You've Been Warned--Again Read online

  The crows in the trees take flight.

  My father turns the gun on me.

  Chapter 27

  I tumble off the hood, away from Father. The snow envelops me in cold white nothingness, stings my eyes, fills my mouth.

  This is no way to die. So close to freedom, and this man who’s supposed to protect me above all others…

  “Daddy!” I scream. “Don’t—please—don’t!”

  I sound the way I feel— like a helpless child. Even on the ground I’m falling. All my safety lines are cut, all my security lost.

  Crouched on the passenger side, I can’t see my father. I can’t hear his movements. He has one more round in that gun before he’ll need to reload.

  That gun. He kept it, and he brought it here. He’s coming around the back of the car. If I stay crouched here, he’ll kill me.

  “Don’t be afraid!” he says. “This is a gift.”

  I dive back onto the hood and roll across. My muscles burn, they don’t want this, but it’s happening. Father shoots again. An eruption of glass rains over my head as I drop back into the snow.

  I run, back toward the house. There’s nowhere else to go. I’m convinced he shot me but the pain doesn’t come. My legs slog through the wet snow like a slow-motion nightmare.

  He’ll take five seconds to reload, maybe less. If I look back, I’ll surely fall, and he’ll have all the time he needs. But I don’t want to die the way Nate did.

  I’m one leap from the doorstep when a snowdrift rushes up on me like a wave. Just as another gun blast rips open the sky. I’m not hit, but I can’t find the strength to stand. I crawl the last few feet to the open door and collapse inside.

  Once the door is shut and locked, I’m struck with indecision. All I can hear is how my panicked whimpers echo in the room.

  My mind leaps a dozen ways. The lock will buy me a minute at best, the windows won’t hold at all. Father has at least one more shot. I have to defend myself. Find Chloe, Stella. I have to scream. I have to live.

  One thought tears through all the rest: the revolver. In that secret compartment with the portrait of the Thorpe family, right where I left it.

  There’s no time to worry about whether it will work. I rush toward the library. Only later will I realize how strange it is to feel warmth as I pass the blue wall of flame in the fireplace.

  It’s not dark inside the library. The room is awash with the glow of a hundred candles, though there are no light sources I can see. So much light, I have to raise my arm to shield my eyes.

  The shelves are stocked floor to ceiling with books—ancient leather-bound volumes with rusted metal clasps, the titles long worn off by time.

  In the center of it all stands the stranger.

  “Looking for this?” he asks, with a shrug, like it’s all a lark.

  He’s aiming that revolver at my face.

  Chapter 28

  With a flick of his wrist, he spins the gun by its trigger guard and catches it backward. He’s offering it, jiggling it like bait.

  “Go on, take it. It’s yours. Finders, keepers, right?”

  “You were dead,” I say. “And these books…”

  The stranger rolls his eyes and leans back against the desk. “Yes, all the world’s forbidden knowledge. You used to be able to get it in just one bite, but those were the good old days.”

  Behind me, the locked front door rattles. Then my father slams his body against it. I cry out, the noise is so violent.

  “Wolf’s at the door. Better arm yourself, sweetie.”

  “You’re not Stephen Thorpe,” I say.

  “My names are legion, but you win the prize, Joanie Baby, because Steve Thorpe ain’t one of them.…”

  “He brought you here. Conjured you. In that room.”

  The false bookshelf is still open, just as I left it. I can’t see the goat’s-head pentagram inside, but I will never forget how it was scraped into the brick by some deranged hand.

  Father slams the door again. He’s growling like a rabid dog.

  “Shoot first, ask questions later,” the stranger says. “You have to protect yourself, Joanie. I can’t intervene.”

  A swell of despair rushes up inside me. The stranger is everything I feared he would be and so much worse. But what he offers, it’s the only way out I can see.

  “You’re not fit to cast stones, Joanie Whitmore. You’re fallen, just like the rest of them. Remember, I can see into your heart.”

