Abby stood in the doorway. Her mouth was open, but she’d lost the ability to breathe.
“Hope,” she whispered. It came out as a gasp, barely audible.
The empty bed and its scattered sheets filled her vision.
There was a mistake. A misunderstanding. Hope was still here, somewhere. She could be hiding under her bed, terrified but unharmed. Or downstairs, oblivious as she got a glass of water. There had to be a simple explanation.
Abby’s eyes were dragged toward the scraps of torn screen that fluttered in the wind.
“Hope.” Her voice had strengthened, but barely. Scarcely more than a choked moan. The house maintained its deathly hush.
This was wrong. The Stitcher took people. But not her sister.
They were so careful.
They had the rules.
They were so careful.
“Hope—!” This time it was the start of a wail, broken and jagged and raw. Abby crossed the room in three long steps. She bent as she moved and craned to see under the bed. There was nothing there but some discarded clothes and dust. She reached the open window and felt the cooling night air graze her raw skin.
Their overgrown backyard and the partially completed holes were a tangled maze of shadow and moonlight. It was a long drop to the ground below.
What was that?
A branch swayed near the back of the yard, almost as though something had nudged it on its way past. Abby leaned forward, breathless. Her hand gripped the sill. The surface was damp, almost slimy. She took her hand away and saw smears of glistening blood.
Drops of it trailed over the sill and down the wall toward the bed. It was fresh. It shouldn’t have been possible, but the patch she’d touched had felt warm.
Hope was here just seconds ago. Something woke me, and it wasn’t the nightmare.
I heard her being taken.
Abby’s pulse was a ferocious, dangerous thing, rushing through her in a torrent as she fled the room. The floor vanished under her feet. She took the stairs three at a time, nearly twisting her ankles as she skidded into the hallway. And then she burst out through the back door, onto the dark porch, and screamed.
“Hope!”
Her voice bounced back at her from a dozen directions.
Rocks and fallen branches stabbed into her bare feet but didn’t slow her as she shoved her way between the overgrown trees, aiming for the place where she’d caught a trace of movement. She hit the back fence, the rough wood scraping over her outstretched palm.
She still held the flashlight in her other hand. She tried pressing its power button again and again, but it wouldn’t respond. She turned, helplessly searching the billowing foliage surrounding her.
“Hope! Answer me!”
Heavy branches swayed in the wind. Moonlight dappled across the ground, a kaleidoscope of motion. Not even the nocturnal insects dared make noise.
She couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe. Hope wasn’t in the garden any longer, and Abby was gripped by a desperation both wild and terrifying in its intensity. Her legs moved, devouring the ground under her. She’d reached the asphalt roads before she even knew where she was going. And she kept running.
Hope had to be nearby, somewhere in these cold and empty streets. She was here, if Abby could just find her.
She screamed her sister’s name until her vocal cords began to burn. And she didn’t stop screaming. Not when her voice began to distort, not when she began to suffocate from lack of air, not when her own ears began to ring from how hard she was running.
House lights burst on around her like fireflies rising through the night. Abby caught glimpses of forms moving behind curtains in a dark pantomime.
No one left their homes. No one tried to help her.
They knew better than to be outside after dark.
Dead streetlights arched overhead like giant, spindly fingers curled over the road. Her eyes blurred with tears. She called Hope’s name again and again, her voice cracking, but the word began to vanish into increasingly frantic screams.
She was losing time and she didn’t know where she was going. The town stretched out in every direction, seemingly endless. A thousand places to hide.
Stop. Think!
Her mind was a crackling inferno of fear and misery. She clenched her hands to either side of her head, her teeth gritted, as she slowed to a halt.
You don’t have much time. Focus!
A thousand scattered thoughts collided.
Hope had been bleeding. Hot red blood on the windowsill, hot red blood on Abby’s palm. If she could find the trail, she could follow it…
It was impossible to see in the dark. Abby hadn’t even noticed the blood in the bedroom until she’d touched it. And the flashlight refused to work.
A whine escaped her throat. There was still time. There had to be. But it was running like sand between her fingers, and the more frantic she became the faster it escaped.
And then, a sound. Footsteps, pounding over the asphalt. Growing nearer. She swung and saw a figure rise out of the gloom.
Rhys. This was his street. He’d heard her. And, unlike the faceless figures lurking behind drawn curtains, he’d come to find her.
“What happened?” His face was pale, his clothes rumpled. He slowed as he neared, one hand reached toward her, the baseball bat he kept beside his front door clutched in the other.
“Hope,” was all she could manage before a scream tried to strangle her. Abby buckled over, hands gripping her knees as she tried to control the emotions that were wrecking her. She drew in a jagged breath. “Hope’s gone.”
Rhys looked as though he’d been slapped. He turned away, one hand pressed to his mouth.
