Doug felt hollow inside, utterly bereft, unable even to summon the tears that his soul wanted to cry. He glanced skyward, expecting to see them descending upon him with their icicle fingers and bottomless eyes, but they were gone.
Then he felt her move. Her eyes fluttered and his breath caught in his throat when he saw her focus on him. Her brows knitted in confusion.
"Doug?" she said weakly.
His heart seized on the tiniest shred of hope that she might live, that he would not lose her a second time.
"I'm here, honey," he said. "I'm right here."
Her confusion flared to anger. "But how did I get here? What happened to me?"
The bitter, cutting edge in her voice gave her away.
"Angela?" he said, his last hope extinguished.
Her eyes rolled up and she passed out from shock, her injuries too great. But he had heard that bitter edge, had seen her eyes, and he knew that whatever part of Cherie had been inside her, the demons had torn it out again.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he whispered to the broken woman before him, the snow already beginning to accumulate on top of her, turning red and melting where it touched her blood. Things could have been so different if only he'd known.
Still, he could not cry. Doug laid his head back and gazed up into the storm, and amid the whipping snow and punishing wind he saw a single pair of eyes glaring at him, dark pits like holes in the world.
He screamed as the demon hurtled down at him through the blinding snow, long icy talons outstretched. Heart seizing, breath frozen in his throat, he rolled away from Angela and threw himself sprawling across the road. He felt those talons at his back, slashing, tugging, ready to eviscerate him. He reached the snowbank and launched himself over the top, twisting around to see how close he was to death.
The snow swirled around Angela's broken, motionless body, but of the ice demon there was no sign. Wherever it had gone, Doug prayed it would never return.
TJ grabbed his wife by the hand and looked into her eyes, all the tension between them forgotten. The scraping continued on the walls and roof and TJ kept his eyes averted from the window over the sink, afraid that he would see another of the winter ghosts staring back at him with those empty, frozen eyes. Hate-filled eyes, as if the things despised him for the warmth of his flesh and wanted to strip it from him.
"The upstairs bathroom has no windows," he said, turning from Ella to Grace, still unnerved by the aged wisdom in her eyes. "We can stuff a towel under the door-"
"It may not keep them out for long," Grace said, her voice sounding even more like her grandmother's.
TJ put a hand on her back, hustling her along in front of himself and Ella. "I don't see another option. They'll find a draft eventually, get into the house. If we're waiting out the storm, we've got to buy time."
He felt as if his pulse throbbed throughout his body, banging in his temples and the tips of his fingers and beating a rapid rhythm in his chest, but he had to stifle his fear. Grace-Martha-rushed for the stairs and started up, with TJ and Ella ascending behind her. At the top of the stairs, TJ started to turn toward the hall bathroom, but Grace had stopped short in the corridor, staring through the open door of her bedroom.
Ella grabbed her daughter by the arm. "Hurry!"
Grace pulled her arm free, turning to glare at Ella with Martha's eyes. "Look outside!"
TJ and Ella crowded behind her and saw that she had stopped to peer into her darkened room. The purple, frilly curtains that Grace loved had been drawn back and beyond the window the snow fell at a less drastic angle and the flakes seemed diminished. The storm had not ended, but it seemed to have weakened slightly.
"Listen," Ella said. "The wind has died down." She turned and searched TJ's face with hopeful eyes. "Do you think-"
A terrible noise erupted in the attic overhead, a squeal like nails dragged out of wood followed by a little pop that TJ recognized as a light bulb bursting.
"Oh my god," Ella whispered, grabbing his arm so hard that her fingernails dug through his shirt and into his flesh.
"It's so cold," TJ said, and he saw his breath fog in front of him.
"They found a way in," Grace said. "A vent or someth-"
The attic had a hinged door with a drop-down ladder and as the three of them stared it began to shudder and bang with pressure from above. TJ stared in mute horror as the pull-string hanging below the trapdoor began to ice over.
The shrieking began again, but this time it wasn't the gale outside but the howl of frigid wind whipping through the house's eaves. TJ looked at Ella and Grace, saw the sorrow and surrender in their eyes, and knew he could not live if he lost them. He thought of all the times he had held Grace in his arms when she was a baby and even later, as she grew-thought of all the nights Ella had fallen asleep curled against him in bed with her head resting in the crook of his arm-and he moved.
