Christmas Blackout

by Maggie K. Black

  It was as if someone was trying to bring The Downs crashing down with her inside it.

  Her eyes fluttered shut again, as memories assailed her.

  It had been quarter after three when she’d gotten home. The Downs had seemed eerily empty. No Dominic. No dog. Yet candles had flickered in the living room, covering every possible surface of the room like someone’s creepy idea of a romance.

  Then a hand had grabbed her neck, and a gun barrel had pressed against her temple. A cloth had been clamped over her face filling her nose with the smell of something sickly sweet.

  Now she gasped in a deep breath, filled her lungs and screamed.

  “Piper!” The thumping stopped and a man ran out of the darkness toward her. “Don’t scream. It’s all going to be okay. Just do what I say, and then I can let you go.”

  Slowly her eyes rose toward him. His hand clenched a sledgehammer. Brick dust covered his body. His face was half-hidden in shadows, but she saw enough to gasp in horror.

  “Dominic?”

  No. It couldn’t be. The young man she’d known since they were kids, who loved his huge family of nieces and nephews and was training to be a cop—he was the man now standing over her as she was tied, helpless, to this chair?

  “Let me go. Please, Dominic. I don’t know what’s going on here or what you think you’re doing but you have to let me go.”

  He broke her gaze and gestured toward the scraps of paper on the table in front of her. “Figure out what that means, then this’ll all be over.”

  He raised the sledgehammer high, turned back to the wall and swung. She didn’t even glance down at the paper he pointed to.

  “I don’t care about some paper star or where Charlotte is now!” Her voice was swallowed up by the deafening blows landing against the brick in the darkness. “I care about the fact my friend attacked me and tied me to a chair. What happened to you? What happened to the Dominic I know? Remember when we were seven and I climbed that tree in the park to get your kite back? Or when we were ten and your family went on holiday so you asked me to come over every day to feed your turtle? Please! Dominic, you’re scaring me!”

  The thumping stopped. Dominic turned. His face was so pale in the lamplight it was almost white. His eyes darted past her into the darkness.

  “It’s okay, Piper. I don’t want to hurt you. Just focus on solving the puzzle, and it’ll be all over soon enough. Please.”

  The puzzle? She stared down at the table. Someone had taken apart the Christmas star she’d made as a child and spread the pieces over the table, pushing the pieces together at the corners and lining up the lines as best they could. It was a page of newsprint, with headlines about Christmas holidays and fairs, just like a regular community paper.

  The date at the top read December 25, 1924.

  It was issued during American Prohibition, and when Canada’s alcohol was under tight government control.

  Right around the time of The Downs’s rumored speakeasy and smuggling past.

  “What are you doing?” she asked him. “What do you think is behind those walls?”

  He didn’t respond.

  Years ago Charlotte had come here looking for a speakeasy. She’d always told Piper so.

  And I hadn’t believed her, because I’d stopped believing it was real.

  But Charlotte had believed. She’d fallen hook, line and sinker for the tales of walls stacked with old, frosted glass bottles of bootleg rum, hidden envelopes of money, bags of jewelry and loot from ill-gotten gains. Charlotte hadn’t just robbed The Downs. She’d searched it for some hidden treasure she could use to get away from Alpha.

  What if she’d found it?

  Piper stared back at the paper. Some lines were darker than others, just slightly, as if the printing plates had been uneven with ink. Subtly, in ways she’d never noticed as a child. Now her adult eyes traced and connected the darker letters like a grid. It looked like there were blueprints hidden within the words on the page. If she joined up the vertical and horizontal lines the pattern they formed created walls, entrances, and hallways. But pieces of the page were missing. Strips here. Jagged pieces there. Holes from where she’d torn the paper in her youthful enthusiasm.

  “This isn’t the whole page,” she said. “There are pieces missing.”

  “Just focus on remembering.” Dominic shifted his weight and started on another wall. “Keep reading and fill in the blanks.”

  So he didn’t know about the blueprints and thought it was nothing more than newspaper articles. He might have no clue why Charlotte had stolen this star or what it had to do with finding her. Dominic’s swings grew faster, harder. At this rate he’d bring the entire house down.

  “But I was a child when made this. I have no way of knowing what was here.”

  “Piper, please!” Dominic’s voice rose, filling the basement. “All we have to do is find Charlotte and then this will all be over.”

  Find Charlotte? Charlotte was a person. Not a hundred-year-old rumor from history, an object hidden in a box of Christmas decorations or something to find by bashing holes in a wall. Had Dominic lost his mind?

  The longer she stared at the paper the clearer the hidden blueprints were appearing. Tunnels were appearing on the page now, a passageway, and what looked like a hidden room.

  “Untie my hands. Please.” She kept her voice level and firm, pushing through the fear even as it threatened to take her over.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Pips. I would if I could, but I can’t.”

  Again, Dominic’s eyes flitted to the shadows and then around the room, like a mosquito trapped in a jar. Her head turned. But all she could see was the darkness looming in from the corners of the room and filling the cluttered basement.

  “Why? Why can’t you, Dominic?”

  No answer. Sweat ran down Dominic’s face. Was he frightened, paranoid, on drugs?

