Eighteen-year-old Tanzy Hightower knows horses, has grown up with them on Wildwood Farm. She also knows not to venture beyond the trees that line the pasture. Things happen out there that can’t be explained. Or undone. Worse, no one but she and the horses can see what lurks in the shadows of the woods.
When a moonlit ride turns into a terrifying chase, Tanzy is left to question everything, from the freak accident that killed her father to the very blood in her veins. Broken and confused, she turns to Lucas, a scarred, beautiful stranger, and to Vanessa, a charming new friend who has everything Tanzy doesn’t.
But why do they seem to know more about her than she knows herself?
Snippet!
“Tanzy.” Vanessa’s voice is low behind me. A jolt of heat zips through my body, followed by an icy wave of dread that wraps around me like a wet blanket and starts to squeeze. I can hear myself gasping, but my lungs don’t recognize the oxygen each time it rushes in and out. I’m suffocating on air. I wait for her to gasp or yell, but she is silent. She walks over to “John,” in a plain, unhurried stride and then toes at him with her silver shoe. He lets out a low moan.
“We need to call an ambulance,” I stammer, wrapping my sweaty arms around my trembling frame.
“The hell we do. He’ll be fine,” she says and glares down at him.
“I think I really hurt him.”
“I saw what he was trying to do. That’s no way to treat a lady,” she scolds. He tries to yell but it comes out as a gurgle. “See, he’s fine,” she says as she kneels beside him and fishes his wallet out of his back pocket.
“What are you doing?” The whispered words claw their way up my throat.
“What do you know? His name really is John,” she says as she tucks his cash into the neckline of her dress and drops his credit cards and driver’s license down the storm drain. I hear her toss his wallet into a stack of cardboard boxes piled against the brick wall, but I can’t tear my eyes away from John’s face, which is such a bloody mess that I can’t remember what he looks like underneath.
“Come on, let’s go,” Vanessa says and puts a hand on my back.
“We’re just going to leave him here?”
“Of course we are.”
I stare at her, incredulous.
“This is his fault. If he hadn’t tried to do God knows what to you out here, then none of this would’ve happened,” she says. “Someone will find him, don’t worry. I’ll make sure of it, if it makes you feel better.”
