DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

sharp knock at the front door.

She glanced quickly toward Kevin, who was lying on the floor, reading a mythology textbook. He scrambled to his feet, looking as panicked as she felt.

Holbrook came rushing out of the kitchen, motioning for them to lay low.

He grabbed his shotgun. “Stay down!” he ordered.

There was another series of knocks.

Penelope hit the floor, crawling next to Kevin as she watched Holbrook first peek through the closed living room curtains, then hurry over and open the front door.

“Jack!” the teacher said. He ushered in another man, a short-haired, stern-faced, well-built, middle-aged man wearing the tattered remnants of a dark blue suit. The two of them gave each other what looked like some sort of secret handshake, a ritualized greeting that involved twisting thumbs and touching elbows.

Another Ovidian.

Penelope rose to her knees, then stood, as did Kevin.

Holbrook led the man into the living room. “Jack, these are two of my students: Penelope Daneam and Kevin Something-or-other.”

“Harte,” Kevin said.

“Daneam?” Jack’s eyebrows went up.

“Their daughter.”

“And you are?” Kevin said.

“Jack Hammond. Napa P.D.”

A cop! Penelope smiled, filled with relief and a buoyed sense of hope.

“Thank God you’re here.”

“Are you a maenad?” Jack asked her.

The relief died as quickly as it had flared. There was a flat coldness in the cop’s eyes, a studied detachment in the way he looked at her that made her extremely uneasy.

“She’s one of us,” Holbrook said. “I think we can use her to get him.”

Use her.

She moved closer to Kevin. She didn’t like the way this conversation was going.

“So where are the rest of you?” Kevin asked. “Is this it?”

Jack nodded, and the coldness in his face fled, replaced by a weariness that looked closer to exhaustion. She suddenly noticed that there were bruises on his skin, dull splashes of dried blood on his torn suit.

“I couldn’t get here right away,” he said. “So I holed up in the H.Q.”

“Were any of the others there?” Holbrook asked.

“They were all there. They’d been slaughtered. Mike was naked and drenched with wine—it looked like he’d been trying to pass—but he’d been killed just like the rest of them.” He took a deep breath. “Their heads had been switched.”

“Bastards,” Holbrook breathed.

“They were still outside, and I only had one round in my revolver, so I stayed there, hid. This was the first day I thought it was safe to come out.”

Penelope was extremely uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure if Jack—or Holbrook and Jack—blamed her in any way for what had happened, but she felt guilty nevertheless, as though she was a spy in the enemy camp.

She wasn’t a spy, though. She was on their side.

She was a traitor.

“Did you save your toga?” Holbrook asked.

Jack shook his head. “Nothing.”

“That’s okay. I have an extra one for you. Come on.”

The two of them walked down the hallway to the basement door, started down.

Penelope looked at Kevin, standing next to her. He shook his head.

“Somehow, I don’t think that, in this instance, two heads are better than one.”

“Maybe we should get out of here,” she suggested.

“And go where? Did you see the way that guy was beat up? And he’s a cop!” He shook his head. “It’s dangerous out there.”

“Holbrook said they could ‘use’ me.”

“I didn’t like that either,” Kevin admitted.

“What do you think they plan to do?”

“From everything I can tell, they don’t have any plans at all.”

“What are we going to do?”

Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

Jack didn’t turn out to be all that bad.

He was a cop, of course, a conservative, hard-nosed kind of guy, but that cold steeliness she’d sensed in their first meeting seemed to have been the result of stress and hunger and lack of sleep. Rested, fed, and relaxed, he seemed nicer than Holbrook and infinitely more human, and she and Kevin found that they were able to get along with him quite easily.

She glanced over at Jack, curled up on the couch sleeping. Kevin was sitting on the floor, leaning against the opposite wall, reading one of Holbrook’s texts. The teacher, as always, was down in his basement.

They were all starting to get a little stir crazy, starting to act a little funny, and Penelope wondered, not for the first time, if it might not have been better if they’d stayed outside, roamed around in the car, and not holed themselves up in here. She thought of all of those shut-ins who received their impressions of the world solely through television. They watched the newscasts, watched the news magazines, watched the based-on-a-true-story made-for-television movies, they saw shootings and rapes and robberies, and they were convinced that the world outside their doors was filled with danger, that violent death lurked around every corner. Paranoia fed upon itself, and she wondered if they weren’t doing the same thing here, blockading themselves in Holbrook’s house as they talked and worried about and demonized the frightening outside world.

But it was hard to demonize a world that had real demons in it.

Or gods.

What was Dionysus exactly? God? Monster? It was more comforting to think of him as some sort of monster or demon. She could imagine going up against that.

It was harder to think about fighting a god.

Kevin put down his book, stood, stretched. He glanced over at Jack sleeping on the couch, then silently motioned for Penelope to follow him into the kitchen.

She looked again at the stopped clock above the dead television, then walked out of the living room. Kevin was already peeking through the curtains that covered the window above the sink. “Anyone out there?” she asked.

He shook his head.

There had been earlier. A gang of wasted teenagers, dressed only in the bloody skins of domestic animals, had chased a herd of naked old men down the street using pistols and bullwhips. One old man had tripped and fallen, and they’d whipped him and trampled him, the last two kids in the pack picking the old man up by his legs and dragging him behind them as they disappeared