She climbed through the window into Vess’s bedroom, where she had left a lamp burning.
In the upstairs hall, she glanced at the open door across from the bedroom. The dark study lay beyond, and she was still troubled by the feeling that there was something in it that she had missed, something vital she should know about Edgler Vess.
But she had no time for additional detective work. She hurried downstairs to the living room.
Ariel was huddled in the armchair where she had been left. She was still hugging herself and rocking, lost.
According to the mantel clock, the time was four minutes past eleven. “You stay right there,” Chyna instructed. “Just a minute more, honey.”
She went through the kitchen to the laundry room, in search of a broom. She found both a broom and a sponge mop. The mop had the longer handle of the two, so she took it instead of the broom.
As she entered the living room again, she heard a familiar and dreaded sound. Squeak-squeak. Squeak-squeak-squeak.
She glanced at the nearest window and saw the uninjured Doberman clawing the glass. Its pointy ears were pricked, but they flattened against its skull when Chyna made eye contact with the creature. The Doberman issued the now-familiar needful keening that caused the fine hairs to stiffen on the nape of Chyna’s neck.
Squeak-squeak-squeak.
Turning away from the dog, Chyna started toward Ariel—and then had her attention drawn to the other living-room window. A Doberman stood with its forepaws at the base of that pane too.
This had to be the first one she had encountered when she’d gone out of the house, the same animal that she had sprayed in the muzzle. It had recovered quickly and had bitten her foot when she’d been pinned on the ground by the third dog.
She was sure that she’d blinded the second dog, which had shot at her like a mortar round from out of the darkness, and the third as well. Until now she had assumed that her second chance at this animal had also resulted in a disabling eye shot.
She’d been wrong.
At the time, of course, she herself had been all but blinded by her fogged visor—and frantic, because the third dog had been holding her down and chewing through the padding at her throat, licking at her chin. All she had known was that this animal had shrieked when she’d squirted it and that it had stopped biting her foot.
The stream of ammonia must have splashed the dog’s muzzle the second time, just as it had during their first encounter.
“Lucky bastard,” she whispered.
The twice-injured Doberman didn’t scratch at the window glass. It just watched her. Intently. Ears standing straight up. Missing nothing.
Or perhaps it wasn’t the same dog at all. Perhaps there were five of them. Or six.
At the other window: Squeak-squeak. Squeak-squeak.
Crouching in front of Ariel, Chyna said, “Honey, we’re ready to go.”
The girl rocked.
Chyna took hold of one of Ariel’s hands. This time, she didn’t have to pry the fingers out of a marble-hard fist, and at her urging, the girl got up from the chair.
Carrying the sponge mop in one hand, leading the girl with the other, Chyna crossed the living room, past the two big front windows. She moved slowly and didn’t look directly at the Dobermans, because she was afraid that either haste or another moment of confrontational eye contact might spur them to smash through the glass.
She and Ariel stepped through a doorless opening to the stairs.
Behind them, one of the dogs began to bark.
Chyna didn’t like that. Didn’t like that at all. None of them had barked before. Their disciplined stealth had been chilling—but now the barking was worse than their silence.
Climbing the stairs, pulling the girl after her, Chyna felt a hundred years old, weak and depleted. She wanted to sit and catch her breath and let her aching legs rest. To keep moving, Ariel needed constant tension on her arm; without it, she stopped and stood murmuring soundlessly. Each riser seemed higher than the one below it, as though Chyna were the storybook Alice in the wake of the white rabbit, her stomach full of exotic mushrooms, ascending an enchanted staircase in some dark wonderland.