Riders (9 page)

Two seconds after I sat down, Daryn got up and walked the other way. And, wow. That really got to me.

“Good night, angel!” I yelled. Then since I was already being so mature, I belted out a horse neigh at the top of my lungs.

Or was it a whinny? It suddenly seemed super important to understand horse sounds. Like, just a really important thing to get a handle on, so I sat down and tried to work that out. Some part of me recognized that I was maybe in denial, but I was stuck in that gear until Anna’s phone rang in my pocket.

I fished it out. My mom was calling, but the image on the small screen paralyzed me. My parents in Yosemite. Smiling, with their arms around each other. I could see Half Dome behind them. I could see part of my arm in the background, too. Flexed, because I was showing off my biceps, which were new. It was spring. Anna and I had just turned sixteen. We’d gone camping for our birthdays.

The phone kept vibrating but I couldn’t make myself answer it. I didn’t want to talk to my mom. I couldn’t face the worry I was probably putting her through. I couldn’t think of a single person I’d have answered for.

Wait, I could.

My dad.

But I knew he wasn’t calling.

When the call went to voicemail, I saw a string of alerts for the dozen other voicemails and texts I’d somehow missed. There were more from Mom. From Taylor, Anna’s roommate. From Griffin and Casbah. From Cory. There was even a missed call from Wyatt Crazy Eyes Sinclair.

I stuffed the phone back into my sweatshirt pocket and pressed my eyes closed, trying to unsee that photo. Trying to
think
. If Cory had called, did my commanding officer in the Army know what was going on?

Hold up. All I’d done was get into a college brawl. And that was to protect someone—it wasn’t something I’d instigated. The rest was …

What was the rest?

I rubbed my hand over my head—my busted hand, which was feeling
a lot
better. The pain was fading away and the swelling had started to decrease, too.

But really. War?

War?

Naw. No way.

This was just a practical joke. Someone had decided I’d make a great contestant for their reality show. I shot to my feet and stared into the darkness. They were going to regret that decision.

“Where are you?” I demanded, searching for cameras. “You really want me in your dumbass show?”

The phone rang in my pocket again. I grabbed it and launched it as far as I could into the waves. It felt good. It felt great, in fact, so I kept going, hurling shells, sticks, rocks, anything I could find into the ocean. When I’d finally worn my anger down some, I dropped to the sand.

I was tired and lately being awake sucked, so.

I went to sleep.

*   *   *

I woke with the image of my dad’s death seared into my retinas.

It was, um …

It was something I hadn’t seen or dreamt about in a while. In months, actually. Since I’d joined the Army. But that night—it was still night, still dark when I woke up—that night everything was right there, sharp as the day it’d happened.

It was summer before senior year. My dad and I had just bought the Jeep and I was looking forward to a couple months of surfing and fishing with Griffin and Casbah. For summer jobs, Casbah was teaching little genius kids how to build rockets in science camp. Griff was helping our high school coaches with baseball clinics. I wanted to do that too, but I decided to work for my dad instead.

He had never pushed the path he’d walked on me—not going into the military or taking over his roofing business—but I got the feeling he wanted me to see the company he’d built from nothing. And I wanted to be able to look him in the eye one day and tell him it wasn’t for me, if it ever came up. It felt like the right thing to do. To try out, at least. So I agreed to spend the summer learning the ins and outs of running a roofing company. Basically doing whatever he asked me to do. Sometimes that meant making pickups at lumberyards in his truck. Other times it meant lunch runs to Subway. Mostly, I was learning the labor part. The sweat-your-ass-off-in-the-sun part.

I was bored out of my skull within the first week, but I somehow survived June and July. On August 2, a Tuesday afternoon, with only a week and a half left before school started back up, Dad called me down off a house in a residential neighborhood. We’d been weatherproofing two leaky skylights. Tons more exciting than laying down roof tiles. I got into his truck and we drove a couple of blocks. One of the neighbors had seen the skylight work and wanted a bid for a new roof.

