Free Let Him In (Let Him Trilogy) by Sharon Davis Page A

all too familiar sight: in between the bathrooms was a giant board with missing person fliers attached to it, and of course Amelia, with her condescending, blinding white grin ( I have to have the bleaching, Clint, all the A List celebrities do it! ) just had to be one of them.
    “Will there be anything else?” asked the ogreish cashier.
    Lacey blew out a harsh breath as she dumped her stuff on to the conveyor belt.  “Do you see anything else?”
    With a deliberate slowness, the cashier swept the items across the barcode scanner, depositing them one by one into a plastic bag. Picking it up, she held it out to Lacey—who roughly grabbed it out of her pudgy-fingered hand—before hitting a button on the register. “Your total is fourteen sixty-nine.”
    Handing her a twenty, Lacey returned the cashier’s smirk. “Here ya go, Princess Fiona.”
    The cashier’s grin slid off her reddening face as she handed Lacey her change. “Thank you for shopping at Walmart,” she bit out through clenched teeth. “Please come again.”
    Lacey gave her a parting wink before leaving the freezer for the oven. By the time she pulled out on to Route 42—after dodging several cars whose drivers apparently couldn’t care less about right-of-way laws or stop lights—she was wishing she’d worn shorts instead of jeans.
    Less than a minute later she entered a fast food junkie’s paradise: McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut and KFC on her right, Burger King, Taco Bell and Arby’s on her left. No contest, of course—all hail the King. She didn’t know what they put into their Whoppers but the things should come with warning labels just like alcohol and cigarettes. Good thing she didn’t gain weight easily because lounging around in bed reading Richard Bachman was a helluva lot more appealing to her than Sweatin’ to the Oldies with Richard Simmons.
    Lacey parked in the first available spot and then dashed inside, beating to the counter a middle-aged man wearing blue coveralls splattered with white paint and a baseball cap with CARL embroidered on it. “Whopper with cheese and a large—”
    Don’t forget you have an hour long ride-walk back to the house of horrors.
    “—make that a small root beer.”
    The spindling girl behind the counter  (Olivia was printed in white letters on her red name tag, though to Lacey she looked more like an Olive, as in Oyl)  flashed a much practiced smile and said, “For only a dollar more—”
    Lacey’s hand flew up, silencing Popeye’s girlie as effectively as Jason Voorhees’s machete.
    A couple of minutes later she was sliding into a booth at the back of the restaurant. Her taste buds tap danced as she took a bite that would’ve made Jaws feel inferior. 
    Ohmuhgawd.
    Lacey swallowed after only three chews and then wrapped her lips around the straw of her drink, sucking hard and fast as she glanced out the window, almost strangling when she realized she had an audience. Leaning against the front of a white van was a raven-haired woman. Her sequined blouse, leather pants and stilettos were the same scarlet red shade as her long fingernails and lips, which were parted slightly because of the black sunglasses dangling from between her obviously bleached-to-blinding-white teeth.
    The corners of the woman’s mouth curled up as their eyes met. 
    Lacey was about to mouth Can I help you? when the woman suddenly spun around. She greeted Carl, who was trying to sneak up on her, with a hard slap that sent the Burger King bag he carried flying out of his hand. The woman laughed as Carl—grinning, no less—snatched the bag off the ground.
    With a roll of her eyes, Lacey returned her attention to her meal. Woodstock’s inhabitants were even weirder than Hermit’s.
    As she drove into the three car garage, Alexis struggled to get the female she’d seen inside the Burger King out of her head. Raging within the human had been almost every emotion imaginable except for happiness, Alexis’s least