You've Been Warned--Again

by James Patterson

I could almost hug my father, but he’s trembling and he’s drifted somewhere far away in his head. All I can do is grab the oven mitt Mother left on the couch and wipe away the blood spatter on his face.

  Chloe breaks the silence. “Holy shit, you guys…”

  I can’t even despise her for what she just did with Nate. Not after I’ve watched a man get stabbed to death.

  Never mind. I want to feel gushing relief, I want to belt out a survivor’s howl. But there’s a weight still pressing on my chest, suffocating me. Even with Thorpe lying dead.

  It’s this house. Evil seeps through the cracks. Bad spirits take shape in the halls. Bad desires stir in the bedrooms.

  I won’t be free until I’m gone from here.

  Father’s BMW display key is on the peg by the door. When I grab it, Father doesn’t complain or even ask the obvious question: How will you get out? He’s too deep in shock for that.

  “Wait, where are you going?” Nate asks, still half-dazed.

  “To get the police,” I tell him.

  “Would somebody tell me what the hell is going on?” Chloe asks. “Where’s Stella?”

  “The police will sort this out,” I say. I can’t bring myself to tell her about the apparition in the upstairs window, what it probably means. I can’t even tell myself.

  I hurry through the breezeway, into the garage. Dusk peeks through the narrow carriage house windows, but it’s hardly any light at this hour.

  I tap the mounted button a dozen times before I realize the problem—no power, no automatic door.

  “Shit.”

  “Let me help you, Joanie,” Nate says. I didn’t invite him along, but here he is. He brushes past me, down to where my father’s hundred-thousand-dollar luxury car awaits. Just the sight of him makes me want to retch, but nobody else is offering any help.

  Fine, I don’t care. I’ll occupy myself by futzing with the ridiculously complex control on the display key.

  Nate yanks the overhead emergency handle to disengage the garage door from the track, then lifts it by hand. Winter rages into the garage with such force, he stumbles back a step.

  A knee-high wall of dense snow blocks the way. Enough to stop the car from getting through entirely. Right about now I’d gladly trade my father’s fancy car for a junker pickup truck with four-wheel-drive.

  Something I do on the display makes the BMW start—and then roll forward without me inside it. I yelp and lunge for the door as the car noses itself deep into the snow. Then it stops. Like it’s possessed and screwing with me.

  “Take me with you, please,” Nate begs, hands in prayer.

  “Go to hell.”

  “Look, I know I messed up. I was stoned, and with everything else that was happening, I lost my bearings, and…”

  “And what, you accidentally fell into her? In the kitchen? You didn’t even have the decency to get a room. Oh, and, she’s sixteen years old, Nate. Sixteen. Five months ago you would’ve been on a sex offender’s list.”

  He says something else I can’t hear over the relentless wind. He’s still praying at me, giving me puppy eyebrows. The pathetic behavior makes him even more sickening to me. But I take a breath for clarity. I’ve seen two deaths today. Life’s too short.

  “After today, I never see you again. You understand?”

  Inside the car is like a womb, lit all around with strips of ambient blue light. In the passenger seat, Nate shivers like he’s been rescued from an icy shipwreck.

  “I want you to know you broke my heart,” I tell him. Already there’s a film of snow on the windshield I have to brush away with the wipers. The wet blur in my eyes I have to wipe away with my sweater sleeve.

  I clip my seat belt into place.

  Trish said I was the good one, the white sheep of the family. I want to believe that’s true. I want to believe the nastiness that runs in the Whitmore blood has passed me over. Because if I carry this family with me, there will be no such thing as a clean getaway.

  A field of white stretches between us and the black metal gate rails. I don’t know if this car will make it through. I don’t even know if I can stay on the driveway. But I have to do this.

  “You deserve better than me, Joanie,” Nate admits.

  “Wish you’d told me that when we met.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “What?” I growl.

  “How are we opening the gate?”

  “I’m gonna smash it down,” I say, and I grab the gear shift.

