No. She wasn’t going to let herself think about Dakota.)
Well, okay, she had been silly. Back then she hadn’t known what to look for in a horse: sureness, steadiness, the ability to know the person on its back as surely as any other human being ever could or would. Eb had all that, and the star.
I should hurry home in case Mom and Dad check on me, she thought. Even in her mind, the words rang hollow. They would be in Albany, working hard. Supposedly this was because their jobs were so demanding—which they were. Skye knew that. But she also knew that the real reason they’d buried themselves even deeper in work during the past year was because they didn’t want to let themselves think about Dakota either. Skye hadn’t quite realized how far they’d taken it until she moved back from boarding school five weeks earlier. She also hadn’t realized how badly she’d wanted them to be home.
But they all had to deal with this in their own way. If that meant she had to deal on her own, okay.
Clicking her tongue and bringing in her heels, Skye got Eb moving, his hooves crunching through the snow. Only about six inches of it on the ground at the moment, which was as good as it got in upstate New York in early January. Soon it would be falling a foot or two at a time, maybe more. All around her, the stark branches of leafless trees stretched up to claw at the low gray sky.
“Now we know to avoid the cliff,” she said aloud, her breath making clouds in the crisp late-afternoon air. “That’s one more place we won’t go. Soon we’ll have figured out a nice long track in the woods to ride on every day, one where nobody ever died, and I won’t have to see anything scary at all.”
But already Skye felt as if she would never again be able to escape the presence of death.
It had begun at Evernight, during that last terrible day. As the vampires fought among themselves, some tribal battle she’d never understood, ghosts trapped within the building had been set free. One of them—Lucas’s dead love, Bianca—had remained imprisoned. Skye’s loyalty to him had led her to make a spontaneous offer—to take Bianca inside herself, to be possessed by her—in order to help her escape.
What Skye hadn’t counted on was how it would feel to share a body with a dead person—how terrifying it was, even when it was someone she instinctively trusted. And she definitely hadn’t realized that being possessed would leave her open to the spirits of the dead forever.
As Eb took her through the heavy woods, Skye wondered if anybody besides her had ever seen these visions. If anyone else understood that throughout Darby Glen, on the streets, in the buildings, even out here in the forest, the world reverberated with the echoes of death after death—
A snapping sound nearby startled her, but only momentarily; it wasn’t unusual to see foxes darting among the snow or deer foraging for what little food remained this time of year. Skye almost welcomed the break from her thoughts—better to lose herself in the moment, in the warmth of Eb, the rhythm of his stride, the beauty in the woods around her. So she looked toward the sound with more relief than alarm—Until she saw that the snap had been caused not by an animal but a man.
He stood there in his brown coat, staring at her. If he had smiled, waved, or called out hello, Skye wouldn’t have found it unusual; this was state land, after all, and though she and Eb often had the trails to themselves this time of year, she wasn’t the only one who found the forest in wintertime beautiful.
But he didn’t do any of those things. He just stared at her with a flat, almost haughty gaze that felt unnervingly familiar.
“C’mon, Eb.” Skye urged her horse to go a bit faster, still only slightly shaken. This guy, whoever he was, didn’t look good to her—but as a rider, she was faster than he could ever be.
Or so she thought.
Eb’s steps quickened further, and the muscles in her body tensed to hold her steady in her seat. Twigs snapped beneath his hooves, and ice crunched—and yet she could hear more than that. She could hear footsteps behind them.
Skye glanced over her shoulder and saw the watcher in the brown coat, walking after them now, unusually sure-footed on the treacherous terrain. His unnerving expression hadn’t changed at all, but his hands were no longer in his pockets. He was clenching and spreading them, over and over, as if preparing for some kind of strenuous task. Like, say, strangling somebody.
Which was probably completely paranoid of her, she decided; she couldn’t allow her visions to bleed over into her every waking thought. But she looked back at the trail ahead and wondered if she dared to urge Eb to move faster. Rocky—snowy—but not too bad. She jabbed her ankles into his sides, not too roughly, just hard enough for him to know it was time to move.
Eb shifted into a brisk trot, or as brisk as he could manage given the undergrowth, but it was enough to leave behind any human who wasn’t running to keep up.
Again, Skye looked over her shoulder. The guy was running after her. And more than keeping up.
This was real. It wasn’t paranoia, or a supernatural vision of death, or some hysterical hallucination cooked up by what she’d been through at Evernight. That man was real, and he wanted to hurt her, and he was coming after her as fast as he could.
Skye dug her heels into Eb’s sides and snapped the reins, the signal for him to gallop. Treacherous as the ground was, Eb responded immediately by breaking into a run. She leaned forward, the better to avoid being smacked in the face by the tree branches now rushing by her. Her breath quickened, the air so brutally cold that her throat ached. Fear lanced through her, but anger, too—fierce enough to almost overcome the fright. How dare this jerk try to come after her? He was a disgusting creep and she wished she could take a horsewhip to him, but she knew that instead she had to get the hell out of here.