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She runs ahead of me, pointing forward. I catch up and take her other hand, letting her lead me toward the source of the emotion she’s picking up on.
The patter of our bare feet on the pavement seems to echo as the loudest sound in the universe.
Pax heads to the right, out of the street and into a driveway six houses away from ours. I don’t have the first clue who lives here. Kiddo stops halfway between sidewalk and front porch, seeming afraid of the building.
“In there,” she whispers.
Now I hear it—the sound of an argument raging inside the place. A man and a woman are going at it. Despite the insults and screaming, they don’t give any clue as to why they’re arguing. Nothing they say reveals the problem… cheating, finances, bad sex, disagreement on where to go for the holidays… just random shouting.
“Wait here,” I whisper, despite it being pointless. Paxton already seems to have decided not to get any closer to the place.
I hurry past her and approach the house, heading for the only window with light in it. Looks like the living room. Inside, a couple in their mid-thirties stand amid the carnage of a hellacious argument: broken stuff, thrown pillows, upset furniture, and a smashed coffee table.
Okay, this looks bad for sure, but it doesn’t really seem like it’s worth barging into their lives. Paxton might be overreacting to their emotions since her own are so frayed about the unicorn having to leave.
The couple continues screaming at each other and throwing small objects. They’ve devolved into simple childish insults and aren’t even mentioning whatever issue got them going. I take a step back and turn away, pretty much convinced this is a nothing-burger (as Tammy has been known to say).
Paxton waves both hands at me, in a ‘no, no, no, don’t leave’ gesture. The kid looks freaked out. The long, unvoiced, ‘pleeeeeeease’ radiating from her eyes is enough to make me sigh and turn back around.
When I peer back into the window, a small book is in mid-flight across the room, evidently thrown by the man. The book is too small and too feebly thrown to cause injury, merely bouncing off the woman’s shoulder and hitting the floor. That the man threw something at her is bad, yes, but not the worst part. As soon as she recovers from flinching, she stares at him in this cold, calculating, serial-killer sort of way that makes a chill roll over me. Without another word, she calmly walks out of the room.
Yeah, kiddo is right. Something bad is about to happen.
If the faint squeal of anxiety coming from Paxton behind me is any indication, that woman’s looking for a weapon. I stare into the house at the hallway she disappeared into, weighing what to do if she reappears with a gun. Motion to the right catches my eye. I shift my gaze into the dining room visible through an archway at the back of the living room. A shadowy figure stands by the wall.
The instant my gaze falls on the creature, I somehow know it’s responsible for the argument and all the dark emotions going on in there. No wonder the argument sounded so random and devoid of cause… they weren’t arguing over anything real. That thing drove them to it.
As this realization dawns on me, the woman emerges from the hallway holding a giant steak knife.
Bad, yes. But not as bad as a gun.
Still, I need to get involved before she kills him… or he gets the knife away from her and kills her. Paxton’s extreme reaction to their mood makes complete sense now.
The woman raises the knife in a total Norman Bates pose, then runs toward her husband.
I stare at a spot about halfway between them and teleport into the house, appearing just in time to stick my leg out and trip her while simultaneously exploiting my superhuman reflexes to snatch the knife away like I’m confiscating it from a small child who shouldn’t be handling sharp things.
She faceplants into the carpet and slides into him. The poor guy had been standing there, making no attempt to defend himself. The tumbling ‘Mrs. Bates’ sweeps him off his feet like a bowling ball hitting a giant pin. He topples forward and lands on top of her.
I spin left, thrust my hand at the shadow creature, and try to throw a lightning ball. Sparks form over my fingers. I’ve got a microsecond to catch myself and concentrate on not letting the magic get too crazy. With that unicorn in my backyard, everything supernatural’s getting overcharged. I don’t need to blow a two-foot hole through this house.
A more modest grapefruit-sized lightning sphere shoots off my hand, making a bang only a little bit less intense than a 9mm gunshot. Still way too loud for comfort, but no one’s eardrums are bleeding.
The shadow thing is evidently startled by my sudden appearance. It doesn’t even try to move out of the way—not that it had much time. One lightning ball is enough to blast it apart into smoke. Another creature, less humanoid in shape than the first, comes rushing at me from behind, out of the same hallway the woman disappeared into earlier.
It’s somewhere between dog and octopus. Tentacles, four legs… a tail, perhaps. The thing leaps at me like an enraged Doberman, trying to bite me on the face. Time seems to slow down as my vampire reflexes shift into high gear. I swing around and feed the little bastard a lightning ball at close range, pumping electricity right down its throat while its jagged silhouette teeth are less than three feet away from my neck.
It bursts into a cloud of black smoke.
I stand still, listening.
Neither the woman nor the man are trying to get back up. They mutter, sounding disoriented and confused, as if they just lost an hour or more of memory.
Other than them, the house is quiet. I don’t hear anything else moving around… and the dark, fatalistic energy hanging over the place is gone.
Now’s my chance to get out of here before they notice me.
A quick mini-teleport puts me back outside where I’d been a moment earlier. Paxton screams. Her voice isn’t right behind me in the driveway where she’d been earlier; instead, it sounds a little farther away down the street.
