The smirk deepened as she continued to advance on him. “I’m horny. And so are you.” She laughed. “You naughty little boy.”
Every bit of Kelsey’s essence rebelled against this. It was wrong on a very basic level. It was obscene. Christ. He loved his sister. Adored her, even. But that love had always been a pure thing, absolutely untainted by the ugliness of incestuous desires. He wanted to scream. To cry. When his sister drew to within a few feet of him, he backed out of the doorway, psyching himself to run out of the house.
There was just one problem with that.
A large man was blocking the way to the staircase.
Not just a large man, but a very tall, very muscular man with a black hood over his head. Except for the hood, the man was nude. His cock stood erect and glistening, pointing at Kelsey. Kelsey yelped. His mind was close to cracking. The world had gone nuts. He felt as if he’d fallen through a crack in reality, or as if one of his most hellish, psychotic dreams had materialized into reality.
Melissa put a hand on his shoulder. “Relax, Kel. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ll see that soon. You don’t know how lucky you are.” Her hand massaged his shoulder. “This is the best day of your life.”
The hooded man took a step toward him.
The surge of terror Kelsey experienced broke his paralysis. Before he could think about what he was doing, he rushed forward and swung a foot toward the man’s exposed genitals. The man didn’t have time to react. His pained shriek was astonishing. He wobbled and stumbled backward. Kelsey pressed his advantage, kicking the man again. The hooded behemoth tumbled down the stairs.
Melissa screamed.
Kelsey rushed down the staircase, leaped over the man’s still body as he reached the floor, pulled open the door, and staggered outside. He wobbled but managed to stay upright as he made his way to the Olds. Then the keys slipped from his hands and he knelt to pick them up. As his shaking hand closed around them, he heard footsteps pounding down the driveway. He got to his feet and saw his still-nude sister streaking toward him, a hand clutching a large kitchen knife raised high above her head, her face contorted in an awful expression of pure hatred and rage.
Through some miracle, Kelsey’s fingers found the correct key right away and he unlocked the Oldsmobile. He slipped in and pulled the door shut, slamming the lock down just as Melissa arrived at the driver’s-side window. She pounded on the window and screamed at him. Kelsey started the engine, tore out of the driveway, and raced away from his home at a reckless speed. A few blocks away, his hands started shaking again, this time so badly that he was swerving all over the road.
A glance at the rearview mirror revealed no sign of his sister.
He pulled over and waited for the shaking to subside. And as he waited, an image floated into his head: the sneering, sadistic face of Myra Lewis. Despite a lack of evidence, he felt certain Trey’s girlfriend was responsible for whatever had taken over his sister. It was a gut feeling, an emotional reaction, but he was convinced.
She’s a demon.
Fucking hell.
Somehow, Myra had sensed he might be a threat-a threat she needed to eliminate. Kelsey groaned. This was more than he could handle alone. How could he hope to fight something so powerful? People needed to know there was an evil loose in Rockville, something insidious, something that was slowly taking over, but he couldn’t imagine anyone believing something so crazy.
Jake McAllister. Maybe.
And Will, of course.
Kelsey froze and stared through the windshield at the empty road ahead.
Fuck.
He had to get to his friend before they did.
His hands steady now, he restarted the Oldsmobile, pulled onto the road, and sped out of Washington Heights.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Shit!”
Will slammed the phone down in its cradle.
He’d never find out where Trey’s brother was staying at this rate. How the hell long could his mother and that other woman gab? At least Kelsey’s parents had been cool enough to get Kelsey a cell phone. They cared about their son. His own parents, well-heeled tightwads, refused to even invest a tiny, tiny little bit of money in a second line. It was ridiculous. His dad was a lawyer. He made twice the combined income of Kelsey’s parents. But the old man wanted to teach him the “value of a dollar.”
“Shit! Shit! Shit!”
Will’s heart slammed in his rib cage. He knew he needed to calm down. Getting all pissed off was no good. It wouldn’t help Trey, and it damn sure wouldn’t do anything to loosen the parental purse strings. He stared at the phone, wondering how many seconds had passed since the last time he’d checked the line.
A minute?
Maybe a little more.
“Fuck!”
He did what he always did when he was frustrated. He turned to the poster of Jessica Alba pinned to the wall above his bed. Jessica, clad in a skintight black leather outfit, regarded him with an expression that was both stern and knowing. He had a recurring fantasy in which she slipped into his room in the middle of the night and handcuffed him to his bed. Believing he possessed vital information she required for some unknown reason, she interrogated him with a wonderful ruthlessness, strutting about his room on thigh-high black vinyl boots with stiletto heels, resplendent in all that black leather.
He pictured it again and felt a little better.
Until he heard footsteps thumping down the hallway toward his room. He grimaced. These were not happy footsteps. These were not even mildly perturbed footsteps. These were the footsteps of doom, as confirmed by the loud knock on his door a moment later.
His mother’s voice cracked at him like a gun blast: “William Henry Mackeson, open this door this instant!”
Will gulped. Anytime his mother used his full name, he knew he was in for it. He slid off the bed and got shakily to his feet. He drew in a calming breath, crossed the room to open the door, and cringed at the expression on his mother’s face. “Uh…what’s the problem, Mom?”
Alexis Mackeson was livid. Her face was red and her eyes bulged in an almost cartoonish way. She wore a pretty floral-print dress with a scooped neck that displayed impressive cleavage. His mother had a nice figure and she liked to show it off. She flirted with damn near every man she met, and Will suspected she was doing a lot more than just flirting with many of them. With the hours his father kept, she had plenty of free time for infidelity. Once upon a time, Will had loved his mother with a kind of starry-eyed devotion. But that was before he learned some unpleasant truths, including the bitter realization that his mother and father only played at being a loving, happy couple. It was a facade they presented for the world. Alexis looked good on Blake Mackeson’s arm at social functions, and Alexis enjoyed Blake’s money.
Will dreamed of the day he’d be free of their “let’s pretend” world.
She shoved her son backward, stalked into his room, and threw the door shut behind her. “You little snot. I will not tolerate rudeness. You damn near deafened me when you slammed that phone down.” She gave Will a hard shake. “Goddammit, boy, I taught you better manners than that.”
Will sniffled. “I’m sorry.”
At seventeen, Will knew he was too old to allow this kind of treatment. He wanted to cry, but crying was for pussies.
The phone rang.
Will took an unconscious step toward it, but Alexis stopped him. “Oh no, you don’t. You let that phone ring, child. I have to teach you a lesson in manners. Make you see why it’s wrong to be such a miserable little snot.”
The phone continued to ring.
Desperation contorted Will’s face. “Mom, that might be Kelsey. I have to talk to him. Trey’s in trouble. We have to-”
Will was caught off guard by what happened next. She landed a hard backhand blow across his face that knocked him to the floor. Will rolled over and stared up at her, his eyes wide, his jaw aching. He was stunned. His mother had never been the world’s best, but this was the first time she’d ever struck him. She’d never even spanked him for misbehaving as a child. The terror he felt now was something new and awful. For the first time, he believed he truly understood how Trey felt when his parents got liquored up and turned violent.