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I stomped back up the stairs, irritation stiffening my limbs. “I think the power might be out on the street,” I called to Fawn. “I’m just gonna go outside and check.”
Fawn nodded absently, but she didn’t look up from the problems she was working through. “Check on Mrs. Soros next door, too, if the power is out. I don’t want her falling and breaking her hip again if she’s wandering around in the darkness.”
I cringed at the thought of my old neighbor laid up in a hospital bed. The woman had to be nearing ninety. “On it.”
I opened the front door and walked out onto the driveway to peer over at Mrs. Soros’s place, expecting her house to be as dark as Fawn’s. But bright lights shone through her living room window, and I could see her propped up in her favorite recliner, probably watchingWheel of Fortune. Different colors from the reflection of the TV danced across her weathered face.
Across the road, light spilled around curtains, and farther down the streetlamp flickered annoyingly, like it had ever since I’d bought the place.
I frowned. “Guess it’s just us then.”
I turned around to go back inside. “Fawn! We might have to call an electrician. Everybody else has—”
A heavy arm clamped around my neck from behind.
The panic was immediate. I tried to scream, but it came out silently, no oxygen to fuel it. I thrashed against the muscled arms that bound my own, holding me tight to his chest. But the choke hold worked fast, and within seconds, darkness danced at the edges of my vision.
The last thing I thought before I went under was that William Reed was never going to stop until I was out of the picture completely.
25
EVE
Faces haunted my dreams. Boston’s. Fawn’s. William’s. But there were other’s as well. Shadowed, expressionless profiles I didn’t recognize. They swirled menacingly through the darkness, sudden flashes lighting them up, only for them to sink back into the blackness they’d emerged from. I squeezed my eyes tight, trying to block all except Boston’s. I held on to his image until it disintegrated into a million tiny pieces that I couldn’t gather quick enough to save.
“Hello?”
The voice sounded far away, and I squeezed my eyes tighter again, searching the darkness for my safe place. When that had become Boston, I didn’t know. I just knew I needed to get to him. With him by my side, the darkness would go away.
I so desperately wanted the darkness to go away.
“Is somebody there?”
The voice was closer this time, and something about it familiar. I forced my eyes open, fighting against the pull that tried to keep them closed. But the darkness was just as deep and thick with my eyes open, as it had been with them shut. The only difference was that with my eyes open, pain rushed in. A burning ache in my throat that worsened when I tried to swallow. A pounding at my temples that rivaled even the worst migraines I’d ever had. And a dull throb in my arm.
Quietly, I probed the ache with my fingers and winced at the tenderness there. It reminded me of the years my brothers and I had pounded the crap out of each other. A good knuckle right to the fleshy part of a bicep gave off a similar ache, but my fingers glanced over a puncture mark, and my foggy brain concluded I’d been jabbed with something.
Everything came rushing back. Going outside to check the lights. An arm around my neck and feeling like I was suffocating.
“Fawn,” I choked out. Oh Jesus. She’d been in the house.
“Eve? Oh my God, where are you?”
There was a scrabbling sound from the corner of the room, and I held my arms out wide in either direction, feeling around in the darkness until my fingertips made contact with her clammy skin.
She immediately burst into a sob, and I pulled her close, wrapping my aching arm around her hunched shoulders. “Shh, it’s okay. I got you.” It was the automatic instinct I’d always had around her. Comfort and protect. On the outside, I assured Fawn that everything was going to be okay. Inside, I was a mess of panic and wishing somebody would hold me the way I held her.
Not somebody.
Boston.
My heart cracked open with the force of wanting him. A panicked sob of need and burgeoning hysteria clawed its way up my throat, and I swallowed painfully, trying to shove it down. Fawn’s shoulders shook while she cried, and we both couldn’t fall apart.
It was on me to hold it together. “What happened?”
I felt more than saw her shake her head. “I don’t know. I was working on my assignment, and I heard footsteps behind me, but I just assumed it was you. Then there was an arm around my throat, and the next thing I know, I’ve woken up here.”
“Same thing happened to me, but outside.