Think. Focus. There’s still time, the desperate voice in Abby’s mind pleaded. There has to be. There’s still time—
As long as I know where to go.
“Vickers,” she said.
Rhys’s dark eyes flashed toward her. Moonlight splashed over the sharp planes of his face and the crease furrowing between his brows.
“Vickers.” The words came out cracked and unsteady on her dry throat, but full of conviction. “We need to go to Charles Vickers’s house.”
* * *
They ran the route to Stokes Lane.
Abby was still in her nightdress, only now it was covered by Rhys’s jacket. Rhys brought nothing else except the baseball bat. He typed a brief message into his phone’s group chat while they ran. There was no guarantee the message would make it through with technology this unreliable. Or that Connor or Riya would wake to the chiming notification, even if it did. But it felt like something they still needed to do. It was a Jackrabbit rule: tell someone where you’re going.
If they never came back, at least their friends would know why.
They didn’t stop moving until they reached the head of Stokes Lane, then Abby slowed, breathing heavily.
Ahead of her, a thousand strange items shimmered in the moonlight, all lashed to the fences and posts with lines of red thread.
At the end of the street was Charles Vickers’s house. Two stories tall and impeccably maintained, it was like a physical manifestation of its master: so plain that it would have been easily overlooked, except for a cluster of small, bad signs. Bars fixed across all of the windows. A padlock sealing the garage door.
Upstairs, a light shimmered in one of the curtained, metal-clad windows.
Abby forced her legs to carry her forward. On either side, the offerings shuddered as a breeze ran through them.
Dolls, their heads rotting and splitting at the seams. Baskets full of broken jars and fruit that had decayed into a thin layer of grime years before. Ribbons, wood carvings, and even fine jewelry that no one was brave enough to take back were slowly tarnishing.
On one fence, tied so low to the ground that Abby could only imagine a young child leaving it, was a plastic bucket and matching shovel used for building castles in the sand. The bucket was half full of rainwater and teeming with mosquito larvae.
The fences along that road were macabre. Rust ran from old nails hammered into the wood. Paint flaked painfully from surfaces that must have once been bright colors. Metal clattered against metal like a dozen nightmarish wind chimes whispering in unison.
Her hands shook. Her breathing was shallow. The houses around them were nothing but abandoned shells except for Vickers’s, and the isolation felt like frost creeping into her flesh.
Ahead, an old driveway, run through with paper-thin cracks, led up to the house’s front porch.
“Abby.” Rhys glanced at her, and he seemed to communicate worlds within that one look. “I won’t be leaving your side tonight.”
Her heart was in her throat. He dipped his head toward her, his eyes intense as they searched hers.
“Whatever you’re planning to do, I’ll be with you. But I need to know. How far do you want to take this?”
She understood what he was asking. People who challenged the Stitcher very often never returned. Like Abby’s own father. If they tried to get Hope back, the most likely outcome was that all of their lives would be cut short in horrifying ways.
How far do you want to take this?
She knew the answer. It was in the marrow of her bones, in the air she inhaled, flowing through her veins with every beat of her heart. “As far as it’s possible to go.”
No matter the cost.
He nodded once, a silent acceptance, and faced forward again. Abby took a shallow breath.
Four steps separated her from the porch. The wood had been recently painted, but it creaked under her weight. Rot lurked beneath a pretty veneer.
She tried to swallow around the lump in her throat. Every window—even the smallest ones—was covered with thick metal bars. But she believed Hope was somewhere inside this building. Which meant Abby needed to get in, too.
Keeping their presence quiet wasn’t going to help them. She was fairly sure Vickers not only knew they were there but was waiting for them. And she wasn’t getting into the house unless he let her in.
She raised her arm and pounded a clammy fist into the door. Four loud beats. The fifth was interrupted. An unseen latch unlocked and the door swept open.
He was here.
“Hello and good evening, Abby Ward. Rhys Weekes.”
Charles Vickers loomed into the entrance of his home. A damask dressing gown, the same rust red as his car, was knotted over white pajamas. Slippers, innocuous and tufted, covered his feet. He gave the impression of just having stepped out of bed.
Except he’d opened the door within four knocks.
Abby had been right. He’d been expecting them, likely waiting in the hallway for their approach. And he wanted them to know it.
His glasses glittered in the moon’s pale light. When he smiled, his teeth matched their luster. He looked clean, his hair combed, but Abby was hyperaware of how easily the reddish shade of his gown would hide bloodstains. A distant smell—the same damp, cold stench Abby had begun to associate with Vickers—flowed out of the house.
“What can I help you with tonight?” Vickers asked, and his voice was full of that quiet smirk that sent ice through her blood.
He wanted to make small talk. As though everything was normal, as though this was just any night, as though he couldn’t see the smear of blood on Abby’s hand and the hatred in her eyes.