  “Dominic! Talk to me! This is crazy. Whatever’s going on, I can help you!”

  “Just find Charlotte, Pips. Please.”

  He stepped out of the light and into the darkness. She watched his shadow on the floor as he swung a sledgehammer high over his head. The banging started up again.

  Oh, Lord, help me please.

  She lowered her head as fear and frustration battled in her mind, laced with a toxic confusion that threatened her ability to even think straight. Her vision swam before her, the pieces fading in and out of focus. They were definitely blueprints, a map. But not for the basement Dominic was desperately chipping away at piece by piece. Nor the barn that Gavin had demolished.

  These were blueprints for the main floor of The Downs.

  There was the staircase. Here was the entrance to the basement. There was the fireplace—

  Something about Christmas things...

  Something about brick...

  Then suddenly, her gut told her all too well what Charlotte had discovered and why she’d demolished the Christmas tree and decorations to find it. Even why someone would come back here looking for her now—the final winter before they were due to break ground for The Downs renovations.

  “I think I know where Charlotte went!”

  Dominic froze. Something rustled behind her in the darkness.

  “But I won’t know for sure without my hands. Some of these pieces aren’t in the right place.”

  Dominic nodded. “Okay. But just one hand.”

  One hand would have to do.

  “Okay. Just one. That’s all I need.”

  Dominic stepped closer. Then he bent down and touched her left hand. His voice dropped until it was barely a whisper. “You know I care about you, Pip, right?”

  She nodded to show she’d heard him. But she didn’t trust herself to respond.

  “Forgive me, Pip.” He
untied the rope. Her left hand fell free.

  “I forgive you, Dominic.”

  She gripped the chair with her right hand and leaped up, swinging the chair around above her head. It hit Dominic hard on the side of the head, knocking him to the ground.

  She scrambled across the floor, yanked her other hand free and grabbed the sledgehammer from the floor.

  “Piper! Wait! Please!” Dominic’s voice echoed up the stairs behind her. “You don’t understand.”

  Oh, she understood well enough. She had to get upstairs. She had to call the cops.

  She had to find Charlotte.

  Her feet pounded up the stairs. Just three more steps and she’d be at the top.

  A gunshot sounded behind her.

  Dominic yelped.

  His desperate scream was filled with such pain, it sent shivers through her body.

  Then his voice fell silent.

  She turned back. Dominic was lying on the floor in the basement now. Blood pooled beneath him.

  A figure stood over him, his face hidden in the shadows.

  “Hello, darling.” A cold voice rasped from the darkness. “You really shouldn’t have hit your friend like that. He was only trying to save you and his family. Wouldn’t want all those precious little nieces and nephews to have something terrible happen to them on Christmas Day.” Dark chuckles poured like ice water over her skin. “I told him I’d let you all live if he followed my instructions and did what I say. Not that I was ever going to let him go alive. Not after what he did.”

  The sledgehammer tightened in her grasp. She took a step backward up another step. Candlelight was flicking in the living room. Dim and faint. “You’re Alpha?” Her feet were now just two steps from the top. “You were the cruel, mean, controlling boyfriend that both Charlotte and Trisha wanted so desperately to get away from. You terrified Charlotte, so much that she wouldn’t even go to the cops. She had no family and you were paying her rent and tuition. She thought she could steal something valuable enough to gain her freedom or buy her way to a new life. But you wouldn’t let her go, would you? You followed her here. You spied on her and Dominic.”

  “Stop it!” he bellowed up the stairs toward her. “He has no right to try to take my love from me!”

  “But Charlotte got away, didn’t she?” Her feet slid back up another step.

  A floorboard creaked in the darkness behind her. Someone else was there in The Downs, behind her in the darkness.

  Lord, as much as I wish Benjamin was here, I also hope he’s still far, far away and in safety.

  “Stop right there. Or I will hurt you.” Alpha stepped forward slowly into the light. She saw two well-polished shoes. Tailored tweed pants. A cane.

  Piper’s free hand rose to her lips. Tobias.

  The arrogant, delusional man who wrote books about warfare and torture, who in one moment would spout random things out of context and had confused both Trisha and Piper with university students, but in another was lucid enough to spin long, creative stories. He now stood in the tiny pocket of light at the bottom of the basement stairs, a gun in his outstretched hand, still smoking from shooting Dominic.

  Ever since Kodiak had first attacked her by the barn it had almost felt like she was stuck in a time loop. Charlotte had come to The Downs six years ago. Yet, Alpha seemed to think she was there now.

  What if, in Alpha’s mind, it was still six years ago?

  All this time she’d foolishly presumed Alpha had to be some young heartthrob to hold such sway over both Charlotte and Trisha. And not just because she’d thought Alpha, not Dominic, was the man Uncle Des had seen Charlotte kissing in the woods six years ago. It’s all about thinking like a predator, Piper. Now she could imagine how a well-spoken, well-connected man might have sounded as the online suitor and financial benefactor to a vulnerable young woman so many years his junior.

