Page 158 of Dying to Meet You
Then it snaps.
I see the dog fly forward.
Beatrice takes a sudden step backward and trips, one arm windmilling as she starts to go down.
Lickie’s body arches toward Beatrice, who screams.
There’s a deafening bang as the gun goes off. The sound is followed immediately by the piercing crash of breaking glass.
A scream lodges in my throat. Lickie lands on Beatrice with all four paws and clamps her jaws onto Beatrice’s arm with a growl that would frighten the devil.
Beatrice screams, the gun dangling from her fingers.
I do one more ab curl and use my bound feet to awkwardly kick her hand. I hear the satisfying sound of the gun sliding across the wood floor, out of reach.
Beatrice screams again, this time in agony. Lickie makes another terrifying sound, while I suck in the sudden breeze. Above me, there’s a gray, cloudy sky where there should be a century-old, stained-glass window.
I’m trying to make sense of that when I hear more glass breaking somewhere else in the house. “Rowan?” yells Harrison’s voice. “Are you there?”
“YES!” I shout back.
I am. I’m still here.
63
Natalie
Natalie is pretty fast, but her fatherfliesup those stairs.
Broken glass crunches under their feet as she tears upward toward the sound of someone screaming. And the dog is making unholy noises, like a creature from a horror film.
Her father clears the stairs first. “Lickie, OFF!” he shouts.
Then her mother’s voice says something unintelligible.
Natalie is so scared that her legs almost give out. She makes it to the third floor a few seconds after Harrison.
There’s blood everywhere. It’s literally flowing toward her shoes, and soaking Beatrice’s hair. And there’s a smell. Like wet pennies.
Her mother is lying haphazardly on the floor, one arm chained to the balusters, the other hand bent in a sickening way that hands shouldn’t bend. Her eyes are closed, but her chest rises and falls in great gasps.
Natalie hears sirens.
Her father’s voice breaks through her terror. “Natalie, look at me.”
She turns her head toward the steadiness of his voice, finding his gray-eyed gaze and holding it.
“Go downstairs and let the cops in. Tell them to call an ambulance and that there’s a gun here on the third floor. Go now.”
She looks once again at her mom, who’s obviously in pain. But her chest rises reassuringly with each new breath.
Then she turns and runs to do what her father asked.
64
Sunday
Rowan
