had happened to them—but it would have no effect on the goat or any other magical construct that might be out there. A sense of foreboding just about overwhelmed me, but the screaming intensified, and my dad wasn’t about to entertain any debate.
“Go upstairs,” he ordered once more, then strode toward the door, shotgun at the ready.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Luke and I ran up to my dad’s study and looked out the window at the spectacle that was being staged—quite deliberately, I’m sure—in front of the house. A group of eight or ten Nightstruck mingled about in the narrow street, right under a streetlamp, so we had no trouble seeing them. They had a pretty girl about my age surrounded. Her clothes were torn, and she was bleeding from a split lip and a nasty gash on her forehead. Her sobs were loud and panicked enough to carry over Bob’s barking, and she kept whirling frantically around, trying not to let anyone come up behind her.
Piper and the goat were both there. The goat seemed larger than I remembered, and let’s just say that it was very obviously male. It threaded its way through the mob, none of whom reacted to my dad’s shouted orders to stop what they were doing.
The girl tried to skitter away as the goat approached, but all she managed to do was throw herself into the grip of a couple of the other Nightstruck. They shoved her back into the center of their circle. The goat rose up on two legs, and I thought it was going to gore her with its horns, but apparently that horror wasn’t enough for the creatures of the night. Instead, the goat wrapped its front legs around her thigh and started humping her leg like a horny dog. Which would have been grotesque enough without all the goat’s various spines and horns.
The girl screamed and wrenched herself away. I gasped and covered my mouth when I saw the long, deep slashes in her thigh, slashes that were quickly turning her jeans red with blood.
Luke made an attempt to draw me away from the window, but we’d spent enough time together by now that the attempt was halfhearted. He knew there was no way to stop me from watching, short of tackling me to the floor and sitting on me. He settled for taking my left hand in his—leaving my gun hand free—and giving me a squeeze.
If I ended up having to shoot, I would need both hands, but for now I was grateful to have the anchor of his touch. Dread coursed through me, and I might have drowned in it if I didn’t have his hand to hold on to.
There was a deafening boom as my dad fired the shotgun. He was still standing right on our doorstep, I guess, because I couldn’t see him even when I pressed myself as close to the window as the motley array of towel rods would allow. One thing I did know was that he hadn’t fired the shotgun at the Nightstruck, because none of them went down. I supposed he couldn’t, when they had an innocent victim in their midst. Shotguns are not precision weapons.
Most of the Nightstruck turned to look, as if they’d noticed my dad for the first time. Piper, however, was looking straight up at me, making eye contact through the window. She was smirking and confident, not remotely rattled by the shotgun blast. She crooked a finger at me, beckoning, but I sincerely doubted she expected me to respond.
Dad pumped the shotgun loudly, and I finally caught a glimpse of him as he advanced toward the gathered Nightstruck. Thanks to the injured victim, he still couldn’t afford to shoot. I didn’t know if the Nightstruck had enough brains or sense of self-preservation to figure that out.
For a moment it looked like they were going to call his bluff, like they were all going to stand there like statues until he was close enough that they could grab him. I willed the victim to make a run for it while her captors were distracted, but she had collapsed to the pavement and curled up in fetal position—maybe from pure terror, or maybe because the goat had hurt her so much she couldn’t stand.
Dad bellowed at the street people to back away or he’d shoot, and he finally seemed to get through to them. The circle surrounding the girl dissolved as the Nightstruck slowly, casually backed away. All except Piper