Read The Thirteen Hallows for Free Online

had forgotten about Franklin. He had already exhausted six of his nine lives, and she prayed he was all right. As if on cue, the infuriated tabby meowed from behind the bushes where he was hiding. Judith collected him in her arms and calmed him, thrilled that her beloved pet was safe.
    “Your front door is open,” Sarah said. “Did you lock it this morning?”
    “I always lock it,” Judith whispered, then added, “Oh no.”
    “Wait here.” Sarah placed Judith’s bag of books on the ground and approached the open door carefully. Using her elbow, she pushed it inward. She could not suppress her loud gasp. “I think it’s time to call the police.”

6
     
    Robert Elliot had always wanted to be an interior designer.
    An artistic youth, he would spend hours inside the house coloring at the kitchen table until his father would smack him on the side of the head and yell at him to play football with the other boys. However, Elliot preferred drawing to athletics: sick, dark pictures often involving people being guillotined or animals brutally cut open for dissection. He had a vivid imagination, which was best served confined within the pages of his notebooks. It was safer that way. Yet Elliot’s father continued to push him throughout his youth, and the teenager finally snapped on his eighteenth birthday when he made the first of many pictures come alive, bludgeoning his father to death with a cricket bat.
    A gifted public prosecutor had managed to commute Elliot’s sentence to fifteen years, during which time Elliot continued to draw as well as read voraciously, using the prison library to educate himself. Hardened by his time in prison, Elliot found that jobs for which he was best suited required only two things: an enormous financial incentive and a great deal of violence.
    He picked a piece of lint off his chocolate brown Dolce & Gabbana sports jacket as he watched the elderly woman hobbling up the street. Elliot smiled and made a quick call. “She just arrived, sir.”
    Static crackled on the cell. It was the latest BlackBerry on the market, yet the reception was always fuzzy and when he spoke he could hear his voice echoing back at him. He had no idea where he was phoning. The number was in the United States, but Elliot guessed it was bounced around a dozen satellites before it reached its final destination.
    “I’m sorry, sir. What?…Oh. No. There’s someone with her. A redhead. Early twenties, I’d venture to guess. She wasn’t in any of the lady’s pictures.”
    Robert Elliot listened carefully to the baritone voice on the other end of the phone, abruptly glad of the distance separating him from his employer.
    “Presently, I think that would be unwise, sir,” he advised cautiously. “The girl’s a variable. I don’t know how long she’s likely to be there. She could be police for all we know.”
    Static howled and then the line went dead.
    Elliot gratefully hit end. He dropped the phone back into his pocket, turned on the engine of his black BMW, and pulled away from the curb. As he cruised slowly past the Walker house, he was unable to resist a smile, imagining the look on the old woman’s face when she saw the way he had redesigned her beloved home.
    Robert Elliot had always wanted to be an interior designer, and his new employer had finally given him his opportunity.

7
     
    The house had been completely trashed.
    Judith clutched Franklin tightly in her arms as she stepped into the hall. There were gaping holes in the floor where the floorboards had been torn up. Anger welled up inside her, burning in the pit of her stomach, flooding her throat, and stinging her soft gray eyes. Holes had been punched in the walls, and all the framed covers of her children’s books that had once lined the walls lay crushed and crumpled on the floor.
    Judith put the cat down and walked to the end of the hall, stumbling over the shredded Oriental rugs as she tried the door to the sitting room. It would open only