Grabbing Ella, he shoved her to the bathroom. She careened through the open door and fell, sliding on the Italian tiles, scrambling to get back to her feet.
"No, TJ, don't-"
He picked Grace up and went through the door, shouting for Ella to shut it even as he pushed Grace into the bathtub, thinking how absurd it all seemed, how wrong. How grimly mundane.
"It's not going to work," Ella said quietly, her breath fogging in front of her.
Ice crystals had formed on the vanity mirror. TJ refused to look at it or to think. He grabbed towels from the linen closet and jammed them under the door, pushing with his fingers, filling the gap there, ignoring the fact that there were thinner gaps all around the doorframe.
"Thomas," his mother said, in the voice of his little girl, and TJ felt his heart seizing in his chest as he ignored her, pressing himself against the door, hoping to narrow the spaces around it.
Supposed to protect them, he thought. Mom. Ella. Gracie. You're supposed to take care of them. But he'd broken his word to his mother and she'd died as a result, and now the things that had killed her had returned to murder the rest of his family, to drag him into a hell constructed of his inability to love them enough. To be the man he'd always aspired to be.
He slumped against the bathroom wall and stared at the doorknob, watching as ice began to form around it.
Ella fell to her knees on the fuzzy blue throw rug, shaking her head as she stared at Grace, trembling with grief.
"Mrs. Farrelly," Ella said, staring into the little girl's old-woman eyes. "Martha. Please, you can't let this happen."
Grace stiffened, chin raised. "The storm is dying."
"Not fast enough," Ella said. "I don't care what happens to me, but Grace-"
"We'll be all right," the girl replied, and for the first time TJ saw the selfishness in her, saw that in her fear she would say anything.
Ella slapped Grace so hard that it spun her back against the wall of the tub.
"Stop it!" TJ snapped.
The bathroom door began to tremble, and they heard long, icy claws drag along the wood.
Tears ran down Ella's face as she turned to stare at her husband. "Don't let this happen."
TJ squeezed his eyes shut against the scratching noises and the anguish in his wife's eyes. But even with his eyes closed, he felt the grip of the cold, the temperature still falling. His chest hurt as he inhaled the frigid air and opened his eyes, turning toward his wife and daughter-his "girls," he called them.
He went and knelt beside Ella, nudging her aside as he reached into the bathtub for Grace, who stared back at him with the fearful, hurt, suspicious eyes of his dead mother.
"Mom," he said, and Grace allowed herself to be pulled in her father's embrace … Martha into her son's.
TJ held her there, wincing at the rattle of the door in its frame, at the scrape of those icy claws on the wood. The gap was small but it had to be enough. Why weren't they coming through? Were the creatures toying with them? TJ thought they must be and hated them for it.
He breathed in the scent of his daughter's shampoo and felt her little heart beating against him. A thousand images of his mother crashed together in his head, memories that he cherished but that he had stored away like a much-loved photo album, there to be drawn out when he missed her most.
"Losing you was so hard," he whispered to his mother. "Blaming myself made it even worse. But the living are the living and the dead are the dead."
The scraping on the door grew louder and a gust of frigid air blew into the bathroom through the gap between door and frame, and he knew the evil that had come for them had decided to end it.
"TJ," Ella said, and he heard her crying behind him, needing him.
He tightened his embrace on his daughter, shuddering with a sadness the likes of which he'd never known.
"I'll always love you, Mom, but I can't lose my Grace. She's only eleven. She deserves to have a life. She deserves a chance. The Martha Farrelly I know, the woman who wanted grandkids so badly, she'd never put Grace at risk. I know you're scared-"
He felt Grace relax in his arms, felt her breath on his cheek as she exhaled, nearly hanging from his neck.
"Daddy?" she whispered.
TJ couldn't breathe. He jerked back, holding her at arm's length, staring at his little girl. When he glanced over his shoulder he saw a gossamer shadow moving out through the door, passing through it as if it weren't there, and he nearly called for her to come back.