When Stars Come Out (When Stars Come Out 1)

“Fuck!” he says, and his dark eyes contain a frantic fire. He lifts the blade to strike when a blur of black charges into him, knocking him off his feet. The next moment, Natalie is standing over me, reaching for my bound hands with a knife.

“Look out!” I shriek as Thane comes forward swiping at Natalie with his bloodied blade. She springs away, dodging his blow. With Thane distracted, I roll off the stone slab and land hard on the floor. I try prying my wrists from the restraints, but the tape bunches and pulls painfully against my skin.

Thane and Natalie are locked in a knife fight. While Natalie fights like a dancer—her thrusts graceful and deliberate, Thane is full of rage, slicing and cleaving, backing her into a corner. At the last second, she shifts into her raven form and takes flight overhead, but Thane is quick and grabs her claw, jerking her from the air and slamming her into the wall. She reverts to her hybrid form, a heap of feathers on the floor.

“No!” I scream and Thane advances on me. I bite at the tape around my wrists to loosen it. He lifts the blade over his head with both hands, and as it comes down, my hands are free and the thread comes to life in my palm. It lances him, piercing his chest. His eyes and mouth go wide as the thread passes through his throat and pops out one eye, then the other.

When he's consumed, Thane’s body falls, lifeless, to the floor and the coin lands on my chest with a thud, but I barely register the feeling because a dark cloud stands in the place where Thane was. It is powerful and crackles with the energy of the dead. Influence hisses at me, and I swear to Charon it rears back as if to punch me and charges forward. The sensation of It inside me is something I don't quite have words for. It's like the sensation of falling when you're upright and haven't even moved. It's the sensation that someone's in the room with you but you're alone.

It's searching for something to latch onto—a dark seed it can fertilize and grow into something all-consuming and terrible.

It finds what it's looking for in the form of my poppa's death. The day I found him dead after he put a gun to his head and blew his brains out. It's a day I've never forgotten, but one I don't bring to the surface often, yet Influence pulls it out of the dark pool of my mind, sets it pedestal and tells me to worship it.

I scream.

My brain feels divided in two. One side rational; the other desperate for death. Tears rush down my face and I feel split into a thousand jagged pieces. I'll never be put back together again. Too much of myself has been lost. With this new sadness comes a power I've never felt, a pump of adrenaline, motivated by a wish to kill myself.

I cannot continue.

I have to end the pain and suffering...

Now.

The pain in my shoulders where Thane stabbed me is nothing compared to the way my heart seizes at the memory of Poppa’s death.

I push Thane’s lifeless body off me. He had a knife. Where is it?

There!

Just a few feet from me. I grab for it, but someone kicks it out of my reach.

“No, no, no!” I howl. Disappointment crashes into me hard. I try following the blade as it slides across the floor, but someone stomps down on my leg then grabs a handful of hair.

I meet Lennon's ice-like eyes. My right hand is free to defend and I send my sharp nails down her face. Her skin comes loose under my nails and she screams, casting me aside.

“Bitch!”

Influence continues to invade my body, like thick oil, coating and suffocating all the parts of me that like the light.

“Your soul is mine!” Lennon hisses, reaching for me again. I grab her arms and pull hard. She tumbles over me and onto the ground. The impact jars her hold and then I'm free. I stumble to my feet. My mind still feels split in two, and I understand that as much as I need to be free of Lennon, I also need to be free of Influence. I call the thread forth, just as shadow-like creatures circle me like sharks smelling blood. When they rise to the surface, it's as thick, tar-like glue. I'm lodged in a puddle of darkling quicksand. I stumble, and my hands are consumed, quashing the thread.

I scream, trying to free myself when I hear Lennon laugh. She bends so that her eyes are even with mine. “This is for your own good. Once Influence takes hold, you won’t feel so desperate to die. You’ll be used to this feeling of hopelessness, and easier to control. Just like Thane.”

At the mention of Thane, I recall the marks on his wrists. Times when he’d cut himself, probably as a result of Influence taking hold.

Suddenly, it feels like someone’s cracking my head open, and I have this renewed determination to win, to defeat Lennon and Influence. I know how Influence corrupts. Grief might be all-consuming, but there are pockets of light—memories that bring a flood of feeling—sadness, yes, but also happiness and love and warmth. Sensations that make the darkness a little more worth it. All I have to do is knock some holes into his darkness.

And so, I think about all the nights spent with Poppa on the old quilt grandma Poppy made, watching the stars. He would spread it out, his crepe-paper hands decorated with brown spots and raised veins.

“Gotta bring Poppy,” he'd say and wink. “Help me set up the telescope.”

A chasm forms between my mind and Influence. Tendrils of Its being reach out, stroking, testing my resolve.

I prepare the tripod. Poppa assembles the telescope. I sit on the quilt, the dew-stained grass already soaking through the blanket to dampen my clothes.

“Tonight I spy with my little eye,” Poppa would say as he closed one eye to focus on something in the sky. He pauses and turns to look at me. “Well, why don't you tell me.”

The tendrils draw back as if burned, Influences hisses.