Dad hauled a ladder off the truck and climbed up to the warped wood-shingle roof of a yellow bungalow, his black notebook and yellow pencil tucked into his back pocket. I stayed in the passenger seat, the air-conditioning cranked up against the August heat, texting with my friends. Casbah had heard about a party someone in our rival high school was throwing that night and our messages were all harebrained ideas about how we’d get in. Idiot stuff like posing as pizza-delivery guys and dropping in through skylights—which I’d conveniently just learned to remove that day.

Then something stopped me. This light creeping feeling, like when you realized a spider’s been crawling on you. I diverted the AC vents, but I still felt off.

I looked out my window.

My dad stood on the roof. He was looking down at me with the strangest expression on his face. I remember it perfectly. It was a look I’d never seen before, like something terrible had happened that he couldn’t fix.

The pad and pencil dropped out of his hand. One stopped, the other went rolling. I watched my dad bend down to pick them up. His knees thudded onto the roof, then his shoulder, and then it hit me that he wasn’t kneeling.

He was
falling
.

The pencil dropped into the gutter, but he kept going. He kept going, all the way down to the brick walkway. As I watched from an air-conditioned truck, texting my buddies about a party.

I went around and around with those images. Seeing the ladder and that warped roof. The yellow number-two pencil. My dad’s face. Basically just torturing myself for a couple hours like that until I couldn’t take it anymore.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep again so I stood and scoped out the darkness. There was no sign of dawn on the horizon. I didn’t see Daryn, or anyone else, but I waited a little longer to be sure I was alone. Then I took a closer look at the metal cuff gleaming at my wrist.

What
was
this thing? I rested my right hand over it. A hum like a mild electrical current vibrated into my arm. I waited for more but nothing else happened. “Come on, magic metal. Show me what you got.” Nothing again. “
Go,
you piece of—”

A sound swelled in my ears like thunder, but deeper. A noise like an oil drum rolling. It was coming from down the beach.

I turned toward it, searching the night.

Out of the fog came the most stunning thing I’d ever seen.

A horse.

A massive horse, almost as wide across as my Jeep, coming at a full gallop.

In the darkness, and with the fog, and at a distance, I couldn’t be sure, but its coat was a bizarre red color, like blood from a deep cut, but bright. A deep, bright red. Even stranger were the flashes of gold and yellow on its hooves and mane.

Flashes that looked like flames.

I knew nothing about horses but its ears were pressed back. When I added that to its speed and trajectory—fast and headed directly toward me—my situation suddenly seemed dire.

“Stop!” I raised my arms. “I said
stop
!”

The horse lowered its head and
sped up,
each massive hoof sending up explosions of sand. I only had seconds before I was steamrolled, so I did the only thing I could.

I sprinted for the water, high-stepping through the shallows until I was deep enough to dive. Then I kicked, swimming under the surface, pushing through cold black water until my lungs burned.

When I came up, I was well past the breakers. The horse had followed me a little way in. Its coat put off so much illumination, it had created a circle of aquamarine water around it, like the ocean had pool lights. Its mane had gotten soaked and hung straight against its strong neck. I didn’t see fire anymore, though. I wondered if I’d only imagined that. I didn’t think so.

It waded deeper into the water, toward me. A wave rushed past its thick chest and it shied back, head bobbing, but its attention never left me.

I knew this wasn’t a dream. Everything felt crystal clear. The cold salt water tickling my throat. The way my sweatshirt and jeans made me clumsy as I treaded water. The ocean swells lifting me as they headed for the beach. But I also couldn’t believe I was awake.

“Are you real?” I shouted over the crash of the surf.

The horse reared, making no sound as its massive hooves slashed at the night. It settled back into the water with a splash and let out a wet snort. Then it turned and trotted away, disappearing back into the fog.

C
HAPTER
14

The next thing I remember was waking up to someone shoving me in the shoulder. I grabbed the first thing in sight—my attacker’s ankle—and yanked the hell out of it. By the time I figured out what was actually happening, Daryn had already hit the sand.

She was only down a second before she sprang back up. “What is
wrong
with you?”

