Riders (Riders, #1)(22)

I was tired and lately being awake sucked, so.

I went to sleep.

*

I woke with the image of my dad’s death seared into my retinas.

It was, um …

It was something I hadn’t seen or dreamt about in a while. In months, actually. Since I’d joined the Army. But that night—it was still night, still dark when I woke up—that night everything was right there, sharp as the day it’d happened.

It was summer before senior year. My dad and I had just bought the Jeep and I was looking forward to a couple months of surfing and fishing with Griffin and Casbah. For summer jobs, Casbah was teaching little genius kids how to build rockets in science camp. Griff was helping our high school coaches with baseball clinics. I wanted to do that too, but I decided to work for my dad instead.

He had never pushed the path he’d walked on me—not going into the military or taking over his roofing business—but I got the feeling he wanted me to see the company he’d built from nothing. And I wanted to be able to look him in the eye one day and tell him it wasn’t for me, if it ever came up. It felt like the right thing to do. To try out, at least. So I agreed to spend the summer learning the ins and outs of running a roofing company. Basically doing whatever he asked me to do. Sometimes that meant making pickups at lumberyards in his truck. Other times it meant lunch runs to Subway. Mostly, I was learning the labor part. The sweat-your-ass-off-in-the-sun part.

I was bored out of my skull within the first week, but I somehow survived June and July. On August 2, a Tuesday afternoon, with only a week and a half left before school started back up, Dad called me down off a house in a residential neighborhood. We’d been weatherproofing two leaky skylights. Tons more exciting than laying down roof tiles. I got into his truck and we drove a couple of blocks. One of the neighbors had seen the skylight work and wanted a bid for a new roof.

Dad hauled a ladder off the truck and climbed up to the warped wood-shingle roof of a yellow bungalow, his black notebook and yellow pencil tucked into his back pocket. I stayed in the passenger seat, the air-conditioning cranked up against the August heat, texting with my friends. Casbah had heard about a party someone in our rival high school was throwing that night and our messages were all harebrained ideas about how we’d get in. Idiot stuff like posing as pizza-delivery guys and dropping in through skylights—which I’d conveniently just learned to remove that day.

Then something stopped me. This light creeping feeling, like when you realized a spider’s been crawling on you. I diverted the AC vents, but I still felt off.

I looked out my window.

My dad stood on the roof. He was looking down at me with the strangest expression on his face. I remember it perfectly. It was a look I’d never seen before, like something terrible had happened that he couldn’t fix.

The pad and pencil dropped out of his hand. One stopped, the other went rolling. I watched my dad bend down to pick them up. His knees thudded onto the roof, then his shoulder, and then it hit me that he wasn’t kneeling.

He was falling.

The pencil dropped into the gutter, but he kept going. He kept going, all the way down to the brick walkway. As I watched from an air-conditioned truck, texting my buddies about a party.

I went around and around with those images. Seeing the ladder and that warped roof. The yellow number-two pencil. My dad’s face. Basically just torturing myself for a couple hours like that until I couldn’t take it anymore.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep again so I stood and scoped out the darkness. There was no sign of dawn on the horizon. I didn’t see Daryn, or anyone else, but I waited a little longer to be sure I was alone. Then I took a closer look at the metal cuff gleaming at my wrist.

What was this thing? I rested my right hand over it. A hum like a mild electrical current vibrated into my arm. I waited for more but nothing else happened. “Come on, magic metal. Show me what you got.” Nothing again. “Go, you piece of—”

A sound swelled in my ears like thunder, but deeper. A noise like an oil drum rolling. It was coming from down the beach.

I turned toward it, searching the night.

Out of the fog came the most stunning thing I’d ever seen.

A horse.

A massive horse, almost as wide across as my Jeep, coming at a full gallop.

In the darkness, and with the fog, and at a distance, I couldn’t be sure, but its coat was a bizarre red color, like blood from a deep cut, but bright. A deep, bright red. Even stranger were the flashes of gold and yellow on its hooves and mane.

Flashes that looked like flames.

I knew nothing about horses but its ears were pressed back. When I added that to its speed and trajectory—fast and headed directly toward me—my situation suddenly seemed dire.

“Stop!” I raised my arms. “I said stop!”

The horse lowered its head and sped up, each massive hoof sending up explosions of sand. I only had seconds before I was steamrolled, so I did the only thing I could.

I sprinted for the water, high-stepping through the shallows until I was deep enough to dive. Then I kicked, swimming under the surface, pushing through cold black water until my lungs burned.

When I came up, I was well past the breakers. The horse had followed me a little way in. Its coat put off so much illumination, it had created a circle of aquamarine water around it, like the ocean had pool lights. Its mane had gotten soaked and hung straight against its strong neck. I didn’t see fire anymore, though. I wondered if I’d only imagined that. I didn’t think so.