Jo could feel the icy air swirling around her, but it offered little relief from the waves of heat. Before waking up drenched in sweat, she’d dreamed she was tied to a stake with flames lapping at her bare shins. She’d watched the hem of her white dress catch fire. Within seconds, her entire body was ablaze. Jo knew the dream well. For years, she’d lived in fear of it. Only in recent months had she begun to understand it. Now when the dream came, she let herself burn. Heat was energy, and energy, power. She wondered if she could learn to control it—to channel the fury and indignation that fueled it. She wanted to find out exactly what she could do.
With her eyes closed, Jo envisioned a brilliant blue orb of energy hovering above the palms she held cupped in her lap. She’d just set it spinning when a sound from another room broke her concentration—the faint whoosh of a window rising. Her eyes opened and the orb vanished. She was on her feet in an instant.
“Art.” Jo shook her husband. He answered with a snore. “Art!”
“What?” he mumbled.
“Shhh! There’s someone in the house. Call 911.”
“Where are you going?” he asked, struggling to sit up.
Jo padded toward the door in her bare feet. “To get Lucy.”
“Are you fucking crazy?” Art was fully awake. “Let me do it! Get back here!”
But Jo was already out the door and halfway down the hall. She peeked into the bathroom as she passed. It was empty, as was the guest bedroom. There was only one other room on the second floor—the one near the stairs at the end of the hall. The one with a poster of a K-pop boy band. The one where her eleven-year-old daughter was sleeping.
The door appeared closed, which told her she’d found the intruder. Lucy always slept with it open. But a sliver of space between the door and its jamb told Jo the latch hadn’t caught. She readied her arm—elbow bent, palm facing out. Then she slammed her hand into one of the wooden panels. The door flew backward into the wall, where it stuck, its knob embedded in the house’s thirty-year-old Sheetrock. Jo hurled herself over the threshold, expecting the element of surprise to work in her favor. In the split second in which the room was revealed, she saw her daughter on the bed, hands zip-tied, eyes bulging, the small stuffed pig she’d slept with since she was an infant crammed into her mouth. Jo’s brain registered Lucy’s hands frantically gesturing toward the left side of the door. Then Jo’s world went dark.
She woke with the right side of her face pressed into carpet, her head throbbing, and her hands bound. A large body lay blocking her view of the room. She recognized the familiar hole in the back of Art’s favorite Columbia T-shirt and wondered what the hell he was doing. Then the sound of duct tape being ripped from a roll brought her back to the bedroom, and Jo knew she didn’t have long to act. A self-defense instructor who’d offered weekly classes at the gym always showed new students how to break out of zip ties. Jo thought of it as a parlor trick with little practical use, but the three simple steps had lodged in her brain: Tighten the zip tie with your teeth. Raise your arms over your head. Swing your arms down and apart with as much force as possible. Rage, fear, and frustration swirled inside her as she began to bring her hands to her mouth. Her body was burning and her arms were slick with sweat. She smelled hot plastic as she bent her neck toward her wrists. Before she could clench the loose end of the strap between her teeth, the band holding her wrists stretched like a piece of chewed gum and fell away.
The man was busy wrapping Lucy’s ankles with a second strip of duct tape as Jo rose from the floor. She grabbed her daughter’s new tennis racket and positioned herself behind him. “Get your fucking hands off my kid,” she growled.
When he spun around, she caught him in the face with the edge of the racket. It wasn’t enough to take him down, and he came back at her with a fist to her temple. Jo’s knee rammed into his groin, and a kick to the abdomen sent him sailing into the bedroom wall. She was on him the second he hit the ground, with the handle of the tennis racket pressed against his throat. He was a large man, well over six feet, with a chest so broad she could barely straddle it. She took a good look at him, attempting to commit his appearance to memory. His most distinguishing feature seemed to be a lack of one. Even if she’d seen his face a thousand times, it wouldn’t have left an impression.