Chapter 75

The safe house appeared out of the trees as they careened up the driveway.

The cabin sat still in eerie darkness, a glob of black in the shrouded night.

“The lights aren’t on,” Thom said. “That’s not good.”

Dawn flung the truck door open and sprang out before it stopped moving. She gripped her shotgun with iron fingers. She bounded up the stairs with Charley and Thom behind her. At the top of the stairs, she froze.

The front door was mangled. The center was shattered open, an array of jagged wooden fibers with excoriated paint. The door swung from its lowest hinge, the others broken away completely. A massive hole of blackest night stood on the other side, the frame ripped into splintered submission. Looking through the doorway was like looking into the mouth of a giant Bludgeon, hollow and hungry.

“Henry . . .” Dawn said.

The mother lioness came out.

Dawn charged through the center of the broken doorway and into the mouth of the darkness.

Cold fear gripped Charley. Something had ravaged the door. And it was inside the house.

Thom bolted through the doorway also.

Charley stood alone outside. The wind howled in the trees like lost banshees of the forest. It pressed hard against her skin and bit her ears.

She couldn’t stay outside. She had no other choice.

She jumped into the hornets’ nest behind Dawn and Thom.

Charley heard the sound of scratching and gouging. She’d heard those sounds at the school.

The lights turned on. Thom was at the light switch.

A dozen Gremlins filled the hallway. They clawed at the door to the center room in a wild frenzy, with two giant Bludgeons behind them. The door to the center room, despite the scraping, stood firm and without a mark.

Charley was transfixed. The moment felt surreal. The Nekura outnumbered them. Charley reached to create the whip of light, but something happened before she could.

Dawn’s silver hair began to glow. Her hair became brilliantly iridescent, changing from muted silver to white-hot sterling. Her hair raised from the back of her neck as if alive, and light beamed from the end of each strand. It flooded her eyes and poured out of her mouth. Her core became a flooded combustion chamber of light. She threw her head back and lifted off the ground.

The Nekura watched and recoiled. They no longer scratched at the door to the center room. They watched Dawn Murphy become a living paragon of the Light. They growled and cried before her presence.

She looked at the Nekura through lustrous, glowing eyes.

Then she surged forward.

Dawn lunged with the velocity of a cannon shot. She struck with the precision and speed of an incensed viper, body-checking the first Bludgeon into the second with a crushing shoulder charge. Even with her small frame, she threw the two massive beasts backward against the wall with incredible force. She leveled her shotgun in a single swoop, and light exploded out of the end of the gun. The massive burst of light ripped them apart, and their hard stony exteriors shattered throughout the room. The pieces splintered into flying shards that decomposed into ash before they hit the ground.

She spun around and grabbed a Gremlin by its spindly arm. She launched it into a group of three others and brought up the shotgun again. Another large, wide-mouthed blast devastated the four Gremlins, with evaporating smoke and murky ash smeared on the wall.

Like a dancer in choreography, she flipped the shotgun in her hands and held it by the barrel. She swung the stock of the gun as a club, which connected with the remaining Gremlins. They were crushed backward, and all landed in the corner in a heap, each falling on the other and clamoring to get away, screeching in terror at the Salient’s wrath and light-filled body.

She flipped the shotgun in her hands and pointed the barrel at the teeming mass of Nekura. Three scatter-shot rounds ripped into the heap, and their moving stopped. The Nekura decomposed into a common black mass. All that was left was unmoving ash and wafting smoke.

The light pouring from Dawn’s eyes began to dim. She settled on her feet and no longer walked on the air. Her hair settled on her neck, and its color changed back to its quiet, suggestive silver with faint glints of sparkling. Her hazel eyes returned and her posture relaxed.

She turned and gave Thom a silent, glaring look.

She walked up to the door of the center room and opened it easily.

She let out a sigh.

Henry lay in the center of the room, safe and undisturbed, still unconscious, with the small candle beside him burning soft blue light.