Guardian (1993)

A telephone rings in the dead of night with shocking news for single mother MaryAnne Carpetner: her friends the Wikensons are suddenly, inexplicably, dead, and their only child, MaryAnne's godchild, abruptly orphaned. But as MaryAnne rushes to embrace her young charge, disturbing questions mount. Was it merely a chance, tragic mishap that took these lives? Or murder?

Soon MaryAnne will begin to suspect an even more sinister force at work, for Joey Wilkenson, a sad and silent adolescent, seems to harbor secrets beyond her most nightmarish imaginings. AS winter transforms the beautiful, lonely Wilkenson ranch into a forbidding place of blinding storms and dangerous darkness, a series of horrific murders - killings that suggest a raging  animal or worse and defy solution by a desperate police force - draw ever closer to her young family.
Alone in the howling winter whiteness, MaryAnne Carpenter must guard her children against an unseen, ever more insatiable killer - a killer who is closer than she thinks. Now MaryAnne beings to know the true meaning of terror ...

"JOEY --"  

     The sound from the far reaches of the barn swelled into a snarl, then something came charging out of the blackness toward her. Acting only on her reflexes, MaryAnne jerked back from the gaping darkness, slamming the door shut and dropping the bar into place just as the thing, whatever it was, hurled itself against the other side. Her heart pounding, she turned and fled back across hte yard, slamming the kitchen door shut as soon as she was inside the house.
     What was it?
     What had been in the barn?
     It couldn't have been Joey - it couldn't have been been! Surely he would have answered her when she called to him. Surely, he wouldn't have attacked her.
    Would he?