And he would this time, too, though his weary heart still held only the thought of his sister, and the knowledge of pain.

Chapter Twenty-one

BALTHAZAR KNEW HE SHOULD BE RELIEVED AT the news that Skye had a date. It was a definite sign that she was willing to walk away from—whatever it was that had been building between them. She was no angrier than his bad manners deserved; she wasn’t going to cry or carry on like a woman scorned. They could cooperate in figuring out her powers; they could work together to ensure she remained safe from Redgrave. She wouldn’t ask anything else of him. That was exactly what he should hope for.

Instead, as he drove back to his home through the winter storm, he kept thinking about Skye in Keith Kramer’s arms.

Keith Kramer. A mere boy. And not even a particularly intelligent, dynamic, or kind one. One who turned in history papers late, and despite repeated corrections kept confusing your and you’re. He was handsome in a generic sort of way, though, and apparently a football star—some girls went for that, but Skye? Not her. She was special. There was nothing ordinary about her. Keith was the definition of earthbound.

Damn, but he needed a cigarette. His resolution to quit had never been as difficult as it was right then. He wanted to light one up, suck it in, blow out smoke that could kill other people. Such as Keith Kramer. How could she even think of going out with that … blond lump?

She can think about it because you cast her aside, he reminded himself. You don’t have the right to control who she sees.

Yet the mere thought of Keith’s hands on Skye’s lithe body made Balthazar furious with jealousy.

For one moment, he couldn’t see the road in front of him, even his hands clenched on the steering wheel. All he saw was his dark vision of Skye lifting her face for someone else’s kiss—

And that was the moment someone walked into the road in front of his car.

He shouted in wordless horror at the thump of his car striking flesh and bone. Even as he slammed on the brakes, sending his car careering into the thicker snow alongside the road, the body was flung up onto the hood, onto his windshield, limp and in tatters. For a moment he could only stare, aghast, at the crumpled form that lay in front of the windshield. Then, slowly, his victim lifted her head to stare through the glass at him.

“Gotcha,” Charity said, before bursting into peals of laughter.

Balthazar slammed his fists against the steering wheel in frustration. “Jesus, Charity! You scared the hell out of me.”

She grinned at him, wriggling with pleasure as if she were a little girl telling riddles again. “Just think! If it had been a human, you could’ve eaten it! And no guilt about biting that one at all.”

“Your idea of guilt and mine are very different.”

Her expression darkened. “They are, aren’t they?”

Balthazar got out of the car. His feet sank in loose, powdery snow almost up to his knees. The darkness around them was nearly total, and by now almost nobody else was foolish enough to be out on the road. He and Charity were alone. Her white dress and pale hair made her appear to be part of the snowstorm around them.

“You’ve gone back to Redgrave,” he said. “Thought you had your own tribe.”

“I do. They’re with me. But you never forget your first love, do you?”

Once again he remembered the barn where he’d drawn his last breath as a living man, and how slick with blood and gore it had been when he’d finished murdering her. No moment in his existence had greater horror than the one when he’d seen Charity dead by his hand—lying next to his first love, the woman he’d tried to save by sacrificing his sister. Tried and failed.

Charity was thinking of it, too. Her high, youthful voice shook, as if from the cold. “Why do you never choose me? Why am I never the one you want to save?”

“Why do you always choose to go back to Redgrave? How can you be on his side after what he did to both of us?”

“Redgrave only killed you,” she spat back. “You’re the one who murdered me!”

They’d had this argument before—hundreds of times, over hundreds of years. This was Balthazar’s cue to retort that he’d been given no choice, that she knew how it was, that she would have died one way or the other before that night was through. Would she rather be poor Jane?

But this time was different. Because this time, he’d been back there. He’d relived it, as vividly and immediately as he had experienced those events the first time. This time, Balthazar finally understood.

Charity wasn’t asking him why he hadn’t somehow managed to save them all from Redgrave’s clutches.

She was asking why he hadn’t done her the mercy of allowing her to be the one who died.

Jane had a chance, he’d told himself. Charity didn’t. Charity’s spirit and soul had already been broken.

But that was why he should have killed her. Had Jane been a vampire—maybe she would’ve been a killer like Redgrave, because the change transformed people in every possible sense, but maybe she would’ve been like Balthazar or the other vampires of Evernight. Sane. Reasonable. At any rate, her choices would’ve been her own.

By turning Charity into a vampire, Balthazar had ensured that she would remain trapped in the labyrinthine chambers of her own insanity for all time.

Balthazar said, “I’m sorry.”

“You always say—”

He sank to his knees in the snow and looked up at her. The gesture silenced her beyond any words he’d ever spoken.