to head back into his own turf and hunker down at the mill. Lily might understand, but would the others? After all, it was all his fault—Wendy’s words haunted him, her revelation that he was the reason she’d begun taking her duties as a destroyer of souls in earnest. He was the reason thousands of Shades and innumerable other ghosts around the city were gone. Their absence had been puzzling the Riders for weeks, but now he understood. It was all his fault.
The worst part wasn’t his shame, though. The worst part was the fact that he craved the Light. Like an addict seeking that final, fantastic fix, Piotr had to stop himself from turning around and rejoining Wendy in her room, from begging her to end his existence. She had been something he’d never encountered, something terrible and wonderful, and as much as he hated her, he still yearned for her.
Stomping along the back roads, listening to the distant hammer of the train pounding on the tracks, Piotr played their encounter over again in his mind. Caught in the limbo between spirit and flesh, Wendy had never looked more painfully beautiful. As she sank back into her skin the remains of the Light played about the edges of her body, glimmering with welcome—and excruciating—heat, leaving her almost smaller than before; slighter. Though now flesh, she’d appeared somehow insubstantial to the touch and definitely weaker in both spirit and will.
Driven by instinct, Piotr had perceived the well of flowing years coursing under her fragile living skin, tempting him with its bounty of life and Light. She was fragile in the limbo between spirit and flesh—he sensed that, like a Walker, he could take her life if he wanted to.
All he had to do was strike.
Safely distant, Piotr could admit to himself that he’d hated her then, and loved her, and hated himself for loving her. The blistering cold of his fury threatened to overwhelm him. She was a monster. She was his friend.
Ignoring her pleas for understanding, he’d left. To protect her, to protect himself.
It was the only part of that whole hideous encounter he was proud of.
The touch of Wendy’s human hand had been wonderful. The heat of the Lightbringer’s spiritual regard had been…more. And Piotr knew that he wanted more from her than she’d ever be willing to give. Sickened and torn, he started to walk faster, to jog, then run. Chased by his memory of Wendy encased in Light, Piotr fled, leaving the valley behind.
Homecoming came, homecoming went, then Halloween. Wendy spent every free moment roaming town, looking for a fight with the roving dead. Sleepless and careless of her safety, Wendy burned with a furious light.
Each night Shade after Shade melted away at the slightest touch and Walkers fell by the dozens. Wendy spent every night purposefully
More than once she thought she spied her mother in the distance. Wendy would speed up, hurry toward the ghost, only to find a random Shade. Her reaps were fury-driven and none-too-gentle. Wendy hated them all.
Driven now by some deep-seated urge to keep moving, to keep doing as she should have done the moment her mother fell, Wendy quit calling Eddie for help with reaping and instead borrowed her father’s car without permission. Jabber stalking at her side, Wendy spent the wee hours wandering all the darkest parts of the Bay Area, seeking out the forgotten places and darkest alleys with suicidal glee.
She quit visiting her mother and deleted the calls that the hospital left on her cell. Wendy had more important things to worry about now. She didn’t want to face Dr. Emma’s curious concern or her mother’s blank and emaciated eyes.
“When Dad comes home, I’m gonna tell,” Chel declared one night when Wendy snagged his keys off the nail in the garage. Jon, sitting at the kitchen counter, took one look at Wendy’s face and abandoned the area, taking his half-eaten mixing bowl full of mac ’n’ cheese with him. Chel, ignoring her twin’s escape, pushed on, sliding between Wendy and the door to the garage.
“Where do you go, anyway, when you take off like this? You’re not visiting Eddie, I checked. Pick up a skanky boyfriend you’re ashamed of, Wendy?” She eyed Wendy’s bare arms, peering knowingly at the hollows of Wendy’s elbows. “Or maybe got into something a little worse?”
