The banter gave her a second of relief, for which she was grateful. So when she punched in the reply of asshat, she meant it as a playful compliment. The light on her phone dimmed, and she tossed it onto the mattress and sat, once again facing the creeptastic staircase…just in case. She reached for her iPad, and then reconsidered.

If she had heard something, and if it were a real threat, she didn’t like the idea of background noise. If there was a rabid raccoon chomping on the exposed wires, or a freaky opossum hunching its way across the insulation in the attic, she would like to know. Even though the only weapon she had was the plastic knife that’d come with her dinner. She really should have brought the crowbar in with her…

Most likely, nothing would happen, and she’d claim Hawaii with nary a hair harmed on her head. She abandoned the tablet and dug out the novel she’d impulse purchased. It was a romance, thank you very much, no Stephen King for her. No, sir. She’d barely cracked the spine when she heard it again, as strong and sure as if she’d said it herself.

“Go!”

Gooseflesh lit her arms and legs despite the propane heater next to her warming the air. Definitely a voice, she was sure of it this time. It’d been tinny as if being played back from a gramophone, but unmistakably feminine. Almost… forceful.

Her dinner lurched in her stomach as her eyes tracked to the stairs leading up to the inky beyond. The voice had come from the second floor this time. If only she hadn’t made out the word so clearly. If only it had been some garbled, unidentifiable sound, she could’ve passed it off as the house creaking. But she’d heard it. As clearly as she heard her teeth chattering in her head right now.

Whatever was in here with her wanted her to leave, and she may have needed to be told twice, but she wasn’t about to wait around for a third time. Knees wobbling, she kept her eyes glued to the staircase as she felt for her phone and her purse. The darkness upstairs morphed into more shapes the longer she stared into it, so she risked looking away long enough to gather her things. She gauged the distance between the staircase and the front door, inventorying the obstacles that lay between her and the exit.

The urge to run was strong, but she forced herself to step carefully. Besides, not like she could physically outrun a ghost… Which did not make her feel any better. Following the mental path she’d mapped in her head, she stepped around the air mattress, over the lantern, and skirted the heater. She’d come back for her things in the morning. In the bright, happy sunshine. She was out of here.

Her feet hit the porch seconds later. She ran for her car, not bothering to close the mansion door behind her. Heart thundering, Lily plunged a hand into her purse.

“Keys, keys,” she muttered, searching for the lost metal in the depths of her purse. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. But she’d already begun to panic—each time her hand encountered anything and everything but keys in her Coach bag.

A sound in the distance made her jerk her head toward the house. The faint light from her lantern dully illuminated the entrance. That was it. No screeching banshee raced across the yard. No specter floated toward her on a cloud of ethereal smoke.

She still didn’t want to go back inside.

She upended the stubborn handbag and dumped its contents onto the hood of her car. Lip gloss, pens, coins, and various other useless items rolled onto the ground. No keys. Which meant…

“No.” Her voice came out as no more than a tiny whine.

She was going to have to go back in and get them.

She yanked on the driver’s door, then all three passenger doors of her cherry red compact. Each handle gave beneath her palm only to spring into its original position. Locked. But of course.

She rested her hands on the hood of her car and forced herself to breathe. “They’re in there somewhere,” she told herself in the calmest tone she could manage. Other than a preliminary sweep of the kitchen when she’d first arrived, the only area she’d been in was the twenty square feet in the center of the living room. That was good. That was a relatively small area. It’d take her five seconds to search, ten tops.

All she had to do was walk back in there and rummage through a few things. Although, her temporary boudoir was strewn with shopping bags, blankets, and snack food. The spark of hope that had ignited fizzled. The keys could’ve been inadvertently kicked under the air mattress, tossed away with her dinner container, or balled up in the packaging when she’d unwrapped the fresh bed sheets. She’d have to do a careful search to find them. That would take several minutes. Minutes that might mean hearing or—gulp—seeing something that would forever haunt her psyche.

Dread pooled in her gut when she cast another glance at the doorway, but she steeled her spine and put on her imaginary armor. “You can do this,” she whispered. “Just go in and—”

A flash of movement—something too tall to be an animal, unless it was a bear—moved at the tree-lined edge of the forest.

Hallucination caused by stress. She sucked in a deep breath, closed her eyes for the count of three, and reopened them. The shadow moved, the shadow of a man, and lifted a long handle with a curved piece on top. Then it progressed, that figure wearing the night, crunching over sticks and brush on the ground and coming right for her.

The scream building in her throat stopped short when the figure stepped from the trees into the pale moonlight. But the man’s gait was…familiar somehow. More of a swagger than a lurch. And when he held up—good God—a plastic ax, and groaned what she guessed was supposed to be a scary sound, Lily almost burst out laughing.

The face wasn’t white with black eyes like she’d originally thought. It was… a hockey mask. On Friday the thirteenth. Another low sound came through the mask, and she shook her head. The closer he got, the better she made out the man’s build, and it wasn’t hard to guess whose shoulders those were—or whose handsome head sat atop them. And since he was trying so very hard, and deserved a little payback, she decided to play along.

Pushing away from the car, she pulled in as much oxygen as she could and screamed like any good B-movie actress. A muffled sound that could have been her name, followed by a slur, came from the man in the mask, who unceremoniously bonked into a tree. “Ow.”

Lily swallowed a giggle, ran for the house, and pretended to trip up the porch steps. That’ll teach him.

The asshat.

Chapter Five

Dammit!

Marcus pushed off from the peeling bark of a big-ass tree he could not see thanks to zero peripheral vision in this stupid mask. He didn’t mean to scare her so badly. Good lord, the ax was as chintzy as they came. But the sound Lily made was a decidedly frightened one as she trekked from her car to the house.

God. He felt like an asshole.

“Lily!” he called, the mask muffling his words. He reached for the Friday the 13th face covering his own and yanked at the strap. “Ow!” How it had wound itself into his short hair, he had no idea. He half-stumbled, half-limped, thanks to the welt on his shin from a misplaced tree branch earlier, and lifted both arms to attempt to untangle his hair from the strap.

Through the eyeholes, he saw Lily stand casually and dust herself off. As he came closer he saw she didn’t look as scared as she’d sounded a minute ago. She looked, well, pissed.

Her eyes were narrowed, and practically glowing with anger. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

He held up his hands to explain.