After Midnight

  “What did you do?” I knew from past experience just how over-protective my brother could be. “Did you threaten him? Did you get into a fight with him?”

  “Forget about it.”

  I checked his knuckles and his face, but I didn’t see any bruises or cuts. Whenever Gray had defended me at school in the past I never saw what he did, and afterward he refused to talk about it. Whatever happened, whoever had been picking on me never tried it again.

  Even if Gray’s intimidation tactics worked this time with Boone, there was still Tiffany Beck, and Barb’s prediction: She’ll probably forget about it after she calms down. In a few months. Or years.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if we’d be moving away by Christmas or next summer. But thanks to Trick, we were staying put and settling down in Lost Lake. I’d be going to Tanglewood until I graduated. And I’d just embarrassed the most popular girl in school in front of her friends and half the students in our grade.

  Yep. I was doomed.

  Trick was sleeping when we got home from school. After Gray dropped his stuff in the house he said he was going for a ride and went out to the barn to saddle Flash. That left me alone to do my homework and start getting stuff ready for dinner, which was fine by me. When Trick got up he was going to ask me about school, and I needed time to think up some convincing lies.

  It hadn’t been that bad, I thought as I filled out the endless stack of forms Trick would have to sign later. All my teachers had seemed okay. Barb had been nice to me, and in his own way so had Ego. Cheerleaders had to have more than one uniform, and it wasn’t like I was going to hang out with Tiffany Beck or her posse. Hopefully Gray had scared off Boone for good.

  I hadn’t gotten one of my bad headaches, the kind that made me so dizzy and tired that I had to go to bed. And I knew the knot in my stomach would go away. By Christmas.

  I decided to make Italian for dinner, and was searching through the freezer for some ground beef when Trick got up. He still looked tired but his voice sounded better, and he didn’t grill me too much about school. Still, he knew something was wrong. Trick always did.

  “You want to tell me about it?” he asked as he watched me chop onions for the sauce.

  “I just did.” I dumped the onions in with the ground beef. “It’s a good school. I like my teachers. My student mentor is great.” I glanced at him. “All right. The truth is I skipped school, shoplifted cigarettes, met a cute married man and now I think I’m pregnant. Happy?”

  “If he’s getting a divorce. Smoking’s bad for the baby.” He got up, came over and kissed the top of my head. “If you ever do need to talk about anything, I’m here.”

  “I know.” That was something he didn’t have to say, but the reminder was nice.

  He finally went out to the barn to shovel out the stalls and fill the feed buckets, which gave me time to finish making the sauce and put it on to simmer. I took an early shower, folded the laundry and had the table set by the time my brothers came back to the house.

  I had learned to cook by getting some easy cookbooks from the library, and watching some shows on television, but my cooking was only average. Lucky for me Trick and Gray weren’t picky, and they always cleared the table and did the dishes for me. I tried to read for a while that evening, but I kept seeing my juice splashing all over Tiffany’s uniform, and the shock and hatred on her face as she shouted at me. Whatever happened because of this, I wasn’t drinking anything at lunch but water for the rest of the school year.

  Because we had to get up at dawn to take care of the horses, we all went to bed pretty early. I said good-night to Trick and Gray at ten, and spent the next hour staring at the ceiling before I gave up on sleep. I changed out of my nightshirt and shorts into my riding clothes, tiptoed down the stairs, and stuck my head out into the hallway. Trick’s bedroom door was shut, so he’d gone back to bed. Nothing short of a train wreck outside his door would wake up Grayson.

  I slipped out of the house through the back porch door and walked to the barn. I wasn’t supposed to go riding at night. I could repeat word-for-word the lectures Trick gave me about it, too: It’s too dark out here in the country. You can’t see where you’re going. If the wildlife don’t come after you, Sali could step in a hole you don’t see, throw you and then you’d be in a bad way. We wouldn’t know you were missing until morning.

