The Stars Never Rise

I nodded, still trying to process all of it. It made a certain brutal sense. “How long do you think it’ll be before someone notices her missing from work?”


Another shrug. “A few more days, hopefully. Devi called in and said she had the flu. They practically begged her to stay home.”

I cracked open my bottle of water, then stared at it. I was sitting on a dead woman’s couch, drinking a dead woman’s water. Hell, I was now a dead woman’s daughter. How was it possible that without changing at all, the world we lived in now looked nothing like the world I’d thought I understood twenty-four hours before?

“How do you do it?” I sipped from the bottle, struggling to bring my thoughts back on track, then screwed the lid back on. “How do you…get in there?” I waved my empty hand at Reese’s body.

“I don’t know.” He looked surprised by the sudden change in subject. “I’ve never really thought about it. I just kind of…step in. Figuratively speaking, of course, since I don’t actually have any feet.”

“Why not? Where’s your body?” That was probably the strangest question I’d ever had to ask.

“I don’t have one.”

All the questions skittering around in my head stuttered to a stunned halt, and the abrupt internal silence left me reeling. Grasping for his meaning. “What do you mean? How can you not have a body?” A sudden horrible possibility made my heart ache for him. “Are you…dead?”

He actually laughed, and even in Reese’s voice, the laughter sounded like Finn. “I’m not a ghost, Nina. I just don’t have a body. I never have, at least not as far back as I can remember.”

“How is that possible? Are you human?”

“Of course I’m human!” He wasn’t laughing now, and I realized I’d hurt his feelings. I felt bad about that, but my initial fear had taken root again, deep inside me, and I couldn’t think past it.

People have bodies. Demons don’t, at least in our world—who knows what they look like in their world?

Only demons could possess someone else’s body. Only demons would want to, right?

True, I’d never heard of a bodiless demon not getting sucked back into hell, but I’d never heard of a bodiless human at all. Was one really any less believable than the other?

“I’m sorry, Finn, I just…I don’t understand. I mean, if you don’t have a body, how do you know what you are?”

“Well, I guess I don’t. Not for sure.” He shrugged. “But I know what I’m not. I’m not a demon, Nina. I have a soul. In fact, that may be all I have.” He held my gaze, waiting for my response, and just like every time he’d looked at me since the moment we’d met, there was no sign of doubt in his green eyes. He meant everything he’d said. Including the fact that he didn’t know for sure what he was, and I didn’t know how to process that.

“Okay,” he said, when I’d opened and closed my mouth twice without managing an actual response. “I know that’s a lot to chew on at once, but I need you to understand something.” When I nodded, he took a deep breath and continued, in Reese’s voice. “I may not know for sure what I am, but I know who I am. I’m left-handed, no matter whose body I’m in. I love spicy food and hate licorice, no matter whose tongue I taste it with. My favorite color is blue—the exact shade of the deepest blue in your eyes,” he said, his gaze glued to mine, and something deep in my stomach flip-flopped so hard and fast I almost lost my balance sitting still on the couch. “I’ve learned a lot about who you are too.”

I shook my head, denying what couldn’t possibly be true. “We met less than twenty-four hours ago.”

“It’s not the amount of time that matters, Nina. It’s what you do with it.”

“What did you do with the time?” My voice was only half a whisper. That was all I could manage with him looking at me like that. As if nothing else in the world existed. As if there was only me, and this moment.

“I paid attention.”

“To me?”

“To everything. To the green peas you picked out of your beef stew. To your secondhand clothes.” He ran one finger over the frayed hem of my long-sleeve T-shirt. “To the way you frown when you’re thinking, as if your disapproval should be enough to change whatever’s wrong.” He blinked and his focus deepened somehow, as if he could see right through my eyes and into my soul. “I paid attention to the fact that you got your sister out of the house and faced down that demon yourself, with no idea you could actually handle the fight. And I paid very close attention to the way you kissed me back.”

My cheeks flushed bright red at the bottom edge of my vision, and the memory of that kiss warmed me everywhere else.

He reached for my hand and I let him take it, but my fingers wouldn’t relax in his grip, because it wasn’t his grip. It was Reese’s. I frowned. This new hand was broader, its fingers longer. This hand felt different. It didn’t feel like Finn. This hand swallowed mine like it had when I’d shaken Reese’s hand.