Sky Rider

by Nancy Springer

  “Damn. I can’t.…” Panting with pain, she had to stand still. Couldn’t go any farther. No duh; why had her fool head started thinking she could do the things she used to do? Good grief, it had been how long since the accident? Time enough to know better. She knew she couldn’t go hiking around—

  But I have to find Skye!

  Where was he?

  He should be haunting his death site. But he had not been there that afternoon. So he could be anywhere.

  Dusty looked around at dark hills, a freckle drift of stars, a silver wisp of moon. Her breathing quieted. She listened to the rippling of water in the pond, the breeze in the evergreens. She sighed, and caught the faint fragrance of bluebells.

  Something made her think of her mother. For just a whisper of an instant it was as if she could see Mom sitting at a kitchen table in the night sky, cradling flowers as white as moonlight in a crystal amethyst vase, talking with spirits.

  How did Mom do that? How did she find her angels; how did she know they were there?

  Standing amid starlit night, Dusty closed her eyes. “Mom,” she whispered, meaning Let me be more like her.

  The thought spooked her a little, because to be like Mom was to be, well, different. According to most people, crazy.

  “So what,” Dusty muttered. It was a crazy world.

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then stood as still as the night, just—just being there. Hearkening.” Waiting for something, she wasn’t sure what. Trying to be brave. Trying to feel a presence in the night.

  “Skye?” she whispered. “Where are you?”

  Fear knifed into her like a lightning bolt, jolting her eyes open. Danger.

  Terrible peril.

  But not so much for her as for him. Skye. Somewhere Skye was in serious trouble.

  Dusty sensed this in a wordless moment, not so much understanding as feeling—she had to help, she had to help, she had to find him. “Oh,” she whispered, and then she stamped her foot and—she wanted to yell, but it came out a whimper because everything hurt. “Oh. Skye, you idiot, where are you?”

  A white shadow moved. Dusty jumped, then stared, then trusted other senses more, hearing the sound of small hooves, smelling a warm grassy odor. She smiled as Pinocchio trotted up to her like a big dog.

  “Pinoke.” She reached out to touch his shaggy back. Without pausing, he trotted around her as if she were a goal post, swiveling her.

  “Pinoke?” she whispered. “You know?” But duh, of course he knew. Horses saw spirits all the time.

  Pinocchio slowed just a little to head back downhill.

  Dusty set her teeth, hung on to his furry back, and followed.

  It was all she could do to keep up with him. She jarred along at her fastest walk, panting more with pain than with exertion. God, she hated this, she hated not being able to run and ride and do things, she hated feeling crippled. She hated her father when he was drunk; she hated what his drunk driving had done to her.

  They were heading … back toward the house?

  “Pin-oc-chi-o,” Dusty panted, “what—”

  The she saw. No thunder sounded, and no thunder of hoofbeats, either, but there might as well have been thunder and lightning. At a hard, headlong, eerily silent gallop, Tazz swept like a red storm out of the forest, over the fence with no more effort than wind, down the pasture.

  Red? Yes, Dusty could see him red in the night, aglow like a horse made of fire. She could see Skye riding the way she used to ride, like a lick of white fire on the big horse’s back.

  No, not like her. Dusty knew that she herself had never been so beautiful, or so incandescent with rage.

  She ran toward Skye, or tried to run.

  It occurred to her that she ought to be afraid. Any sane person would be afraid. But there was no time, she had to concentrate on fighting her pain—every step felt as though it was going to kill her—and since when had she been sane anyway?

  “Skye!” she cried.

  If he heard her he gave no sign of it. He was ahead of her, galloping toward the house. She would never reach him in time.

  “Skye! Your mother wants me to tell you—”

  Tazz skidded, wheeled, reared. Spectral hooves struck at the air above Dusty’s head. Skye’s fierce face glared down at her. “What?” he shouted. “What did you say?”

