Free Return to the Shadows by Angie West

and
very quietly knelt down to pull her sketch pad toward me.
    “Mom?”
    I held a finger to my lips and motioned for
her to be quiet while I wrote a quick message on the pad.
    “Would you like that?”
    “Okay….” She squinted to read the message on
the pad.
    There are men waiting outside. Don’t cry.
Don’t make a sound. Please. We are going to my bedroom. We have to
be very quiet.
    Her eyes widened, but she made no sound.
Bless her, she caught on quick.
    The bad men? She scribbled.
    Yes. But we won’t let them hurt us. I
promise. Let’s go.
    What?
    Go to my room. Put my gun and bullets in my
bag that’s in the nightstand. And our shoes. And one sweater. But
don’t make any noise. Can you do that for me?
    Yes.
    Good. Let’s go now. Hurry.
    She nodded, slipped off of her bed, and
quietly down the hall. I forced myself to walk casually down the
hall to the kitchen while Ashley went the other way and slipped
into my bedroom without a hint of sound. Normally, the thought of
my first-grader handling a loaded gun would have been enough to
have me breaking out in hives, yet tonight it was wholly necessary
for her to do so. I needed to create a diversion in the
kitchen…bang pots and pans around and move about as if I were
fixing a snack. Ashley was not tall enough to trade places with me.
The lights would cast a silhouette in the window. If I wasn’t in
the kitchen, the entire plan would be thrown off. We would have
precious little time once everything was packed. The man—rather,
the men—outside would make their move, either before we left or as
soon as Mike showed up. They couldn’t afford not to.
    Mike. I stopped suddenly and it hit me that I
still had to get a message to Mike. I was loathe to use a cell
phone…the call would be heard. But I could send a text message. I
walked calmly to the bedroom and slipped my cell phone out of the
bag, pausing to give Ashley a quick thumbs up and a reassuring
smile before returning to the kitchen.
    Don’t come after us. We are leaving
tonight. I need to see him again. Under the light of the
Sycamores. I hit send and slipped the phone into my pocket,
hoping my brother would be able to decipher the message. It was all
I could do. The last thing I needed was for anyone to think that
Mike knew what I knew. He would become just as much of a target as
Ashley and I were. Of course, I reminded myself grimly, that was
assuming we all managed to live through the night.
    The clock on the wall stuck three. The
witching hour, how appropriate. And oddly enough, reassuring in its
own way. Mike would have been knocking on the door already if he
were coming, which meant he had understood my text message. One
hurdle down, I breathed. Getting out of the house was another
matter entirely, and it mostly depended on sheer luck. I was not
comforted by the knowledge.
    Closing my eyes, I began to count. One, two,
three, four, five... The lights went out. Dead silence filled the
house…no whir of a ceiling fan, no hum of a refrigerator. It was
time.
    “Oh, that damn breaker again,” I cursed
loudly. “Stay here, Ashley; I’m going to the basement to fix
it.”
    I darted into the hallway and burst into the
bedroom, surprising Ashley. Shh , I motioned and quietly
locked the bedroom door. Sliding the dresser in front of it felt
like a nerve-wracking waste of time that we didn’t have, but it was
necessary. We needed every advantage we could create for ourselves.
I knew that the security system would be the next thing to be
disarmed. The police would be notified within minutes when the
security company failed to get me on the telephone. I quickly
turned off my cell phone and slipped it into the bag, then took out
the gun and twisted the silencer onto it. They would be fast. We
had to be faster. And very, very quiet.
    The front door opened a second before the
basement window shattered; the sound was muffled by the neighbor’s
dog barking next door. You would think the dog would have