Running

        Cillian ran and I ran, my lungs burning with every breath I took and tears blurring my vision but I pushed on. Behind us, the house that had raised me kept getting smaller and I wanted nothing more than going back to properly grieve the two people that dedicated 25 years of their lives to me.

          Nova will find them in the morning. Somebody will realize something is wrong and would bury them properly. It’s a small town after all.

         I don't remember most of the first few streets but I do remember gravel biting through the soles of the shoes I wore. I remember Cillian's hand closing around my wrist every time I slowed down, not gentle, not asking, just towing me forward like he'd already decided grief could catch up with me later, once I survive this phase.

          I remember thinking, somewhere underneath the panic, that May Town had never once in my life looked like this. These porch lights I'd walked past ten thousand times were suddenly strange and hostile, every shadow between them a place something could be waiting.

"Left," he said, the first full word either of us had managed in three blocks. "Left, now, go."

"Where are we even….." I tried to ask but he wasn’t having it.

"Left, Aurora." He snapped and I clicked my mouth shut.

I went left. Some part of me had apparently decided that arguing with the man currently keeping me alive was not wise and I hated how easy that decision turned out to be.

We cut through a stranger's backyard, then over a fence I definitely bruised something climbing, and down an alley that smelled like garbage and wet concrete, and it was there that Cillian finally stopped. He flattened both of us against a brick wall in the dark, his arm braced across my front like that would do anything against whatever those things are.

"Are they….." I started and he fixed me with a glare.

"Quiet." His voice had dropped to almost nothing, his eyes fixed on the alley mouth, and in the bad light I watched something in his face go carefully blank, the way you go blank when you’re doing math you don’t like the answer to. "Two more. Maybe three." He said to himself but I could hear him.

"Following us?" my heart rate spiked and my blood went cold. I don’t want to die tonight.

"Following the smell of fear, a.k.a you."

"That’s not funny." I tried to be stern but my voice came out shaky and timid.

"I wasn’t joking." A beat. "A little bit joking."

I laughed. It came out broken and much too loud for an alley we were apparently hiding in, and I clapped a hand over my own mouth. Cillian's arm was still across me, and for one moment the only thing I could think about was how warm he was, how his heartbeat under my knuckles, where my hand had landed flat against his chest without my permission, was going twice as fast as it should have been for someone who looked this calm.

"Sorry," I whispered.

"Don’t be." His eyes found mine in the dark, and something in them wasn’t blank anymore. "You just watched two people die. You’re allowed to be a little hysterical."

"Is that a clinical diagnosis?"

"It’s a Cillian diagnosis. Less accredited but statistically more accurate."

I felt my throat close up and he must have felt the shift too because his hand came up, slowly and settled against the side of my face, thumb brushing under my eye where apparently I'd started crying without noticing.

"Hey." He said gently and just like that, I allowed myself to break down.

"I don’t know how to do this," I said through my tears and closed throat. "I don’t know how to just keep moving. They’re back there. They’re just back there and I’m standing in an alley crying on you."

"I know."

"Do you? Because you seem remarkably okay for a guy who also apparently grew night vision and superhuman door-breaking skills in the last hour." I kept out the part where he changed into something that wasn’t quite human.

Something flickered across his face, there one moment and gone the next. I saw the moment his guard went up and he became careful again. He stepped back enough to put a polite distance between us, though his hand lingered a half-second too long against my jaw before it finally dropped.

"I’ve had longer to get used to things not making sense," he said. "You get thirty more seconds. Then we move."

"Thirty generous seconds."

"I’m a generous man."

"You once threatened to report me to the city over a delivery truck."

"That truck was blocking my driveway for eleven minutes."

"We’re being chased by monsters and you’re still doing the truck bit."

"It’s a very good bit." But his mouth had softened at the corner, almost a smile, the kind I’d catalogued exactly once before across a quiet street and hadn’t expected to see again so soon, especially not while he was covered in blood that.

"Can I ask you something," I said, "and will you actually answer it, or is that also a later problem?"

"Depends on the question."

"Were you always like this? Before tonight, I mean. Was there ever a version of you that was just, you know,  a guy. A normal, boring guy who happened to live across the street from me."

He was quiet long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer at all.

"No," he said finally. "There wasn’t. I’m sorry you didn’t get to meet him. I think you would have liked him better."

"I don’t know about that." My voice came out softer than I meant it to. "I’m getting fairly attached to this version."

Something shifted in his face, quick and unguarded, gone before I could be sure I'd seen it at all.

"Thirty seconds is up," he said, voice dropping back into that flat, focused register. "There’s somewhere we can go. Someone I trust with my life. He’ll know what to do next."

"A person? An actual person, or another thing wearing a person like a coat?"

"A person. Mostly." At my look, he almost smiled again. "He’ll explain that better than I will. It’s not far "

"Define not far." I said with my eyebrows raised.

"Far enough that I need you to run again."

"I just cried on you in an alley. I’m going to need at least a minute to compose myself into something resembling a person who isn’t falling apart—"

"Aurora." He said it like he’d practiced saying it gently and abandoned the effort halfway through. "I need you to run."

"Who is he? This person you trust with your life. Do I get a name, or is that also classified." I continued pestering him.

"Orion." A muscle worked in his jaw. "He’s going to have a lot of opinions about tonight. Try not to take them personally."

"Opinions about what, specifically?"

"About me not telling you things I probably should have told you two years ago." He said it fast, like ripping something free before he could think better of it, and didn’t look at me while he said it.

"That’s an interesting thing to bring up while we’re being hunted." I said sarcastically.

"I’m aware of the timing, yes." He grunted.

I looked past him, down the alley, and saw it. It was not a person, not quite, just a wrongness in the shadows where the streetlight didn't reach. It was too patient for something that is supposed to chasing someone.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. Running." Sacred as hell, I put all my high school P.E class to use.

We ran. And somewhere in the miles that followed, between one gasped breath and the next, I understood two things with total, useless clarity: that I would follow this infuriating, secretive, occasionally very funny man anywhere he asked me to, and that whatever was behind us hadn't given up. It had simply decided, for now, to enjoy the chase.