Free Legion of Despair: Book Three in The Borrowed World Series by Franklin Horton Page A

themselves as they watched the house. She was nearly certain that they could not see her because of the glare off the window. She backed away slightly, just in case, putting her body off to the side of the window. She watched to see if they would walk away but they continued watching.
    She ran to the front door in a panic. She looked out and couldn’t see her dad or Will. They were probably unloading the trailer into the garage for now and the garage wasn’t visible from her front door. She could yell for them but it was several hundred yards. They probably wouldn’t be able to hear her. She started to run out the front door and toward her parent’s house but with the yard bare of any concealing vegetation she would be out in the open. What if they came after her? If they took her, no one would have a clue where to even start looking.
    She found that the idea of running away did not set well with her. She did not want to be afraid in her own house. She wanted to stand her ground. She had been raised to do that. She was not a victim and she would not let herself become a victim. This was her house. She needed to calm down and take control of this situation. She had not seen any visible weapons. If she could calm herself, she could take care of this.
    She closed the front door and locked the deadbolt, then made a quick pass around the lower floor of the house and confirmed that all of the doors and windows accessible from the ground were locked. She ran back to the kitchen and glanced out the window again. The men were still there. One held a long knife in his hand now and was using it to point. It looked like he was pointing toward the French doors that led from her dining room to the patio. Surely they couldn’t think the house was abandoned. If they’d been watching it for any time at all, they would have seen her father and husband leaving with the trailer full of stuff. Maybe they knew it was still occupied and didn’t care.
    She ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Though they planned to take all of the guns with them to her dad’s house, they’d not started moving them yet. They had a gun safe in the bedroom that her dad had bought them as a housewarming gift. She punched the code into the digital lock and threw the lever. The weapon that both her dad and Will had encouraged her to use if she ever had to defend her home was the 12 gauge shotgun. It was a Mossberg 590 tactical model and they kept it in the front of the safe with the tube magazine loaded and the chamber empty. All she had to do to ready the weapon was to rack the pump and chamber a round. If the sound of the pump action cycling was not sufficient enough to deter these trespassers, then perhaps a chest full of 00-buckshot would do the job.
    Shutting the gun safe, she ran to the window of Lana’s room and peered out the curtains without disturbing them. The men had come closer and were at the edge of her straw-covered lawn. They had crouched down and continued to study the house. She wondered if they were trying to figure out if anyone was home or not. They were clearly on her property now. They were trespassing and were not well-intentioned or they wouldn’t be lurking in the weeds behind the house. They wouldn’t be wearing masks. She had to make it clear that this was the wrong house to mess with.
    She returned to the front door, unlocked it, and slipped out. She looked back toward her parents’ house one more time and still saw no one. Though two weeks ago she could have called over there, or even called 911 for help, now there were fewer options. As she’d considered before, she could run, but that would not send a message of strength. That would not be a deterrent. Panic resurfaced and she had a brief thought that she should run to her sister’s house for help, then she remembered Charlotte and her husband were not there because they were at her dad’s house looking after all the kids, waiting on their turn to empty their own