was getting on my nerves, making me even more tense, and I wished he’d give it a rest. I knew better than to try to silence him, however.
Abruptly, Bob turned away from the front window and leaped to the side window.
“Please, let’s go somewhere safer,” Piper begged.
I licked my lips, doing a quick mental inventory of the house. There were no rooms without windows, but the windows in the basement were only a few inches high, barely peeking above sidewalk level. However, we used our basement like many people use attics, meaning the place was crammed with boxes of junk, broken furniture, and stuff we plain didn’t know what to do with. There wasn’t much room to move around, and it was about the creepiest place I could imagine hiding from some unknown creature that was toying with us in the dark.
“The windows are all locked,” I reminded Piper yet again. “And if it could break through one, I think it would have done it already.”
“Right. So you should put the gun away and we should go downstairs and play cards.”
I gave her a dirty look but didn’t reply.
Apparently our stalker moved again, because Bob almost knocked Piper and me down as he charged past us, this time heading for what used to be my sister’s bedroom. I lowered the gun and took a deep breath.
“It’s not going to get in,” I said, trying to reassure myself as much as I was trying to reassure Piper. “If it does, it’ll have to go through Bob to get to us. And if it goes through Bob, there’s always this.” I held up the gun. “I’m not saying we should go play games, but I think we should both try to chill a bit.” Ha-ha. Like that was going to happen. “Let’s go downstairs, where we’ll have more than one candle.”
The light from the single candle Piper still carried was barely enough to penetrate the darkness, and the flickering shadows it cast made me want to jump out of my skin.
I don’t think Piper was convinced of our safety—I know I wasn’t—but she allowed me to coax her back downstairs, where we hastily lit even more candles. No amount of candlelight could equal the power of electricity, but it was better than nothing.
It wasn’t long before Bob came flying down the stairs, once more in pursuit of something we couldn’t see. I would have thought he’d be getting tired by now, but he showed no signs of slowing down as once again he took up his post at the front window. The shutters were broken, crooked, and scratched all to hell from his last frenzy, but not enough to allow us to see outside.
I stood at the ready. I didn’t point my gun, because I didn’t want my arms to get tired, but I made sure that both Piper and I were far away from the window Bob was attacking so that, if it came to it, I’d have enough time to point and shoot before whatever was out there got to us.
I won’t say I was relaxed—my heart was still pounding in my throat, and I still felt the occasional tremor in my knees, but I was beginning to feel vaguely secure. The thing outside continued to move from window to window, driving Bob out of his mind, but I had seen no sign that it could break in and get to us.
Our neighbor, a nice little old lady who always doted on Bob when she saw him, started pounding on the wall between our houses, complaining about the noise. If I hadn’t been so scared, maybe I would have laughed about it. Short of shooting him, there would be no way on earth to silence Bob—even if I had wanted to. If nothing else, he kept us apprised of the creature’s position, and he was a wall of fur and muscles and teeth between us and it.
The would-be intruder continued its leisurely course around the perimeter of our house, apparently interested only in us, not in any of the other houses in our row. It led Bob to the kitchen, where he threw himself against the door that led out into the courtyard. Mrs. Pinter, next door, banged on the wall once more, this time harder and louder.
Piper and I stood within the circle of candlelight in the middle of the dining room, neither of us speaking as we continued to track Bob’s progress. Only the barest flicker of light