her waist and turned the window crank, rolled the glass up for her. We hit a rut, hard, and the top of my skull banged into her jaw. Black pinwheels erupted and whirled and faded before my eyes.
“Slow down!” I yelled. “You’ll run us off the road!”
“Can’t slow down,” she said. “Behind us.”
I looked back through the rear window. They pelted after us, their hooves raising a low cloud of white chalk, five figures so pale they were like the ghosts of stallions.
Geri shut her eyes and sagged, lowering her chin almost to her breastbone. We nearly went off the road then, as the Corvette blasted into a hairpin turn. I grabbed the wheel myself and hauled on it, and it still didn’t look like we were going to make it. I screamed. That got her attention, drew her up out of her pain. She wrenched at the wheel. The Corvette slung around the corner so hard the back end swished out to one side, throwing rocks. Geri drew a ragged, whistling breath.
“What’s wrong?” I asked stupidly—like everything wasn’t wrong, like she hadn’t just seen her brother and her best friend trampled to death, like there wasn’t something impossible coming up behind us in a roar of pounding hooves.
“Can’t breathe,” she said, and I remembered the hoof coming through the windshield and slugging her in the chest. Broken ribs, had to be.
“We’ll get into the house. We’ll call for help.”
“Can’t breathe,” she repeated. “Paul. They’re off the merry-go-round. They’re after us because of what we did, aren’t they? That’s why they killed Jake. That’s why they killed Nancy.”
It was terrible to hear her say it. I knew it was true, had known from the moment I saw the horse with the burned face. The thought made my head go spinny and light. The thought made me feel like a drunk on a carousel, going around too fast, too hard. When I shut my eyes, it seemed to me I was dangerously close to being thrown right off the great turning wheel of the world.
“We’re almost to the house.”
“Paul,” she said, and for the first time in all the years I’d known her, I saw Geri trying not to cry. “I think there’s something broken in my chest. I think I’m smashed up good.”
“Turn!” I cried.
The front left headlight had been smashed out, and even though I’d traveled the road to Maggie Pond a thousand times, in the darkness we almost missed the turn to my parents’ place. She yanked the wheel, and the Corvette slued through its own smoke. We thudded down a steep gravel incline and swung in front of the house.
It was a two-story white cottage with green shutters and a big screened-in front porch. A single stone stoop led up to the screen door. Safety was eight feet away, on the far side of the porch, through the front door. They couldn’t get us inside. I was pretty sure.
No sooner had we stopped than the horses surrounded the car, circling us, tails twitching, shoulders bumping the Corvette. Their hooves threw up dust and obscured our view of the porch.
Now that we were stopped, I could hear the thin, whistling wheeze Geri made each time she drew breath. She hunched forward, her brow touching the steering wheel, her hand to her breastbone.
“What do we do?” I asked. One of the horses swiped the car hard enough to send it jouncing up and down on its springs.
“Is it because we stole his money?” Geri asked, and drew another thin sip of air. “Or is it because I cut one of the horses?”
“Don’t think about it. Let’s think about how to get past them into the house.”
She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Or is it just because we needed killing? Is it because there’s something wrong with us, Paul? Oh. Oh, my chest.”
“Maybe we could turn around, try to get back to the highway,” I said, although already I doubted we were going anywhere. Now that we were stopped, I wasn’t sure we could get going again. The front end of the car looked like it had met a tree at high speed. The hood was mashed out of shape, and something under the crumpled lid was hissing steadily.
“I’ve got another idea,” she said, and looked at me from behind tangles of her own hair. Her eyes were rueful and bright. “How about I get out of the car and run for the lake? That’ll draw them away,