The furious beating of wings almost caused her to reel backward. She expected the tumult of doves or pigeons that had spiraled around her by the side of the highway, or the blinding blizzard of birds that she alone had seen while in the Expedition. But the flock made no appearance, and after the briefest spate of flapping, the wings fell silent.
Kenny wasn’t sharpening knives. Unless he proved to be crouched behind an armchair or a sofa, Kenny wasn’t even present.
Another series of metallic sounds drew her attention to a cage. It hung five or six feet off the floor, supported by a base similar to that of a floor lamp.
With tiny taloned feet, a parakeet clung to the heavy-gauge wire that formed the bars of its habitat; using its beak, the feathered prisoner plucked at those same restraints. With a sweep of its fluid neck, the parakeet strummed its beak back and forth across a swath of bars as if it were a handless harpist playing a glissando passage: zzziiinnnggg, zzziiinnnggg.
Her tattered reputation as a warrioress having been further diminished by mistaking a parakeet for a mortal threat, Jilly retreated from this moment of humiliation. Returning to the stairs, she heard once more the bird’s vigorously feathered drumming of the air, as though it were demanding the freedom to fly.
The rap and rustle of wings so vividly recalled her paranormal experiences that she resisted an urge to flee the house, and instead fled up toward Dylan. The bird grew quiet by the time she reached the midpoint landing, but remaining in flight from the memory of wings, she hurried to the upper floor with too little caution.
* * *
Fake fear had washed out of Becky’s blue eyes, and a mad glee had flooded into them.
She launched herself off the bed in a frenzy, slashing wildly with the knife. Dylan twisted out of her way, and Becky proved to have more enthusiasm for murder than practice at it. She stumbled, nearly fell, barely escaped skewering herself, and shouted, ‘Kenny!’
Here came Kenny through the door that Becky had not indicated. He had certain qualities of an eel: lithe and quick to the point of sinuousness, lean but muscular, with the mad pressure-pinched eyes of a creature condemned to live in cold, deep, rancid waters. Dylan half expected Kenny’s teeth to be pointed and backward-hooked like the teeth of any serpent, whether on land or in water.
He was a young man with flair, dressed in black cowboy boots, black jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black denim jacket brightened by embroidered green Indian designs. The embroidery matched the shade of the feather in the cowboy hat that had been perched atop the suitcases in the bedroom across the hall.
‘Who’re you?’ Kenny asked Dylan, and without waiting for an answer, he demanded of Becky, ‘Where the hell’s the old bitch?’
The white-haired woman in the candy-striped uniform, home from a hard day’s work, was no doubt the old bitch for whom these two had lain in wait.
‘Who cares who he is,’ Becky said. ‘Just kill him, then we’ll find the old pus bag and gut her.’
The shackled boy had misunderstood the relationship between his brother and the girl. Cold-blooded conspirators, they intended to slaughter Grandma and little brother, perhaps steal whatever pathetic trove of cash the woman had hidden in her mattress, toss Kenny’s two suitcases in the car, and hit the road.
They might make a stop farther along the street at Becky’s house to pick up her luggage. Maybe they intended to kill her family, too.
Whether or not their plan subsequent to this snafu would prove successful, right now they had Dylan in a pincer play. They were well positioned to dispatch him quickly.
Kenny held a knife with a twelve-inch blade and two wickedly sharp cutting edges. The rubber-coated, looped handle featured a finger-formed grip that appeared to be user-friendly and difficult to dislodge from a determined hand.
Less designed for war than for the kitchen, Becky’s weapon would nevertheless chop a man as effectively as it might have been used to dismember a chicken for a stew pot.