Free Whispers at Midnight by Karen Robards

sharp. Grasping her wrists, he detached her sudden death-grip with laughable ease and stepped away before she could stop him—and she would have stopped him, because the idea of being left alone in the dark now scared the pants off her.
    “Matt…” Under almost any other circumstances, the panicked urgency of her tone would have embarrassed her.
    “Don’t move.” He was already out of reach. She knew because she tried to grab him. Switching on a flashlight she hadn’t known he had,he was heading with swift purpose toward the dining room. She tracked his progress with instinctively held breath until the beam vanished inside the open pocket doors.
    Just like that, she was on her own in the dark and terrifying hall. Exhaling, she looked warily around.
    “Carly! Carly, what’s wrong? What’s happening?” Thumping around like a moose in a broom closet, Sandra was clearly still in the bathroom. “Ow! I can’t see anything! I can’t find the doorknob! Carly, can you hear me? Are you out there? Carly?”
    A man yelled. Almost simultaneously, something crashed toward the back of the house, as if an object that was both big and breakable had hit the floor and shattered. Carly jumped what felt like six feet straight up, then whipped around, staring uselessly toward the kitchen, from which the sounds had seemed to come. Looking in that direction, she could see nothing at all; she might as well have been blindfolded.
    Matt. Had something happened to Matt? Her heart threatened to pound its way out of her chest. Again she strained to see or hear. Nothing.
    “Matt?” Calling him, her voice sounded all quavery. Matt didn’t answer. She broke into a cold sweat. Had something happened to him? How would she know if something had? The downstairs was a rabbit warren of interconnecting halls and rooms. Matt could be anywhere. So, in fact, could the prowler. Having dispensed with Matt, at that very moment he could even be circling back around toward her. …
    Galvanized by the thought, Carly got her rear in gear and bolted for the exit.
    “Car-lee-ee!” The pitiful-sounding wail was close at hand, and it jerked her attention away from the beckoning screen door.
    “Sandra!” Carly realized that she couldn’t just leave her friend to the tender mercies of whatever fiend might answer her cries. Sweating, panting, she made a lightning detour to her right and yanked open the bathroom door. “Come on, come on, there’s somebody in the house!”
    Sandra leaped out into the hall, trusty pan in hand.
    “ Somebody in the house? What do you mean, there’s somebody in the house?” Brandishing the pan, she looked wildly around.
    “Come on!”
    Explanations could wait. Carly took off again with Sandra, ignorant as to exactly what was going on but no fool, right on her tail. Carly shoved the screen door wide and ran out into the safer-feeling grayness of the night. Across the porch, down the steps, through the yard, into the truck, lock the doors—bingo, sounded like a plan. But before Carly could do more than barely begin to put it into motion, Sandra let out a startled cry behind her. Whirling, Carly watched through the closing screen door as Sandra went down in the hall with a crash that seemed to shake the house.
    “Sandra!”
    Dear God, had Sandra been shoved, shot … ? Pulse racing, Carly yanked the door open again, prepared to go to her friend’s rescue in the teeth of the monster lurking in the dark.
    “Stupid cat,” Sandra groaned, rolling onto her back. As if on cue, Hugo shot through the open door in a blur of white, streaked past Carly’s legs and flew across the porch to disappear over the rail into the still-falling rain.
    “Hugo!” Calling uselessly after him, gaze swiveling from the place where the escapee had vanished into the night to the fallen one left behind, Carly made the obvious connection: Sandra had tripped over Hugo.
    The lights came on. Just like that. One minute Carly was gaping at Sandra sprawled