“Balthazar?”

He tensed as the phantasms of the past vanished, leaving him back in his own mind, in the here and now. He still knelt in the snow, the taste of blood fading on his tongue. Skye’s face was pale with worry.

“How long?” His voice croaked as though he hadn’t spoken in months. “How long was I … out?”

But Skye said, “Maybe a minute and a half? I don’t know. Are you okay?”

“I think so.” What the hell had just happened to him?

The smell of smoke and gasoline reminded him where they were; at the sound of distant sirens, she looked past him. “I don’t want to leave Mr. Lovejoy—we have to stay—but how are we supposed to explain this?”

“Leave it to me.” Balthazar summoned all his strength of will to stand upright again. “I’ve got a lot of experience in covering this stuff up.”

The police were told that Skye had been walking home from school, and that Balthazar was headed toward downtown, when they separately saw the explosion. Mr. Lovejoy’s car had then jumped the curb; no doubt he’d been startled. Another car had sped away afterward, but they couldn’t say what it had to do with the explosion. They were bewildered, innocent bystanders, no more.

“I still can’t believe they bought that,” Skye said as they walked away from the scene, smoke still thick in the darkening sky overhead.

“Why not? It’s actually more plausible than the truth.” Balthazar glanced back at the police cars behind them. None of the officers suspected they had any greater involvement. It was frightening how good he’d become at lying over the past few centuries.

“I just—I feel awful. Mr. Lovejoy’s all banged up, because of me—”

“It’s not your fault.” He spoke so forcefully that she stared at him, but it was important that she understand this. “What happened is not because of you. It’s because Redgrave and his crew came after you. All of this is their fault. Nobody else’s. Never forget that.”

“Redgrave?” Skye frowned. “I thought you said his name was Lorenzo.”

“The one hunting you last night and this afternoon is Lorenzo. The one who drove up at the end, the guy with gold hair? That’s Redgrave. He’s much older and much more powerful. Almost anything Lorenzo does, he does because Redgrave wants him to.”

“But why?” Skye breathed out in frustration, her breath creating a little cloud in the frosty air around them as they continued toward her house.

“I’m not sure.” Though he was beginning to consider a disquieting possibility. Skye was holding her injured hand. She had reopened the cut on her hand during their escape. If that was her blood he’d tasted on the ground—if that was the reason for what he’d just experienced—

But that was impossible. Nobody’s blood had that kind of power. Surely some of what had happened in his mind had more to do with the fact that he’d just had to face Redgrave for the first time in more than thirty years. He’d been injured and dazed; he’d had a hallucination. He couldn’t be sure of more than that.

Balthazar forced himself to focus again on Skye’s situation. “I don’t know what it means yet, but whatever it is about you that Lorenzo responded to—it’s made Redgrave curious. Once he’s curious, there’s no stopping him.”

“Is this the reassuring part of the speech? Because I’m starting to get worried.”

“There is no reassuring part of the speech.” His eyes met hers, and he could see Skye’s effort at a joke was her way of trying to be brave. Good: She’d need some bravery to get through this. “This is bad. This is real. And until we figure out what to do—I’m staying with you.”

For the first night, at least, this meant staying in her room.

As he punched out a text message—hey, he was getting pretty good at this—Balthazar said, “Your parents really aren’t going to notice the guy staying in their house?”

“They’ll probably get home after midnight and leave before six A.M. Usually they don’t even look in here,” Skye called from her bathroom closet, where she was changing into her night-clothes. He ought to have offered to stay downstairs, in some room her parents wouldn’t enter, but if one of Redgrave’s tribe tried to get in through the windows of her bedroom—no, it was too dangerous. For tonight, he was staying close. “They work really hard ever since—since Dakota.” From the tightness in her voice, Balthazar knew that must have been her brother’s name.

Although Balthazar knew he was no expert in dealing wisely with grief, he said, “They shouldn’t leave you alone so much.”

“That’s how they cope. When they get hurt, they work harder. Since last summer, they’ve been working harder than they ever have in their lives.” The depth of her understanding surprised him; he’d been on earth a lot longer than Skye before he’d been able to look past his own pain to somebody else’s. “They leave me little notes and treats. I know they love me. It’s okay.”

Her room was a colorful place, with lavender walls and a bright quilt on the bed, and a shelf laden with gleaming equestrian trophies and ribbons. A couple pieces of homemade artwork hung on the walls: a collage made mostly of magazine cutouts that seemed much too angry to be Skye’s own work, and a framed, blown-up, artistically Photoshopped photo of Skye with another girl he remembered from Evernight, Clementine Nichols. And yet there was something a little bare about the room—maybe only because she’d been at boarding school the past two and a half years.