Page 90 of The Midnight Knock

Thomas looked like he would rather swallow a mouthful of buckshot than comply. Tabitha, however, raised her hands from the desk in a slow show of surrender. She eased sideways, away from her brother. She stepped around the desk.

“What are you doing?” Thomas hissed. “What are you doing?”

Tabitha ignored him. Nodding to Jack Allen’s corpse, she said, “Could somebody move him out of the doorway? We need to refuel the generator.”

Indeed, as Ethan and Ryan grabbed an ankle apiece and dragged Jack Allen toward the fire, the lights died down to almost nothingand took ages to return. The mountain, silent these last few minutes, moaned again. The creatures outside swept over the motel. They were right outside that same door.

There was a careful sound, ascritch-scritch-scritchat the window by the fireplace. Ethan saw a massive shape in the dark. A talon creeping on the glass, wondering if it was time to break in.

Scritch-scritch-scritch.

The lights returned but they were hazy, flickery, liable to fall again at any moment. Ethan knew the sign of a dying motor when he saw one.

“This way,” Tabitha said. “Hurry.”

KYLA

They left Thomas standing behind the counter, the man looking lost. Terrified. He said nothing as they filed out the door. He seemed so scared, Kyla worried his brain might have shut down entirely.

They had bigger problems.

A sleek black boat of a car—“A ’54 Roadmaster,” Ethan murmured, clearly awed—was parked outside the office. Jack Allen’s car. Ryan swung open the driver’s door, said, “The keys are in the ignition.” He cranked the engine, only to kill it a moment later. “The tank’s dry.”

“No surprise,” Tabitha said.

Kyla hardly paid any attention. Her eye was drawn to the old house behind the motel, its dark shape barely visible at the foot of the mountain.

If not for the strange silver light glowing in the upstairs window, she might have forgotten the house was there at all.

Ethan followed her gaze. He said, “There’s something important over there.”

“Do you remember what?”

“No. But it’s waiting for us.”

They followed Tabitha down the front porch, the lights of the motel guttering like candles in a strong wind. Speaking of wind, the gale that had hammered the motel near midnight had died, but in its place was an awful stillness, a tension like a wire between Kyla’s ears. She could feel those creatures out there, moving through the night. She remembered the shape of them from yesterday. She remembered their feathers and their scales and their terrible strength.

She remembered the way the one locked up in the office had torn Tabitha’s head from her body and heaved it against the window as Kyla ran for her life.

Kyla remembered everything, not that it explained very much. Her headache might have been gone, but her mind was still a blur.

Tabitha stopped outside room 1, the next door down from theoffice, and dug a hand into her pocket. Kyla remembered that she and Ethan had come to this room last night in their search for clues and found this door locked. As Tabitha slid a key into the bolt and swung open the door, Kyla saw that inside was a simple room like all the others, only this one had clearly been lived in for some time. The two twin beds were unmade. The open wardrobe was hung with clothes.

An unframed photograph was propped against the lamp on the nightstand: Thomas and Tabitha and a thin, severe, black-haired man who could only be their father. The three stood in some desert, all three of them dressed in jeans and boots, each holding a spade in one hand and a brush in the other. Only Tabitha was smiling.

Tabitha herself was hurrying down the room. From the other side of the long dresser, she produced a series of heavy metal cans.

The first two were blue metal. “Can someone carry these? I believe the motel is out of water.”

“Thank God,” Ryan said. “I’ve been thirsty for an hour.”

Tabitha dragged out another metal canister, this one painted red.

“Gasoline,” she said.

“Music to my ears,” Kyla said. With a nod, Ethan hefted the can.

Lastly, Tabitha’s fingers hesitated over a piece of folded paper waiting atop the dresser. After a long moment’s deliberation, she plucked it up and tucked it in her pocket.