DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

held her breath. There was no sound from the bedroom, the others were still asleep. She knew she should go back, wake them up, but she thought of Holbrook shooting first, asking questions later, and she decided to take a peek herself first, just in case. Maybe these were people like them, victims.

Then why were they laughing?

Her eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, and she walked slowly out toward the living room. She knew she was being stupid. This was what she complained about idiot characters doing in horror movies—going off to search for the monster by themselves—and though logically she knew that it was a foolish thing to do, it seemed normal, felt natural.

The laughter was calling to her, she realized, beckoning her. She should be worried about that, but she wasn’t. She was scared, she was frightened, but she wasn’t worried.

She walked into the living room.

The laughing was louder here. She could hear the door being pounded upon by several sets of hands, and the noise chilled her. The living room was dark, and she could see only the vague outlines of furniture.

Unthinkingly, almost against her conscious will, she walked across the carpeted floor to the door.

Why weren’t the others waking up?

She thought of screaming to get their attention, but she didn’t. She thought of picking up the shotgun next to the door, but she didn’t.

She reached for the first dead bolt.

The laughter was constant, at once feminine and masculine, innocent and knowing, and it remained the same as it traveled from one voice to another. It was like a melody almost, the pounding on the door like a rhythm.

She opened the door.

She did not even have time to react.

Mother Sheila punched her hard in the stomach as Mother Janine grabbed her by the hair and shoved a hand over her mouth. She was yanked through the doorway and pulled down the front walk to where Mother Margaret waited in front of a brightly painted van.

As she was shoved headfirst into the rear of the vehicle, she heard the door to the house slam loudly shut behind her.

12

Penelope was gone.

Kevin paced the living room as Jack sat silently on the couch. Holbrook remained cross-legged on the floor, cleaning his shotgun.

Where could they have taken her?

She had been kidnapped. No doubt about that. Holbrook had started to suggest that she had gone with them on her own, that the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree, but Kevin had threatened to punch him out if he said anything more, and Holbrook had shut up.

It felt weird threatening a teacher, but any ties Holbrook had to respect and educational authority had long since been worn through, and Kevin felt neither guilty nor regretful.

Jack had stayed out of the confrontation entirely.

They were assuming that Penelope’s mothers had taken her, or, if they had not done so themselves, that they were behind the people who had. It had been a surgical strike; Penelope had been kidnapped and the rest of them had remained untouched. If it had been a random attack, they all would have been taken. Or killed.

Which meant that Penelope was still alive.

He hoped.

He had no idea where they had taken her, though. That was the most frustrating thing. They could be anywhere—

“The winery,” Jack said.

Kevin stopped pacing, turned toward the policeman. “What?”

“They probably took her home.”

Of course. He should have thought of that himself. He stared at Jack.

Had he been thinking aloud? Or had the policeman just… known what he was thinking? He was being stupid. There was enough to worry about I without reading meaning into coincidence. They had just been thinking the same thing at the same time, that’s all.

Under the circumstances and given the subject, it wasn’t unlikely.

“We’ll go there,” he said. “We’ll rescue her.”

“How?” Holbrook asked.

Kevin looked down at the teacher. “What?”

“How are you going to rescue her? Walk into that crowd, pass by her mothers, grab her by the arm, and walk out with her?”

“I’ll figure out something,” Kevin said defensively. “You’d better figure it out ahead of time or they’ll rip you to shreds.”

“Well, why don’t you help then?”

Holbrook grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Kevin faced him. “You have a plan for once?”

Holbrook laughed. “That I do,” he said. “That I do.”

13

Penelope awoke on the grass. Her mothers were nowhere to be seen, and she sat up, stood. Her mouth tasted like wine, but, thank God, she was still fully dressed. And there was no blood on her. Whatever had happened, it couldn’t have been much.

She smelled sex, though. On the air, in the breeze, on the grass.

And it smelled good.

She turned her head, looking around. She was not in the meadow, in the woods behind the winery, as she would have expected. Her mothers had taken her to the field where the fair had been, leaving her at the perimeter farthest from the road.

She yawned, feeling groggy, dumb, slow. She was not sure what had happened. She could not remember being hypnotized or drugged or knocked out, but her memory of last night seemed to have stopped at the point where her mothers shoved her into the van. She could not recall anything after that.

A leather-clad woman rode past on the back of a nude man fitted with a harness and stirrups. The woman carried in her right hand an assortment of paintbrushes, and Penelope watched as she galloped over to a man whose skin had been dyed blue. She handed him the brushes, and he passed them out to a group of children who were helping to paint a monstrous stone phallus that had been embedded in the ground.

Penelope looked around the enormous field, her gaze moving from one grotesque tableau to another. He had organized them. The drunken chaos of the previous days was gone, replaced by an institutionalized insanity, a harnessed altered consciousness. The people she saw were obviously intoxicated, obviously behaving crazily, but there was an overriding rationality behind their individually irrational