The Stars Never Rise

Melanie screeched and let go of my hand. She tried to run, and the demon lunged for her. I stepped between them, and the demon bowled me over. My head smacked against the floor—concrete covered by thin carpet—and the room spun around me.

The demon launched herself off my abdomen, driving the air from my body as she pounced after Mellie like a cat. I forced myself up, gasping, when she dragged my sister away from the door and tossed her toward the couch. Melanie stumbled foot over foot and caught herself with one knee on the center cushion.

“Run,” I gasped, still trying to catch my breath. But Melanie collapsed on the couch, crying, her knees tucked up to her chest.

“Where would she go?” the demon demanded, hunched in an agile squat between me and my sister. “We are everywhere. Seen but unseen. Known but unknown.”

“She’s lying.” I backed away from Melanie, trying to draw the mother-monster my way so my sister could run. But Mellie only cowered. “The war is over. We won.” The only surviving remnants of the demon hordes roamed the badlands as degenerates, and they were reportedly few and far between. And gradually dying off as they slowly starved for souls.

“Yes.” The demon advanced on me, swaying sluggishly like a bridge in the wind. As if she might pounce again at any second. “We did.”

“What does that mean?” I said as Melanie finally climbed off the couch and crawled toward the kitchen, and suddenly I wished we’d found a way to pay the phone bill. The Church could already be on its way.

“We are endless, Nina. We are legion.” The demon stood straighter and frowned, as if my lack of a reaction disappointed her. “That statement would have scared the shit out of your grandparents. But my point is that there are more of us than you could ever imagine. We outnumber the grains of sand on the beach, the drops of water in the ocean. The seas in hell rage with us, rising and falling in waves, cresting and crushing one another. We bleed and moan and starve, yet we cannot die. We think of nothing but escape, yet there is nowhere to go. Nowhere but here. And for every one of us that breaks through, anchored in your world by the souls we devour, there are thousands still waiting, begging, fighting for the chance. But souls are finite and your bodies are fragile hosts. There will never be enough of either to go around. The only way to stay here is to find a new host before the old one dies, and every time one of us fails in that endeavor, another will rise to take its place. You. Cannot. Win.”

Despair pinned me to the spot where I stood. Was she telling the truth? Were there really thousands of demons in hell for every one that had broken into our world? If so, why bother to fight? Humanity would fold in the end anyway. How could it not?

Then Melanie’s gaze met mine over our mother’s shoulder, and I remembered why we should fight. Why we’d been fighting for more than a century, though no one else seemed to realize the war was still raging.

Demons might win in the long run. In the future. That seemed inevitable. But this demon wasn’t going to win this fight. She wasn’t going to sell my sister and claim my soul.

This demon was going down.

“Run!” I shouted at Melanie. My sister stared at me in surprise for the half second it took our mother to whirl toward her. Then she took off for the back door, sneakers squealing on the scratched, faded linoleum.

The demon snarled and lurched after her, but I grabbed her thin arm.

She turned to me, her eyes flashing with a cold, bright white light. Her mouth opened wider than should have been possible with a human jaw, and terror shot through me like a thousand bolts of lightning. Suddenly I realized I had no idea what to do next. I hadn’t thought beyond distracting her so Melanie could get out.

The demon snarled again—at me this time—and the back door slammed shut as she jerked her arm free from my grasp and lunged for the door. And that was when I understood that she couldn’t hurt me. At least, she couldn’t kill me. Not if she still wanted my body.

I sprinted several steps and grabbed a handful of my mother’s shirt, then jerked the material as hard as I could. She made a strange strangling sound as the collar pulled tight against her throat. I yanked again, and she stumbled backward toward me.

“Keep running!” I shouted, with no idea whether or not Melanie could hear me. “Don’t stop and don’t come back! I’ll find you after—”

After what? After I killed the demon?

Demons couldn’t be killed; they could only be exorcised. But I wasn’t an exorcist. The best I could do was kill the host body—my own mother’s body—and even if I managed that, what was to stop the demon from then taking over my body? Which had been its plan all along.

Exorcist. I needed an exorcist. For the first time in my life, I was desperate to get in touch with the Church. But the phone was dead.