Read Dark Star for Free Online Page B

she could probably carry everything in his apartment by herself, I didn’t feel my presence was necessary. I went for a run.
    After everything that had happened that day, I needed to clear my head. I kept thinking about Mom’s words—it’s just safer this way—and about what she wasn’t telling me. Secrets. That hint of worry on her face that she struggled to hide. I thought back to my dream: the darkness of the city, the silence. I thought about Kelly. Her twisted silver sandal. Her eyes closed, her face blue and marbled and dead.
    And then I found myself at Gideon’s.
    It wasn’t a surprise, really. Gideon only lived a mile or so away, and my legs were accustomed to taking me there. He opened the door before I could knock, giving me that lopsided little grin of his.
    “I had a feeling you’d show up,” he said.
    “What, now you’re psychic too?”
    “Say that a little louder.”
    I shrugged and followed him down the stairs to his room, then flopped onto his bed while he turned off his computer game. The two cats lounging on his pillows looked irritably up at me.
    “How was your talk?” Gideon asked. A third cat began to slink out from under the bed, and he bent to catch it.
    I groaned. “Sidekick Extraordinaire is moving in with us.”
    “Leon?”
    “No, her other sidekick.” I flipped over onto my stomach.
    “And you’re upset.”
    “Not … upset, exactly. Unnerved.” It still wasn’t anything I could put into words.
    “Worried about having a man in the house?”
    I rolled my eyes at that. “I wouldn’t call Leon a man.”
    He grinned. “You are harsh on my gender today.”
    “So this is a male solidarity thing?”
    “It won’t be such a big deal,” Gideon said. “Aren’t you always complaining that he’s there all the time anyway?”
    “Exactly. He already treats me like the younger sister he never wanted—and if I wanted a brother, I’d hire you.”
    “What, do you really think he’s going to tie your shoelaces together and put grasshoppers in your bed?”
    “Okay, maybe I wouldn’t hire you,” I said, laughing. Gideon certainly had big-brother experience, though. His parents had been one of those couples that try for years to have a child, finally decide to adopt—and then promptly have three more children. As far as I could tell, all of his sisters worshipped him. I figured he was kidding about the grasshoppers. “But that doesn’t make me any happier about this.”
    “Leon’s not so bad.”
    Easy for him to say. For some reason I truly could not fathom, Gideon and Leon actually got along. “You just think he’s cool because he can teleport.”
    “How is that not cool?”
    Well, I had to give him that one. It wasn’t as spectacular as, say, flying—but it did have a certain appeal.
    I sighed. “At least he knows how to bake.”
    “What’s really bothering you?”
    “I don’t know.” I rolled to my side, dislodging one of the cats. Gideon’s room was below ground level, but he had a window well, and the blue of twilight drifted in. “There’s something going on,” I said. “Mom won’t talk about it, of course—but I think something’s happening. I’m worried about her.”
    “Your mom knows how to take care of herself.”
    I knew that. She didn’t need protecting. She was strong, and not just physically. She’d had to be strong.
    But something was out there. Something I felt in more ways than just Knowing.
    And it seemed, for just a moment, in the thready blue light that moved across the floor, that it was calling to me.

6
The night Gram had given me my Nav cards, she came into my room and sat on the floor, spreading the cards out before her.
    The memory was always clear in my mind: it had been one of those dark midwinter nights when the frost on my window was so thick I couldn’t see out and the wind was so loud it didn’t rattle so much as roar. Gram loved nights like that. The best time for stories, she always said, and she lived to tell