  As if facing an angry, frightened colt, Dusty stood still and kept her voice level and low. “I was talking with your family—”

  Tazz’s forehooves plummeted to the ground beside her. No thud, just a weird silence as the horse stood inches from her. She could see his flared nostrils, but she could not hear his breathing. His eyes were absences in his red, glowing head. It was Tazz, her own beloved Tazz, yet she did not dare to touch him.

  She said very quietly to Skye, “They miss you a lot. Your father, your mother, your brothers. I went to see them—”

  “You—you scum! Stay away from them! Don’t you go near them!”

  She had known that he was furiously angry, but not that he was angry at her. What had changed? Surprise made her stand there with nothing sensible to say. “But they’re worried about you,” she whispered.

  “You don’t deserve to know them. Traitor.”

  “I—”

  “You let me think you were my friend! When your father is the one who killed me!”

  Oh.

  Somehow he had found out, or figured it out. He felt betrayed. Dusty stood aching, with no answer for him, because what he had said was all too likely true. Even though she’d had nothing to do with what had happened, a wordless guilt made her silent.

  “He is a murderer. And it looks like he is going to get away with it in this world. But I know a world where he will not get away with it.” Skye reached out to tug on Tazz’s black-fire mane and turn him away from her.

  She could barely believe what she was hearing.

  Yet—yet she did believe. “You’re going to—you’re going to kill him?”

  “Yes,” he said curtly over his shoulder. “With one touch of a fingertip. I have that power.”

  She knew he did. She had already seen and felt his power.

  In a lightning flash of intuition as deep as sky, as deep as her mother’s eyes, Destiny comprehended the full meaning of soul peril, and she felt dread settle upon her like a mantle the size of the night and far darker. Oh, Skye. If he used the power to kill, he would no longer have the power to heal—not others, not himself. He would be dead, soul dead, for eternity, more dead than her father would be.

  And already he was riding away.

  Shaken as if she had been struck, trembling, Dusty did not know how to make him see how wrong his hatred was. And how deadly. How final.

  She tried. “You want to be a murderer, too?” she shouted after him as fiercely as he had shouted at her.

  “As if I care, traitor girl?” His voice floated back to her as he cantered away.

  Chapter Seven

  On Tazz, Skye shot across the pasture like a comet in the night. Dusty ran after him, jarring her back so badly that tears ran; she sobbed with each step—but it was no use. Skye was going to reach the house before she could hobble past the pond.

  On—my—horse.

  Suddenly she was furious. She yelled, “Tazz!”

  Ten years had to count for something. When Tazz was a fuzzy brown baby and she was not much more than a fuzzy baby herself, she had napped in the straw with him, she had pillowed her head on his softly breathing side. When Tazz was a little older, she had slipped his first soft halter on him. When he was a yearling, she had put the rubber bit in his mouth and walked behind him with the long reins. She had saddle trained him so gently that he had never been frightened, not once. And after that they had always been together. Whole days of riding. Camping trips in the mountains, racing the deer.

  “Ta-azz!”

  She saw him hesitate, then surge forward again.

  Her anger was gone, but all the memories were in her voice a
s she cried out, “Razzle My Tazz!”

  He whinnied, and the weird red-fire light in him flickered out. Still galloping fast and proudly, he swung in a wide circle, speeding back toward her, flashing like crystal in the night, with a ghostly sheen. Even though Skye’s hands were tugging his mane and Skye’s heels were thumping his sides, Tazz slid to a cow-pony stop in front of her, his eyes shining like dark moons. She put a hand on his forehead, and he arched his neck so that she could rub the itchy place between his ears.

  “You—you total traitor!” Skye could scarcely speak, he was so furious. “You gave him to me!”

  She had no intention of taking Tazz away from him, Tazz glimmering like a ghost, Tazz belonging so obviously to an afterworld now. But let Skye think what he liked, the idiot. Dusty shot back at him, “And what have you given me?”

  “I healed you!”

  “For five minutes once. Then you took it away. Just like that.”

  On Tazz’s back, he sat still. His beautiful face had gone intently still. He whispered, “I did?”

  “You mean to tell me you haven’t noticed?”