  This man, this demon, he knows every dark note I’ve ever sounded. My pride, my anger, my lust. He’s prying me open, digging his claws into the core of my being.

  “Take the fucking gun, Joanie!” he screams. The light in the room wavers a moment, lengthening our shadows, reddening his face.

  I step forward and snatch the gun from his hand. My eyes bore into his. I don’t look away from the flames I see burning inside his head, even though I’m struck through with fear.

  “There,” he says. “That feels better, doesn’t it?”

  Father throws himself against the door again. This time it splinters open. Momentum tosses him inside and sprawls him out on the floor.

  I’m already scrambling up the steps to the second floor. There’s as much rage in my heart as terror. A voice in my head demands I hold my ground and empty this gun into my father before he figures out where I am.

  Kill, it says. Kill the man who gave you life.

  I’m not ready to listen. I want a chance to think, someplace to hide, but I know damn well this house will not protect me.

  “Joanie!” Father’s caught me in his sights and he fires.

  The staircase railings disintegrate behind me. My left leg is yanked by a vicious force. I sprawl, half on the landing, and I kick for a foothold that will stop me sliding back down the stairs.

  Pain sears through my foot, all the way up my calf.

  I’ve been shot.

  Voices seep out of the woodwork. Some of them I know—my mother, Stella, Alan. But some are darker, more distant. Murdered Thorpes, and even farther back, strange accents, languages I don’t recognize, Native chants.

  Generations of dead all calling in chorus.

  I have to crawl up the last few steps. My desperate drive to live gets me down the hall—that, and the voices guiding me through the dark.

  Every second, the pain in my foot gets sharper, hotter. My already snow-soaked shoe is stained through with blood. It’s too dark for me to see the damage, and that’s a blessing. I’d probably pass out.

  Joanie, can you hear us? the voices call from the bedroom.

  There’s a small light to guide me there. I limp inside to find that it’s a single candle overturned on the floor. Its flame is somehow still glowing.

  Come to us, Joanie.…

  They’re all here. Mother on the bed, Stella and Chloe on the floor. Their bodies lie like mannequins, twisted and discarded. My family is a hellish tableau of corpses.

  Their voices linger in the frosted air, and now I understand.

  They don’t want to protect me, they don’t want to help.

  They’ve lured me here to join them.

  Chapter 29

  Time is a downward, backward spiral. Carter was there at Joanie’s birth, and he will send her off to death. She’ll see. She’ll understand why it has to be this way.

  He finds her slumped on the floor with her back against the funeral bed. She’s still alive, gasping small gulps of breath. She’s tortured by her fear while the rest of them lie at peace.

  “Why?” she cries, her chin puckered and trembling.

  He wants her to understand, but words never explained a thing. She has to feel that this place is where they were always meant to arrive. This house, this room.

  “Aw, come on, Cart. Tell her. Tell her why you have to kill her.” The stranger is a silhouette framed in the glass doors. He is just a shape—he can be anywhere in this house he wishes.

  “Because we can’t be redeemed,” Carter says.
/>   Joanie shakes her head, no. She points a revolver at him with her trembling hand. A sudden tremor of doubt passes through Carter’s mind. Where did she get a gun?

  “That’s right,” the stranger tells her. “Don’t think, just shoot.”

  Carter should leap out of the doorway, but something won’t let him move. Maybe it’s pride, of all things. Pride in Joanie, that she’d manage to survive this far. That in the end, she’d be more clever than her father, more deserving.

  What she doesn’t realize is this: she’s just playing the role that this stranger has designed for her. This has been the stranger’s game from the very start. He’s always been whispering betrayals with his serpent tongue.

  Tonight, he shouts, “Shoot him, you dumb bitch!”

  The stranger’s voice floods the room from every corner. It submerges Carter’s head in noise. He aims the shotgun at his daughter, even though it’s empty.

  “No…” Joanie says. She lets her arm fall into her lap.

