Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

Under no illusions that Kenny's better judgment would ensure his continued hesitancy if an ideal opening appeared, Dylan borrowed some moves from Becky, though he probably looked less like a failed ballerina than like a dancing bear. He rounded on the embroidered cowboy just as Kenny came in for the kill.

The kid's moray eyes revealed not the feral ferocity of Becky, but the calculation of a sneak and the incomplete commitment of a coward who was bravest with a weak adversary. He was a monster, but not the savage equal of his blue-eyed squeeze, and he made the mistake of slipping in for the kill instead of lunging full-out. By the time Dylan turned toward him, the bat arcing high, Kenny should have been rushing forward with enough momentum to duck under the bat and drive the blade home. Instead, he flinched, juked back, and fell victim to his lack of nerve.

With a Babe Ruth crack , the bat broke Kenny's right forearm. In spite of the looped handle and formed grip, the knife flew out of his hand. Kenny seemed almost to lift off his feet, as though he were a two-base hit if not an out-of-the-park home run.

As the screaming kid failed to take flight and instead dropped like a bunt, Dylan could sense Becky coming at his back and knew that a dancing bear could never outmaneuver a psychotic ballerina.

As she reached the next-to-the-last step, Jilly heard someone shout 'Kenny!' She halted short of the upstairs hall, unsettled that the cry had come neither from Dylan nor from a thirteen-year-old boy. Urgent and shrill, the voice had been female.

She heard other noises, then a man's voice, likewise not Dylan's and not that of a boy, though she couldn't discern what he said.

Having come to warn Dylan that young Travis was up here with Kenny, but also having followed to help him if he needed help, she couldn't freeze on these steps and yet retain her self-respect. For Jillian Jackson, self-respect had been won with considerable effort through a childhood that, except for the example set by her mother, had provided fertile ground for seeds of self-doubt and excessive self-effacement. She would not here relinquish what she had struggled so long and hard to capture.

Hurrying out of the stairwell, Jilly saw a spill of soft light coming from an open door on the left, brighter light issuing from a door farther along on the right – and doves erupting through a closed window at the end of the hallway, a vision of doves that left the panes intact in their wake.

The birds made no sounds – no coos or cries, nor the faintest thrum of wings. When they exploded around and over her, cataracts of white feathers, a thousand piercing gazes, a thousand yawning beaks, she didn't expect to feel them, but she did. The breeze stirred by their passage was spicy with incense. Their wing tips brushed her body, arms, and face.

Staying close to the left wall, she moved quickly forward into a storm of white wings as dense as the feathery blizzard that earlier had swept across the Expedition. She feared for her sanity, but she didn't fear the birds, which meant her no harm. Even if they had been real, they would not have pecked or blinded her. She sensed that they were in fact proof of augmented vision, although even as this thought occurred to her, she had no idea what augmented vision might be; for the moment it was a thing she understood instinctively, emotionally, rather than intellectually.

Although she could not be harmed by these phenomena, the timing of the birds' appearance couldn't have been worse. She needed to find Dylan, and real or not, the birds were a hindrance to the search.

'Ha!' exclaimed someone close at hand, and an instant later, Jilly felt on her left the open doorway that the seething flock had hidden from her view.

She stepped across the threshold, and the birds vanished. Before her lay a bedroom revealed by a single lamp. And here was Dylan, too, armed with a baseball bat, bracketed by a young man – Kenny? – and a teenage girl, both brandishing knives.

The bat cut the air with a whoosh , the young man screamed, and the wickedly sharp knife, tumbling free, clattered against a walnut highboy.

When Dylan swung the bat, the teenage girl behind him tensed, for an instant tightening down in her crouch. As Kenny shrieked in pain, the girl drew her knife back in striking position, certain to spring forward and bury it in Dylan before he could turn to deal with her.

On the move even as the girl uncoiled out of her crouch, Jilly shouted, 'Police!'

Monkey-agile, the girl whipped around but also sidestepped to avoid turning her back on Dylan, to keep him in sight.

Her eyes were as blue as any sky adorned with cherubim on any chapel ceiling, but also radiant with dementia surely spawned by psychosis-inducing drugs.

A Southwest Amazon at last, but too squeamish to risk destroying the girl's eyes, Jilly aimed lower with the instant ant death. The nozzle on the can that she'd found in the pantry had two settings: SPRAY and STREAM. She had set it on STREAM, which would reach ten feet, according to the label.

Perhaps because of her excitement, her homicidal exhilaration the girl was breathing through her mouth. The stream of insecticide went straight in, like an arc of water from a drinking fountain, moistening lips, bathing tongue.

Although instant ant death had a notably less severe effect on a teenage girl than it would have on an ant, it wasn't received with lip-smacking delight. Less refreshing than cool water, this drink at once took all the fight out of the girl. She flung the knife aside. Gagging, wheezing, spitting, she staggered to a door, yanked it open, slapped at the wall switch until the lights came on, revealing a bathroom. At the sink, the girl cranked on the cold water, cupped her hands, and repeatedly flushed out her mouth, sputtering and choking.

On the floor, groaning, crying with a particularly annoying note of self-pity, Kenny had curled up like a shrimp.

Jilly looked at Dylan and shook the can of insecticide. 'From now on, I'm going to use this on hecklers.'

'What did you do with Shep?'

'The grandmother told me about Kenny, the knives. Aren't you going to say "Thanks for saving my butt, Jilly" ?'

'I told you not to leave Shep alone.'

'He's all right.'

'He's not all right, out there by himself,' he said, raising his voice as though he had some legitimate authority over her.

'Don't you shout at me. Good lord, you drove here like a maniac, wouldn't tell me why, bailed out of the truck, wouldn't tell me why. And I'm supposed to – what? – to sit out there, just shift my brain into neutral like your good little woman, and wait like a stupid turkey standing in the rain with its mouth open, gawking at the sky, until it drowns?'

He glowered at her. 'What are you talking about turkeys?'

'You know exactly what I'm talking about.'

'And it's not raining.'

'Don't be obtuse.'

'You have no sense of responsibility,' he declared.

'I have a huge sense of responsibility.'

'You left Shep alone.'

'He won't go anywhere. I gave him a task to keep him busy. I said, "Shepherd, because of your rude and overbearing brother, I'm going to need at least one hundred polite synonyms for asshole." '

'I don't have time for this bickering.'

'Who started it?' she accused, and turned away from him, and might have left the room if she'd not been halted by the sight of the doves.

The flock still streamed through the hallway, past the open bedroom door, toward the stairs. By this time, if these apparitions had been real, the house would have been so fully packed that extreme bird pressure would have blown out all the windows as surely as a gas leak and a spark.