At that moment, the guy whispered, “Did you see who was after you?”

For a few seconds, I just stared at him. He lifted his hand from my mouth so I could answer. His body was heavy atop mine, and the world seemed to be spinning. I finally managed to say, “You mean, besides you?”

“Me?” He had no idea what I was talking about. Furtively, he cast a glance behind us, as if on the defensive. “You were running from someone—weren’t you?”

“I was just running. There was nobody after me except you.”

“You mean, you thought—” The guy jerked back from me that second, so that I was free. “Oh, hell. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to—Man, I must have scared you to death.”

“You were trying to help?” I had to say it before I could believe it.

He nodded quickly. His face was still close to mine, too close, blocking out the rest of the world. Nothing seemed to exist except us and the swirling fog. “I know I must’ve freaked you out, and I’m sorry. I really thought—”

His words weren’t helping; I was getting more dizzy, not less. I needed air, quiet, something that I couldn’t think of while he was so close to me. I pointed a finger and said something I’d hardly ever said to anyone in my life, definitely never to a stranger and certainly not to the single most terrifying stranger I’d ever met: “You—just—shut up.”

He shut up.

With a sigh, I let my head flop back upon the ground. I dug the heels of my hands into my eyes, pressing down so that I saw red. The taste of blood was thick in my mouth, and my heart was still thumping so hard that my rib cage seemed to shake. I could have peed myself, which would have been just about the only way to make this scenario more humiliating than it already was. Instead, I kept taking deep breaths, one after the other, until I felt like I was strong enough to sit up.

When I did, the guy was still there next to me. I managed to ask, “Why did you tackle me?”

“I thought we needed to take cover. To hide from whoever was chasing you, but that turned out to be, uh”—he looked embarrassed—“nobody.”

He ducked his head, and I got a good look at him for the first time. There hadn’t exactly been time for me to notice anything about him before; when your first impression of somebody is “psycho killer,” you don’t take time to analyze the details. Now, though, I could see that he wasn’t a grown man like I’d assumed. Although he was tall and broad shouldered, he was young, maybe about my age. He had straight, golden-brown hair that fell across his forehead, mussed from the chase. His jaw was strong and angular, and he had a solid, muscular body and amazingly dark green eyes.

But the most remarkable thing of all was what he was wearing beneath his long black coat: battered black boots, black wool trousers, and a dark red V-necked sweater emblazoned with a crest—two ravens embroidered on either side of a silver sword. The crest of Evernight.

“You’re a student,” I said, “here at the school.”

“About to be, anyway.” He spoke quietly, as if he were worried about scaring me again. “You?”

I nodded as I shook my tangled hair loose and started to pin it up again. “This is my first year. My parents got jobs as teachers here, so—I’m stuck.”

That seemed to strike him as odd, because he frowned at me, and his green eyes were suddenly searching and unsure. In an instant, though, he had recovered and held out his hand. “Lucas Ross.”

“Oh. Hey.” It felt weird, introducing myself to somebody I’d thought was trying to kill me five minutes before. His hand was broad and cool, and he gripped mine firmly. “I’m Bianca Olivier.”

“Your pulse is racing,” Lucas murmured. He studied my face intently, and I felt nervous again—but in a much better way. “Okay, if you weren’t running from an attacker, why were you running like that? Because that didn’t look like a morning jog to me.”

I would’ve lied if I could have thought of any plausible excuse, but I couldn’t. “I got up early to—well, to try and run away.”

“Your parents treat you bad? Hurt you?”

“No! Nothing like that.” I felt so offended, but I realized that of course that was what Lucas would have to assume. Why else would a totally sane person be running through the woods before the sun was completely up like she was escaping with her life? We’d only just met, so maybe he still counted me as totally sane. I decided not to mention the nightmare flashbacks, because that would probably tip the balance toward crazy. “But I don’t want to go to school here. I liked our hometown, and, besides, Evernight Academy is—it’s so—”

“Spooky as hell.”

“Yeah.”

“Where were you going to go? Do you have a job lined up, something like that?”

My cheeks were flushed, and not just from the exertion of the run. “Um, no. I wasn’t really running away. Just making a statement. Sort of. I thought if I did this, my parents would finally get how much I don’t want to be here, and maybe we could leave.”

Lucas blinked for a second, then started to grin. His smile changed all the weird pent-up energy inside me, transforming it from fear into curiosity, even excitement. “Like me with my slingshot.”

“What?”

“Back when I was five, I thought my mom was being mean to me, so I decided to run away. Carried my slingshot with me because I was a big strong man, you see. Could take care of myself. I believe I also took a flashlight and a package of Oreos.”