  I never argued, but I didn’t agree with him. Technically I had never promised him that I wouldn’t go out at night on Sali. Besides, when I couldn’t sleep, riding was the only thing that tired me out. Trick didn’t know it, but I had great night vision and could see everything ahead of me, even on new moon nights. Sali was steady as a rock; nothing spooked her, even the things that should have like snakes or sudden sharp noises. As for the wildlife, I’d never run into anything bigger than a stray cat or a possum.

  The only time I ever felt right with the world was at night, riding my horse under the stars.

  As soon as I went into the barn Sali put her head over her stall door and whickered to me. The color of bittersweet chocolate with a big white blaze on her nose, she was darkly gorgeous, and she knew it. She also knew I only came out this late when I wanted to sneak out with her, and I think she liked it as much as I did. Jupiter came to his door, too, but when the big white stallion saw it was me he snorted and stomped a little. Some people thought horses were too dim-witted to understand human beings, but not me. I suspected Jupe always knew exactly what I was up to and, like Trick, he didn’t approve.

  Flash ignored all of us to sulk in the corner of his stall. He was so much like Gray sometimes it was spooky.

  I strapped my bareback riding pad on Sali before I bridled her and led her out of her stall. I didn’t use a saddle or stirrups when I rode at night, mainly because riding bareback added to the sense of complete freedom—but also because in the morning Trick might notice that the underside of my saddle was damp (the pad I could hide). I looped the reins over her head, stepped onto the mounting crate and boosted myself onto her back.

  At eighteen hands high Sali was a big mare, but I was no shrimp, so we fit each other. I kept her to a slow walk as we rode out of the barn and out into the back pasture before I eased up on the reins and let her quicken to a lope. Trick had bought Sali for me because she had a smooth, gliding gait, and her breed was famous for being gentle and comfortable to ride (all desirable traits for the eleven-year-old I was when I got her). I loved to ride Sali because her running walk was faster than most horses’ canter, and she had incredible stamina; she never seemed to get tired.

  The nights had grown a little cooler since July, and layers of thin mist hovered over the open pastureland and swirled around the nubby dark trunks of the bordering trees. Some of the black oaks on our land were over a hundred years old, Trick had told me, and had survived tornadoes, hurricanes and countless wildfires. He thought they were beautiful, but I liked the maples and the ficus trees better. They didn’t remind me of nightmares I could barely remember, or bad Halloween movies I couldn’t forget.

  Along with the house our farm included a hundred and forty acres. About half of it had been cleared sometime in the past for use as pasture and planting, and the rest were woods and groves that formed a natural boundary area between our land and the closest neighboring parcel. The other property, about three times the size of ours, was mostly woods and wetlands (another polite name for swamp). The realtor in town had told Trick that no one had lived on it for years, which made me wonder why someone had posted so many No Trespassing signs along the outer tree line.

  Once we were far enough away from the house, I leaned forward, urged Sali into a full gallop, and let her race into the back forty. Her hooves ate up the ground and flung clods of dirt and grass into the air behind us. The coarse black hair of her long mane whipped against my cheeks, but I didn’t care. With the mist parting around us and the stars glittering just above the black billowy shapes of the oak canopy, I felt like we were flying instead of riding.

&n
bsp; I felt the other rider before I saw or heard him, to the left of me, coming up as fast as Sali and I were galloping. I spotted a gap in the trees a hundred yards ahead, where Trick had installed the new barbed wire and post fencing he’d been working on all summer.

  The other rider was heading straight for it.

  I reined in Sali, but she didn’t have brakes like a car and we broke into the clearing just as I saw a big black blur burst out of the pines. The stallion must have seen the fence at the last moment, but he wasn’t a jumper, because he swerved away instead of trying to clear it. As I caught my breath the huge black reared and bucked off his rider, who landed on the fence and collapsed it.

  “Hold on,” I called, and urged Sali over to the fence. I swung over and jumped down, looping her reins over the post before I ran over to the fallen rider, who was struggling inside a tangle of wire and splintered wood. “Are you okay?”

  He lifted his head, and his long black hair fell away from a pale, angry face. “I will be fine.” He grabbed at the wire wrapped across his chest, and then hissed and pulled his hand back. “Go back where you came from, girl.”

