My phone's insistent buzzing finally penetrates my exhausted brain. I blink awake, disoriented, reaching for it in the dark. The screen glows with multiple notifications:

  ALERT: BACK DOOR ENTRY 3:17 AM ALERT: KITCHEN MOTION 3:19 AM ALERT: HALLWAY MOTION 3:21 AM

  My heart slams against my ribs with increasing speed. Someone's in the house. Moving through it systematically. I'm about to start moving, when I turn my head and notice something in the doorway.

  "Hello, mongrel," he whispers, like he's afraid to wake me up.

  The voice freezes me mid-movement. Male, unsettlingly deep. My night vision adjusts enough to make out a tall, angular silhouette filling my doorframe. He's dragging something quietly along the carpet, long, thin, metal. Not a sword - who carries a sword? - but something else. A curtain rod?

  I pretend I'm still sleeping. I make a little mumble and roll over, keeping my eyes mostly shut. All I see is silhouette. There's nothing else to look at.

  Then, the silhouette is upon me like a bat flying towards the screen.

  "It's really, really funny. Poetic," he almost snarls, voice way deeper than anyone that spindly has the right to possess. "Vermin like Belle chooses vermin like you. Bloodhound. Mongrel."

  He's holding what looks like a metal drawer slide, the kind from a cabinet, that much I can make out now. As I watch, a spike of black metal with reddish undertones grows impossibly from its end, extending until it's nearly touching my face, thin and pointy like a thorn, or the tip of a nail. It creaks and buzzes, humming, hissing, popping, until it stops, a solid six inches long and fully occupying the rail's narrow width.

  "Samantha. What a mutt name. Perfect etymology. I don't care about your mutt name or your mutt genetics," he rambles, leering down at me. His eyes bulge, and I don't think he's fully closed his lips a single time, even as he's about to start drooling on me. "Rachel. Benjamin. Mutts! Garbage people. I'll make sure your line ends here."

  He hoists his ersatz pickax up with both hands and holds it over me like a guillotine. My eyes snap open.

  The corners of his lips pull up just a little more.

  "Good. You're listening. I need you to know what I'm going to do. She gets an impromptu hysterectomy, and he gets gelded. Don't worry. I'll cauterize. You can live, just under my terms. No more inbred dogs. No more bloodhounds. No more Bloodhounds," he mutters, almost more to himself than me.

  There's two smaller wolves fighting each other inside my skull. One of them is terrified by the home invasion, and the other one has combat training, so what ends up happening is that my fingers start twitching while there's a sort of whimper building up underneath my chest, which feels totally out of character because I've met much worse people than this nutcase. I've already got teeth growing under my wrists, under my knuckles, across my shins, ready to stick and move. Whimper or taunt? Whimper or taunt?

  The coin lands. "You're nuts. Totally schizo," is what I end up saying.

  "I'm FINE!" He shrieks, going from baritone to soprano in a split second. He slams the drawer slide down, the spike landing where my head was a fraction of a second earlier and cutting a thick gash along my cheek, ripping a cut through my ear. He's already panting like he's out of breath, lifting his makeshift weapon from my bed. "I'M NORMAL!"

  He swings again backwards, the flat side of his cabinet rail slamming into my ribs and throwing me off the bed. I land bad and roll into my desk with a thick, swallowing thud, coughing a glob of blood with it.

  Shrike runs a hand through his hair, slicking sweat and spittle through it. He's wearing gloves. Boxing gloves? Boxing gloves, with vinyl doctor gloves underneath. My computer mouse jostles from the movement, and the screensaver turning off gives me a blue-lit view of his perspiration-shiny face. A tattered, too-tight light brown suit with big shoulders. Blonde, angular, pointy, like he's made of triangles and bones. A red bandana tied around his upper arm. I swallow. Is this really where we're going?

  You can't wear red armbands anymore, nutter. 80 years bad taste.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  I don't think he cares about appearances though. I'm beginning to get the impression that he doesn't hate me for your typical gangster reasons. I can guess this because he sees me staring at his armband and sets his drawer slide down just for a moment to adjust it, just to make sure I can see the Iron Cross slashed onto it with thin lines of black paint. "Oh yes. Get scared, mongrel," he spits, still grinning. "I'm doing you a favor. No Tay-Sachs for your children. No crying retards sucking up my money. No pollution in my country."

  I only have a second to wonder to myself what 'Tay-Sachs' is. He picks up the drawer slide, and the air is filled with the sound of a thousand humming, hissing metal bees as dozens of new spikes emerge from basically everywhere a spike could come out of.

