Nightstruck - Jenna Black Page 0,95
said I just wanted to go home and sleep for a few hours.
Luke was too much of a gentleman to let me carry my own bag, so he took my overnight bag and I took Bob and we crossed to my house through the courtyard.
A nasty surprise awaited me. When we turned the corner onto the patio right outside my back door, we found a tall ladder propped against the wall and a sprinkling of broken glass below it. With a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I looked up.
Someone had broken the glass out of one of the windows on the second floor. I didn’t know what had happened to the towel rack bars my dad had installed, but they weren’t there anymore. I supposed they weren’t all that hard to get around, as long as you didn’t have to worry about a vicious German shepherd getting in your face or about the neighbors calling the police.
Under ordinary circumstances, I would have immediately backed away and called the police myself. As the daughter of the police commissioner, I certainly knew better than to enter a house when there was such clear evidence it had been broken into. However, I knew exactly who had broken that window, who had invaded my home, and it wasn’t anyone who could still be hanging around now, in the daylight. I didn’t know where the Nightstruck disappeared to during the day—no one did—but for sure it wasn’t my house.
I took out my keys with a shaking hand. Luke laid a hand on my shoulder.
“That’s probably not a great idea, Becks,” he said.
Even in the midst of my growing rage and dread, I felt a little hint of warmth at hearing him call me by the nickname. Only close friends and family called me Becks, and I couldn’t remember ever hearing Luke do it before.
“We both know who did it and that they’re not hanging around,” I said, twitching away from his hand while trying not to be rude about it.
“Yeah, but we don’t know that no one else took advantage of the opportunity to go in,” Luke argued.
Technically he was right. But I figured most of the burglars and thieves in our city had been subsumed by the night already and weren’t likely hanging out in my house. Also, the police department had more than enough on their plates already without wasting their time on what was probably nothing.
“We have Bob,” I reminded him as I unlocked my back door. I took a deep breath to steady myself, not knowing what horror to expect, before pushing the door open and stepping inside. Not surprisingly, Luke stayed right on my heels.
The good news was that we didn’t find any blood or dead bodies. The bad news was … well, everything else.
Piper and her night-dwelling friends had been thorough. Every stick of furniture in the house was broken. Every cushion and pillow and bed was gutted. Every wall—and in some places even the ceiling—was covered in foul graffiti. Every dish and mirror and knickknack was smashed, every piece of electronic equipment spilling its wiry metal guts.
She’d ransacked my room and my dad’s room, shredding every stitch of clothing. She’d torn pages out of all the books and had even torn up the cute kiddie pictures my sister and I had drawn. Dad said he was storing them so he could trot them out to embarrass us if ever we brought home a boyfriend. He even followed through on that threat with Beth once. I remembered, because my mom had picked a fight about it, irritated with him because Beth was irritated.
As if all that wasn’t enough, the place reeked of spilled booze, cigarette smoke, pot, and urine.
Luke tried to coax me away, but I wasn’t willing to leave until I’d taken full stock of the damage that had been done. Maybe it was like poking at a sore tooth and I should have stopped, but I couldn’t bear not knowing.
Except for what I was wearing and the change of clothes in my overnight bag, everything I owned was destroyed. The house itself might be salvageable—I’d have to have someone come look at it and see—but everything inside it was irreparably ruined.
“Let’s go,” Luke said gently when we had explored every room. He took my arm and guided me toward the staircase. “My mom and I will take care of calling someone to come clean this up. You’ve been through enough without having to deal