  Chapter 23

  The child has gone upstairs to look for her mother. Carter can hear her wailing up there, like she’s screaming through layers of bulletproof glass. Calling for him. “Dumba, hurry, please!”

  Dumba—like he’s some kind of imbecile.

  Chloe has found Stella. She thinks there is something to be done. There is. In the end, they will all come to realize. He hears the ticking. He’s set the clock moving and only he can make it stop.

  But first Carter grabs the stranger’s ankles and drags him off the chair. The weight strains his lumbar muscles, but he works through it until the head smacks the floor with a satisfying thump.

  He wants to sit in his chair, wants to be done. Not just yet.

  When Carter reaches the master bedroom, dusk has settled outside the French doors, and now the shuddering light of a candelabra is all that holds back shadows.

  Must be the girl who brought that candelabra up here and set it hastily on a side table. She’s collapsed on the floor beside Stella’s body, holding her dead mother’s head in her lap.

  When she sees her grandfather, she swats away the tears like they’re a nuisance. Her eyes glisten in the candlelight. She wants Carter to love her, but she’s a stranger to him, even more than her mother ever was.

  “He killed her,” the girl says. “She’s dead.”

  “I had to stop him from hurting anyone else,” Carter says. He speaks to her like he’s lulling a baby to sleep.

  “You had to do it,” she says. She casts a slight glance at him, ever so subtle, then her eyes flash to Martha on the bed.

  Carter has been careful. He’s pulled the comforter over his wife’s body to hide the stab wounds, but her blood has begun to seep through the fabric.

  And Chloe has noticed.

  The dying embers in his belly are stoked once again.

  Chloe lifts Stella’s lifeless head from her lap and stands upright, smoothing out her skirt. She hikes her chin, flares her nostrils, and steadies her shivering. Clever girl.

  “We have to decide what to tell the police,” she says.

  This girl is even more than a stranger to him. She’s alien, the way she dresses, like Halloween, the way she talks, so cold, so steady, so knowing. Or maybe Carter understands her all too well.

  And he has already done what he set out to do. He’s bent time into a circle. He’s come to this place to reconcile the lawyer he killed, the Turnbull murders, the Thorpe family massacre, and he’s done. What the universe has asked of him is complete.

  “I have a confession,” Chloe says. She pulls her cell phone from the waistband of her skirt. A fold of cash falls to the floor. Hundred dollar bills. She takes no notice of that.

  “My phone works,” she continues. “When everybody else was bitching about coverage, I—I thought it would be funny to play along.”

  She offers the phone to him. It glows in her hand like a gem, and her face is lit with such soul-baring intensity that Carter almost can’t endure it.

  “There’s no issue with calling out,” she says. “You can tell them what Stephen Thorpe did, or whatever you want to say.”

  Her bow draws so sweetly across his strings. The sound of it clears his mind and offers him a vision of a life to come. A tropical island with crystal water, music, endless warmth.

  He has money to buy himself a decade of heaven at least. She’s showing him the way out of this nightmare. She’s trying to save her own life.

  “Why should you be any differen
t from the rest?” he asks.

  Her breath quickens. There’s a hitch in her resolve. The phone slips from her hand and she doesn’t even flinch when it breaks open on the floor.

  “I hated my mother,” she says. “I’m glad you killed her.”

  She smiles to show that she’s on his side. There is no need to euthanize her like the others. She’s already a dead soul walking, and she isn’t his child to judge. She is not his blood.

  “I love you, Dumba,” she says.

  He grabs the candelabra. The first strike hits her skull like a spade against rock, and Carter keeps digging.

  Chapter 24

  I stomp the gas with all the hope I have left. The car is my heart and it’s roaring, ready to burst.

  The tires dig through the snow. They’re rooting for solid ground, getting nowhere. I push harder, locking my knee, but time seems to slog. An emptiness grows in my chest. Even nature is fighting against me.

  Then, with a satisfying chomp, the treads strike gravel. Nate slaps his hands on the dashboard. We’re fishtailing, then we’re not, and the car bursts out like a bull from its pen.

