“I don’t see any spider.”
“It ran away. It’s gone.”
He releases me with a shove and turns to open the fridge. I go to the coffee pot and quickly pour him a cup, hoping to distract him. When I put it down on the counter beside him he takes a drink, and I risk putting a hand to my hair to rub my aching scalp while his back is turned.
Dad drinks his coffee and I start to relax a little. As soon as the kitchen is clean and I’ve put a load of washing on, I’ll go out for a ride. Maybe I can catch up with the circus and follow them for a few miles, and dream about being with them. I wish I could go anywhere far, far away from here. I wish I had one penny to my name, or some ID, or even a bank card. I have nothing. Dad’s made it impossible for me to exist in this world without him. He did the same to Mum, giving her cash to do the weekly shopping and demanding the receipts and change as soon as she got back. In the end it all be
came too much for her, and she fled when I was twelve.
I don’t blame her for leaving. I just wish she’d taken me with her.
“Ryah.”
The calmness in his voice tricks me. I should know by now never to trust him when he sounds calm, but my head is filled with the circus. I turn around, just in time to see something flying at my face. The back of Dad’s hand slams into my left eye and cheekbone and I go sprawling across the floor, knocking over several kitchen chairs as I grab for anything to keep my balance.
I can feel Dad standing over me, but I can’t open my eyes. The breath has been knocked from my lungs and my face is throbbing with pain.
“What did you do with it?” When I don’t answer, he grabs me by the hair again and wrenches my face up to his. I scream. I can’t help it. The pain is intense.
“I said, what did you do with it?”
I try to hold back the tears, because he hates tears, but they spill in hot rivers down my cheeks.
“What did I do with what?” I whisper. I’m not sassing him. I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“You lying bitch, don’t pretend you don’t know. You’ve poured it down the sink, haven’t you?”
He lets go of me and stomps into the next room, and it finally dawns on me what he’s so angry about. The whisky bottle. I shouldn’t have touched it. He’s unpredictable when he’s drunk, but sometimes he’s worse when he’s sober. Meaner. More calculated.
I hear an ominous chunk from the next room, and all the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. He loved to threaten Mum with the shotgun, holding it to her throat or making her open her mouth and shoving the barrels between her teeth. Once, she wet herself she was so scared, and he made her lie in it for hours while she sobbed.
I pull myself to my knees, every bone in my body aching. I have to get out of here, or he’s going to do the same to me.
Chapter Two
Cale
It’s a lonely stretch of wooded farmland and fields I find myself passing through just after lunchtime. The sun lays lightly on the unmade road; wisps of radiance stirred by shadows. Jareth, my muscular black Friesian, walks at a leisurely pace beneath me. There’s no need to hurry. We’ll catch the circus up by dusk.
We pass by a pond that’s choked with weeds, and the water looks stagnant and unhealthy. Half a mile down the road is a cattle farm, and my gaze flickers over the empty sheds and deserted, churned up yards. There’s a heap of broken and rusting farm equipment in the field beyond, and not a living creature to be seen anywhere.
Jareth whickers, and shakes his mane.
“I know,” I murmur to him, gazing around. “I feel it, too.”
I never would have thought that a stretch of land could say, Go away, you’re not wanted here, but I get the message loud and clear.
I click my tongue, and Jareth breaks into a trot.
There’s a cottage up ahead, and over the sound of Jareth’s clopping hooves I hear a deep voice raised in a shout. Then a high-pitched scream. I clench the reins, drawing Jareth back to a walk, and peer through overgrown bushes to a crumbled and untidy house.
A side door flies open, and a girl with a long, straw-colored plait and a blue sundress dashes outside. She’s barefoot, and she races across the muddy yard and disappears into the stable. Barely a second later, a pale gray horse bursts out into the sunshine, the girl astride its back. Her eyes are wild and she’s clinging to the horse’s mane. For a moment I’m certain she’s going to fall off, because the horse wears no bridle or saddle, but as she races out of the front gate she’s more than secure atop the animal’s back. She gallops straight past me and up the road.
A middle-aged man in a stained T-shirt and with a grizzled gray beard stumbles out the front door, holding a shotgun and yelling at the top of his lungs, “Come back here, you lazy bitch!”
The girl and her horse are already a hundred yards up the road and moving fast.
Realizing he’s too late, the man heads for the stables, still clutching the shotgun. When he heaves down a saddle, the gun catches on the railings and it almost topples him.