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CHAPTER 2
The hallway was empty.
And nearly dark, the only light coming from the far end, where a shadowy illumination crawled up the staircase.
I don’t think we’re alone. . . .
Kara licked her lips, as she had a hundred times before when she was sneaking around this old house. She made her way to the smaller staircase and crept down the steps in the darkness, her skin feeling too tight for her body, her lungs barely able to draw in a breath.
She slipped onto the second floor and was vaguely aware of the music again as she crept into her bedroom. It was empty, but as she shined her flashlight’s beam over the room, she noticed the pile of clothes were still on Marlie’s bed. Folded clothes and boots near her open suitcase. Her own bed was as she’d left it, the covers thrown back and crumpled.
But her sister wasn’t inside.
She bit her lip.
Fought fear.
Heard the strains of the same Christmas carol seeping through the house.
“. . . All is calm, all is bright . . .”
Barely breathing, she made her way along the hall to Jonas’s room. It was the smallest of the bedrooms and even messier than usual. The bed unmade, junk on his desk, clothes and games tossed over the floor and . . . Oh, God! An unblinking eye reflecting her flashlight’s beam.
She dropped the flashlight and bit back a scream. Shrinking backward to the door just as she realized she was looking at the stuffed head of a deer that had been mounted on the wall and now lay on the floor, antlers propping it up.
Crap!
Her heart felt as if it might fly out of her chest.
It was just the deer. Long dead. Stupid dead animals were mounted all over this house and they’d always creeped her out. She snagged the flashlight and swept the beam over the rest of the mess. Not far from the stag’s head, pushed against a half-drunk bottle of Gatorade, an eagle was sprawled, feathers everywhere, and she realized the bird hadn’t just fallen from its perch on the wall but had been sliced and . . . beheaded. The body with its curled talons was still attached to the stand, but the head was separate, the sharp beak digging into the carpet, glassy eyes condemning.
Her insides turned to water and she raised the beam of the flashlight to the wall over Jonas’s closet, to the spot where a sword had been mounted. The weapon was a relic from some long-ago war. The weapon was never supposed to be handled, never to be taken down from its spot on the wall.
Never.
Now it was missing.
Kara wasn’t surprised by that.
Just this afternoon as Kara had passed by his room with the door ajar, she’d spied him with the sword in his hand, and he had been swinging it and lunging with it like he was in some kind of fantasy battle. A ninja or something.
Idiot,she’d thought at the time.
Now she was scared to death.
Her fingers tightened around the handle of the scissors.
The next room belonged to both of her older brothers. Donner. He was really Marlie’s brother, both of them Mama’s kids. Mama had them before she’d married Daddy. And Sam Junior and Jonas were brothers, too. Daddy’s sons. They had a different “real” mom. That left her, Kara, the only child of both Mama and Daddy.
Not that it mattered.
At least not to her.
And certainly not now.
She only wished she could find any one of them.
The older boys’ room was the same as it always was—a mess of rumpled sheets and coverlets sliding to the floor to tangle with clothes, shoes, boots and candy bar wrappers and cans. Sam Junior’s backpack was pushed against the foot of his bed, his new Nokia cell phone on the dresser. He was always the neater of the two and never without his new phone. So why had he left it?
