Secretly Sam by Heather Killough-Walden

sent that truck after them to kill them. She absolutely knew that she’d managed to pull them off the road just before they would have hit the bridge crossing Southside Ravine and would have had nowhere to go. And she knew that they would live now.
    We will live , she thought – just before unconsciousness claimed her.

 
    Chapter Fourteen
    At just after three in the morning, the house was dark and quiet, and Logan remained wide awake, her mind spinning. She’d come home earlier that night to a rare silence. All of the lights were off and there were deeply breathing bodies in all of the beds. Of everything she had experienced recently, this was perhaps the most unrealistic event of them all. A home like hers – at peace.
    She almost resented it. Why was it that her family chose a time when she wasn’t around to finally get along? And why now , when her own little world was falling apart so dramatically?
    But then, albeit reluctantly, she recognized it for what it was – a blessing. No one was being hurt right now. It was something to be very thankful for. And it was one less thing to worry about. And so she let it go.
    Now she took a deep breath, exhaled softly into the evening, and rolled over in her bed to stare out the windows across the room.
    Something moved on the other side of them.
    Logan gasped, sitting bolt upright. Her blankets slipped from her shoulders. Her heart hammered; blood roared through her ears. She was on the second floor – what the hell could have moved in front of the windows?
    A bird , she thought. A bat. A really big moth?
    But her heart wouldn’t listen. It continued to pound relentlessly as she gazed steadfastly at the darkness beyond her white, gauzy windows and wished with all her might that she’d remembered to close the blinds.
    She stared, and she stared some more. She stared until her eyes hurt and she realized she hadn’t blinked. She blinked – and the shadow came again, shifting just beyond the glass, in that indistinct blur that was half reflection and half night.
    Oh God! Logan jumped from the bed, fighting the instinct to curl more deeply into it and burrow beneath her covers. Against every dictate of self preservation, she inched forward, squinting to try to get a better look at what lay beyond the glass.
    The shadow moved again. She opened her mouth to cry out, her second instinct to call for her parents. Parents were always the ones you wanted when the monster came in the middle of the night, no matter how old you were.
    But before she could make a sound, the windows slammed open, swinging inward on a violent fury of wind. Logan shielded her face with her arms as her hair whipped madly around her and loose objects in her room began to shift or fly. Her feet retreated along the carpet until the backs of her legs bumped into the edge of her bed and she fell, plopping onto the mattress as the contents of her room continued to whirl about.
    Hesitantly, she peeked from behind her forearms, squinting her eyes to avoid the lashing punishment of her strands of hair.
    In the darkness just beyond her windows, two red dots burned bright. They gazed into her eyes, spearing through to her soul. She stared open-mouthed, unable to move more than to draw breath.
    It’s not Sam , she thought. It was an odd thing to realize, but it was a very definite thing as well. Who ever, what ever, this was, it was probably working for Sam. Maybe it was a part of him somehow, but it wasn’t him.
    The burning red dots disappeared, and there was a sudden, pulling rush all around Logan. She almost screamed when the drawers in her dresser flew open. Sitting atop her socks, undergarments and folded t-shirts were stacks of loose leaf paper upon which she’d written story after story. These papers at once began to lift away, shuffling into the wild, churning air like large, thin playing cards. Logan watched them for a moment, still too stunned to do anything.
    And then, as the first dozen sheets made