Lights Out (Book 3): Front Lines Read online

  Still, when she stepped aside to let Brian through, they were both surprised. It didn’t hold Brian long, and he rushed in, leaving Emma out with Kellen.

  Chapter Two

  Emma stood awkwardly outside Kellen's front door while Brian went to fetch his gun.

  Her first instinct was to turn tail and run back to her house. If she had been the same person she'd been weeks ago, the woman that hated confrontation above everything, she would have. Because she really didn’t like the way Kellen was eyeing her.

  But her reason for being there was too important. If the worst thing Kellen could do was shout at her, she would take it. Besides, she deserved it. She had been sleeping with the woman's husband behind her back for years and pretended like nothing happened the mornings they happened to run into each other. Hell, she had babysat for them their five year old daughter.

  With the way she'd blown up at them, Emma wondered if she'd had some idea what was going on that wasn’t just jealous paranoia talking. She was so quick to believe she was right at just the slightest provocation. She wondered if at any time they had been careless with their affair. She didn’t think so, but Kellen already turned out to be sharper than they thought.

  The really scary thing, was how good she'd been about acting friendly when she suspected Emma of sleeping with her husband. Emma herself had always been uncomfortable and tried to run away at the first chance she got, though really, that hadn't been so far from her usual behavior.

  But, well, it was justified after all. In Kellen's eyes, Emma had dealt the first blow.

  She wasn’t sure what their family had been like, exactly what had pushed Brian to do the things he did. She did know that they met just months before she got pregnant with her first daughter. Brian married her because she was pregnant, though he wasn’t that much older than Emma and Kellen was nearly a decade older.

  Kellen was the breadwinner in their family. She had no idea what Brian had been doing before he met Kellen, but his hobbies were working out, and his only job was taking care of his kids while his wife went out and worked.

  The situation worked for them, as far as Emma had seen in the beginning. Kellen owned a salon where she went to work every morning. It was a job she liked, and it actually raked in good money that they didn’t both need to work, though she wondered how they arrived at that conclusion. She wondered, if he hadn't gotten tied to Kellen because he was careless, if there had been something he'd wanted to do with his life besides becoming a house husband.

  He was good at it, though. With how he tended to act around her, she used to forget. And Kellen had given birth to their second daughter about a year ago so he had an infant in the house. Yet the few times she'd seen him interact with his children, he was so good with them. Their first daughter, Brianna, may have been a mistake, but he cared for her—for both of them—a lot. And the girls both adored their father.

  It was strange, actually. In a lot of cases, children were closer to their mother than their dads, but they Wright couple's children had a preference for Brian. More than just preferring him, she had seen little Brianna Wright afraid to sit with her own mother, because Kellen was such a stranger to them. Actually, there was a time when they came over to her house and they shared a meal, and the whole time Brianna had seemed more attached to Emma than her own mother. Emma had thought the other woman hadn't noticed, but maybe she did?

  Then after that, getting paranoid about her husband trying to elope with Emma, it must have snapped her out of her pleasant attitude.

  Emma didn’t want to be blamed. She didn’t want to be in the middle of a family squabble, and she would have complained if it was entirely unrelated to her. But she still felt some guilt for what she'd done. Brian had approached her and Emma had been blinded. He was someone attractive, the kind of guy she could never possibly attract, and she had been flattered when he focused his attention on her. She had let that cloud her mind and she fell into his seduction.

  That had been bad enough. But she hadn't been able to stop. Her life was so unfulfilling that it was the one thing she kept seeking out when she was feeling on the edge of desperation. She'd had the dream, once, to marry a man and start a family on her own, but none of her relationships ever went anywhere. They were more a means of stress relief than anything else, and when she realized Brian was the best there was, she got attached to him.

  Of course, then her feelings changed. The guilt had been there from the beginning, but the more it went on, the worse Emma felt. It really started to feel like she was taking a drug, a quick fix to boost her up, but that didn’t last long. Almost immediately after, she would feel so empty that it had scared her a few times. She didn’t like Brian enough to keep sleeping with him, but how she felt without giving into the relief was what kept her going to him for so long.

  Then everything went south, and she finally made the decision to end it with him and focus on her family. She hadn't even liked him, because it wasn’t like they talked. They didn’t know each other besides being neighbors for so long, and when they met for their trysts, all they did was have some small talk that meant nothing and get down to business.

  Recently, they had been spending a lot more time together. With Kellen having no choice but to stay home and look after their kids, he'd taken up volunteer work for the town, like Emma had. They'd been sent out on work a couple times together, though the first of those times, when she went with him alone, had been the catalyst for Kellen getting mad at them.

  Still, Emma knew Brian better now. Before, she'd stereotyped him, but spending so much time with him where they actually talked had made her face some truths about her neighbor. She hadn't even liked him before, but now she could consider him a friend of sorts. She didn’t want to make things harder for him and his wife to reconcile. If anything, she would have helped, if she thought Kellen would actually listen to a word she said. Hell, it was a wonder she had lasted this long without getting attacked.

