Page 52

With a laugh, I took off. Our dads used to give us safety drills on how to deal with home intruders, the crazy bastards, and timed trips to the gun safe were always a part of it.

“Not bad,” he said when I returned, pistol in hand. “Fifty-six seconds.”

I looked at his hands. One was empty, the other held a gun. “You don’t even have a timer out.”

“Ever heard of counting?”

We smiled at each other, but I looked away quickly, like he’d turn on me if my eyes lingered too long. It had happened before.

I slipped into the running shoes by the back door.

“Oh.” I grabbed him a flashlight out of a drawer by the back door and got myself one from the drawer beside it.

Flashlights and guns were something we had no shortage of.

“Why didn’t you have your gun out when I got here?” he asked, and I saw him cock his head out of the corner of my eye.

I grimaced and glanced at the weapon in my right hand. It was carefully aimed in the safest direction. We were cops’ kids. We knew how to handle a gun, and I was embarrassed at my lapse. “I-it’s so embarrassing, but I got too scared to move. I was just, I don’t know, frozen in place until you rang the doorbell. Thanks for being so fast, by the way.”

“Always,” he said, tone vehement, no hesitation.

The warm feeling in my chest just kept growing.

I followed him out back.

“Start whistling and calling him,” Declan instructed, as he meticulously began to search my yard.

I stayed glued to him, as close as I could get without touching, safely aiming my gun and flashlight the other way, and started calling for Max.

My flashlight kept catching pale strips of trunk between the trees. Twice my body decided they were people before my eyes corrected it.

He never came, and by the time we made it to the tree line, my knees were shaking.

I’d hated going into the woods since I was nine. Any woods, really, but especially at night.

The ones behind our house had never done anything to me, but apparently my nervous system wasn’t interested in geography. Trees were trees. Dark was dark.

Eventually I’d even switched rooms so I no longer looked out on them, instead facing the Bishop house.

“Max,” I kept calling, my voice a weaker thread with every step we took into the forest.

I felt a sudden chill. It wasn’t warm out, and I was hardly dressed.

I hadn’t even noticed until then. The heat of the house and my company had distracted me from the fact that fall was fast approaching.

Finally Declan called off the search and we started heading back for the house.

“Again, I’m sor—”

“Stop saying that. Something happened to your dog. You woke up and had a bad feeling. You did exactly the right thing.”

We stepped inside, and he locked up.

I expected him to leave right away—was in fact worrying over our awkward parting—but then he didn’t.

He headed that way but stopped in the living room.

He was looking at the front door as he said, “I’ll crash on your couch until our parents get back. I’m going to grab one of your dad’s T-shirts. Go put the gun away, and grab me a blanket and a pillow.”