he lived alone. And if he were upstairs, then who the hell had made that noise? I debated, one foot hanging in mid-air as I gripped the polished wooden banister, until Frog flashed past me down the steps and disappeared into the hall that led toward the kitchen.
That decided me. If Frog wasn’t scared, there was no reason for me to be either. And anyway, I’d decided earlier today I was the kind of person who was brave. So that was what I was going to be.
I descended the rest of the stairs and crossed the foyer, jumping when I saw what looked like a person silhouetted in the moonlight streaming in from the window above the front door, before realizing that it was just the life-sized suit of armor I’d seen earlier that day.
Seriously. A suit of armor. And it looked real, and old, too. Who had one of those?
I followed Frog’s footsteps, turning right and ducking down a hallway almost hidden behind the stairs. I hadn’t explored much of the house today, just enough to find the kitchen. But I only made it about ten feet down the hall before I heard the noise again.
It wasn’t a dangerous-sounding noise, exactly. Not like a gun cocking or someone scraping a knife along a whetstone—though come to think of it, I wasn’t sure I’d even know what those sounded like. It was probably just Holden making a sandwich or something, but I stopped short again, and this time the fear that pounded in my chest wouldn’t let me keep going.
Maybe I was being a baby, giving too much credit to my shrouded, half-remembered nightmares, but the idea of an unknown person in this massive dark mansion terrified me, and with a quick nod to myself, I turned and headed back the way I’d come. Cowering under the covers seemed like a perfectly reasonable Plan B.
I got three whole steps before I bumped into a side table and sent something clunky and metallic crashing to the floor. Silence reigned for two seconds afterwards. Then footsteps came pounding towards me.
Shit.
I took off back the way I’d come, praying I could avoid any other priceless antique furniture that might be lying around, but I’d barely made it to the foot of the staircase when someone grabbed me from behind.
Something animal inside me took over. Heart in my throat, I lashed out, elbowing the person behind me. I connected somewhere along their abdomen and was rewarded with a grunt. But before I could pull away, my assailant grabbed both my arms and held them, twisted, behind my back, and motherfucker, my shoulder did not like that position.
I braced for more pain, for the attack to continue, but as soon as my arms were pinned, the person behind me stopped moving, and I heard a woman’s voice at my ear.
“Who are you, and how the hell did you get in here?”
I blinked into the darkness. It was on me for expecting my attacker to be a man, but I definitely hadn’t expected to be treated like I was the one out of bounds. Nor had I expected the woman behind me to sound so calm and collected while immobilizing my entire body.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say even if I could have said something, but my throat still hurt like a bitch, and I didn’t feel like pushing it. Just swallowing chunks of banana at dinner tonight had been painful.
“You needn’t think that silence will help you,” the woman said. “The easiest way to get out of this is to tell me who you work for, and hand over your camera.”
Camera? I twisted, trying to get a look at the woman. What the hell was she talking about?
“Look, if you want to do this the hard way, I will search you for your equipment, but if you—”
I didn’t get to hear the end of that sentence, though, because a streak of gray came flying across the floor and knocked into us. The woman stepped back, off-balance, and I crashed to the ground.
A moment later, a door upstairs opened, and Holden’s voice rang out.
“Gus? Is that you? Is everything—”
He stopped talking when he reached the top of the stairs and peered down at the scene in the foyer below. Holden’s face was still in shadow, but the moonlight illuminated me, the woman, and Frog, sitting daintily on the bottom step as if he weren’t the physical manifestation of primordial chaos, quite clearly.