  But Kellen didn’t do anything besides stand there, several feet away from her, silently.

  She realized this was the first time she'd been around the other woman when she wasn’t happily chattering her ear off—or, more recently, shouting obscenities at her about her ruining their family. Kellen usually had such a bubbly personality that the change still left Emma reeling. But she'd seen the woman consumed with anger and trying to attack her, so the cold reception wasn’t exactly a shock.

  Not that she did absolutely nothing. No, that would imply that Kellen had even come close to forgiving her transgression, and Emma wasn’t sure she could. Kellen was glaring hard at her, and Emma didn’t blame her for her anger. She couldn’t. Because technically, even though she didn’t have the proof, she and Brian had been sleeping together behind the woman's back for a long while. It wasn’t like they had any special feelings for each other, either. They both just wanted an escape from what they considered poor situations. Not that it made it any better. If anything, wasn’t it worse because it was for such a selfish reason?

  Emma had known it was wrong. But she hadn't been able to stop herself, and Brian didn’t try either so she just went along with it. She didn’t have the strength to stop, until looking after her family and their interest—and in truth, a large scare form the crash that nearly took her and Chase's life along with so many others—became more important than keeping up her affair with Brian.

  Kellen still didn't have proof of how long they'd been going around behind her back. A few compromising situations was all it took for Kellen to accuse them both. Hell, Emma had even hurt Chase without meaning to with the whole affair, because she had been too self-absorbed to see how he felt. Sure, he'd been advocating for her to end it when he found out about it, then found out she didn’t even like Brian, not that it was necessary to sleep with him. She hadn't even known Brian and Chase had been friends before the whole affair started, and they'd broken their friendship over her without her knowing.

  Emma had been pretty close to losing
everything because of her stupidity, because she couldn’t chose between her best friend and the comfort of having Brian. Chase meant a lot to her, and he helped her out a lot, but not to the level where Brian had, and she'd never thought of a romantic relationship with her best friend before.

  But they were truly over now. Emma didn’t even think about the decision, because all the times she fell into bed with him were when she was at her weakest, mentally. She knew now it wasn’t a healthy way of coping, but Emma didn’t have any other way and it never occurred to her to seek professional help. Because a lot of it tied to a past she'd tried to forget. If anyone in the family had needed that kind of help, her sister and grandmother needed it more, and she couldn’t let herself be so weak to rely on them when the rest of her family wasn’t. Well, that and she just didn’t have good memories about therapists.

  There was no way she could allow herself to give into weakness now, though, which meant she would never fall back to Brian, no matter how familiar being with him was.

  A while passed on in silence, while Emma stood there feeling uncomfortable and Kellen continued to glare at her with contempt. It probably hadn't been that long a time, it could have been less than a minute, but her anxiety was growing. She already had problems bigger than having her neighbor mad at her, but it wasn’t exactly a small thing either, and it bothered her.

  She wanted to say something to Kellen. Apologize or explain herself, or whatever it took to get Kellen to stop looking at her that way. But she knew anything she said would likely make things worse between them. An apology wouldn’t be enough. Excuses would only make her angry. Anything else Emma could say wasn’t appropriate for the situation considering what she wanted to get out of it.

  But this situation was just too awkward. Emma couldn’t say anything about Kellen glaring at her. She tried meeting the other woman's eyes a couple times with her head held high before giving up and looking away in discomfort. She fidgeted in place, wishing she was anywhere else but there, but didn’t turn around to go back to her place even though it was only a few feet away. This was too important to just turn her back on because she wasn’t comfortable. Kellen didn’t move from her place beside the door, but Emma didn’t think she was imagining feeling a heavy pressure beating down on her from the other woman.

  Finally, Brian returned with a shotgun, breaking the awkward silence the two women had been locked in, but Emma only let herself relax a little. Having Brian there just seemed to make the tension in Kellen higher instead of less.

  Then Emma looked at the gun he held in his hands, and suddenly the situation shifted in her mind. She almost forgot Kellen was even there as she felt the build-up of excitement in her chest.

  This was it, the means to get what she wanted. This gun was going to be their first line of defense against the women that attacked them when they came back for more of their food. One simply wasn’t enough, not against the many they'd been under threat of before, but it was a start.

  The excitement in her died quickly, though. She remembered, of course, that their attackers had more numbers, and more guns. They were also ruthless. While they hadn't actually shot anyone, Emma was pretty sure it had just been to save on the bullets. They were quick enough to pistol whip Chase in the face for talking back and trying to get them to leave. Then when Emma tried to go to him to help, when he fell, she'd been threatened into leaving him on the ground or risk being shot herself. Of course, she had stayed still, feeling scared and on the verge of tears.

  Just remembering it made her blood boil, at the same time it reminded her just what they were up against. Having the one gun was better than being completely unarmed, but not much better. She wanted to curse at how unfair it was. She didn’t want to believe that Chase had been right, that they really should just stay out of the women's way and do as they said. Brian had offered her a weapon because he was of the same mind as her, that they had to fight. But seeing it, Emma began to fear the fight they were about to get involved in with such a huge difference in power.

