Blood Revealed by Tracy Cooper-Posey Page A

nothing,” she assured him. “I’m just being a paranoid mother. I’ll go find them with the car and take them home and I’ll give you a call when I get back home, too.”
    Peter looked relieved. “Yeah, kids these days.”
    Blythe tried to give him another reassuring smile. She was already moving away from the door. She turned and ran for the car, slid into the driver’s seat and gripped the steering wheel hard.
    Before putting the car in gear and taking off, she mentally tracked the probable route the kids would have taken. She didn’t know it as well as they did, because she always drove. Although, they had been living in this neighborhood for twelve years now and she had gotten to know more about the shortcuts than any of her kids realized.
    There were alleys and side roads that would let her check almost every section of the route. There was just one chokepoint that she wouldn’t be able to reach with the car, not even to get a distant glance at it. First, she would check the other sections.
    Blythe drove faster than was safe for that quiet neighborhood. In ten minutes, she was able to establish that Jake and Simone were not in any of the alleys or foot paths that cut through the back areas of the neighborhoods. That just left the chokepoint.
    Her heart was starting to hammer now. She wheeled the car around, the tires squealing a bit on the tarmac, and made her way to the side street where the fenced in sidewalk emerged. The land developers, in their wisdom, had had gas pipes laid neatly between houses and all the houses fed onto that big main pipe. Nothing had been built over the top of it and the city had laid down a concrete path. The residents on either side had put up their fences and now the three hundred yard path meandered between the fences across the length of one city block.
    In Blythe’s mind, it was a chokepoint, because once someone was in the tunnel, there was no way to get out other than going through. It was tactically a bad news route. Her kids wouldn’t think of it that way, though. They would only think of it as a way to save five minutes and the effort of having to walk around the block rather than through it.
    Her instincts were screaming at her now. So she didn’t drive right up to the mouth of the alley. Instead, she stopped the car about twenty feet away. She killed the engine and eased herself out, shutting the door quietly.
    Grouping the big bunch of keys in her fist, she moved over to the mouth of the alley and pressed herself up against the palings. She drew a deep breath, then carefully looked around the corner.
    At first she didn’t see it.
    Jake and Simone were standing together, clinging to each other, their eyes wide.
    Her relief at seeing them both alive was so intense, that at first she didn’t notice anything else.
    Then the thing moved.
    It was between her and the kids and must have been hunched down, considering its next move. Jake and Simone were frozen with fear, so it had time to consider.
    Blythe’s arrival had stirred it. She had been quiet, but clearly not quiet enough. In the back of her mind, she made a mental note that the creature had phenomenal hearing.
    It rose, straightening up so that the things it was standing on grew longer. There was a joint in the middle of what would have been legs, that she might have called knees, except that they pointed backward like a dog’s hind legs.
    She got the impression of sinewy strength, as the thing turned its head to look at her. Deliberately, she stepped out into the middle of the footpath, cutting off the exit.
    The head was bony, with very little spare flesh. Very high cheek bones extended into bony projections that emerged from what might have been its temples. Blythe only processed that in the back of her mind, where her strategic center sat. She was more conscious of the thing’s eyes, which were red and glowing, like something out of a horror novel.
    There was a snout and far too many teeth, that were long and