It didn’t matter how velvety he made his words. He’d opened the door. And that was all she’d needed.
Abby lunged forward. Vickers moved with lightning speed to block her path. The door slammed into her shoulder, hard enough to leave bruises.
“Oh, you’re feisty tonight, aren’t you?” he whispered.
She refused to answer him. Instead, she leaned into the doorway, wedging it open, and filled her lungs with air.
“Hope!” Abby yelled. Her voice seemed impossibly loud as it bounced through Vickers’s house, echoing through dark and hidden rooms. “Hope, if you can hear me, make a noise!”
“Enough of that,” Vickers said. A strand of hair slid loose and draped over his forehead, but his smile didn’t fade even an inch as he purred, “You’ll wake the neighbors.”
He pushed on the door. Abby’s muscles strained, but Vickers was stronger. She slid back an inch. The doorway’s opening narrowed.
No.
She knew, with awful certainty, that if she allowed him to close the door on her, she would never see her sister again.
A hand slammed into the wood at her side. Rhys, his teeth bared, shoved, forcing Vickers back.
“Go,” he hissed to Abby, fire in his eyes. “I’ll hold him here.”
Abby’s heart was in her throat, choking her. She darted through the opening. Vickers reached for her as she passed. His short fingers grazed the back of her nightdress, but she spun out of his reach.
She was in the Stitcher’s home. A place no one was ever allowed to see.
A soft rug padded her footsteps as she staggered into the hallway. She hesitated just long enough to glance back at Rhys. He had Vickers cornered next to the door; the bat was held ahead of himself like a barrier to keep Vickers in place.
Sickly yellow light flowed from the hallway’s bulb. It reflected off the sweat dotting Rhys’s skin. Vickers’s smirk had vanished. His face had turned flat and cold, all emotion drained out, his eyes like flint as they tracked Abby’s progress into his home.
She didn’t know how long Rhys could hold him.
But she didn’t need much time. Just a minute or two. Long enough to find one person.
Hope. Where are you?
The house was nearly perfectly dark. Abby didn’t know its layout. She moved blindly, rushing and breathless, her hands stretched ahead of herself as she searched for light switches.
Click. A light came on. A living room was ahead of her, two unused couches and one worn recliner facing a small box TV. She kept moving.
Past the living room was a kitchen. Abby pulled up short.
A cutting board was on the counter. Knives had been placed onto it, five of them, lined up with surgical precision.
Abby’s blood felt like ice and fire as it rushed through her. Clammy and sick, she called, “Hope!”
Still no answer. Hope was either too scared to make noise, or couldn’t.
There was a muffled cry from the hallway. A thud. The sound of shoes scraping over the floor.
Please, Rhys, please hold him. I need more time.
Abby flew through the house. Her eyes darted over every dim, small detail she could make out, searching for a familiar figure, possibly huddled or collapsed in a corner. Room after room was empty.
A thud came from the hallway, louder now. It sounded like a baseball bat being slammed into the wall.
Ahead, a set of stairs led to the second floor. A faint light shone from its top.
Abby took the steps two at a time, her lungs empty and her heart hammering. Portraits had been hung on the wall; she was so focused on the path ahead that she was halfway up the stairs before she realized the portraits were missing person posters, taken from around town and lovingly framed, each one suspended by a length of red thread.
The house seemed to press in on her, crushing her. She screamed her sister’s name again as she reached the upper landing. Downstairs, voices overlapped in short, sharp exclamations. There was a crash of breaking glass.
Rhys needed help. But she couldn’t stop her search for Hope. Not yet.
She slammed her hands into doors as she passed them, sparing just seconds to search each room before she moved on to the next. They were spare bedrooms, reading rooms, empty spaces that hadn’t been touched in years.
A light glowed from beneath the final door. Abby slammed into it, forcing it open.
Red across the bed. Red across the floor. Red across the walls.
It was Charles Vickers’s bedroom. He’d decorated it entirely in crimson. The exact same shade of red that he used to sew up his victims.
The bed was made tidily. The wardrobe doors hung open, revealing rows of sweater-vests and cardigans he loved.
Abby stepped inside, rotating slowly, her gaze darting from crimson wallpaper to crimson carpet.
Her sister wasn’t there.
“Hope!” Her voice was hoarse. She felt lost, like a lifeboat cast out at sea, and it didn’t matter how hard she rowed because she had no idea which direction to turn.
And then she heard it.
A heavy, angry bang, like a door slammed with enough force to fracture it. The sound set every one of her bones on edge.
She turned toward the doorway, her hands clenched so tightly that the tendons felt like they were about to snap. Rhys?
For a second, there was nothing but silence. Then a horrible, sick sound rose from the floor below. Not quite a cough, not quite a gasp, but thin and raspy and delighted.
Charles Vickers was laughing.