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There were no signs of Apollo anywhere, but Allie didn’t have that gnawing feeling in her gut that something had gone wrong. She wanted to believe she and the dog had formed a bond since he had come into her life, but maybe that was just her trying to convince herself he was still out there, somewhere, alive and kicking.

According to Lucy, Apollo had taken off without warning, and it was about ten seconds later that she heard the first gunshot — or “coughing sound”—followed by a man cursing loudly very close by, even though she couldn’t see him.

Lucy was sitting against an armchair to her left at the moment. The furniture, like the sofas and half of the living room behind her, was covered with a heavy tarp. Just her luck that the first of Walter’s neighbors she ran across weren’t home, and from all indications, hadn’t been for some time. She thought this might have been a summer residence, but from the dust that she had unwittingly rubbed onto her clothes and the cobwebs she was still picking out of her hair, it had been more than one summer since anyone had lived here.

The teenager had her back against the thick white covering and her knees pulled up to her chest, staring forward at the pitch-black living room. Allie wasn’t sure if Lucy was more afraid of Jerry stalking toward them or the emptiness of the large house around them. It was quiet, so quiet, which only added to the eeriness.

Thirty seconds after he stepped out of the woods, Jerry was already halfway to the house, all the while moving slightly hunched over with the submachine gun in front of him. His head was in constant motion, searching the grounds for anything and everything. She couldn’t see any wounds on him as he stepped in and out of the halo of lights, which meant he had survived Apollo unscathed. She just hoped the same was true for Apollo.

For some reason, the Glock in her hand felt heavier now than when they first settled next to the window to wait for Jerry. The linen curtain that bookended her view of the front yard was very still and she wished she could open the window even just a crack to ventilate the stale air inside the house that made just breathing a chore, but that would have been a dead giveaway, and she needed Jerry to get close.

Way, way closer than he currently was at the moment.

Which was why she clenched her teeth when the bastard suddenly stopped about forty yards from the front porch.

Closer, she thought, willing him to keep moving.

But he didn’t. Instead, he went down on one knee and peered at the house.

Had he spotted her hiding behind the window to the right of the front door? Could he make out the damaged door that she had closed back up as much as she could, using a metal shoe rack to lodge it (just barely) in place? Or had the moonlight given him an angle on her that she hadn’t accounted for or thought possible?

Closer. Come just a little bit closer!

Instead, he got up and started sideways, and she knew instantly he was going to try to go around the house and sneak up on them from the back. And if he did that, she’d have to reacquire him again, which would mean she would lose the element of surprise—

Dammit!

She rocked backward and picked herself up from the floor, then scooted another couple of steps back from the window, lifted the Glock, and squeezed off a shot that shattered the glass, the gunshot booming inside the house.

Jerry was running right even before the first piece of glass pelted the porch outside. Maybe he’d even seen her moving before she pulled the trigger and shot through the window. Either way, she didn’t wait to see if the first shot had hit him. She fired again, trying to track his movements. He was surprisingly fast for a man wearing all that gear.

The ground where he had been standing erupted with dirt—another miss! — and the man was still on his feet, still moving impossibly quick — until finally he disappeared out of her field of vision before she could squeeze off a third shot.

Allie stood up and pressed her body against the wall, staying out of view of the window even as glass continued to trickle onto the wooden deck outside. Without the window, the chilly night flooded the house and swamped her in a cool breeze that dug all the way through her layers of clothes and to the bones underneath. Next to her, Lucy, who had mirrored her movements and was now leaning against the wall, shivered against the sudden surge of cold air.

“Did you get him?” Lucy asked. She sounded like she was holding her breath.

Allie shook her head. “He’s going to try to outflank us, come in from the back.”

“Can he do that?”

“Yeah.” Allie looked around her, then, “We need to get up to the second floor.”

“It’s dark up there…”

“It’s dark down here, too,” she said, “but at least we’ll have higher ground on him.”

The girl looked petrified, not that Allie was feeling so great about their chances, either. Especially against that submachine gun…

* * *

It didn’t take Jerry very long to find his way in through the back door. She could hear his boots squeaking against the kitchen’s tiled floor, the sound of his voice as he communicated with someone over a radio. The fact that he wasn’t even trying to disguise his approach was proof of how little he thought of her and Lucy as potential threats.

Maybe he even knew she only had five bullets left. The Glock had seven remaining when she tried to pick him off through the window. She knew, because she had counted while she and Lucy were waiting for him to come out of the woods.

Five bullets against however many magazines Jerry was carrying with him in that pouch around his waist. He’d probably already reloaded once, maybe twice. Would he really carry more than two extra magazines? Anything was possible, and right now she had to err on the side of caution. Besides, even if Jerry had used up all of his submachine gun’s ammo, he still had the sidearm. How much spare ammo did he have for that?

The answer was more than she had.

She might have sighed out loud, because Lucy, hiding behind the ajar bedroom down the hall from her, moved slightly, the fabric of her pants rustling in the darkness. Allie didn’t look back at her, a little afraid that her own lack of conviction might show on her face and infect the girl.

Instead, she gripped the Glock tighter and pressed her chest closer — though there wasn’t a whole lot of space left — against the second-story floor and peeked through the two balusters in front of her. She was so low to the ground that she could see and smell the dust gathered round the base of the wooden poles even in the pitch-darkness. It had definitely been a while since someone put a Dustbuster to work on this place.

He was moving slowly from the back of the house to the living room, as if he had all the time in the world. And maybe he did. She had kicked the door in expecting sirens to wail or at least lights on the alarm panel to start blinking. Except there wasn’t any panel on the wall, and nothing blinked. While waiting for Jerry to show up, she had been holding out hope that the house had a silent alarm, with the control panel somewhere else in another part of the residence calling out to the authorities at that very moment.

Except no one had come. Not even after she had fired two more shots into the dead silent night.

So maybe Jerry was right. Maybe he did have all night to stalk her, maybe—

A loud growl from the darkness interrupted the silence.

Jerry heard it at the same time that she did. He stopped almost directly below her on the first floor and spun around, lifting the MP5SD as he did so.

She didn’t know why, but something prompted her to jump up to her feet and shout down, “Hey, dickhead!”