  She won’t shoot. After all this, she won’t.

  Carter doesn’t know if she’s a saint or a fool.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake…” the stranger groans. He’s a sudden tempest of frustrated rage, flailing a dozen limbs and screaming in a thousand dissonant voices at once.

  He has failed to tempt her.

  The glass panes in the French doors all shatter at once, and the storm sweeps in off the sea, invading the bedroom. A blanket of electric static drapes over Carter’s body and all the lights come back on.

  The stranger isn’t dressed in Stephen Thorpe’s skin anymore. He’s found a much younger form, the spitting image of Carter himself, when he was a youth. Except for the gaping wound that barrels straight though his right eye socket.

  It’s Alan Whitmore. Carter’s only son.

  He wears the same suit he was buried in.

  Carter drops his gun. The Whitmore family gun. The same gun Carter found lying next to the corpse of his twenty-year-old child. His son, another victim of that age-old family curse, that creeping and all-enveloping emotional darkness that no amount of money has ever been able to buy away. His only male heir, a suicide.

  “What’s wrong, Dad?” Alan asks as he lifts one of his mother’s dead hands. He gazes down at her with a beatific smile.

  It’s the boy’s real voice. Joanie recognizes it, too. She drags herself off the floor, sobbing from the pain of her gunshot wound. But when she sees her brother, it’s like she expected him all along.

  “It’s not real,” Carter says.

  “Father, do not forsake me, your only begotten—” Alan starts in a mocking tone.

  “Shut up! You’re not my son!”

  “I came to take you back with me,” Alan says. “All of you.”

  Carter has to cover his eyes to be rid of this horrendous vision. His throat is so tight he can’t breathe, and his heart is being crushed inside his chest.

  He knows damn well where this devil wants to take him.

  “Joanie can come, too. You’re all invited,” Alan says.

  “No…” Carter pleads. His dead lay about the room, but whatever mercy he thought he delivered them was a lie. Hell has taken them all.

  “Here’s your chance to break the line forever, Pops. We’ll all go down together.” Alan spreads his upturned hands and raises them like a conductor bringing the orchestra to crescendo.

  Around the room, they start to whisper. Just the faintest chant, and in some language Carter doesn’t know. Latin, maybe, or older. First it’s Martha in the bed, then Stella and Chloe. Their pale lips move in unison.

  Joanie slaps her hands over her ears.

  “Don’t listen to them!” she yells.

  But Carter listens. He is the receiver and the instrument. He reaches out for his last living child. She cowers, but she’s backed herself against a wall. There’s nowhere left for her to go.

  “Please…” she begs.

  But Carter knows what he must do.

  Chapter 30

  Come with us, come with us, come with us.…

  A thousand demon voices fill my head. Even with my hands crushed over my ears, I hear their chant grow louder and faster.

  My father comes toward me with his face twisted in distress. He brought us all here to be punished. For our bitterness, our bickering, our greed and lust and lying, the devil will take us.

  I tried so hard to be someone else, to set myself apart…

  But Father wants me dead, just like the rest of our family. I brace my back against the wall and lift myself up onto one leg. The pain is so intense, I’m only partly conscious. My eyesight seems to be frosting over.

  I press my hands into his chest, but I’m too weak to hold him back. My throat won’t form the words I need to beg for my life.

  He clutches my head in both his hands. He’s so stricken with tremors he could self-combust, but his hands are steady and firm, just like his eyes.

  “You’re the only one who knows better,” he says.

  Then my father lets me go. He steps past the line of broken glass. Out on the balcony, the wind ripples his flannel shirt.

  “Dad…” I say, but my voice is so weak. He can’t hear me.

  The stranger sits on the edge of the bed wearing the face of Stephen Thorpe again. One leg crossed over the other, he picks glass pebbles from his pant leg and contemplates Father like he’s a painting in a museum.

  “Pay attention,” the stranger says. “This is the best part.”