  “I live here,” I told him, and crouched down to start untangling him. “Hold still or you’ll just make it worse. Did you hit your head on anything? Does anything hurt when you move?”

  “Stop.” He took in a sharp breath. “I can do this myself. You may go.”

  I may go? Was he kidding?

  He looked to be about my age, maybe a little older, but it was obvious he wasn’t getting out of this without help. So I ignored him as I tugged and pulled and worked each length of wire free. Trick had special-ordered the fencing, which was studded every couple of inches with clusters of long, sharp iron spikes. I tried to be careful, but by the time I freed the last length from the boy’s legs both of my hands and forearms were cut and bleeding in several places.

  Other than rips and tears in his clothes, and some thin slashes in his skin from the barbs, I didn’t see anything wrong with his arms and legs. That didn’t mean anything.

  “Does your head hurt? What about your back?” He started to get up and without thinking I put an arm around him. “Take it slow. You might have broken something.”

  When he got to his feet he was a head taller than me, and had a long, lean form with broad shoulders and streamlined muscles that made me think of Olympic swimmers and speed skaters. Dark stains mottled the long sleeves of his white shirt, and he was covered in grass and dirt, but he didn’t stagger or fall again. In fact, he stood so still all I saw move were his eyes as he looked around.

  “The last time I rode here there was no fence.” He regarded me. “Is this your doing?”

  The way he was talking made me blink. I’d only heard people speak like that in movies. But maybe he was from another country, or English wasn’t his first language. “My brother put it up this summer. You are on private property, you know.”

  “Am I.” He didn’t seem worried about it as he inhaled slowly. “You’ve been injured.”

  “It’s only a couple of cuts from the wire.” I looked up and saw his face clearly for the first time. His skin looked like moonlight, he was so pale, and his eyes were the color of marcasite, the darkest shade of silver. He had long, dead-straight black hair that gleamed with tiny blue and purple lights, and spilled over his shoulders as if it were liquid. Add to that the fact that he had the most beautiful face I’d ever seen on a boy.

  The anger faded from his expression. “Are you in pain?”

  “I’ll be okay.” No, I wouldn’t. Not in this lifetime.

  He took my arm from around him and held my wrist up so he could look at my hand. “You’re bleeding.” He took a cloth handkerchief from his pocket, folded it and pressed it against my cuts. He wasn’t looking at my hands or my face now, but stared over my head. “Thank you for your help.”

  Maybe the sight of blood made him feel sick.

  “You’re welcome.” I heard a buzz in my ears and felt dizzy, and had to brace myself with my other hand against his chest. I hadn’t realized my heart was pounding so fast, and then I felt his heartbeat under my palm, thumping as fast and as hard as mine. I moved my fingers until I touched his skin through a tear in his shirt, where I felt something cool and wet mingle with the blood from my cut hand.

  That was when I realized how good he smelled. Like spices and herbs simmering in honey.

  My skin felt tight and hot, as if it were shrinking, and my face practically blazed. I was behaving like an idiot, and probably bleeding all over his shirt, but I didn’t care. I focused on the feel of his heart, and listened to my own.

  The beats slowed, grew heavier, and then melded together, until there was no difference in the rhythm. His heart was beating with mine, exactly in sync.

  “We can ride back to my house.” The way my head was whirling made it hard to speak. “My brother can call for some help. I think I’m going to faint.”

  “I have you.” He put his arm around me. “Tell me your name.”

  “Catlyn.”

  He repeated it but he made it sound wonderful, like it was something besides my name, and then covered my hand with his. His fingers felt deliciously cool against my fiery skin. “You are so warm. Do you feel that, Catlyn?”

  All I could manage was a nod before the night started crowding in on me. Then I was falling, and he moved, so fast, lifting me off my feet and up into his arms.

