His fingertips reached the latch. Curled beneath it.

Then he flung it up over the metal loop, freeing the lid and skipping back with the shotgun raised.

A form exploded up out of the trunk, screaming, long hair fanning out. Two hands drew back and swiped the air, moving as one piece. Long nails whisked so close to my face that I felt the wind against my cheeks. Metal glinted around the wrists.

I waited for the boom of the shotgun, but Patrick wasn’t firing. The person lunged forward to attack again, her face falling into a band of moonlight from the window.

“Alex?” I said.

All the tension went out of her body. Her shoulders curled in, and her hands fell to her waist. Handcuffs cinched her wrists.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Chance?” Her gaze immediately moved past me. She squinted into the darkness, and then her lips parted. “Patrick,” she said. She moved by me and hooked her arms up around his neck. He lowered the shotgun to his side and held her.

“What happened?” Patrick asked. “Who did this to you?”

“My dad.”

“Where is he now?”

A clicking sound rose, barely audible at first but growing louder.

It was coming from the closet.

Entry 9

ENTRY 9

From the darkness of the walk-in closet, two spots glowed a bluish white.

Eyes.

Or—I realized somewhere through the wave of panic crashing over me—eyeholes.

The sound continued, a wet, irregular, throaty clicking.

I swallowed. We turned slowly to face the closet head-on.

The glow illuminated the interior, enough for us to see Sheriff Blanton standing stiffly between the racks of hanging clothes, his head tilted slightly back to face the ceiling.

The glow faded, and the clicking stopped. His chin dipped down, and then those empty tunnels stared at us. It was as though he’d been sleeping and we’d woken him up.

Sheriff Blanton leapt from the closet.

Patrick stumbled back, trying to raise the shotgun, but Alex’s cuffed hands were still tangled around his neck. The two of them fell down, clearing the way to me.

The sheriff jumped over their bodies, one hand grabbing a second set of cuffs from his belt, the other reaching for my throat.

There was barely time to react.

I dropped, and as his hands clenched the air where my head had been, I whipped the hook at him, the point sinking into the meat of his thigh.

It was a deep blow—I felt the shock tremor of the tip striking bone—and he froze, staring down as blood soaked out through his khaki uniform pants.

For a moment everything stopped.

Then the shotgun exploded. In the confined space of the room, the sound rattled my teeth.

Patrick had managed to untangle himself from Alex. Not wanting to injure me or her, he’d fired straight up into the ceiling.