The Stars Never Rise

“Been looking all day,” he said, and if he was winded, I couldn’t tell. “In the end, I just followed the sirens.”


I wanted to ask how he’d known the sirens would lead to me, but there was no time to talk after that. The minute my feet hit the grass in the yard that bordered mine, footsteps pounded behind us as the exorcists—at least two of them—gave chase. When I glanced back from the cover of darkness, flashing lights were painting the whole neighborhood in frantic bursts of red and blue.

The first cop car screeched to a stop in front of my house, and a second later an ambulance swung into the driveway, but the boy in the dark clothes pulled me forward again before I could see anything else between the houses.

We ran and climbed fences and dodged streetlights, huffing with exertion, our breath exploding in little white puffs that shone in the moonlight and trailed behind us with each step. Soon we outran the flashing lights, and right after that, the sirens stopped. Speedy medical care could no longer help the exorcist—he’d been shot in the chest.

My mother had been beyond help long before the police had arrived.

I tried to think of nothing as we ran—nothing but putting one foot in front of the other without tripping—but racing through a neighborhood I already knew by heart didn’t take much focus, and my brain was working much faster than my legs. The questions I hadn’t been able to put into words with my mother’s body cooling at my feet were suddenly there all at once, shooting through my head too fast to truly contemplate, much less voice. With the sharp wind stealing my breath, each inhalation felt like swallowing cold steel needles.

And still we ran, his warm hand around mine, pulling me through my own neighborhood from one backyard to the next, then across the first major street with hardly a glance in either direction. A horn blared as a car screeched to a stop two feet away, but the boy just kept pulling me, faster, farther.

The night was a blur of cold air and dark buildings, broken only by bright patches of light at every intersection. Our footsteps pounded, pounded, pounded, but that sound changed when we ran from concrete onto grass, then onto gravel, then back to concrete. At last, when my fingers were numb from the cold, my legs were sore from the run, and my lungs ached and burned with every breath, the boy pushed open a dented metal door in the center of a long, narrow alley, then tugged me into the building. And finally, we stopped moving.

I leaned over with my hands on my knees, gasping for breath, my heart thudding so hard my chest felt like it was going to explode. I’d never run so fast or so far, and even though we’d outrun the police and the exorcists, I still felt like I was being chased. No, hunted. I felt like I was being tracked or stalked by something I couldn’t see—something I could almost see—and even though it hadn’t found me yet, whatever it was, it was still searching. Looking. Scenting me out. And it would find me. I knew that like I knew to breathe or I’d die.

But I didn’t know how I knew.

I pulled my hand from the boy’s for the first time since we’d left my house.

“It’s okay,” he said when he noticed me scanning the room, peering into the shadows for this threat I couldn’t see but couldn’t shake off. “I don’t think they saw which way we went.”

“It’s not that.” I wasn’t sure how much he’d seen, why he’d been near my house at just the right time, or why he was helping me, but my na?veté had died around the time I lost my first baby tooth. He knew all he was going to know about me until I knew a little more about him.

His eyes narrowed as he studied me. “You feel something?” he said, and I blinked as if I didn’t know what he was talking about, because I shouldn’t have known what he meant, and he shouldn’t have known what I felt—the pursuit of…whatever was chasing me.

None of this made sense.

“I feel like my mother’s dead and I don’t know how that happened.” I breathed deeply while the burning in my lungs slowly faded. “I feel like my pregnant sister is in Church custody and probably terrified. I feel like I shouldn’t be standing in an abandoned warehouse with some guy I don’t know.”

I feel like my life is a book, and someone turned the page before I was ready, and now I can’t follow the story.

“That wasn’t your mother.” His green eyes practically glowed, reflecting moonlight shining in from a broken window overhead. He brushed his palms on his dark jeans, and when he turned to gesture through a doorway at the body of the warehouse, I realized that his black hoodie was threadbare and almost worn through at the elbows. “Come sit, and I’ll explain what I can.”

A new possibility crept in to overwhelm the fears that had driven my flight from the police. I shook my head slowly, hands curling into fists at my sides. I didn’t know the alley we’d run through. I didn’t know the building. I didn’t know the boy. And I had no idea how he knew about my mother.