The Mastiff and the Cobra on the Loose

The rear entrance exploded inward with a crash that punched panic through my ribs. Upstairs, Sarah screamed again, raw and terrified. Beneath it, Duke’s deep warning rumble rolled across the yard as he faced Richard.

Richard stood on the gravel drive as if nothing had happened. His polished shoes pressed into the stones, a small brass key glinting between his fingers. My sister’s terror did not move him. That smug little curve in his mouth did.

I tightened both hands around the garden shears and ran. My boots shredded the edge of the neat lawn while I charged toward the porch, every nightmare I could imagine firing through my head at once.

Richard was outside. Duke was watching him. So who had just smashed their way into Sarah’s house?

The front door remained locked tight. Whoever had entered had chosen the kitchen door behind the house, the reinforced door I had put in myself after Richard started making Sarah afraid to sleep at night.

I jammed my key into the front lock, twisted, and drove my shoulder into the door. It banged open hard enough to strike the hallway wall. I did not stop to care what I damaged.

“Sarah!” I shouted as I tore down the hall toward the kitchen.

The only answer was the pounding of my own steps. Then I reached the kitchen and stopped so abruptly the shears nearly slipped from my grip.

The back door was wrecked. Its deadbolt still sat locked in place, but the wood around the strike plate had been torn apart. White-painted fragments covered the linoleum like shattered bone.

Water spread across the floor from Sarah’s fallen pitcher. Through it ran a trail of fresh mud, huge square-toed boot marks heading away from the destroyed doorway and straight toward the stairs.

They were size twelve. I had seen the same kind of tracks near the lavender bushes outside. Now they were inside, wet, recent, and leading toward my nephew.

“Marcus!” Sarah screamed from above me. The sound came from Toby’s room.

I flew up the staircase two steps at a time, lifting the shears as though they could protect anyone from what waited upstairs. At the landing, Toby’s bedroom door slammed shut in my face.

The lock clicked from the other side.

“Open the door!” I yelled, throwing myself against it. The panel shuddered but held. “Sarah! Toby!”

“Help us!” Sarah cried through the wood, her voice breaking apart. “He has him! He won’t let him go!”

I backed up, planted my foot beside the lock, and kicked. The frame groaned. I hit it again with everything I had, and the wood finally split with a violent snap.

The door whipped inward and struck the wall. I rushed into the room with the garden shears raised, ready to meet whatever monster had cornered them.

Instead, I found Sarah pressed against the closet, clinging to Toby so tightly she seemed to be trying to hide him inside her own body. Toby’s face was buried against her. Both of them were shaking.

The man in the middle of the room was Deputy Miller. He held a broken piece of the rear door frame, looking from it to me with startled suspicion. His other hand hovered too close to the holster at his hip.

Miller had once been my friend, back in high school, before fifteen years in the sheriff’s department turned him into a man who measured every room for danger. Now his eyes settled on the shears in my hands.

“Put those down, Marcus,” he said. His voice filled the cramped bedroom, sharp and commanding. “Set them down now.”

“Miller, what are you doing here?” I lowered the shears, but I did not release them. “You broke through the back door?”

“I was forced to,” he said, breathing hard. “Dispatch sent me after a 911 report. Someone said a woman and a child were trapped here with an armed man holding them hostage. They also claimed there was domestic violence history and that they heard a shot.”

“There was no shot,” I said. My thoughts were crashing into each other. “A snake came at Toby in the garden. I got Sarah to bring him inside. Who made that emergency call?”

Sarah stared past Toby’s hair, horror draining what little color remained in her face. “Who would tell them Marcus was trying to hurt us?”

Miller looked at me, then at Sarah, and delivered the answer that turned the room colder than the broken doorway below. “The caller identified himself as Richard Evans. He said Marcus was holding his family hostage.”