in September, but Naomi had no doubt that they were one and the same, that nothing was the way she had thought it was, that she had been less perspicacious than foolish.

She turned to run, in front of her the bathroom door slammed shut, she seized the knob, it wouldn’t budge. Trapped.

When Minnie told Zach to get away from the door, he instead turned toward it, to see what was wrong, and there was the woman.

Minnie screamed as the blade flashed.

Zach dropped, tucked, rolled as the cutting edge sliced the air with a
whoosh
where he had been. As he sprang to his feet, he heard the cleaver chop into the carpet inches short of him. The freaking maniac had swung it so hard that she cut through to the wood beneath and needed a moment to free the blade, spitting and keening like a rabid weasel or something.

Clutching her LEGO wheel to her chest with both arms, Minnie backed away from the desk toward the hall door, screaming again. Man, he hated to hear his sister screaming, it tore at him. Zach snatched up the desk chair, throwing it at the maniac to buy a few seconds. Struck, the woman stumbled backward, and by the time she regained her balance, Zach had the Mameluke sword.

Lizard-fast in spite of her long dress, the shrieking lunatic came at him before he could draw the sword from the scabbard, came at him in a fury, and he didn’t even
know
her. He used the sword and sheath defensively, as a cudgel, holding it by both ends and thrusting it forward to meet the descending blade. The cleaver rang off the polished-nickel
scabbard, and the force of the blow almost vibrated the Mameluke out of Zach’s hands. She swung left to right, horizontally, under the sword, almost slashing his belly. He danced back, she slashed right to left, and the blade snagged his T-shirt and flashed away with a quiver of light but with none of his blood.

The smooth curved back of the claw slides harmlessly along the nape of the bitch’s neck, and the two sharp talons snare her blouse. Preston jerks, ripping the collar, pulling her against him. With his left arm, he encircles her throat. As her right arm comes up, maybe trying to shoot backward at him, he swings the hammer at her hand. He strikes the gun instead, it flies out of her grip, thuds off the area rug, clatters across the floor.

At the feel of her, the warm delectable body, Preston’s rider wants her, after all, and so does Preston, he wants to take her and kill her with a knife
while
he’s taking her, which is more extreme than anything he’s seen in the roughest bondage films. Time the killing cut to the moment of his orgasm. This is his rider’s desire, as well, for it believes that Death is the best sex.

The husband is coming down the stairs, the pistol-grip shotgun raised, but he can’t take a shot without killing his rich-bitch baby-making machine. She’s kicking at Preston’s shins, clawing at the arm that encircles her neck, but he feels no pain, he is supernaturally
strong
. He’s a match for any of the superheroes in all those movies that he has watched repeatedly while rooting for the archvillains.

Using the woman as a shield, he drags her along the hallway, toward the back of the house, grinning at Calvino, who follows them with the shotgun ready, the big tough cop with his door-buster gun, but his badge and his gun don’t matter now.

“Shoot me through her,” Preston taunts. “Go ahead. Blast both of us to Hell. You won’t want her anyway, when I’m done with her. You know what happened to your other hump? That hottie, Cindy Shooner? She committed suicide five years ago, she’s waiting for this bitch in Hell. They can compare notes about what a one-minute wonder you were in bed.”

Preston wants the cop to threaten him, to beg for her, to try some half-assed psychology, because it will be sweet to hear the terror in his voice. But Calvino says nothing, just shows him the muzzle of the 12-gauge and follows, waiting for an opportunity, but he’s not going to get one.

At the study, Preston drags his prize of fresh meat out of the hall, backward across the threshold. The cop quickly closes on them and tries to shoulder through the door, thrusting the shotgun ahead of him. But if the house cannot be used to kill, it can be used to hamper. The door closes hard against Calvino, pinning him to the jamb.

“The house is mine now,” Preston declares, grinding himself against the rich bitch’s tight butt, “and everything in it.”

Although the cop strains to break free, the door is unrelenting, denying him further entrance, squeezing him hard until he will have to retreat. Swinging his right arm past the wifey, Preston strikes at the husband’s face with the hammer, Calvino jukes, the claw gouges a chunk from the door frame.

The bitch hasn’t stopped tearing at Preston’s left arm. But suddenly she seizes the handle of the hammer, ferociously twists it, so surprises him that she takes the weapon. Trying to snatch it away from her, he unintentionally relaxes the arm around her throat. She starts to slip down and away. He grabs a fistful of her hair to yank her back. For a moment his head is fully exposed.

Face flushed and clenched with the effort to squeeze farther into
the room, Calvino gains two inches. He thrusts the shotgun forward, over his wife’s head, into Preston’s face. The flash—