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.