  What the hell.

  It was a heck of a time to have her rationality restored. Her mind wasn’t so clouded with anger and the need to retaliate that she would suddenly turn suicidal. This would involve a lot of people besides just her, after all, including members of her family and Chase. She couldn’t be so careless as to throw away their lives on some fool's errand, all because she had her pride hurt when those women came into her house and took her things at gunpoint while she was too afraid to do anything.

  She wasn’t changing her mind, but just one gun, when they didn’t know how many their enemy had?

  "Dammit!" she cursed under her breath. They would need more, a lot more, but Emma could feel the frustration build up as she wondered where they were going to get more guns. She'd had one at some point, but she had been careless with it and it had been taken away from her. They didn’t keep guns in the house...

  "What's wrong?" Brian asked, holding the gun out for her inspection. "It's a little old, but I take good care of it and I have some ammunition from the last time I went out with it."

  She shook her head. Her problem wasn’t with the weapon's condition. It hadn't even occurred to her. "That's not it, it's just this won't be enough. Think about it Brian, how many people did we face last night?"

  "I didn’t count everyone, but there were ten that I did see," he murmured, frowning. "I know it isn’t good enough, but it's better than nothing for a start, right?"

  She nodded. "For a start, yes. But where do we get more? One shotgun is going to be useless against ten armed women. And they could be more of them, when there are only so many of us, even if we all took up a weapon. I had the one gun but it's gone, and I don’t have any good weapons besides knives in my place."

  She wouldn’t mind using knives, but considering the people she would be up against could get her from a distance, she wasn’t feeling very optimistic about it. Even if she could get up close, she could only attack one person at a time, and it would be enough time for someone to start shooting. They weren’t in some action movie where everything would end up okay in spite of the odds against them.

  Emma ran a frustrated hand through her hair. There was no way it could be enough. They'd need more weapons, and not just any—they needed guns. Even more, they would need people that had and knew how to use these guns. But where would they get more?

  "Your solution is simple," Kellen said, cutting through Emma's distraction. "Stop thinking like you can take care of it all yourselves. You just need to round up more people from our street to help fight. It's not like yours is the only house around here, you know. If these women will be endangering the neighborhood, then it affects all of us."

  It... hadn't occurred to her actually. She was so dead set on doing it on her own, with her family as support, that inviting in outside help hadn't even occurred to her. There was the fact that the women had broken into their secret stash of food, but she didn’t need to let anyone into her house, did she? They could put up a line of defense from the outside and no one would ever have to know about what was in the shed in their back yard.

  Emma was too surprised that the other woman was even talking to her to do more than gape at her, even though she wanted to say it was a good idea. She knew some houses must have been hit before those women even came into her house, so they might have some people willing to join them because they'd lost something to them.

  Then Kellen disappeared into the house for a moment, and returned with her own gun. It was a hand held, maybe medium sized. It was definitely smaller than the one Emma had before, but not too small, and it fit in her hand like she'd held it plenty of times before.

  Both she and Brian gaped at her. That he looked as surprised as she did led Emma to believe that he didn't know about this either, but how was that even possible? They were married and had been living together for years. Clearly, Brian wasn’t the only one keeping his secrets.

  "I refuse to allow anyone dangerous near my k
ids. Know that this is the only reason I'm not slamming my door in your faces," Kellen warned them.

  It was the only reason Emma was even here, knowing their now rocky relationship. It was strange how much this meant to her, considering she couldn’t exactly claim to have always liked Kellen in the past. But Emma couldn’t help but be impressed by Kellen's guts.

  That she was willing to do all this, that she was holding a gun in her hand at all, made Emma think that she'd severely misjudged her. She had believed that Kellen didn’t know how to do much of anything. Since she'd been the one to earn money for the family at her salon, where she got most of the town gossip, Emma had been under the impression she would be beside herself looking after her children without her husband there. It was a step higher that she could be this determined to looking after her family, reminding Emma of her own resolve. Brian himself looked proud of his gun toting wife. This was beyond Emma's expectations, and she couldn’t be gladder to be wrong.

  "I can help you out rounding up people to fight," she offered, stepping closer, but not without some caution. Kellen might not want to go so far as to call a truce. "We're gonna need all the help we can get. I saw ten, but there was a chance that others had gone to other houses, so we aren’t even sure of the enemy's numbers."

  Kellen didn’t react negatively, in spite of how she'd been glaring at Emma earlier. Actually, her expression had reverted to the calm look she'd had on before, with extra determination in her eyes as she stepped closer.

  Brian watched in amazement as the two women shook hands and headed out together.

  Chapter Three

  Now that there was a plan, and she had Kellen there helping her, Emma felt they had a chance in this, and her excitement was growing again.

  She wouldn’t have thought they would ever team up for anything, but she was definitely impressed by Kellen taking the initiative. She also harbored some hope that this was what they needed to fix their broken relationship. They may not exactly been friends, but she had been their neighbor for a long time, and Emma had known her longer than she'd known Chase and Brian.