Halfway Home on Book #5
The prologue and eight chapters are finished, so the book is half-written!
Next up, a big New Year’s Eve party, where Sara will start to piece together the mystery and figure out what her evil counterpart is really up to.
Here’s a quick snippet from chapter six – Sara tries to confront the rival dreamer, someone she so far only knows as “the woman in red”…
Sara is in bed, completely naked. Her heart is, finally, slowing, and her breathing is almost back to normal. She rolls onto her side and stares at Brian, who stares right back at her. She reaches out to him, and pulls herself closer. Her face is only an inch or two from his, and she says, “I’m not finished yet. I missed a couple of things on the list.”
Brian leans over those last couple of inches and kisses her. What seems like a very long time later, he answers her. “Tell me about them.”
Sara opens her mouth, about to do just that, when she feels something. The temperature has just dropped, she thinks. She feels a chill – a draft. Almost as though…
She knows exactly what’s happened, and she pushes Brian away. “I’m sorry,” she tells him, jumping out of bed, eyes searching all around the room. “I know you’re here,” she calls out. But there is no one else in the bedroom. Sara goes to the door, opens it. There’s a window high up, above the top of the stairs, and, as Sara suspected, it’s open.
The window is at least seven feet off the floor, but Sara jumps up and easily catches her hands on the windowsill. It doesn’t occur to her that she shouldn’t be able to pull herself up the way she’s doing. Or that the window isn’t nearly large enough for anyone to have climbed through in the first place. None of that matters. Sara knows what happened: the woman in red came in that way, and when she realized Sara was aware of her, she went out the same way.
Sara is crouched on the windowsill now. She’s not even breathing hard from the effort of getting up there. Even though it’s only a foot and a half wide, she sticks her head out and then pulls herself through. The fact that what she’s just done is physically impossible doesn’t enter her mind.
Sara sees no sign of the woman. She’s obviously on the ground already, so Sara jumps after her. It’s probably a twenty foot drop onto the icy, hard driveway, but Sara lands easily and without any injury. She sees footsteps leading away from her landing spot, heading out to the sidewalk. She begins to follow them, thinking, I wish Chrissy were with me. She could run that bit – that woman down.
Sara’s thought is answered immediately; Chrissy comes running out of the house through a dog-flap that Sara knows isn’t a feature of her front door. “You know what to do, girl. Go get her!” Chrissy runs off, barking madly. In the distance, two blocks away, Sara sees, just for an instant, a woman-in-red-sized shadow pass below a streetlight.
Despite the distance, Sara hears a surprised, or possibly terrified, yelp. And then, quite clearly, “What the hell? She can’t do that!” Sara runs after her dog, in the direction of the voice, but by the time she gets to the streetlight, there’s nothing there but a very confused Chrissy. All sign of the woman is gone…
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