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way: reports of the disappearance had been all over TV. But Charlie didn’t have the chance to do more than look at her with widening eyes, because a sound—a faint rattle from the direction of the back door—froze both her and Jenna in place. Suddenly as still as rabbits with a dog nearby, united by fear, they shot simultaneous panicky looks in the direction of the sound, to no avail: the solid base of the breakfast bar was in the way, preventing them from seeing anything beyond it. But for Charlie at least, there was no doubting what they had heard: the doorknob rattling. Her heart thudded in her chest. Goose bumps chased themselves over her skin. As she strained every sense she possessed in an effort to divine what was happening beyond that door, she tried to swallow, only to discover that her mouth had gone desert dry.
    This can’t be happening.
    “He’s here,” Jenna gasped on a note of purest horror, her hand around the receiver tightening until her knuckles showed white. The wad of paper towels she had been holding to her forehead dropped, forgotten, as her hand fell. Oblivious to the blood that still oozed from the cut, she shot Charlie a petrified look.
    Charlie knew exactly how she felt.
    “That’s it,” Michael barked at Charlie as his big, semi-solid-looking body surged right through the breakfast bar in a preemptive rush toward the back door and whoever was on the other side of it. “Move your ass. Upstairs. Now. ”

CHAPTER THREE
    “Don’t go outside. You might get sucked in. You need to stay close to the running water,” Charlie called urgently after him as, galvanized by fear, she shot into motion herself. If he heard her, she couldn’t tell: he had disappeared from view. Physically formidable in life, in death Michael could provide her with about as much in the way of actual protection as a whisper of air, although he didn’t seem to remember that most of the time and there were indeed occasional moments when he solidified and was once again the badass he had formerly been. Not that those moments were anything that he could control, or she could count on, so she didn’t. Thrusting her cell phone into her pants pocket, careful to stay hunched over so that she couldn’t be seen through the windows, Charlie lunged across the kitchen toward the only possible source of a weapon in the house: the silverware drawer.
    Pathetic? Oh, yeah. But she had no gun, no burglar alarm, no real defensive system set up in the house, because after what felt like a lifetime of it she had been sick to death of living her life in fear.
    “Who are you talking to? There’s nobody there,” Jenna wailed. Then, into the phone as Charlie threw her a startled, self-conscious look because she hadn’t even realized that she had been talking to Michael out loud, Jenna added in a voice that shook: “He’s here. He’s trying to get in the door. Tell the police to hurry. Please, please tell them to hurry.”
    Trotting out her standard line that she was talking to herself seemed pointless under the circumstances, so Charlie didn’t bother. Pulse racing, eyes fixed on what she could see of the windows—she could make out nothing beyond the darkness and the rain, which was falling heavily now, but she knew, knew that someone malignant was out there—Charlie snatched a steak knife from the silverware drawer. Then cautiously raising her head above the level of the counter, she did a lightning scan of the kitchen. Despite the fact that she was focused on the whereabouts of the man with the gun, the thought that instantly struck her was, No sign of Michael. The panicked realization curled through her mind, threading through the more immediate issue of getting to safety like a worm through soft wood. Was Michael outside, or had he been sucked back into Spookville? Not that it made any real difference: in either case, there was nothing she could do.
    And right then, living through the next few minutes was paramount.
    Gesturing