Balthazar
Authors: Claudia Gray
CLAUDIA GRAY
Balthazar
The Time Between: Interlude One
The Time Between: Interlude Two
The Time Between: Interlude Three
The Time Between: Interlude Four
THE DEAD WERE WATCHING.
Skye Tierney gripped her horse's reins in her gloved hands as she shut her eyes tightly, willing the sensation to go away. It didn't matter, though; whether or not she could see the actual images, she knew what was happening near herâthe horror of it was as tangible, and real, as the gray winter sky looming overhead.
Not watching somehow made it worse. Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Skye forced herself to open her eyesâto see the woman fleeing for her life.
She thought he wouldn't follow her up here. He hasn't been the same since his fall two months ago; it was as if the goodness in him left when his head was cut open, and something elseâsomething darkerâflew in. She'd thought he wasn't paying attention, but he was. He is. He's here now, his fingers digging into the skin of her arm as he talks about how she has to be stopped
.
This is different from his other fits. He's scaring her so badly that her throat goes dry and she wants to just fall on the ground, play dead like some kind of witless animal, so that perhaps he'll walk away in one of his dazes. But she can't pull away from him even to fall; he's too large, too strong. Voice shaking, she tells him he's not thinking clearly, that he'll feel sorry for this when he comes to himself again. Her desperate lunge away from him makes his fingers sink so deeply into her flesh it seems as though her skin will tear. Her feet slide in the fall leaves as she hits at him with her one free hand
.
He's smiling as if he'd just seen something beautiful as he pulls her around in one long circle, just like a child twirling a friend, the way he twirled her when they were little together, except that he slings her over the side of the cliff and lets go
.
She screams and screams, arms and legs kicking at the rushing air, all of it futile, and the fall lasts so long, so long, so fastâ
Skye stumbled backward against Eb, her veins rushing with adrenaline and her throat tight. The image faded, but the horror didn't.
“It's still happening,” she whispered. Nobody to hear her but the horse, and yet Eb turned his massive black head toward her, something gentle in his gaze. Her parents always said she gave him credit for feelings he couldn't have or understand. They didn't know anything about horses.
Leaning her head against his thick neck, Skye tried to catch her breath. Despite the warm gray coat and thick teal sweater she wore, cold air cut through her skin to deepen her shivering. The wind caught at the locks of her auburn brown hair that hung from beneath her riding helmet, reminding her that soon night would fall and the wintry beauty of the riding trails on state land behind her house would turn to bitter, even savage, chill. And yet she couldn't bring herself to move.
Their words to each other had been spoken in a language Skye didn't speak, didn't even think she'd heard before. Their clothing and hair made her think they must have been Native American. Was what she'd seen something from five or six hundred years in the past? Did the visions take her back as far as that? Further? It felt like there might be no end to them.
As impossible as it seemed, the visions of past deaths that had surrounded her for the last five weeksâever since the fall of Evernight Academyâweren't going away. She never doubted for a moment that the deaths she'd seen were real, no mere nightmares. This ⦠psychic power, or whatever it was, had become a part of her.
It wasn't as though she'd never believed in the supernatural before this winter; the home she'd grown up in had been haunted. The ghost in her attic had been as real to her as her big brother, Dakota, and about equally as likely to hide her favorite toys to tease her. She'd never been frightened of the girl-ghost upstairsâunderstanding, somehow, that it was playful and young. Its pranks were gentle and funny, things like taking her pink socks and putting them in Dakota's dresser, or knocking on the bed frame just as Skye was drifting to sleep. Dakota had “known” the ghost first, and he was the one who had told her it was nothing to be scared ofâthat ghosts were probably as natural as rain or sunshine or anything else on earth. So she had never doubted that something existed beyond the world everyone could see.
Despite that, Skye had never suspected just how much closer, and more dangerous, the supernatural could get.
Since her sophomore year, she'd been a student at Evernight Academyâwhich, so far as she'd known, was an elite boarding school in the Massachusetts hills, like many others; sure, there were some odd rules, and some of the other students sometimes struck her as definitely older than their years, but that wasn't so weird ⦠she'd thought.
No, she hadn't suspected anything out of the ordinary about Evernight. When her good friend Lucas told her it was dangerousâa school for vampires, no lessâshe'd assumed he was joking.
Until the freaking
vampire war
broke out.
Eb nudged her with his nose, as if willing her back to the here and now. Skye decided he was right. Nothing helped her as much as riding.
She steadied herself on the snowy ground before slinging one foot up into the saddle and hoisting herself into her seat. Eb remained motionless, waiting, ready for her. To think she had him because her twelve-year-old self had told her parents she only wanted a black horse with a white star on its forehead.
(
That's silly
, Dakota had said. He was sixteen, maddeningly superior by then, and yet somehow still the person she wanted to impress more than any other.
You don't pick horses by colors. They're not My Little Ponies
. But he'd smiled as he said it, and she had forgiven him right awayâ
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 demandingâwhich 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 themâLucas's dead love, Biancaâhad remained imprisoned. Skye's loyalty to him had led her to make a spontaneous offerâto take Bianca inside herself, to be possessed by herâin order to help her escape.
What Skye hadn't counted on was how it would feel to share a body with a dead personâhow 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 deathâ
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 thoughtsâbetter 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 alarmâ
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 herâbut as a rider, she was faster than he could ever be.
Or so she thought.
