Read Online A Night Without Stars by Jillian Eaton - Free Book Online Page B

a basic instinct every animal recognizes when it’s threatened.
    I veered off the street. It felt too open. Too exposed. I went through backyards instead, clinging to the shadows as I ducked under clotheslines and crawled over fences, skinning my knees and ripping my hands apart with splinters.
    I didn’t feel pain. I tucked it away in some dark, dusty corner of my mind along with the fear and the mind numbing terror. I only had one goal now. One thought. One reason to keep going.
    Get home. Get Dad. Get Travis.
    I was halfway across a neatly manicured yard when bright floodlights, the kind meant to make robbers piss their pants, kicked on. I didn’t think, I just dove.
    The hedge of bushes didn’t provide a very soft landing, but it beat being seen. With a soft grunt of effort I turned around so I could peer out through the twisted thicket of branches and diamond shaped leaves, my gaze trained on the rectangular cookie cutter porch. I ignored the plastic toys scattered haphazardly across the lawn. I didn’t want to think of children being trapped in the house of horrors, and so I locked them in a corner too.
    A woman dressed in red burst out the back door, her hair a wild tangle of honey blonde, her eyes so wide I could see they were brown even from where I cowered in the bushes.
    She skidded down the steps and went sprinting across the lawn. From my hiding spot I silently cheered her on. If someone else could make then I could make it. I wouldn’t be the only one running from the monsters in the dark labyrinth of suburbia.
    But fate is a bitch, and the woman tripped over one of her own kid’s toys and went crashing to the ground.
    I was halfway out of the hedge, ready to run out and help her, when I saw she wasn’t alone.
    Something had chased her out of the house. Something fast. Something dangerous. It prowled around the edges of the light as the woman struggled to her feet and stumbled towards a wooden gate at the edge of the lawn. I could see the hope in her face. She thought she’d made it. She thought she was free.
    The thing chasing her loped forward with a casual grace. The woman spun. Her fingers slipped off the gate latch. Her shoulders sagged.   
    “No,” she whispered brokenly. “No, please no, my kids, please my little girl—”
    Her captor stepped into the light. My breath caught in my throat. Of all the things I’d been expecting, I never imagined the monsters would look like this .
    The thing that stalked the woman was human yet not human. A girl yet not a girl. She could have gone to my high school. Her hair, brown and sleek and swept over one shoulder, was normal. Small gold hoops caught the light and sparkled at her ears. Her blue jeans and black t-shirt could have been worn by any teenager the world over, but her piercing blue eyes… and the blood that dribbled down her chin… that was about as far from normal as you could get.
    “Stop begging,” she said, cutting the woman off. “You know I hate it when you beg. It is so very tedious.”
    “Why are you doing this?” the woman cried.
    Shut up , I ordered from the bushes. Shut up, shut up, shut up!
    Unfortunately, while it seemed crazy psycho people were a thing now, telepathy still wasn’t. The woman kept blubbering until, without warning, the girl grabbed her wrist and swung her around like a rag doll. The woman hit the gate and crumpled to the ground. This time she didn’t get back up.
    And I saw, I saw even when I squeezed my eyes shut and covered my mouth to keep myself from crying out, that the woman who’d begged for her life and the lives of her children wasn’t wearing red clothes. She was wearing clothes soaked in blood.
    The girl sighed and perched a hand on her hip. Her fingers were long and elegant and painted deep, dark red at the tips. “I told you to stop. Now look what you’ve made me do. Stupid human.” She kicked her fallen prey and started to walk back towards the house. Halfway to the porch she paused. Her