Love Gone by Elizabeth Nelson Read Free Book Online

it
might mean that he wasn’t out here with her.
    And where was Emily? That little bitch
had bolted like a scared cat and now she was nowhere to be found.
At the thought she heard a car starting up from behind her, on the
other side of the garage. No wonder they hadn’t been able to see it
from Liam’s window when this nightmare first started.
    She turned at the noise and screamed
for Bill, “It’s them!” she pointed at the car. “Bill, they’re
getting away. Bill, help!”
    She pointed breathlessly, feeling
completely powerless. They couldn’t just drive away could they? In
answer she heard the distant wail of sirens coming closer. Finally,
the cavalry. But would they be too late?
    Bill was streaking toward her. Running
as fast as he safely could down the icy streets with a weapon. As
she ran she could hear him calling to the other neighbors who were
still just standing in shock on their porches, mouths open at the
scene playing out before them.
    “Alan, Pete, Lloyd!”He called in fury,
“Don’t just stand there. Grab your weapons! The Byrne’s are in
trouble. Help us for god’s sake!”
    Jolted into action by his words and
the sound of the approaching sirens, she could see her neighbors
erupting into a flurry of action. Beyond caring, she screamed and
ran at the silver Toyota that was spinning out in the roundabout at
the end of their street. He was trying to turn around and get away.
She couldn’t let him get away, not without understanding why and
who had swept in and tried to destroy her family!
    She slipped and slid on the icy
streets as she tried to keep advancing toward the beat up car.
Behind the wheel she could see a man grinning and next to him sat
Emily, her face a mask of terror as she stared through the
windshield at Faith. The man hit the gas and pointed the car at
Faith where she stood in the middle of the road.
    Frozen she could see him coming
straight at her, laughing, and then suddenly she was knocked to the
ground, her neighbor Bill on top of her where he’d fallen after
pushing her out of the way of the speeding car. She stared up at
him wild eyed and he leapt up, pulling her unceremoniously to her
feet.
    “Where’s Mac?” he shouted, and started
to pull her towards the house. She wasn’t sure if she was holding
on to his hand or if it was the opposite. She couldn’t let
go.
    Stunned she shook her head and started
to run. Now it was she who was pulling him along. He raced to keep
up with her.
    Reaching the wide open back door she
stumbled into the hall, Bill close on her heels. Still clinging
tightly to his hand. Scared of what might happen if she dropped it.
At this point it felt like a lifeline. She didn’t know what she’d
find in her once welcoming hallway, but the thread of fear that had
started earlier this evening with a long hard look into Emily’s
face had grown into a full blown blanket of terror. She knew her
life was about to change with what waited for her there.
    At first nothing she didn’t see
anything. The hall stretched out, empty before her, the only sign
that something had gone terribly wrong there was Liam’s battered
bedroom door on the right. Across the hall, her and Liam’s bedroom
door was closed, completely unharmed. Farther down the hall, just
before the living room and kitchen, was the basement door. It was
open and ominous. She crept toward it.
    “Mac?” She called softly at first and
then louder, “Mac??”
    Only silence and the faint crackle of
the fire Liam had lit in the living room answered her. It felt like
a lifetime ago that she had asked him to light a fire. A lifetime
ago that she had been standing, happy, with her husband and son in
the kitchen, making dinner and sipping wine. How had everything
changed in a split second?
    Reaching the basement door now she
looked down. The lights were off in the stairway leading down to
the rec room, but she didn’t need the overhead light to show her
Mac’s hand where it lay unmoving on the stair