Balthazar by Claudia Gray Page A

Nobody else’s. Never forget that.”
    â€œRedgrave?” Skye frowned. “I thought you said his name was Lorenzo.”
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œBut why?” Skye breathed out in frustration, her breath creating a little cloud in the frosty air around them as they continued toward her house.
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œIs this the reassuring part of the speech? Because I’m starting to get worried.”
    â€œThere 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?”
    â€œThey’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.”
    â€œThat’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.
    Or maybe not: On one slightly dusty shelf, Balthazar could see the imprints where framed photos