For a second the question did not register, but then Kate remembered the argument about the shotgun that Tom had insisted she keep if she was going to live alone out here. They had compromised when he had put it far back in the unused corner of her closet. She'd meant to get rid of the thing, but after a while she had just forgotten about it. She nodded.

“Did you load it the way I told you to?” he whispered.

There was another squeak in the hallway. Heart pounding, Kate shook her head.

“Shit,” whispered Tom. He was crouched by the side of the bed. His lips touched her ear again. “Is the box of shells still on the top shelf?”

“I think so,” whispered Kate. Her mouth was terribly dry. She strained to hear any sound. Suddenly a door creaked and she swung herself out of bed. “The baby's room!” she said aloud.

Tom moved incredibly fast. The closet door slid open with a bang that almost made Kate scream, he flicked the light on, came out with the pump shotgun and a yellow box of shells, stopped Kate from running down the hall by pressing his hand flat against her chest before she could get out the bedroom door, and shouted, “We have a gun!” as he fed three shells into the magazine.

They both heard Joshua's door slamming open.

Tom was out the door and down the, hall in an instant, slapping light switches as he ran. Kate was a halfsecond behind him. She froze as she stumbled through the doorway into Joshua's room.

A tall man dressed in black was bending over Joshua's crib. In the second before Tom hit the light switch in the room, Kate saw only the black shape looming over her baby, the man's thin face illuminated by the nightlight next to the crib. His fingers were long, gloved, and reaching for her son.

Tom snapped on the light and crouched with the shotgun pointed. “Don't move a fucking muscle!” he shouted, his voice strong and in command. He was still naked; his body looked tanned and powerful to Kate rather than made vulnerable by the nudity.

The intruder was wearing some sort of black balaclava, but his face was uncovered. He had a wide gash of a mouth, long nose, heavy brows, and eyes that looked like black pits to Kate. This is a nightmare, she thought through the frenzied pounding of her heart.

Kate was sure the intruder would use the baby as a shield, but the man stared at Tom from the black pits of his eyes and then lifted his spidery hands and stepped away from the crib. Tom shifted to his left to keep the field of fire away from the baby, and Kate slid along the wall behind him.

“Freeze,” Tom commanded and pumped a shell into the chamber.

The man in black seemed to nod, and then everything happened very fast.

Kate had seen Tom's reflexes in action beforecatching a rafter who had gone over the side in heavy rapids, going on belay to arrest her fall while teaching her to rockclimb, once leaping to stop Kate from a nasty collision with a rock while glissading down a snowfieldbut the man in black moved so quickly that even Tom did not have time to react. One second the intruder was ten feet across the room, arms extended, and the next instant the black form was hurling across the carpet in a tuck and roll, then exploding upright under the shotgun, hands going for Tom's throat.

Tom was the strongest man Kate had ever known, but the intruder lifted him like a child and tossed him across the room. A mobile came crashing down, Tom slammed into the framed N.C. Wyeth print on the far wall, and then he bounced and rolled while the man in black leaped after him. Somehow Tom had held on to the shotgun.

“Down, Kate!”

She had run toward the crib but dropped to the floor on Tom's command. Kate saw a glimmer against the black gloves and realized that the man had a blade in his hand and that the hand was rising above where Tom was sprawled . . .

Kate's scream and the shotgun blast were simultaneous.

The intruder's downward leap suddenly reversed itself as if a film were being run backward; he flew up and back, slammed against the wall where Kate had been standing a moment earlier, and slid to the floor. He left a trail of blood and black wool on the ducksandairplanes wallpaper.

Kate ran to the crib and lifted Joshua out. The baby was screaming, face red with terror at the sudden sounds, but he looked unharmed.

Tom got to his feet, his left arm obviously injured, and approached the fallen man carefully. The knife the man had held now, lay on the carpet. Kate had never seen anything so short and deadly. It had no handle, no hilt, merely a flat knob that she guessed would fit in the palm of his hand. Both sides of the blade were obviously razor sharp.

“Careful!” began Kate as Tom turned the slumped form over with his foot. She caught her breath. The shotgun blast had torn a footwide hole in the man's chest and upper abdomen, while some of the pellets had struck his throat and face. There was much blood. Kate stared for a long second before her medical training took over. She kissed Joshua, set him back in his crib, and crouched next to the man. Blood wicked onto the hem of her silk nightgown and she brusquely flipped it out of the way, tore the remnants of the man's black sweater open, and felt for a pulse at the base of his neck. There was none. The intruder's eyes were slightly open but the pupils had rolled up until only the whites showed.

“Call 911 and tell them to have an ambulance dispatched from Community,” she said. She arched the man's head back and opened his mouth to clear it of blood and tissue fragments.

“Oh, Jesus, Kate . . . don't give that asshole mouthtomouth. Besides, he's dead.”

“I know,” said Kate, bending closer, “but we have to try.”

Tom cursed and set the shotgun against the wall. Lifting Joshua, he stepped toward the door. Kate fought down a sudden surge of nausea and lowered her face toward the dead man's. .

The intruder's eyes snapped open like an owl's, Kate screamed, and he shoved her aside and vaulted to his feet, leaping toward Tom and the baby.

Tom turned instinctively, shielding Joshua from the stranger. The man landed on Tom's back and Joshua tumbled to the floor and rolled under the crib, screaming.

The man in black threw Tom against the wall and leaped for him, long fingers going for his throat. Tom met the attack with a stiff arm and upraised palm that flattened the intruder's nose like a pulped tomato. The man snarledthe first sound that Kate had heard from himand threw Tom ten feet through the open screen door to the balcony. Then he pivoted, reminding Kate of a giant spider, and began scrabbling under the crib to get at Joshua.

Kate's first and strongest impulse had been to get to her child. But her brain had overridden her instinct, and she had left Joshua under the crib while she crawled across the carpet to the shotgun.

The intruder saw what she was doing. He gave up reaching for the screaming child and leaped to his feet and bounded across the room toward her.

Later, Kate did not remember pumping another shell into the chamber or lifting the weapon. Nor could she remember pulling the trigger.

But she would always remember the terrible blast, the sight of the man catapulted backward through the glass of the sliding door, and the terrible angle of his body sprawled across the balcony overlooking the ravine. Tom had just gotten to his knees and now he shielded himself from a hailstorm of shattered glass.

Kate staggered to her feet and stepped forward, staring through the smashed glass at the intruder's body. This blast had almost separated his left arm from his torso. She could see exposed ribs gleaming.

“Kat!” shouted Tom at the same instant the intruder jackknifed forward and seized her ankle.

She went down hard on her back, her head hitting the leg of the crib. The man pulled himself through the shattered door, using just his right arm.