  “I … I’ve been so mad—” But then his lips closed into a hard line. “Why should I care?” he said between his teeth. “You’re his daughter.”

  He pulled back on Tazz’s mane, trying to wheel away. But Dusty kept her hand on Tazz’s head, and Tazz stayed where he was.

  “What do you want?” Skye yelled at her. “You want your horse back?” He made it sound like a threat.

  Not if it meant having Tazz lame or dead, no. She shook her head.

  “What, then?”

  She knew better than to say it to him, but she wanted what his mother wanted; she wanted him to be at peace. And … maybe peace did require justice.

  She tilted her head back to look straight at him up on the tall horse, to meet his smoldering gaze. She said, “Give me a little time to talk with my father.”

  When she limped into the house, her father was still sitting in the same place, staring at the same wall.

  She stood in the doorway. “Dad?”

  He did not look at her. He had not looked at her when she came in.

  “Daddy. Listen to me. They’re coming to get you.”

  For a moment nothing happened, and then his head moved. His eyes, focused on her, were like the eyes of a suffering animal. Pain, fear. Not much else there.

  She asked him, “Did you do it? Did you put that cable there?”

  Now there was a flash of anger. He moved his mouth, spoke. “You’re my daughter.” His voice was scratchy, as if he was having trouble using it. “Whose side are you on?”

  His daughter—but what did she feel for him? She couldn’t tell whether she loved him or she was stuck with him. “You’ve been drinking,” she said. “I ate ketchup sandwiches for supper.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe it would be better if you went to jail! At least you wouldn’t get drunk there. And if you did—” She couldn’t say it, the K-word: kill. She felt sure he hadn’t meant to kill anyone. This was her father; she knew him. This was the daddy who had read her horsie books when she was little. And then when she was a bit older, set her on her first pony. Gave her a leg up at her first big show. Fixed her tack-box latch, hitched the horse trailer, made a wooden sign, RAZZLE MY TAZZ, for the stall door. She knew that he was kind and she also knew that he tripped over his own ego a lot of the time, he could be stupid that way. “If you are the one … who put that cable there—”

  “Nobody can prove anything!”

  “Dad, I don’t care! If you did it, then …” What in God’s name was she going to say to him to make him understand that he had worse things than jail to fear? That she was on his side? That she was trying to save him? “If you did it, you have to face up to it.”

  He didn’t seem to hear her at all. He wasn’t looking at her. “Nobody can prove that I personally did a thing!” It was as though he was chanting his mantra. “Nobody can prove that I did it.”

  Something chilled Dusty’s spine, and she listened to the night. She heard nothing. No door opened and closed. But no door had to. She felt an incorporeal breath in the air. A presence.

  She said to her father, “Don’t tell it to me. Tell it to him.” She turned.

  Skye was there. Right behind her.

  Skye stood in the dark kitchen, now lighted by his white-hot righteous rage. Skye stood no taller than any ordinary person, yet he seemed vast. He was just a sixteen-year-old boy who had been killed, a kid whose photo had been in the paper, a kid who would mostly be forgotten by the time the newspaper went into the garbage—yet he was the universe, all the dying, all the crying. He was everyone who had ever died young.

  With no sound of footsteps, he walked past Dusty, toward her father. He shone as hard as porcelain. Halfway between Dusty and her father, he stopped and stood like a knife made of white fire. Like embodied lightning.

  Dusty’s father stumbled up from his armchair with a hoarse shout and backed away.

  “He sees me,” Skye said, softly, the way a wolf growls deep in its throat.

  “Get him away from me! What’s going on?” Mr. Grove’s voice rose to a childish squeal. “He’s not real … is he? But I haven’t had a drink! I-I can’t—”

  “So tell me,” Skye interrupted him. “Go ahead and tell me how nobody can prove anything, and therefore I’m not really dead.”

  Dusty’s father had gone fish-belly pale. Backed into a corner, he could not move. “It can’t be D.T.s,” he whispered. “What is it?”

  “Judgment,” Skye said.

  “Dusty.” Her father’s glance shot to her, panicked. “Dusty! You see him too? Help me!”

