The Binding by Nicholas Wolff

by a circle of the blackest darkness. She wasn’t moving, barely breathing, as he watched from above. What forms did she watch in that circle, their claws an inch from the band of light, circling her, waiting to tear her throat out if she so much as uttered a sound?
    The shake of the head again, the face covered by gleaming shafts of hair.
    “Did he have anything else in his hands?”
    This seemed to catch her unawares. “ Wh-aat? ” she whispered.
    The murder of Margaret Post had come into his thoughts, unbidden. He leaned in and lowered his voice. Their heads were now bowed together as if in prayer. “You showed that this manwas choking you only with his right hand. Why? What was in his left? Was he holding something there?”
    Nat felt a cold breath escape her lips and bloom against his face. It had no odor. It smelled of the house.
    “NNNnnn . . . ,” she said, the sound trailing off.
    “What was that?”
    She looked up and her eyes were pleading. “ NNN nnnnn . . .”
    “Tell me—”
    “ Knife. ”
    Nat felt danger close now. A flash of dread. He reached out and put his hand over hers.
    “Okay. Okay, a knife. But he didn’t cut you?”
    She shook her head. “He pressed. Here.” She tilted her neck away, baring the flesh of her throat exposed above the turtleneck. She pushed a point on her neck just above her collarbone, her eyes closing as if the spot was still tender. Then she regarded Nat again.
    A voice seemed to speak clearly in his mind. Leave now.
    Nat blinked rapidly. He stood up and looked around the room. The voice had sounded as if it came from someone standing a few feet away. But there was no one in there with them. No one at all.
    “I’ll need to see you again,” he said finally.
    When she looked up, he detected something new in her eyes. Gratitude. Or maybe sympathy for him, for what he’d just committed himself to.
    The two emotions could look very similar, Nat had found, when written on a face.

CHAPTER TEN
    T he door closed softly behind Nat, and he heard the snick of the metal arm entering its socket, followed by a hard click in the silence. He hadn’t realized Becca had a lock on her side as well. He imagined her on the other side of the door, her hand pressed to the painted wood, waiting to hear if Nat would call to her. Then, when that hadn’t happened, the grating of a bolt being pulled across and locked into place. And then silence.
    The yellow light out here was still burning, and it cast a circular cone of solid amber that ended about three feet away from Nat, as if there were a black velvet curtain there. A choking sensation filled his throat, and suddenly he was sure that a hand was about to reach down and place its cold flesh on his neck. He felt the urge to run blindly toward the stairs. But instead he shivered and began to walk purposefully, his right hand feeling blindly against the wall. He touched the slick surface of an oil painting—could even feel the ridges of the painter’s strokes under his finger. When he touched a patch of fur—Jesus, it must have been a mounted deer head—he dropped his hand, a cold sweat breaking out across his back.
    A fucking horror house. The prison of the Prescott clan.
    Nat reached the stairs, and his right foot went pitching over the first step before he caught himself.
    “Mr. Prescott!” he called angrily. Damn it. Why did he leave me out here to break my neck?
    Silence.
    “Prescott!” he yelled.
    He heard footsteps from directly below. Mr. Prescott walked into the center of the foyer, then looked upward, his face blank.
    Nat glared at him and came down the stairs to the landing, then three more steps to the dark hardwoods of the foyer. He marched up to the old man.
    Prescott waited, his eyelids half closed, for Nat to speak.
    “Becca needs treatment. I’d like to see her tomorrow morning at my office.”
    His eyes flicked to Nat’s. “She doesn’t leave this house.”
    “Just bring her in, please. This