“Sorry. You grabbed my shoulder.” I came to a knee and decided to stay there. I’d startled her. She’d fallen hard and looked a little shaken up.

“Grabbed?”
She brushed off her clothes. “I was just trying to wake you up. I barely touched you.”

That was possible. I’d had a terrible night of sleep. Superficial sleep. Shivering, sporadic sleep. After my swim in the ocean, I’d changed into dry clothes, but now I was damp again from the sand and the cool air. And still on edge. And still on one knee. Why again? Was I
proposing
?

I jumped up. “You just surprised me.”

Daryn was giving me a steady look. She didn’t appear to be thinking good things and my face was going hot, so I decided to survey the surroundings, starting with the part of the world where she wasn’t.

Morning had broken. Fog was starting to burn off. No giant red horses in sight. Good. Maybe I had just hallucinated it, like Samrael’s snout. Wait, that wasn’t
good
.

“You went for a swim?” she asked, eyeing my wet clothes piled on the sand.

“Yep. Just felt like taking a swim.” I wasn’t ready to talk about the horse. Not even close.

She crossed her arms. With my Giants sweatshirt swallowing her up and her hair all sleep-tangled, she looked different than last night. Softer or something. “So…” She glanced behind her, toward my Jeep. “Do you have any money?”

An antsy feeling stirred inside my chest. If she needed money, she was probably heading out on her own. Not what I wanted, but I couldn’t blame her. I hadn’t exactly treated her great yesterday.

“Yeah,” I answered. “I have money. Daryn, listen, I—”

“Great,” she said. “Let’s get some food. I’m starving.”

*   *   *

She taught me how to hot-wire my Jeep, which was easier to do than it should’ve been, then we fell quiet as I got us on the road. After last night’s fight and this morning’s takedown, we were oh for two on communicating. It seemed better for now to just not try.

As I drove I became hyperconscious of the cuff on my wrist. I didn’t know if I was responsible for what had happened during the night, and part of me worried a horse might suddenly appear out of nowhere, maybe galloping alongside the Jeep or sitting in the backseat or whatever. But neither happened, thankfully.

We stopped at a breakfast place called Duckies in a tiny beach town. I made sure to broadcast my make-peace-not-war message as soon as we stepped inside. With the number of truckers and bikers in there it could’ve turned ugly otherwise. Then I asked our server for the booth by the windows near the emergency exit, some part of me registering that I was thinking in terms of tactical advantages and escape plans. I didn’t know what was happening and I wanted to be ready for anything.

Daryn and I gave the waitress our orders right away and had a bonding moment over the fact that neither of us liked coffee. It was a quick moment. Then she pulled a beat-up journal out of her backpack and started writing in it. I channeled my energy into making a multilevel structure out of sugar packets and creamer pods.

When our food came, she plowed through a stack of blueberry pancakes and I put away a plate of eggs, bacon, and hash browns, knowing it would give me heartburn, but I was hungry and needed the fuel. We still weren’t talking but I had plenty of time to observe her. She ate like she was storing up for the winter. Fast. A little messy. Drowning every bit of pancake in a waterfall of maple syrup like she had reverse diabetes. Her foot wiggled under the table as she ate, which was weird because usually she seemed really calm. She’d tied her hair up in a knot on top of her head and …

I don’t know. She looked good.

Shame she was such a head case. Probably a criminal on the run. Bummer she thought I was one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

When she glanced up and caught me watching her, she gave me a look, like
what
? So I shrugged, like
nothing,
and we carried on eating and not saying a word.

It was the strangest breakfast I’d ever had.

I didn’t know what to make of it.

So far every second with this girl felt like coming around a blind corner.

We were waiting for the bill when she said, “Your hand looks better.” She wiped her lips with a napkin. “Does it hurt?”

“Oh, this? Barely. Almost not at all. It did last night but now it’s better. Weird, because it was really busted up, but now it’s, like…”

“Better?”

“Exactly. Way better than my stomach’s going to feel after this food.”
Stop, Blake. Just slow down.

“Oh, no. Do you have a stomachache?”

“No. My stomach’s prime.” What the hell was coming out of my mouth?