Page 55 of The Jackal

I didn't stop. I should have. I kept climbing.

The upstairs was worse. If the ground floor had been too quiet, the second floor was a held breath. The work up here was rougher, less finished—whole walls opened, framing bare, the guts of the house showing. Every step I took landed loud in all that stillness, no matter how I set my feet. The air felt thick. Wrong.

And down the hall, from under one door, a light was on.

Low, warm, spilling out in a thin, gold line along the floor. There was something about it I didn't like at all. It looked like an invitation. It looked like a porch light left burning for someone expected. In my whole, strange life I've walked toward a lot of lit doorways in the dark, and every instinct I own is tuned to the difference between a light that means safety and a light that means come in, we've been waiting—and this one, God, help me, was the second kind. I felt it. And I kept walking.

Max whined a third time, and the hair went up on the back of my neck. All of it. At once.

That's the thing that finally reached me. Not the too-quiet, not the walls, not the why-here. My own body. The old radar that dragged me up out of a mine shaft alive and has never once in all the years since pointed me wrong. It came up screaming, every hair on my neck standing straight. Somewhere, deep in me, a clock I hadn't known was running started counting down, loud.

I listened to it, finally. Too late to matter—but I listened. I moved faster, quick as I could go and stay quiet, down that long dark hall toward the beckoning light, because whatever this was, it was already happening, and slow wasn't going to save me now.

I reached the door.

I put my hand on the knob and eased it, and it turned without a sound. I was grateful and suspicious of that in the same breath, because nothing else in that house had done me a single favor. I stopped with the door still shut and keyed the radio one last time, less than a whisper.

"Status?"

"Still in the rack," Brock said. "Hasn't moved. All clear, brother. Whole floor's cold except him."

Cold except him. The whole floor. I looked down at Max, and Max was strung tight as a wire about to snap, his whole body leaning at that door, a growl building so low in him it was more shudder than sound. Both of us on the edge of it. And Brock's instruments said the floor was empty.

What the hell has gotten into us, I thought. It's an easy job. In and out. A man asleep in his bed and every eye in Dominion Hall on my back.

That's what I told myself.

I eased the door open.

And as it swung, in the half-second before I saw the room, I saw the walls.

They were thick. The one the door was set into ran deep—a good foot and a half of it where the frame cut through—and the ones off to either side carried the same heavy wrongness. My eye caught it and snagged. Too thick. I'm no builder, but I've stood in more strange rooms in the dark than any contractor alive, and something about the depth of those walls set a cold finger flat on my spine. Why would they be⁠—

No. It's the renovation. I'm misremembering the downstairs. A trick of the light and a bad angle and a mind hunting for ghosts.

I stepped into the room.

A lamp burned low on the nightstand, throwing the space in soft amber. And there, in a bed against the far wall, was Dominic Craine—propped on a pillow, a book splayed facedown on his chest, hands folded over it, for all the world a man who'd fallen asleep reading.

I took a step in. Max came with me, stiff-legged, his growl climbing.

Craine's eyes opened.

Not the slow surfacing of a man pulled up out of sleep. They opened clean and dry and already aimed at me—the eyes of a man who had never been asleep at all, who'd been lying there in the lamplight listening to me come the whole way up his stairs.

"Hello, Cash," he said.

Every alarm bell I own went off at once.

Max lost the last of his quiet. He didn't lunge—he held at my side—but the growl broke open into something loud and hard and wild. His head swung, not just to Craine but around, around the whole room, to the raw unfinished walls, the exposed seams where the drywall had gone up and never been mudded, the long joints still showing like sutures in a body that hadn't finished healing. He snarled at those seams. I didn't yet understand why. I was seconds from understanding.

Craine sat up, unhurried. He lifted the book off his chest, set it on the nightstand, squared it neatly to the edge, and folded his arms.

"You've got time for one question," he said. Mild. Almost kind. "I'd choose it with care."

Time. The word landed strange. To me, I had all the time in the world—I was the one standing over him with a gun; he was the one in the bed. I looked around the room again. Nothing moved. Nothing I could see was out of place, except that everything about it was, and I couldn't lay a finger on the how.

So, I asked the question that mattered. The one my whole family was waiting on. The one this entire night had been built to answer.