The Stars Never Rise

“How big a horde are we talking about?” I clutched the strap of my satchel. A strange itch had developed in my legs, way too deep to scratch. My muscles ached with it, as if I’d been in one position for too long and now my body wanted to stretch. To move.

“Grayson said it was small, so ten or twelve, I’d guess, unless Devi and the others have made a decent dent.”

That itch in my legs swelled, extending through my arms and down into my feet—a physical sense of urgency, as if my muscles knew we should have been running but my brain didn’t yet know why. I dropped into a squat and bounced on the balls of my feet, then set my satchel down and bent to touch my toes, hoping stretches would alleviate some of that itch to move. To run.

“What’s wrong?” Finn set his duffel on the floor and ducked to catch my gaze. “You feel something?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure what, though. I just…I feel like we should be moving. Fast. Now.” I could sense something strong and dark racing toward us and felt compelled to run in the opposite direction.

“It’s the horde. While you’re transitioning, they can feel you and you can feel them.”

“Yeah, well, I feel like they’re getting closer. Really close.” I picked my bag up and tugged on his arm. “Let’s go.”

He pulled his hand from mine, and I would have been disappointed if I weren’t too scared to focus on anything but the burning in my muscles, urging me to run. “Devi and Reese are on their way, and we’ll be stronger in a larger group. Especially considering you’ve never really fought a degenerate.”

But my instincts weren’t telling me to fight. They were telling me to flee. Right then. As fast as I could. “I have to go.” I settled my satchel higher on my shoulder, and he let go of me with obvious reluctance. “Come with me, Finn. We’ll go to your safe house and meet the others there.” My legs felt like tightened coils about to explode from the tension. My feet ached to run. My head was alive with thoughts that had no form or meaning, like the fuzz on the TV during a rare news outage.

“Nina, look at me.” He put one hand around each of my arms, and his green-eyed gaze searched mine. Only it felt more like an assessment of my mental state. “Calm down. Ride it out. You want to run because your body knows you can’t fight them all on your own. But you’re not on your own, and if we’re not here when Devi gets here, she’ll kill me.” Shadows hid most of his face, but the determination in his voice was very clear.

Screw Devi! Finn was an exorcist. He’d been through what I was going through, right? So why couldn’t he understand that my body was giving me a command I had no choice but to follow? I couldn’t stand still for one more minute, with my muscles burning and my—

His mouth met mine, and I almost choked on surprise. Then his hand slid behind my neck and his head tilted, and I had a second to decide whether to bite his tongue off or kiss him back.

I’m not sure why I kissed him back.

Maybe because he was the only person I’d spoken to in the past twelve hours, other than my sister, who hadn’t tried to kill me, possess me, grope me, or arrest me. Maybe because I’d never been kissed by someone who wasn’t clumsy and hurried, or ashamed of what he wanted, or using me for an entirely different reason than I was using him. Maybe because kissing Finn felt good when I needed to feel something that wasn’t scary and dangerous and terrifyingly uncertain.

What I do know is that I committed to that kiss like I’d committed to little else in life. My fingers brushed over short stubble at the back of his jaw on their way into his hair. He sucked my lower lip into his mouth and I let him have it, then I gave him more. I lived in that moment, fighting panic and urgency with the boldest, most breathtaking and brazenly immodest human contact I’d ever felt.

Then something caught the back of my shirt and I screamed as I was ripped away from Finn, reaching for him, my fingers grasping. I twisted, my heart pounding, ready to scratch and claw at the degenerate who’d snuck into our sanctuary, surely the first of dozens ready to chew me to death and slurp up my insides.

My feet met the floor and someone swung me around by one arm.

A girl’s face came into focus in the dark, and she was definitely not a degenerate, though she did look mad enough to rip my arms off. Before I could truly process the fact that I’d just been caught in carnal contact—yet another sin on top of the charges already leveled against me—she said my name.

“You’re Nina?” Her dark eyes narrowed as she studied me, though she couldn’t have seen much in the shadows. Her grip on my arm bruised, and my heart kept racing, even though she was human, thus unlikely to eat my face off or devour my soul.

I nodded, too surprised to ask the questions rapidly coalescing from the chaos in my head.

“Well, Nina, we’ll get along just fine if you remember to keep your mouth off my boyfriend.”





“I’m not her boyfriend.” Finn stepped into sight on my left, carrying my satchel with his duffel over one shoulder. “Let her go, Devi.”