  In an instant Father is gone, over the edge. My stomach drops like I’m the one who’s falling. I limp and lunge through flashes of pain, out onto the balcony. The wind tries to throw me over, too, but I grip both hands on the railing.

  Far below, Father’s body lies draped across the rocks. He’s a broken shell. The sea waves crash and spit and roar at him from the foot of the slope, and I’ve never felt more alone in all my life.

  In the bedroom, the voices of the dead have gone quiet.

  I turn back to the stranger. “You did this to them,” I say.

  “I helped,” the devil says with a shrug. “I am what I am, as the Good Book says. Let me tell you a little story about eternity.…”

  I won’t listen to another word. He’ll twist my mind, he’ll seduce me with promises and dreams, just like he did to Father. And then he’ll kill me, too—I’m sure of it. He’ll finish what Father wouldn’t.

  I almost lose faith, but then I realize the power has been restored, and the gate outside will work. If I could get through, if I could break free from the sorcery of this house, maybe then I’ll outrun the devil, too.

  I take a few tentative steps and grab for the revolver I’ve left on the floor. The gun won’t hurt him, I know. I just want to keep him from getting it.

  The devil, of course, has already guessed what I’ll do. He twists my sweatshirt in his hand and yanks me upright. “You silly girl, look what you’ve done,” he sings into my face.

  I scream till my throat is raw. I scream against all the evils he’s provoked in my family. But I don’t deserve his punishment.

  I’ll scream out my innocence while he engulfs me in flames.

  Chapter 31

  But the devil doesn’t drag me to hell.

  Instead, he has a fit of wheezy laughter. He makes a show of releasing my sweatshirt, like his game is no fun without a chase.

  I will fight to the end, even if I have no hope.

  I hobble out of the bedroom with my wounded foot dragging limp behind me. The devil guffaws like this is all a slapstick routine.

  With the lights back on, I see the smeared red footsteps I left on the staircase. Every step down the stairs is torture. I’m shivering and nauseated. I could pass out and fall, break my neck like Mother, and this house would have me after all.

  Instead, I keep going. The splintered front door creaks on its hinges. The snow is already reaching over the threshold.

  I take the security remote from the peg where it hangs.

&
nbsp; The devil comes down the stairs at a leisurely pace, whistling to himself. I’m a rabbit struggling in his trap. This torment pleases him.

  Outside, the weather fights to cut me down. I want so badly to lie in the snow and fall asleep forever, but a force of will keeps me moving toward the gate.

  I hobble around the derelict BMW, propping my hands against it for balance. The gate ahead is more than just a gate. It’s a doorway between hell and the world I left behind.

  I press the remote button. The gears come to life and the gate begins to rattle open. My heart leaps at the sight…until a bent rail jams the works after only a few inches.

  It hasn’t opened far enough.

  I can’t accept this. I throw myself against the narrow opening and push one leg through, one arm, but that’s as far as I can go. I’d have to crush my ribcage and skull to fit them through.

  The devil strolls into the red glow of the BMW’s taillights. “Uh-oh,” he says when he spots me on the verge of escape. He picks up his pace, reaching out his hands like claws.

  I shove at the gate with all the strength I have left. Metal groans and scrapes and my arms feel like they’ll snap. The devil’s sharp fingernails scrape across my cheek.…

  …and the gate gives me one more inch. It’s enough, and I collapse into a dreamlike mattress of snow. I’m through. The sound from my throat might be a laugh or a cough or a cry.

  The devil sticks his face through the gap, snarling like a rabid dog. Behind him, the house is nothing but a few lit windows in a field of darkness. I want to believe that’s a sign of hope, of salvation.

  I’d like to believe.

  But the devil mocks me. He puts on an exaggerated frown and says, “Did you really think you’d get rid of me that easily?” As I watch, he wraps one hand around a rail. Then he gives it the slightest tug.

  The gate flies open with an ear-splitting screech. Damaged bars bend and snap and fling out into the night like they’re nothing but plastic.