Page 50 of Run to Ground
After a long minute of fruitless listening as her muscles grew tighter with each passing second, she slid out of bed and turned on her lamp. The bedside clock, an old-fashioned thrift-store find Jules had loved from the moment she’d spotted it, showed it was almost twelve thirty. Closing her eyes with a sigh, she accepted that waking up in three and a half hours was going to be rough.
She couldn’t sleep now, though, not while this unnatural silence was eating at her nerves. Opening her eyes again, she grabbed her cell phone and slipped into the hall, trying to keep her bare footsteps quiet. With each press of her weight, the ancient floorboards whined and complained with small cracks and squeaks. Tiptoeing up to each room, she peeked inside, comforted by the Ty-, Tio-, and Dee-shaped lumps on each bed.
Glancing at the door to Sam’s third-floor room, Jules decided against checking on him. The stairs were noisy enough to wake him if she attempted it, and she didn’t want to disturb his sleep just because she was having a paranoid moment.
Instead, she checked the other second-floor rooms. The nearly full moon streamed into the uncovered windows, making the light spaces brighter but the shadows deeper. Even her almost-silent footsteps seemed to echo in the empty rooms, and Jules kept having to stop to listen, unsure if she’d made a sound or if it came from somewhere else.
By the time she crept down the stairs to the first level, her heart was racing and her breathing came fast.
“Stop it,” she hissed at herself, and then jumped at the loudness of her whisper. The absurdity of that made her laugh quietly, and her heart slowed slightly. Now that the risk of waking her siblings was lessened, she forced herself to walk briskly through the hall to the living room, rather than tiptoe in like a jumpy mouse.
Moonlight slanted through the windows, breaking the room into geometric shapes of light and darkness. Familiar objects—the couch, Dee’s open backpack, a book on the coffee table—looked foreign in the strange illumination. Drawing herself up, Jules made her feet step into the room, and she checked each shadow, each dark corner, until she was satisfied no boogeymen were hiding in there.
In each first-level room, she did the same, until she ended up in the kitchen. When she glanced at the door to the basement, her stomach dropped to her feet. There was no way she was going down to the cellar-like, dirt-floored, lit-by-a-single-bare-bulb, creepy-as-heck basement in the middle of the night. Jules didn’t care if there were multiple serial killers taking refuge in the subterranean space; that was how people got their dumb selves killed in horror movies.
With a shudder, Jules turned away from the basement door. Through the window above the sink, a dart of movement caught her eye. Startled, she stepped back, but then caught herself. A few weeks ago, she might have been able to avoid checking it out, to run back to bed and hide under the covers. Now, though, she was responsible for four other people, younger people, vulnerable people. If something—or someone—was outside, she needed to know so she could decide what to do.
Her phone slid in her damp grip, and she switched it to her other hand. Dialing 9-1-1, she kept her thumb next to thesendbutton and took a hesitant step toward the window, and then another. When she finally was close enough to see outside, she leaned in, watching for another movement.
The evergreens and aspens danced in the wind, their branches lifting and swaying and making Jules wonder if that was the motion she’d noticed. It didn’t seem right, so she kept watching, her gaze scanning over the forest and the listing structure of their barn.
She’d thought the moonlit living room was creepy, but their backyard was ten times as scary. There were so many dark spaces where someone could be hiding, so many flashes of movement that Jules was almost—almost—positive were the wind in the trees. It was hard to see much from the window, though, much less distinguish what was always there from what might be suspicious.
Her teeth caught the inside of her lip as she headed for the back door. “There’s nothing there,” she muttered. “Just open the door, take a quick look, and then you can go back to bed, knowing forsurethere’s nothing there.”
The knob was slick in her hand, rattling loosely as it turned. As she pulled open the door, a gust of wind pressed against her, as if urging her back into the house. Setting her jaw, she stepped onto the back porch, and one of the boards creaked under her weight. Closing the door behind her, Jules let her gaze scan the area. With the trees and weeds and even the barn swaying in the wind, finding something—someone—moving in all that chaos seemed impossible.
Standing outside of this remote house in this mountain town, Jules felt alone and very, very small. How was she supposed to protect her family when she was jumping at every imagined noise? The task seemed impossible. Maybe kidnapping them had been a stupid move, a destructive move, something that would damage them all.
At that thought, she dragged herself out of her gloomy imaginings. She’d done the right thing, theonlything that could’ve been done. Her siblings had thanked her, and they all seemed surprisingly content in their new, more bedraggled life. It was just the dark and the wind and the strangeness of a new place that was getting to her, making things seem hopeless.
She needed to go back to bed, not only because she had to be up in a few hours, but also because the middle of the night was not a good time to weigh major life decisions. Everything seemed heavier in the wee hours of the morning.
As she started to turn to go back inside, the movement caught her eye again. Jules whipped around as she strained to focus on the shifting shadow—one that was definitely not a tree branch. She clutched her phone tighter.
If she called the police, there would be reports and questions and her name would almost surely be run through some database. Dennis seemed to be good at what he did, but Jules would rather not test that, not for an unconfirmed shadow on a windy night. Instead of hitting thesendbutton, she held her breath and watched the spot where she’d seen the movement.
There it is!Something had moved, a shape that was too big to be a cat or a bunny or any sort of nonthreatening creature going about its innocent business in the woods. She’d been so worried about human dangers that she hadn’t even considered that Colorado was home to all sorts of predators, including bears and mountain lions and—
The shadow moved again, the black-on-black shape moving out of the trees, and Jules jolted, the thought of tearing claws and ripping teeth filling her brain, making her lurch back until her shoulder blades hit the door with a painfulthump. As her hand reached for the door handle, the thing—whatever it was—charged toward her.
She grabbed for the doorknob, a shriek building in her lungs, but it evaded her fingers, and she was unable to look away from the dark shape plunging toward her. Her fingers smacked against the doorframe, but she didn’t feel it, couldn’t feel anything except her terror and the scream filling her lungs like overextended balloons. It was so fast, yet she felt like she was bogged down in a slow-motion nightmare. The thing came closer and closer until it lunged onto the porch with her, wriggling with excitement and twisting around her legs.
“Viggy?” she croaked, heart still racing. In response, the dog sat on her foot, a bony part of his haunch digging painfully into her instep. The ache brought back her reasoning skills, and she bent to simultaneously pet him and shove him off her foot. “Holy moly, Vig, you scared the stuffing out of me!”
As her initial panic settled, a new fear rose in its place. Why was Viggy here? Had something happened to Theo? Jules wished she’d gotten his phone number, although there was no way in Hades she would’ve been brave enough to ask, even if she could have come up with a good excuse. After all, how was she to know his dog would end up on her back porch in the middle of the night?
Peering at her phone, she cancelled the call with fingers that shook with residual adrenaline. Pulling up her Web browser, she found the police department’s nonemergency number.
When the dispatcher answered, Jules asked hesitantly, “Can you get a message to Officer Theo Bosco?”
“What message is that?”
“His dog is at my house.”
As the dispatcher asked for her name and address, all Jules could think about was that the call was being recorded, leaving yet another breadcrumb for their stepmother’s investigators to find. She squeezed her eyes closed tightly. It was just one more reason that letting Theo and Viggy into their lives was a horrible, horrible idea.
Viggy whined, and Jules opened her eyes. The sight of the dog, looking at her with sweet eyes and his head cocked to the side, made Jules realize it was too late. A certain cop and his K9 partner had already implanted themselves firmly into her heart.
