The Stars Never Rise

I crossed my arms over my chest and clung to the righteous anger building inside me, because that was infinitely better than confusion. “I know because I’m not evil, and I can’t possess people, and I don’t come from hell, and I’m not thousands of years old!”


“All that is the same for me, except for the part about possessing people. And I don’t have any choice about that. Besides, if I were a demon, I’d have been sucked back into hell years ago.” He met my gaze again, and it felt weird to see Finn’s eyes in someone else’s face. “Do you want to sit?”

“I want to understand.”

“I know. Me too.” He gestured at the couch behind me, and I sat because the alternative seemed to be passing out from a combination of shock and exhaustion. “Want something to drink?” He was already pulling open the refrigerator door before I could answer. The fridge wasn’t new, but it was newer than the one at my house. And this one actually held food.

Finn emerged from the kitchen with a bottle of water in one hand and a clear, unlabeled bottle of amber liquid in the other. He held both up, silently asking me to choose. I pointed to the water. I hadn’t had alcohol since I was fifteen, newly sterilized and determined to prove to myself that my body was still my own, no matter what the Church had done to it.

The Unified Church had no official problem with alcohol, but overindulgence in anything was considered a sin, and any consumption of alcohol by a minor was considered overindulgence. But that had nothing to do with me turning down the…whiskey? I didn’t want a drink because I needed a clear head, and I needed to stay awake until I was sure I was safe, at least for the moment. And I couldn’t do that until I knew how and why Finn was in Reese’s body instead of his own.

He set the unlabeled alcohol on the counter and carried two bottles of water into the living room, where he handed me one, then sank onto the opposite end of the couch, facing me. “Okay.” He cracked open his bottle. “I know this is weird, and I owe you answers. Probably more answers than I actually have. So…ask me anything.”

The questions tumbling through my head were so tangled up that separating one from the rest didn’t seem possible. Then my gaze caught on a framed photo standing on the end table. In the picture, a woman in her forties laughed with a girl not much older than I was, who could only have been her daughter.

“Whose apartment is this?”

Finn frowned with Reese’s fair features. “After all this, that’s your first question?”

“Yeah. Who are the women in that picture? Where are they?”

He twisted to pick up the photo, then studied it while he spoke. “As near as we can tell, the girl is in college. There’s a university pennant on the wall in her room.”

There used to be lots of colleges in the United States. Lots of choices and opportunity. After the war and the necessary restructuring, only a dozen or so remained. None of those were within a day’s drive of New Temperance, which meant the daughter was unlikely to come home and find her apartment occupied by teenage outlaws.

“And her mom?”

“Her mother’s name is Angela Reddy. Ms. Reddy is dead, as of two days ago.”

“What happened to her?”

“Maddock exorcised the demon. The host’s body died in the process,” he said. “Fortunately, her rent’s paid up until the end of the month, so…”

“So you killed her, then moved into her apartment.”

“She was a demon, and she doesn’t need this place anymore, but we do.” His brows rose in a very un-Reese-like challenge. “Have you ever slept in one of the ghost houses? Or in a tent in the badlands?”

My skin crawled at the thought. Rumor had it, some of the ghost houses still held the bones of the people who’d died there a century before. Many of the houses had become nests for degenerates. And a tent in the badlands? I couldn’t even wrap my mind around the danger that represented—nothing but a sheet of nylon between me and whatever monsters roamed the barren ruins of the Midwest. Tents may be waterproof, but they certainly weren’t degenerate-proof.

Still, the apartment…

“It wasn’t coincidence, was it? I mean, the first demon you ran across in New Temperance happened to have an absentee daughter and a paid-up apartment at the back of a complex near the town wall’s north gate?”

“There are no coincidences.” Finn set the photo on the end table and wedged his bottle of water into the crook of his bent leg. “There are more than a few demons in New Temperance, and we couldn’t take them all on, even if we wanted to. We’re here to get you out, which means we need to fly under the Church’s radar as much as possible, which means minimizing food and supply runs. The best way to do that is to set up camp in a furnished apartment. Of all the demons we saw during recon, the one who lived here had the most ideal setup.” He shrugged Reese’s broad shoulders. “So we sent her back to hell and moved into her apartment.”