  I’m almost outside myself, watching the speedometer leap, watching this bad-ass rip across the yard, guided by instinct alone.

  I crouch forward. Snow crashes against the undercarriage. My hands twitch with delicate adjustments, keeping us on target.

  “Joanie…Joanie…” Nate warns, but I won’t listen. I need the momentum if I’m going to push through to the other side.

  The house shrinks behind me. I’ve snapped whatever invisible chains have tried to hold me back, drag me down. I push away my fear of a shattered windshield, glass in my eyes, my chest impaled with an iron spike.

  An alarm goes off in the cab. My toe slips across the brake. Just one quick pulse of hesitation, and I’m already crushing seventy miles an hour. I’m in the zone.

  But the brake has its own mind. The speedometer drops. The car just drifts like it’s on skis, and I feel suspended in a dream. A sudden soft pillow fills my face with powdery air, and then it’s gone.

  We’re stopped. I never even heard the impact, but the car’s front end is smashed against the gate. Digital readouts flash red.

  The air bag powder’s in my throat, making me cough.

  Nate moans. He’s got his head tilted back, his hand cupped over his nose. A thick strand of blood drips between his fingers. His seat belt is unbuckled and his air bag didn’t release.

  I see what’s happened. Some kind of automatic emergency braking has deployed, and I hit the gate at a fraction of the speed I meant to.

  Some rails are bent, some still vibrate from the impact, but it’s still totally intact.

  “Nope,” I decide aloud. I wrench the gearshift into Reverse. All I need is twenty feet of space and I can try it again. I won’t be beaten. This time, I’ll ignore the impact alarm, I won’t touch the brake, and the car will do what I want, damn it.

  But fate isn’t with me. The accelerator flops under my shoe. Something clanks under the hood and dies.

  Chapter 25

  Carter’s shotgun is loaded with two shells. He scoops up four more and pockets them, then traces the contours of the gun with his fingers.

  The basement is black. It’s warmer down here, almost cozy.

  Chloe’s dead, and Stella, and Martha. They couldn’t survive in what the world had become. They’re better off this way. But his heart aches, knowing how they couldn’t accept that truth.

  Joanie’s going to be the saddest of all.

  He’s climbing toward the gray light at the cellar door when the music starts. He stops to listen to the Thorpe family piano. It’s down in the darkness playing Martha’s song.

  See what you’ve done…

  Carter squeezes shut his eyes and wills the music away. It means nothing to him now. It’s just a stupid song about a dog.

  Just then, the floorboards creak. Carter crouches, alert. It could be Joanie and her boyfriend, but he hasn’t heard them come back inside.

  Like a soldier, he pivots into the living room with the shotgun at low-ready. The room is like a mausoleum, nothing in motion but dust motes and frost crawling across the windows.

  A prickle of anticipation bothers the base of his neck. His pulse beats on the fingertip he holds against the trigger. He moves at a crouch toward the recliner, toward…

  The stranger’s body is gone.

  Nothing but a smear of blood on the floorboards.

  Carter swivels at his hips, sweeping his aim across the empty room. A bolt of pain in his spine makes him snarl. The walls close in, the borders of this world collapse. He can feel it.

  The stranger stands with one arm stretched across the fireplace mantel like he’s posing for a photo. Like he’s been there all along.

  His turtleneck is soaked from the stab wounds, and the blood loss has left him pale as the snow outside.

  Carter steadies the gun sight as best he can. From this short distance, he won’t need perfect aim.

  “I killed you,” Carter says.

  “Actually, you conjured me. It was you who invited me, really. Sorry it took me so long to show up.”

  “You should be dead.”

  “Probably. I’m just chock full of cute parlor tricks. Check it out.…” He holds his fingers like he’s got an invisible wand, then flicks his wrist.

  A sudden drop in oxygen steals Carter’s breath. The dead ashes in the fireplace roar to life. Deep-blue flames, almost white.

  “Eh? They don’t call me the Angel of Light for nothing!”

  “What are you?” Carter asks.

