The Stars Never Rise

“Wait!” Mellie cried as a man in a black cassock took her by the arm.

“Don’t touch her!” Adam’s dark hair gleamed in the light from the front porch. He dodged the man reaching for him, then grabbed Melanie’s hand, but as the exorcists pulled her away from both me and Adam, Mellie began to struggle.

Then her mouth opened.

Don’t say it! I shouted in my head, but of course she didn’t hear me.

“That’s my house. That’s my sister!”

“No!” I yelled, drawing their attention back to me. If they thought there was something wrong with me, they might think there was something wrong with my sister too. “Leave her out of this. She has nothing to do with it.”

“Melanie!” Adam was being restrained at the edge of the yard.

“Nina!” Mellie tried to push her way past two of the exorcists, and at the exact moment a third turned to help them, wood splintered in the kitchen and someone kicked in my back door.

“Nina!” a new voice shouted. I whirled toward the sound of my name and saw the boy from the alley standing in my kitchen. The boy with the green eyes.

“Don’t move!” the exorcist team leader shouted again, and I turned to him on instinct, just in time to see one of the men on the lawn aim his gun at my sister, who’d become quite belligerent.

“No!” I screeched, and though I couldn’t hear the footsteps at my back over the shrill sound of my own voice, I could feel them reverberate in the floor beneath my feet. “Don’t touch her! She’s pregnant!”

I regretted it before the words even left my mouth, but I’d had no choice. They would have hurt her if she didn’t stop fighting, and she wouldn’t stop fighting until they hurt her.

At my last word, silence descended. Melanie stopped struggling. Adam blinked at her, stunned, from across our small yard. The exorcist lowered his gun, and the other two let my sister go. What remained of our lawn audience stared in shock because the skinny girl who traded favors for food, and who was now being arrested by a team of exorcists, also had a pregnant fifteen-year-old sister.

Clare Parker and her public execution were no doubt eclipsed in those moments as we made New Temperance scandal history.

Warm fingers folded around my hand, and the boy’s green-eyed gaze met mine as the world fell apart around me. Then he began to pull me backward into my kitchen. “We have to go,” he whispered, and though no one else could have heard him, his words seemed to trigger the return of the planet to its regular rotation. Only, it felt like things were spinning even faster this time.

“Stop!” The team leader raised his aim to my head again.

The boy lifted his right arm. Sound thundered from the gun in his hand and echoed mercilessly in my head. The man in the doorway stumbled backward onto the front stoop. Moonlight glinted off his silver buckles and shone on something leaking onto his cassock as he fell.

“Let’s go! Now!” the boy shouted, and before I could fully process the fact that he’d just shot the exorcists’ team leader, he was pulling me through my kitchen toward the back door.

“Wait!” I insisted as the rest of the team raced across the lawn toward my house, guns drawn. “Melanie!”

“They won’t hurt her if you leave her,” he said. “But they will shoot through her to get to you if we try to take her with us.”

The exorcists gathered around their injured leader, and one of them spoke into a wireless radio, calling for help. The other two still aimed guns at us.

“If you don’t come with me now, they’re going to take you, and I can’t help you once you’re in Church custody,” the boy said while they yelled at him to drop his weapon. “We have to run.”

I didn’t understand everything he’d said, and I wasn’t even sure I’d heard all of it. But his point sank in.

Run.

I was more than familiar with the concept—I’d been caught shoplifting at two different grocery stores the year my mom stopped paying the bills, and both times I’d gotten away by following that very imperative.

Run.

He must have read my decision on my face, because he pushed the screen door open, and when I stepped out onto the stoop, already shivering from the cold, he snatched my coat and satchel from the kitchen chair where I’d dropped them after school, then followed me out.

The screen door slammed shut and gunfire exploded from the front yard. Bullets thunked into wood behind us. The kitchen window shattered, and glass sprayed the dead lawn. I ducked. Melanie screamed. People started shouting. Then the boy was pulling me down the steps and across my tiny backyard. He shoved my coat at me, and by the time he’d wedged his first foot into the chain-link fence and started to climb, I could hear more sirens.

“How did you find me?” I demanded, shoving both arms into my coat. Then I followed him up the fence.