Main Street, almost knocking Mrs Lewington, her mother’s boarder, clean off her feet.
Ignoring the old woman’s protests and the stares of several townsfolk, Evie kept driving as if she believed that by driving fast enough she could somehow put enough distance between herself and the past.
Chapter 2
As she tore up the road towards her house Tom’s words played on a loop in her head.
Everyone believed that Lucas had ditched her and that’s why she was acting the way she was. As if she’d ever act this way over a boy breaking up with her. Tom had no idea. None of them did. And she knew that it was partly her fault – she hadn’t told them the truth. How could she? What would she say? Oh, by the way I’m actually a demon Hunter. Yeah, just like Buffy. But no, I can’t prove it because we killed all the demons and saved the world, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
And Tom expected her to go and see the school guidance counsellor! She laughed under her breath as she swung into her driveway. And tell them what exactly? That she had issues because her boyfriend had been stabbed to death right in front of her? That she dreamt every waking moment, and every sleeping moment too, of finding the man who’d done it and of killing him?
Should she tell them about Cyrus, a Hunter just like her, who had sacrificed himself – taking her place – to end the war no one had even known was raging all around them? Should she go all out even, and admit that she had nightmares about Thirsters? And about demons with razor-backed tails and ones with acid-coated skin? Should she admit that, when she finally managed to get to sleep at night, it was only after taking pills pilfered from her mother’s bathroom cabinet and that when she slept it was with one hand under her pillow, her fingers locked tight around the hilt of a knife? Should she tell them she was too scared to look in the mirror these days because she didn’t recognise the girl staring back at her?
Maybe when she was done telling the school counsellor all about it, and if she wasn’t already locked up in a padded cell, she could write an essay for her English teacher on the subject of fate. She had so much personal experience to flavour it with. She could tell him all about how she’d been told she was the fabled White Light, whose destiny was to end the war between humans and unhumans. And how, like an idiot, she’d believed it all, and it had turned out to be a lie.
There was no such thing as fate. There was only life. And death. And, in between, only heartache and hurt.
She pulled up in front of the house and killed the engine. Her mother was home. She could hear her upstairs, talking on the phone. Evie’s senses had sharpened to needle points in the last eight weeks. She didn’t know at what point they’d stop improving – when she could hear the termites burrowing through the wooden stairs in the basement perhaps? She’d learnt to drown background noises out until they became a fuzzy white noise in her head, similar to the sound of the river rushing at the bottom of the orchard behind the house.
She skirted around the house to the back veranda. The leaves had almost all fallen. The trees were standing knobbly branched and embarrassed almost as far as the eye could see. She looked away deliberately before her eyes could fix on the tree she’d climbed with Lucas but it was too late. Her feet had already paused, tripping on some tree roots buried beneath a pile of leaves and her memory had already gone ahead and hit the replay button, even though remembering that day felt like someone was prising her rib cage open with rusty forceps and poking her heart with a blunt scalpel.
She could see Lucas standing balanced in the fork of the tree, reaching down with one hand and pulling her up as if she weighed less than nothing. She shuddered a little in the cool air as she remembered how he’d her caught around the waist when she’d lost her balance. How he’d smiled and the sunlight had brushed his face, making shadows dance across his lips.
A howl brought her out of her daydream. She spun around. Lobo was standing