Like all the others.” Julian had stepped in front of me on the landing, his arm across me, but I felt him shaking, and I put my hand flat on his back, and I said, quietly, just for him: “It’s okay.

Keep her here.

Just a little longer.” Because under her voice, faint and growing, coming up Elm Street through the dark, I had begun to hear the sound I had been praying for — the sound of sirens.

Chapter 15 — Elm Street

Victoria heard them a beat after I did, and I watched the knowledge cross her face — that the sirens were not a coincidence, that the call had already been made, that for the first time in her long controlled life the situation was not hers to manage.

She looked, for one instant, as though she might rush the stairs anyway.