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I’ve been trying to get out of that all day! I wasn’t going to go. I don’t even want to.
Damn, Balthazar thought. Now he had Tonia Loos hanging all over him and basketball duty, for no good reason. Obviously I’m the one who should’ve checked with you. Well, I’m stuck now. Can you go to the game anyway? I really don’t want to leave you alone more than necessary at this point.
Skye looked more depressed by this than he would have anticipated—it was only a basketball game, wasn’t it? But she sent back, Sure. That means I’ve got to hang out with Madison at Café Keats until the game starts, though.
I’ll make sure you get there safely, he promised.
Then her red-haired friend—Madison, presumably—began whispering to her, and their conversation was on hold.
Balthazar forced himself to stop watching Skye and to turn his attention to more critical matters. He was here to protect this girl; time to think less about the girl, more about the protection.
Now that he’d made sure he would be near Skye most of the time, he knew he was in a good position to stop Redgrave if he came after her. Now he needed to go on the offensive. To figure out what Redgrave meant to do with Skye, and the quickest, best way of stopping him, permanently.
Tailing Skye to Café Keats turned out not to be difficult. Balthazar was just one of several students and teachers who were headed toward the nearby Darby Glen town square; nobody would particularly notice that he happened to be about ten feet behind Skye and Madison at all times. There was a faster route to take to the center of town, a path that dipped into a small gorge but was perfectly walkable—but it was so severely ignored that he suspected it was considered uncool, somehow.
Apparently Café Keats was a coffeehouse. It looked inviting—bright turquoise walls, bright white tables and chairs, and some kind of stage in the back complete with a dark red piano. Students were crowding in, but others had already claimed the best tables. The place was packed. Skye would be safe there; no matter how bold Redgrave might be, he was nowhere near the point of trying an attack anywhere so crowded.
No, that would require getting Skye alone and Balthazar didn’t intend to give him that opportunity.
For a moment, Balthazar watched Skye standing in line with her coffee, laughing with Madison, looking like the normal girl she deserved to be. He hoped she felt that way, at least for a while.
Then he took off. Before he devoted himself to Skye’s protection full-time, he had one last logistical matter to handle.
“You’re teaching at the high school?” said his new landlady, one Mrs. Findley. “My girl Madison’s a senior there.”
“I think she’s in my first-period homeroom.” Balthazar wrote the check out without worrying about the amount; investing well over the past few centuries meant money was the least of his concerns. “But it shouldn’t be awkward. I keep to myself, mostly.”
“And we’ll let you do that, never fear. Madison’s always out, and my husband and I let the tenants do what they like as long as we don’t hear screams or see fire.” Mrs. Findley obviously meant it as a joke, but Balthazar was uncomfortably aware that he couldn’t rule either of those possibilities out. “Here’s your key. Get yourself settled in, and let me know if you need anything.”
His new home was a carriage house, located far enough back from the Findley home that Balthazar could scarcely see it through the trees. Good. He’d have his privacy. Although the interior wasn’t of much interest to him, at least it was pleasant; the Findleys apparently normally rented it out to tourists who came to hike and sightsee in better weather, and so it was furnished with simple, older wooden furniture. Just three rooms—a small kitchen, a dated but shining clean bathroom, and a large bedroom with a gas fireplace and a huge four-poster bed. For honeymooners, he supposed. That bed was larger than their entire sleeping area had been in his childhood home.
For a moment, the memory flared brighter in his mind. He remembered the fields of grass, Fido’s barking, the sound of Charity murmuring nonsense words in her sleep. He remembered the first time he’d seen Redgrave, and how suspicious he’d been. Yet not suspicious enough.
Balthazar tossed his few things onto the bed and went back out, taking stock of his surroundings. If he’d judged the area correctly, he was within half a mile from Skye’s home—a distance he could cover quickly. He walked due south, past the Findley home and back into the woods, surer and surer that he was headed in the correct direction … then stopped.
Between the Findleys’ home and the Tierneys’ was a river.
No, not a river—a stream, but one large enough to still bubble with water despite the cold temperatures. Balthazar knew this because he could feel the deep, illogical and yet irresistible dread any vampire felt near running water.
I can’t cross this, he thought—then immediately rejected that idea. He could cross it. If he had to, he would. It just wouldn’t be easy. Crossing any kind of river or stream was, for a vampire, unpleasant at best, paralyzing at worst.
He imagined looking across the river and seeing her as he had that first evening, riding in the afternoon light. The sunset light now was much the same, and he could picture Skye perfectly: her alert gaze, the set of her shoulders, the outlines of her slim legs against the blackness of her horse. If she were over there, in trouble…
Yes. He could cross the water.
Resolved, Balthazar turned back so that he could begin the journey back to school for the basketball game. After a few steps, though, he realized that he wasn’t alone.
Constantia stood among the trees, so tall that she seemed to belong to the forest, so ethereal and mysterious, he wondered if she was an illusion. He hated that he still felt a twinge of longing at the sight of her. She watched him quietly, hands in the pockets of her long coat, saying nothing. Instinctively he understood that she hadn’t come here to fight him, that Redgrave’s tribe had no interest in hurting him when he wasn’t standing between them and Skye.
No, then their interest in him was far more insidious.
“Following me?” Balthazar said. “I thought you’d given that up.”
“You’re a bit of a bore.” Constantia’s voice held a curl of laughter; her eyes, as always, half mocked him, half devoured. “I keep waiting for you to start being fun, Balthazar. The first century or so, it was worth the wait. These days, not so much. Being near you is like trying to make wet tinder catch flame.”
“Starting a fire requires a spark we don’t have.”
Her thin-lipped smile could be unspeakably cruel. “The first century and a half we knew each other—you didn’t seem to think so.”
