KnockOut

bedroom. Lock the door and stick a chair under the knob. I want you to close and lock the windows, pull the drapes so no one can see in. Turn off the lights. I want all of you to sit on the floor on the opposite side of the bed. Don’t move until I call you. Don’t open the bedroom door except for me. Do you understand?”
    “But—”
    “Do it, now,” Ethan said over his shoulder as he went to the back door, looked out, and slid the dead bolt home. He pulled his grand-ma’s lacy curtains over the kitchen window and took one last look at Joanna, Autumn, and Ox, still sitting there looking dazed and lost, his jaw grinding because he still hurt. “Turn out the kitchen lights. Autumn knows where everything is. Go!”
    Autumn clutched her mother’s hand. “Come on, Mama, we’ve got to hurry.”
    Ethan hoped she’d obey him. He didn’t have time to convince her. He turned and ran toward the front of his house.
    Joanna patted Ox’s arm as she bent down and picked up his gun. She saw he was still too disoriented to take care of himself. “You need to come with us, Ox. It’s not safe for you to sit here right now, okay?”
    Ox raised dazed eyes to her face. “I don’t understand what happened. Why did you all hit me?”
    “I’m sorry, but now you’ve got to come with us. It’s dangerous. It’s what the sheriff wants. I’ll take care of your gun until you get yourself together again.” Actually, she had no intention of ever giving up that gun. They turned off lights in their wake as they half dragged Ox to the back of the house, to Ethan’s bedroom. It was dark as a pit once Ethan had turned off all the front lights. Joanna shut the bedroom door and locked it; but she knew, simply knew, that Blessed was outside the window. What was the sheriff doing? What if Blessed killed him? Or made him kill himself?
    Ethan stood quietly beside the locked front door. He heard them dragging Ox down the hallway, heard the bedroom door close, heard the lock click. Good. They were safe.
    The house was completely dark now. He wasn’t worried about the animals. If they weren’t under his bed, he knew Mackie, Lula, and Big Louie were hiding beneath the desk in his study, all three of them huddled together.
    Who was this man they were so frightened of who’d made Ox act crazy-dangerous, like some mad killer? A powerful hypnotist? That’s what Joanna believed. He had to be if he’d made Ox act against everything he was at his core.
    The man’s name was Blessed; the name itself sounded crazy. Was he some sort of gifted psycho who wanted Autumn? But why? And both mother and daughter knew him and were terrified of him.
    He stood sideways to the front door and slowly, carefully, eased back the corner of the blind to look outside. It was perfectly black, the dark clouds hanging lower now, obscuring the quarter moon. It would begin to rain soon. He stood very still, watching for any shift in the deep shadows, listened for any sound that didn’t belong to the night, but there was nothing except the shimmering of the thick-leafed oak branches in the night wind.
    He heard the owl again, then the answering call of its mate.
    Nothing else.
    Then he heard glass shatter.

8
    ETHAN SPUN AROUND so fast he nearly fell. The sound had come from the back of the house—from his bedroom.
    He banged opened the front door and then ran full-out around his cottage. He saw a man standing on a lawn chair, leaning into his broken bedroom window, a gun in one hand.
    He was tall, long-limbed, with a ski mask pulled down over his head and face. Blessed?
    Ethan heard him say softly, his voice scary slow, mesmerizing, “I know you’re in there, Joanna. I heard the sheriff tell you what to do. You can’t get away again. I know the bedroom door’s locked. I know the sheriff heard the window crashing. When he roars through that door, I’m gonna blow his head off. You hear me? I’m not kidding now. You want to see him die? Send Autumn out. I don’t want to take a chance of shooting her. Send her out now, Joanna.”
    Ethan raised his Beretta and said, “Drop the gun now, Blessed. I won’t tell you twice.”
    The man jerked around, his hand coming up fast. A shot rang out, from inside the bedroom before Ethan could fire his Beretta. The man screamed as he twisted back and fell off the lawn chair, grabbing his arm. “You weren’t supposed to have a gun! You didn’t have to die, but now you are. I’m going to kill you for shooting me, bitch,