Sanctus

Chapter 113

Bonnie stood in her bedroom. Listening.

From down the hall the crying of her baby pulled at her like an invisible cord, but she forced herself to ignore it and listen instead to the other noises in the house. She searched the silence. Heard nothing. Nothing at all.

She stepped over to the closet, her slippered feet silent on the thick cream carpet, and carefully opened the door, revealing rows of clothes on hangers. Then she heard it. The slow squeak of the kitchen door swinging on hinges that had never been set quite right. Someone was down there. Maybe it was Myron, heading back to fix lunch. But then why was he ignoring the baby?

She glanced across at the closet. Pushed her hand through the curtain of clothes to the small wallet safe fixed high on the back wall. She’d made Myron put it in the moment she discovered she was pregnant. The plastic covering on her patrolwoman’s uniform crinkled as her arm pushed past it towards the keypad set in the small steel door of the safe. She tapped her birth date into it and opened the door. Inside was her police badge, a box of 9mm cartridges, two fully loaded clips, and her service weapon.

She picked up the gun and a clip and pulled her arm out of the closet, listening to the wailing and the silent house beyond. She slid the clip into the stock of the squat, L-shaped gun until it made a click, like a tiny bone snapping.

From down the hall the crying grew, getting more desperate, and she felt a tingling behind her nipples as nature began to respond. She held her free arm across her front, padded over to the door, hunkered low behind it, and looked through the crack into the hallway.

Nobody there.

The hungry cry continued and she felt patches of wetness start to soak into her bra. Her grip relaxed slightly on her gun. Maybe she was simply hormonal and imagining all of this. She was tired, there was no doubt about that, and her lioness senses were probably working over-time. She listened for a few beats longer, feeling more and more foolish, and was just about to get up when she heard it.

A stealthy creak of a footfall on the third step of the stairs.

Then another on the fifth.

Myron had always joked that you couldn’t sneak up on anyone in this house.

Myron!!

Dear God, where was Myron?

She pressed her eye closer to the crack, trying to get an angle on the stairs, hoping to see him appear and amble towards the nursery. Instead the second twin started crying, and a faint smell of burning flooded her nostrils, then a vision of hell stepped into view.

It was a man. Tall. Bearded. He wore a red rain slicker, the hood pulled tight round his face. In his hand he held a gun, made obscenely long by the silencer screwed tight to its barrel. His eyes flicked between the sound of the babies crying and the partially opened door of the bedroom.

Bonnie looked up at him. Felt the warm wetness spreading across her chest, like she’d been shot. She held the snub barrel of her gun low against the crack of the door, angling it up as best she could so it pointed at the man. She’d been through weapons training at the academy. Learned to sweep through buildings checking for hostile targets. She went to the firing range every couple of weeks to stay sharp. None of it had prepared her for this. Her hand tightened round the gun as she watched him, his head cocked to one side, listening through the crying, as she had done.

The phone rang in the bedroom, startling Bonnie and bringing the demon towards her at terrifying speed. Red filled her vision as he leaned in to the crack in the door, his own gun raised as he looked through to the room.

Bonnie looked up. Angled her gun higher. Saw his head tilt down. His eyes meet hers.

She fired three shots in quick succession, eyes closed against the splinters blowing back in her face from the bullets tearing through wood.

She opened her eyes. Saw the landing was empty. Leapt up in panic, terrified he may have retreated to the nursery, her stitches tearing with the effort but her mind oblivious to the pain. She rounded the door, tears of fury and terror streaming down her face, ears still ringing from the gunshots. She glanced right as she rushed on to the landing, gun drawn and ready to fire. And then she saw him, lying on his back, at the bottom of the stairs where two of her bullets had thrown him.

She whipped her gun round and surveyed the scene from behind it, her heart hammering, the twins still screaming.

Blood spattered the walls and the pale stair carpet, marking the man’s violent passage down them. Halfway down, his gun lay balanced on the edge of a step like a broken black cross. Bonnie dropped down the few steps to get it, her gun never wavering from the sprawled red form at the bottom of the stairs. She saw a bullet hole in his side and another in his head. His eyes were open and still. The only movement was the creep of dark blood spreading out from beneath him like a hole opening up to drop him back down to hell. She got closer. Crouched low to pick up his gun. Saw something further along the hallway, a sneaker attached to the foot of someone lying motionless on the floor.

She recognized it, realized what had happened. Then her own scream rose, desolate and terrible, drowning out the cries of her fatherless babies.