The Stars Never Rise

My hand still burned. That tingling beneath my skin had become the roar of a blaze that should have devoured my fingers but consumed the demon instead. She hung from the fierce light between us now, like a coat on a hook, limp and slowly swaying, though she seemed to weigh nothing.

I wanted to make it stop but didn’t know how, and my ignorance scared me almost as badly as the fire I couldn’t explain. As badly as the demon hanging from my open hand.

My front door flew open and crashed into the living room wall. I screamed, and the light in my hand blinked out through no conscious effort of mine.

My mother’s body crumpled to the floor like a heap of clothes.

Smoke rose from a jagged, scorched hole in her sternum, where my hand had been an instant before.

I’d burned a hole into my mother’s chest.

No, that wasn’t my mother. My real mother died before I was ever born.

The room spun. My lungs refused to expand. My vision swam and blurred.

“Don’t move!” The man in the doorway aimed his gun at me, and the world snapped back into focus. His black linen cassock was fastened with distinctive silver buckles matching the elaborate silver embroidery on the dramatic flare of his wide cuffs. The tails of his cassock were split up both sides to his hips, for ease of movement, and that split revealed his snug black pants.

His right cheek was branded with a stylized column of fire, scarred into his very flesh.

Even standing there in total shock, I recognized him instantly. Him, and the three others behind him, fanned out on my front lawn—a terrifying sight in their black Church robes and silver-buckled boots.

Exorcists.

No wonder the police hadn’t come. They’d called in a team of specialists. Real exorcists, trained, dressed, branded, and given authority by the Church.

But the cavalry had arrived too late. I’d already…

What had I done?

It had looked for all the world like I’d done to the mother-monster what Katherine Abbot had famously done to that demon on television nearly a century ago. But that wasn’t possible. She was an exorcist. She was the exorcist. A naturalist, the Church had called her, because she’d needed no training. She was born an exorcist. There hadn’t been one like her since.

Except maybe the Church was wrong about that, because what else could you call the boy in the alley, if not a natural-born exorcist?

That thought led to an even bigger question as I stared at the black-clad men aiming guns at my head.

What the hell were they going to call me?





“Put your hands up!” the man at the door shouted. “Did you see what she just did?” he said in a softer voice, that part obviously aimed at the men behind him. “She lit that bitch up!”

Yes, that was what I’d done. I’d lit the bitch up, as if my hand were a match and my mother were a kerosene-soaked rag. I’d lit her up, and now she was dead, and the demon inside her was fried. I’d lit her up, and that was when the world stopped making sense, because my mother was a demon, and I had a five-fingered torch for a left hand, and the exorcists were obviously scared of me.

A second man in a black cassock crowded the first, trying to see over his shoulder and into my house, where I still stood like an idiot, not sure what to do other than keep breathing.

In and out. In and out. Not so fast, Nina. You’re going to pass out.

“She’s a—”

“Yeah, she is.” The first man cut the second one off before he could say something I was pretty sure I wanted to hear. I was a what?

“We have to take her to—”

“Yeah, we do,” the first man snapped.

Whatever happened in the next few moments would change everything for me, and for Mellie. Everything. I knew that. Yet I felt powerless to influence the outcome.

“Turn and face the wall, and put your hands over your head!” the first man shouted, and I realized his aim had never wavered. There was a dead demon on the floor? but he was pointing his gun at me. As if I were the bad guy.

“But I didn’t—”

“Silence!” he shouted, and I jumped, startled. “Turn around and put your palms flat on the wall.”

Before I could decide whether to obey, something moved on the lawn at his back. The neighbors had come to watch our private drama, but they were being herded back to their own houses by the remaining two exorcists, in cassocks so dark they seemed to be part of the night itself.

The onlookers went willingly, because exorcists were rare and scary and carried nearly infinite authority. But they also went slowly because exorcists were rare and scary, and they might never have another chance to gawk at one. Or at the skinny girl across the street whose mother never left the house during the day. The girl who traded what little she had—what did you sell, Nina?—for food and wiped snotty noses on weekends to keep the lights and the heat on. The girl who was about to be taken away in handcuffs by real, live exorcists, which few in New Temperance had ever seen in person.

The small crowd was moving on, slowly, reluctantly, except for one young boy and girl, standing side by side on my lawn. Wearing identical expressions of terror.

Melanie. And Adam Yung.