When Andrew saw Kate’s face scrunched up in agony, her skin was so pale, it took him back to the night his mother had passed away from ovarian cancer, the family beside her at hospice. Seconds before she’d drawn her final breath, her face had gone a waxy white that had troubled him ever since. One moment she was alive, though unable to open her eyes and rambling about a joke that someone name Johnny the Gambler had told her; the next she’d become something that no longer seemed real. He’d always felt that was the moment her soul left her body, her heart beating on for a few more rounds. She was dead yet not dead.

That was exactly how Kate looked now.

Her hands were on her chest, and he knew everything had been too much for her.

But there was something else.

The shape of her shoulder was off. There was a dip in her clavicle that shouldn’t be there. It looked as if something very heavy had been dropped on her, shattering bone and her already damaged muscle. Buttons had his snout buried in her hair, whimpering, as if he were trying to wake her up.

All of this he saw and thought in the blink of an eye, his finger just needing one more ounce of pressure to pull back on the trigger and take off the top of the killer beast’s skull.

Ryker had the ax handle raised for another blow when Andrew shouted, “Stop!”

He was a fraction too late to stop him completely. Ryker shifted his feet and the handle glanced off the side of the monster’s thick skull. Its head whipped around to face Andrew, blood already springing from the laceration above its eye.

Andrew jumped back, worried it would lash out at him.

Instead it went onto its hands and knees, emitting a wheezing gasp like a busted accordion.

When he glanced again at Kate, he saw a rivulet of blood snaking down her face.

Ryker, who looked all the part of a horror himself, reared back to deliver a kick to the creature’s ribs. Andrew hopped over it, tackling Ryker to the ground. The impact burst many of the stitches on his face. Andrew was showered with blood and foul-smelling ooze.

Through his split lips, Ryker shouted, “What the fuck is the matter with you? We have to kill it!”

The odor boiling off Ryker’s face was enough to make Andrew woozy. Just like his mother and very possibly Kate, his brother-in-law was dead yet still waiting to die.

He had to roll off him before he threw up.

“You can’t,” he said, sucking in cleaner air. “Or you’ll kill her.”

Ryker staggered to his feet, searching for the ax handle. The beast remained on all fours, shuddering.

“Her. Him. I don’t care what it is. It has to die.”