  Shit.

  The door crashes open behind him. Dad stands there in his boxers and undershirt, gun raised, face set in a flat expression I've only seen twice before. Mom is right behind him, eyes wild as they dart between me and Shrike.

  "Get away from my daughter," Dad says, voice deadly calm.

  Shrike doesn't even turn around fully. He just tilts his head, like he's mildly interested in a bug that's landed near him.

  "Put the gun down," he says casually, "or I'll put a spike through her eye socket before your bullet leaves the chamber."

  "You'll be dead before you can move," Dad counters, but I can see the calculation in his eyes. The uncertainty.

  Shrike laughs, and it starts low before trilling up into this high, uncomfortable cackle. "You're already in checkmate, plague rat."

  He says that because both of them - both of my parents - are already surrounded with a halo of spikes, like an iron maiden. It took less than half a second. They just slide out of the drywall like they were always there.

  "I've seeded this entire house," Shrike says, his voice dropping to a conversational tone that's somehow more terrifying than his shouting. "Tiny little spike embryos, waiting to grow. They're in the walls, the floors, the ceiling. They respond to rules. Simple ones. If my heart stops - they grow. If I'm restrained - they grow. If I'm still here in fifteen minutes - they grow. And it's so much harder to stop them before they skewer something when I'm not around."

  Dad's hands shake, ever-so-slightly. Shrike thumps his shoe against the carpet, and a single spike slams out at a slightly tilted angle, shooting like a bullet from the floor to underneath Dad's chin.

  "See? Complete control." His smile widens, along with his eyes. It's not like any animal I've ever seen before. Only a human could pull off this sort of expression willingly. "You let me finish my tête-à-tête with your whore daughter, or I turn you all into paté for the police to clean off the walls in the morning."

  "Don't do it, Dad," I say, tasting blood. "He's bluffing."

  "Am I?" Shrike asks, and suddenly another spike bursts from the wall beside me, stopping a hair's breadth from my temple. I can't help flinching away. "Would you bet her life on that, Benjamin Ephraim Small?"

  Dad's hand wavers, the gun lowering slightly, aimed now towards Shrike's center mass instead of his head. Shrike's mouth closes for what seems to be the first time. He inhales, sucking up spit audibly, and wipes his lips with the back of his sleeve.

  The sound of sirens in the distance just begins to pick up. I know I hear it. And as much as I wish he didn't, Shrike clearly hears it too, judging by the way his eyebrows furrow and his grin vanishes just for a second.

  "At least you look after your own. That's never been in question. Silent alarm? Clever." He backs toward my window, never taking his eyes off us. "Bloodhound. When you're ready, come leave your invitation at the Metropolitan Opera House. Second floor. You can pick the place and day, I'll pick the time, and if I think you're trying to play with me I'll impale everyone you've ever met before handling our business."

  With one fluid motion, he unlatches my window and slides it open. Cold night air rushes in, and the sound of sirens rises up to meet it.

  "It's been educational meeting Liberty Belle's mongrel successor," he says, his voice dripping with contempt. "We'll continue our conversation soon."

  He extends his hand out the window, and the air fills with that metallic hissing sound again. Outside, black spikes begin growing from the brick exterior of our house, interlocking and forming a crude staircase upward.

  "Consider this a courtesy call," Shrike says, starting to climb out the window.

  "Fuck you, psycho," I call after him, my entire body trembling. What if I just socked him, right then and there? Would his spikes go off and kill my parents instantly? Fuck. Fuck! FUCK!

  Before Dad can raise his gun again, Shrike is climbing the spike staircase, moving with surprising agility for someone so gangly, loping like a gibbon. We rush to the window just in time to see him disappear onto the rooftop.

  Dad's finger twitches and shakes by the trigger guard.

  The metal staircase begins to tremble, then disintegrates into a cloud of floating black particles that drift away on the night breeze, like dead fireflies scattering into the darkness.

  Mom rushes to me, hands frantically checking my injuries. "Sam, are you okay? Let me see--"

  "I'm fine," I say automatically, though the cut on my cheek is throbbing and I can feel blood trickling from my ear. "Is he gone?"

  Dad is still at the window, gun still raised, scanning the roofline. "Hard to tell without a ladder. Mother fucker," he hisses, hands shaking as he tries to catch Shrike's silhouette in the moonlight. "I can't see him."

  "Do you think he really..." Mom begins, looking fearfully at the walls around us.

  "I don't know," Dad says grimly. "But we're not staying here to find out. Get dressed. We're leaving. Now."