  I wanted to tell him I’d be okay, that I just needed a minute to rest and get my head straight, but the world dwindled away and stars filled my eyes. I should have been frightened, and on some level why I wasn’t confused me. All I knew was a sense of feeling safe and protected, the way I did when I curled up under a warm, soft quilt on a bleak, stormy night.

  The last thing I remembered was the rider carrying me. Not to Sali, and not toward home, but into the shadows.

  Four

  A crick in my neck and the sound of biting and chewing woke me from a dead-to-the-world sleep, but when I opened my eyes I discovered that I wasn’t in my pajamas, my bed or my house. I’d been sleeping sitting up, propped against the trunk of a big black oak. I hadn’t gone back to the barn, hadn’t hidden my bareback pad, hadn’t rewarded Sali with an apple cookie.

  I was still outside.

  I lifted my head from where it had been drooping to one side (which explained the neck crick) and saw Sali tethered to a low-hanging branch a few yards away. “Sal? What am I doing here?”

  She lifted her head, snorted, and went back to cropping grass.

  A couple of stars still twinkled in the dark sky over my head, but a widening ribbon of purple rising over the tops of the trees promised the sun was on its way. It was almost dawn. I’d spent the whole night out here.

  I’d never been thrown from a horse, ever. Still, my first thought was that Trick’s warnings about night riding had finally come true, and Sali had gotten spooked and dumped me. Once I’d carefully moved my arms, legs and neck to make sure none of them were broken, I looked out at the fence where the dark boy had fallen.

  Dark boy. It sounded silly, but I didn’t know what else to call him. He hadn’t told me his name.

  The fence was not smashed to pieces, but completely intact, as if last night had never happened. When I checked my hand the cuts I’d gotten from untangling the dark boy from the barbwire, they had likewise disappeared. I didn’t even have a bump on my head.

  But if the whole thing had been a nightmare or a concussion, who had tethered Sali to the oak tree?

  I stood for a minute to see if I was going to pass out. I felt a little light-headed, and dew had left my clothes uncomfortably damp, but nothing else seemed wrong. As I walked to Sali she lifted her head again and watched me, her big dark eyes as calm as ever. I ran my hands over her to check for any injuries or signs that she’d taken a spill, but she didn’t have a scratch on her. She nuzzled my palm and bumped my chin with her nose when she didn’t find a cookie. For Sali, it was way past cookie time. r />
  “Who tied you up, girl? Was it him?” What was his name? Not knowing it made me feel a little nervous. He could be anyone, live anywhere, and I wouldn’t know until I saw him. He could even be our next-door neighbor. And why did thinking about him make me feel so jumpy?

  Once I felt sure Sali was all right, I left her and walked over to the section of fence where the dark boy had been bucked off his mount. At first glance it seemed fine, but on closer inspection I saw three of the cross ties had been replaced with less weathered boards, and the wire had been tacked into place with carpenter’s nails instead of the heavy-duty staples my brother used. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to repair the fence but make it look as if nothing had happened.

  Again, why?

  I glanced down to see if I could find any broken bits of wood, blood, or anything more to confirm what I remembered, and saw a cool sparkle in the grass by my left foot. When I bent down to pick it up, it turned out to be an old silver man’s ring with a broad band and a scroll-edged oval filled set tiny, flat red and black stones. The darker stones had been set in the silver to form the shape of a flying black bird. It felt heavier than my dad’s broad gold wedding ring that Trick sometimes wore. That was the only jewelry my oldest brother owned besides one small gold earring; Gray didn’t like wearing anything, not even a watch.

  I closed my fingers over the ring, squeezing it in my palm as a peculiar, hot sensation unfolded in my chest and crawled up my neck to boil over onto my face. I’d put my hand against the dark boy’s chest, and our hearts had beat in time. He’d caught me when I’d fainted and swept me up in his arms, and then … I didn’t remember anything else.

  It had to be his ring. More importantly, it proved that I hadn’t dreamt a thing.

  A shaft of sunlight streamed through the trees, making the black stones glitter. My anxious flush cooled and my head finally cleared. It was near dawn. The sun would be up in a few minutes.

  So would my brother Trick.