Chapter 1
During the New Year holiday, Grandma Callaway, who had been bedridden for months, suddenly rallied. Color flooded back into her cheeks, and she insisted, with more energy than any of us had seen in weeks, that the whole family play hide-and-seek together. We all went along with it. Of course, we did. We wanted to make her happy, to let her enjoy herself while she still could.
But Grandma was adamant about one thing. She wanted to be the one who hunted.
“He found you.”
Every time her raspy voice echoed through the house, it was followed by a relative’s piercing scream.
My little brother, River Abbott, and I thought it was thrilling. We exchanged an excited glance, grinning at each other in the dark. We’d been crammed inside the rice bin in the kitchen for so long that our eyelids were starting to droop, and still Grandma hadn’t found us.
“Maybe the rice bin is too hard to find,” I whispered. “Should we move somewhere else?”
I was just lifting the lid, ready to climb out with River, when a voice I couldn’t quite place yet, though somehow deeply familiar, rang out in the empty kitchen.
God is standing watch tonight. That filthy thing out there doesn’t dare come in here. You two foolish children, get back in that rice bin and stay hidden.
Aunt Lorraine Callaway was the first one Grandma found. She’d been hiding in the east room. Then Uncle Neil Preston in the west room. But after each of their screams, the house, which had been so warm and noisy just minutes ago, went dead silent.
River started squirming toward the edge of the bin. “Hope Abbott, there’s a whole house full of people out there. How come it’s so quiet?”
River and I had a mother and a father, technically, but they dumped us at Grandma’s house in the countryside like we were orphans, and none of our relatives wanted anything to do with us. Only Grandma loved us. Truly loved us. Whenever she got her hands on anything good to eat, she’d hide it away in the back of the cupboard, let it rot before she’d touch a bite herself, saving every last morsel for the two of us.
So even if that voice in the kitchen wasn’t just my imagination, I refused to believe Grandma would ever hurt us.