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decided to skip the bus home and walk. It was cold as hell—enough that her throat stung anytime she breathed through her mouth—but she didn’t care. Riding home on the bus would just make the school day seem longer. What she wanted now was to be alone.
    However, it crossed her mind that being alone was maybe the opposite of being careful in a town that might be infested with vampires. So instead of taking the quick way home—which led down a winding country road—she decided to go the long way on Garrett Boulevard. Traffic would be busy, and there would be the occasional cyclists and joggers around. She’d just be alone in spirit, but that was enough. She’d get home in plenty of time to spend a long, enjoyable evening with her head under a blanket, screaming in pent-up frustration and anxiety from one of the worst twenty-four-hour periods in her life.
    But the Garrett Boulevard path was longer than she’d counted on, and her cheeks and nose were frozen numb long before her home was in sight.
    Why didn’t I buy that car last summer? Skye thought as she trudged along the side of the road, hands jammed in the pockets of her long down coat. Her reasons had seemed good at the time—she could afford only a junker, she couldn’t have taken it to Evernight, and her parents had hinted that they’d buy her a nicer car as a graduation present. At that moment, though, with the temperature hovering around ten degrees, Skye would’ve given a lot for some old junker car with a working heater.
    Maybe I ought to have asked Balthazar for a ride home . But could vampires get driver’s licenses?
    Just as she was beginning to get lost in a stupid but delicious daydream of Balthazar sweeping up to her high school on Eb, wearing a long black cloak or something similarly Darcyesque and romantic, extending his hand to her in front of Craig, Britnee, and everybody, Skye glimpsed her first jogger—a diehard who was out despite the chill. She raised her hand in a wave—and then stopped.
    That wasn’t a jogger.
    Even at this distance, she recognized it as Lorenzo.

Chapter Four
    TRACKING A VAMPIRE WAS DIFFICULT WORK.
    Usually, Balthazar liked it that way, because that made it difficult for anybody to track him. Whether he was evading Black Cross or his own disturbed sister, Charity, he valued the ability to disappear if and when he wished.
    When he was the one doing the tracking, instead of the one being tracked—not so much fun.
    All day he’d worked his way through the woods, painstakingly searching for evidence of animal kills. A forest hid its secrets even at the best of times, and in such cold weather, with snow thick on the ground, the bodies were hard to find by either sight or scent. After long hours of combing through the underbrush and checking the trails, Balthazar had found only one other vampire kill. It, too, bore the vicious bite marks but not the throat gash that would’ve marked it as Redgrave’s; he thought the fox had died within the hour.
    Lorenzo is alone right now , Balthazar thought. Redgrave had been in this area with him earlier, though, and probably some others—his tribe waxed and waned over the years, sometimes as few as five or six, but sometimes as many as twenty-five. Whom might he meet with again? Constantia? Charity?
    Don’t think about it. Focus . Lorenzo was on his own for now, and that was all that mattered.
    Balthazar leaned down close to the carcass, breathing in deeply. Lorenzo’s scent lodged deeply within his predator’s mind. It felt good to have an excuse to be a hunter again, to let those powerful instincts claim him.
    He squinted at the ground; the snow cover was too patchy here for him to track Lorenzo by his footprints, but scent alone would do it. He began walking along the path, moving faster and faster as he became surer of his route. The path led up the hill, toward a public space of some kind—the