Page 104 of The Midnight Knock

the office in the dark, midnight approaching, Tabitha says, “You still haven’t figured out the purpose of the

“The eggs,” Ethan said, feeling the weight in his pocket. “What’s the point of the grooved stone eggs?”

“I’m not sure. I have a theory—”

A sound reached them from the back of the cafe: a faintdingof metal. It came from the kitchen. Ethan barely heard it, but Tabitha straightened up.

“Give me a moment.”

She disappeared around the corner of the cafe’s hall. The hall stood open to Ethan’s left, just past the end of the bar, though he was too distracted to think much of it. He pulled the stone egg from his pocket, studying it in the light. One half of the egg was still a dull red from where it had sat in the lake of blood on the office’s floor.

Ethan swallowed. He rubbed his thumb along a red groove, felt a little of it flake off onto the skin. This was Hunter’s blood.

Kyla took out the egg that she, too, had taken from the office. She said, “Jack Allen had this in his pocket. Remember?”

“I know. I feel like I’ve seen another one—”

A scream tore through the night. It was a sound of pure pain, pure fear. It came from the direction of the supply room.

Kyla was on her feet. “That’s Fernanda.”

Ethan rose as well, hesitating when he realized something strange. The egg in his hand: it was trembling.

He’d felt a tremble like this before.

No time to remember where, however. No time for anything.The lights sputtered, died down to almost nothing. The Guardians of the mountain seemed overjoyed at the sight. TheySHRIEKED.And as Kyla reached for the shotgun on the bar, another scream came, this one from very close by.

It was Tabitha.

“Stop!” the woman screamed. “STOP!”

Ethan smelled gas.

They didn’t hear the first explosion. Ethan remembered the kitchen they’d passed through earlier on the way inside. He remembered the long stretch of gas cooking ranges. It wasn’t hard to guess what was happening. What was coming next.

He grabbed Kyla by the arm and wrenched her backward, out of the path of the hallway’s mouth. A moment later there was a great rush of heat.

Fire flowed down the hall. It swept over the bar, engulfing the wood in flame, and Ethan kept pulling Kyla back, back, back. The boom of the gas ranges deafened them for a moment. All Ethan could hear was a high, high whine.

As they backed themselves against the wall of the cafe, his hearing returned in time to hear another explosion, much more powerful than the first. The force of it tossed Ethan and Kyla off their feet. For a moment, Ethan thought it was the mountain—the thing in the mountain—bursting free.

And then the lights died, and he realized it was the generator that had exploded.

Ethan and Kyla landed, hard, on their backs. He saw something white rolling away under one of the booths: the egg that had been in Kyla’s hand. He heard pops outside, gunfire, men screaming, and then more pops closer by; the guns on the cafe’s flaming bar had just exploded. A chunk of metal whizzed past Ethan’s head, missing it by an inch.

Darkness swept over the motel. The flames in the cafe did little to stop it.

Glass shattered behind the bar as the wall of liquor exploded. Kyla screamed. In the firelight, Ethan saw blood running down the back of her arm where she’d lifted it to cover her face.

Tabitha, too, was screaming. The woman crawled into the cafefrom the mouth of the burning hall. She was on fire. She was a wailing ember. It was in her hair, in her skin, in her eyes.

“Thomas,” she said. “He… Thomas… he—”

The fire crept into her mouth. She stopped moving. She stopped everything.

The shock of this hadn’t even settled before a new sound, worse than all the others, burst over them.

The cafe’s front window shattered as something very large and very dark barreled its way inside. It seemed undaunted by the flames. It turned, lit by the fire, and Ethan remembered last night, remembered