“I go out,” Wendy replied, and thrust a twenty from the grocery fund into Chel’s hand. Money normally shut her nosy little sister up. “Like you can talk. Keep your trap shut or I’ll tell Dad how you’re slutting it up with that walking disease you call a boyfriend.”
Pushing Chel easily aside, Wendy reached into her sister’s purse, hanging on the hook beside the door, and pulled out a half-full bottle of Phentermine. “Or about these.”
Humiliated, Chel was in tears; she snatched the bottle back. “Fuck off!”
“Go to hell,” Wendy snapped back, pushing past her, and slammed the door behind.
Part of her felt bad about Chel. She knew her little sister was starting to run with the wrong crowd, starting to get in over her head both at school and after, but there were Walkers left to reap. Life, as her mother used to say, could take care of itself. Wendy just had to watch her own back. As she pulled out of the driveway, Wendy glanced up and saw Jon sitting in his windowsill, shoving spoonful after spoonful of cheesy pasta into his mouth and shaking his head. She ignored him, punched the volume on the stereo up, and spun out into the night.
Weeks passed. Wendy hunted.
Thanksgiving was subdued. Dad had left earlier; he wanted to spend the evening with Mom at the hospital, and Nana had tottered off to the guest room by eight, leaving Wendy to stuff the vast remnants of their Thanksgiving fare into her mother’s weathered margarine tubs and wash the dishes by herself.
It was a dismal job. The stuffing had been soggy, the turkey underdone, and Nana’s cranberry sauce had been the wrong kind, not the canned sort that you sliced in paper-thin layers but the other type, full of pits and twigs and gooshy blobs. Chel had picked at her plate—shredding her roll and feeding it to Nana’s ancient poodle under the table, hiding the dollop of green bean casserole under her mashed potatoes—but Dad hadn’t noticed.
Jon, on the other hand, ate more than enough for the both of them. He was starting to get round in the face and when Wendy, pitying him, had tried to convince him to join her in a pickup basketball game after dinner, he’d turned her down, preferring to mix up a batch of fudge instead.
“Fine,” she snapped, irritated that he wouldn’t help her take her mind off things—off having a holiday season without Mom. “It’s your gigantic ass. Do whatever you want with it.” Wendy stalked away, ignoring the bewildered hurt on Jon’s face.
Life without Mom, she thought hopelessly, had finally begun to fall apart. In her room Wendy hid in the back of her closet, pulled Jabber into her lap, and cried herself to sleep with the ghost of her mother’s cat in her lap.
Weeks passed. Wendy hunted.
Three months. It had been three months—twelve whole and seemingly endless weeks—since Piotr had learned that Wendy was the Lightbringer. Piotr haunted the trails between the city and the valley, lost in his thoughts and brooding.
To keep himself from literally haunting Wendy’s home, Piotr wandered. He crisscrossed well-known trails and streets until he was not a person in the strictest sense of the word, merely a restless spirit walking; striding through the hours of the day in agony until the only face he could see was hers, his every thought tangled around the pain they’d caused one another. Time away from her had given him some hard-earned perspective. Piotr understood why she’d lied about being the Lightbringer at first, but couldn’t wrap his mind around why she’d continued to do so. Didn’t she trust him? Didn’t she owe him that, at least?
This brooding lasted until Piotr, finally closing the circuit towards the city, found a pair of thick-rimmed glasses just outside Elle’s territory. Piotr leaned down, picked them up, turned them in his hand. They were black plastic, horn-rimmed, and familiar.
The bookstore was in chaos when he arrived. Most of the Riders were gone, as were the Lost, leaving only Elle, Lily, and James. When Piotr arrived he found Lily meditating cross-legged in a corner beside James. James, battered about the head and neck, puffy with bruises and gashes, sported several even more severe wounds on his arms and legs. As Lily’s hands moved over them the cuts knit closed, but they were not seamless or pretty. Lily did not have a Lost’s healing touch.
“What happened?” Piotr asked, but knew it was a useless, futile question. He was a tracker and what had