  “Surprised I see.” A self-satisfied smirk curled at his lips, like a magician too proud of a conjuring trick. A chuckle rumbled in the back of his throat. “Oh, you’ll be amazed what you can get a person to do for you if only you know how to motivate them properly. Charlotte and Trisha were all alone in the world and needed caring for. But a disappointing number of people are easy to control by nothing but a very generous check.”

  Through the blood pounding in her head she heard another footstep behind her. Someone was waiting behind her, hiding, and all she could hear was the sound of their breath.

  Benjamin, I have no reason to believe you’d be here. But if you are, signal me somehow. Tell me what I can do to help you save us both.

  Her voice rose. “But you failed, didn’t you? Charlotte ran into the arms of another man. She came up with a plan to get away from you. Did you catch up with her before or after she destroyed my living room looking for the speakeasy?”

  His smirk turned to a grimace.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “You found her and hurt her, but she got away and you lost her in the house. You tore up The Downs looking for her, but she was gone.”

  If what Piper had guessed from reading those hidden blueprints was true, she could even forgive Charlotte for tearing down the tree and destroying the nativity. Pain and fear made people do desperate things.

  Her hands tightened on the sledgehammer. She picked it up like a baseball bat. He might still have a gun pointed at her face, but just one good swing was all she’d need and then he’d be down. She backed up onto the last step, reaching the main floor. A hand brushed against her back in the darkness.

  Benjamin?

  Then a hand clamped her throat from behind, choking the air from her lungs. The other grabbed the sledgehammer and yanked her arm hard behind her back. Her wide eyes stared in horror at the crude bear tattoo on his wrist.

  No. Benjamin was hours away celebrating happily with friends and family.

  It was Kodiak.

  Tobias laughed as Kodiak slowly wrenched her arm harder and harder until the sledgehammer fell with a reverberating thud.

  Lord, don’t let them get away with this. No matter what happens to me, may this monster get caught before he hurts one more woman.

  She shook her head, forcing words out as the fingers on her throat slowly grew tighter. “I’m not one of those vulnerable women you can control, manipulate and scare into silence.”

  “Oh, but, Charlotte, you are.” Tobias stepped closer, one step at a time, with an exaggerated, dramatic flair, until he reached the top. “You think brown hair and a pair of glasses could fool me?”

  Help me, Lord! He’s lost his mind.

  Kodiak’s grip tightened until the pain forced Piper down onto her knees. Whimpering and helpless, she felt Kodiak tilt her toward him like an animal exposing her neck for the kill. Alpha leaned his face in toward hers until she had no choice but to look in his wild, delusional eyes. “You will never leave me again, Charlotte. I was too kind to you before. But this time I will hurt you. I will break you. Until I make sure you’ll never leave.”

  SEVENTEEN

  The sound of Piper crying out in pain stabbed Benjamin like a knife. He crouched low on the second-floor landing, and watched as Kodiak forced Piper down to her knees. The beat of his heart roared inside him like an ocean wave.

  It was now or never. Either he was going to save Piper or die trying.

  He crept to the top of the stairs. Then froze. The stairs leading from the second-floor balcony to the living room were gone, nothing but a pile of smashed boards and timber. If he’d been walking faster and not paying attention, he’d have fallen right through to the floor below. Now what?

  Jump the wrong way and he could break both his legs. Chairs and tables were pressed up still against the walls. The room below was dark and empty except for candles flickering theatrically on the dining room table. No wonder he hadn’t been able
to see any light through the window. An agonizing breath filled his lungs as he watched Tobias lean toward Piper as Kodiak’s grip kept her firmly kneeling there in front of him.

  But her eyes shot upward toward the balcony. Was she praying? Did she know he was there?

  “Don’t you remember?” Tobias’s voice echoed through the darkness. “I’m quite the expert in knowing how to hurt a woman so she isn’t anywhere near dead, but wishes that she was. Apparently I was all too kind to you.”

  Then he strode into the living room and spread his arms like a maestro conducting a hidden symphony. Kodiak wrenched Piper’s head back and forth so her gaze followed his employer’s movements.

  “From now on, you do not speak unless I direct you to.” His voice rose as if he was addressing a full lecture hall. “Nod, Charlotte, to show you heard me.”

  She didn’t move. Tobias snapped his fingers. Piper gritted her teeth as Kodiak forced her head up and down in a nodding motion.

  “Oh, you think you’re so strong, don’t you?” Tobias’s eyes grew cold. He nodded to Kodiak. “Break her arm.”

  Benjamin couldn’t wait one second more. He leaped. His feet hit the back of an armchair just long enough to break his fall, before throwing himself at Kodiak. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Piper slam her elbow back into Kodiak’s face and scramble from his grasp.

  Kodiak swore in pain and lunged after her. But Benjamin got to him first. His fist flew, catching Kodiak in the jaw and sending him sprawling backward onto the floor. The vicious thug-for-hire leaped to his feet. A knife flashed in his hand. He lunged at Benjamin, with the glint in his eye of a man prepared to kill. Benjamin raised his arm and blocked the blow with one strong movement. Then he forced the attacker’s arm down with so much speed that Kodiak’s weapon landed deep in his own leg. Kodiak grunted, falling on his injured leg.