  “Pleased to meet you, I hope you guess my—”

  Carter pulls the trigger twice in quick succession. The double blast rips through the stranger’s torso and gouges two pitted craters into the stone behind him.

  The noise rattles Carter’s brain. Everything is a blur.

  For a moment, the stranger leans over with his hands on his knees. He’s gasping, coughing. When he stands upright again, his turtleneck is nothing but tatters.

  He runs his hand over the pristine flesh of his abdomen.

  “Damn,” he says.

  Carter shouldn’t be able to hear him through the tinnitus, but the voice comes from inside his head, where it’s always been.

  Carter breaks the shotgun’s action against his forearm and plucks the two spent cartridges from the breech. He’s got four more shots, but he’s not going to waste them on something that isn’t even human.

  Something that could never die.

  Instead, he turns for the door, for the last child.

  Chapter 26

  I’m out of the car when the gunshots sound. One right after the other. I crouch and listen, holding the driver door like a shield, but the house looms dark and silent.

  “What the hell was that?” Nate asks. His nose drips blood as he scrambles around the impact site, testing the bent gate rails for some way to squeeze through.

  I close my eyes to find my center calm. Then I trudge through the knee-deep snow, back toward the house that isn’t done with me yet. Back to my family.

  “Joanie, where the hell are you going?”

  “I can’t just—” My voice falters when I see my father.

  He stands in the open front doorway. It’s getting dark and the icy snowfall assaults my eyes, but I’m sure it’s him. He’s holding a shotgun lengthwise across his stomach.

  Fear strikes me harder than the blizzard wind. My understanding begins to slip. Stephen Thorpe is dead, so there’s no reason for Father to arm himself. No reason for him to take the gun out here, where there is only us. Only me and Nate.

  Maybe he’s going to blast open the gate lock. That’s what I try to tell myself, but it’s weak. It doesn’t explain why he’s fired that gun already. It doesn’t tell me where Chloe is.

  Nate yells, “Joanie, here!”

  He’s climbed onto the car hood to get better leverage against one of the two stone pillars that bord
er the gate. The single working headlight stretches his shadow upward, but he’s still not quite tall enough to reach the top of the pillar.

  I see his thinking. If he can climb over the gate, we’re out.

  Father stalks toward us, hunched and stonefaced. There’s no recognition in his eyes. I want to deny everything my instincts are telling me, but my body won’t let me.

  “Joanie!” Nate screams again. “Hurry!”

  The car hood is slick with melting snow. I try to climb but my shoes just squeak across the surface. My fingers are too numb to grip. My face still stings from the friction of the air bag. And this storm—it’s like nature itself fights against us.

  Nate pulls me up. I grab the cold and gritty pillar like it’s driftwood in a shipwreck.

  “Hoist me up, come on!” Nate says. He’s already climbing on my shoulders, his weight bearing down on me. My toes press against the pillar, but even the slightest shift will throw us both.

  All at once, the pressure on my body lifts away. For a second I think Nate’s fallen, but he’s scrambling onto the pillar top. It’s no bigger than a stool seat up there. He wobbles, but he’s made it.

  His nose is broken, his knees are scraped raw. Twenty minutes ago, he betrayed me with such casual cruelty that I never want to see his face again. But when he reaches for me, it’s like the hand of God.

  Father’s stopped behind the car. He watches. White breath spews from his lungs. For one merciful second, I believe he wants us to escape this place.

  But Nate doesn’t have that faith. He pulls back his hand.

  “No, Nate—please!” I scream, my fingers outspread.

  “I’m sorry,” Nate says, and then he’s gone.

  I lose my footing and slam against the car hood. Flat on my back, the wind knocked out of me. All I see is gray sky and a swirling chaos of snow.

  On the far side of the fence, Nate plows toward the main road. The snow is too deep to run, but he’s lunging, leaping, whatever he can manage.

  In a swell of forgiveness, I want him to get away.…

  But Father slips the shotgun barrels between the bars. The explosion turns night back to day. A ragged sphere of red opens between Nate’s shoulders, and then he’s gone. Swallowed by the snow.