  She said, “Just tell the truth for once.” Skye had not yet raised his hands. If he did, Dusty did not know what she was going to do. Get between him and her father, maybe. Plead with him. But she hoped something else would happen. She still hoped Skye would somehow get past this himself.

  She had given up hoping for her father.

  “I did it for you, Dusty!” His gray, frightened stare clung to her.

  Her mouth came open soundlessly, for she could not understand what her father was saying, not at all. Skye must have felt much the same way; he said, “What?” But her father looked only at her, not at Skye.

  “I did it for you. I just wanted … I just wanted people to keep out. I just meant to scare them. That cable—” Amos Grove stopped and swallowed hard, darting a glance at Skye; then his gaze veered back to Dusty and begged her to understand as he went on. “I thought—I thought maybe it would dump a kid on his butt. You know you fell on that trail a hundred times and never got hurt. I never meant to hurt anybody.”

  Skye growled like distant thunder. “So you did put it there. You admit it.”

  “I admit it.” Amos Grove faced him for a moment—but only for a moment. Then he had to look at the floor.

  Dusty still did not get it; how could he have thought he was helping her? “What do you mean, you did it for me?”

  “Because of … because of what happened!” He stared at her as if she ought to know this. “If you couldn’t ride out there anymore, nobody was going to.”

  She began to comprehend. It had started after the accident. “You never told me,” she said, her voice low because she was starting to feel for him again.

  “I-I couldn’t talk about it. But I felt so bad—you, not able to get on that horse, go cantering up those trails—I had to do something.”

  Being at fault was the one thing her father had never been able to handle. And he knew the accident was his fault. Guilt had made him stop drinking for a while. But guilt had also made him do this terrible thing.

  Dusty told him, “If you’d said something to me, I would have told you no, don’t do it. You knew it was wrong.”

  “I-I didn’t mean for somebody to get killed—”

  “You had to know somebody could get hurt. Those ditches with nails in them—”

  “The
y were just meant to blow tires out!”

  “What if somebody stepped in one? You knew it could happen. And the cable—”

  “I never meant—”

  Skye took a step toward him, then stood like carved ivory with a silver sheen of rage. Skye spoke very softly. Too softly. “I’m just as dead whether you meant it or not.”

  Amos Grove stared at him, rigid, and didn’t answer.

  “Dad,” Dusty appealed, “deal with it!”

  His face, stretched with fright, tightened and settled into grim quietude. He nodded. Accepting. Finding some courage. With only a small hesitation he said, “I’ll go to the magistrate in the morning. Give myself up.”

  All Dusty could do was look at him. The room got misty. She felt herself smiling. He was back. Finally her father, her capital-D Daddy, the Daddy she could depend on, was back.

  He said, “Shoot, why wait until morning? Jail can’t be any worse than the hell I’ve been going through. I’ll call the cops now.” He straightened, pushed himself away from the wall, and took a couple of shaky steps toward the phone.

  But Skye blocked his path. “I will say what you will do or not do.”

  “Skye, let him go.” Dusty felt a chill of fear. “He’s—he’s going to face up to it, don’t you see?”

  Skye didn’t turn to look at her. Instead, he stepped closer to her father, poised like a sword, like a burning saber of rage, glaring. White fire pulsed and flared in him. “So you’ll get, what, a few years in prison? A few months on probation? Not good enough. I’m not dead for a few years or a few months. I’m dead for all eternity.”

  Mr. Grove said, “I-I know. I’ve run out of excuses. There’s no excuse.” He faced Skye, and his voice quavered. “All I can say is—I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry’s not good enough.” Skye raised his hand. White flames flickered at his fingertips.

  “Skye, no!” Dusty leaped to stand between him and her father, but then for a moment she couldn’t speak. Her back hurt too much. And she was too … afraid.

  “Get out of the way!” Skye’s yell was a banshee shriek. His contorted face menaced, specter pale, sneering. It was hard to believe he had ever been beautiful. His fury was turning him into something ugly. Evil. A ghoul.