The Stars Never Rise

“Yeah, I saw them on the news.” A lifetime ago, back when I’d thought my biggest problems were Melanie’s pregnancy and coming up with something for dinner. My entire existence had shifted since then. The world had changed. “Why would they mention us but not the degenerates we killed?”


Reese shrugged, then let go of Grayson’s hand and headed into the kitchen. “Because only the Church is allowed to save the day.” He took a carton of eggs from the fridge and set a skillet on the stove. “If word got out that we were better at ridding the world of demons than the Unified Church is, people might start to realize they don’t need the Church. The good brothers and sisters in charge aren’t willing to let that happen, so they paint us as the bad guys in order to mobilize private citizens against us. Everyone knows bad guys don’t kill monsters.” He took a chopping knife from a drawer and gestured with it. “Bad guys are the monsters.”

“Okay, I get that, but why are they leaving out the parts that don’t make us look good? Why don’t they report on demons breeding their own hosts, or degenerates in New Temperance?”

“Because that makes them look like they can’t protect the people,” Maddock said. “It’s a two-part propaganda technique. Make us look bad while making them look good. Make sense?”

I nodded reluctantly.

“Who wants an omelet?” Reese pulled vegetables from a drawer in the fridge and set them on a cutting board.

Everyone else called out requests for tomatoes and onions and cheese, the very prospect of which would have made my mouth water a day earlier. But now…

“Nina?” Reese called, and I looked up to see him holding a small block of cheddar.

“No thanks. I’m not really—”

“Shhh!” He cut me off and spun to face the door, knife wielded like a weapon. “Footsteps.”

I couldn’t hear them, and based on the wary but unsure expressions all around me, neither could any of the others.

Someone knocked, and we all froze. Then suddenly everyone was moving at once, silently and eerily fast.

Maddock stood and pulled a handgun from the end table drawer while Devi crossed into the kitchen and plucked two knives from the block. As she and Maddock headed for the front door, Devi pressed one of the knives into Grayson’s hand and motioned her toward the bedroom. It took me a second to realize she was hiding because she wasn’t yet an exorcist, which meant she had no enhanced speed or strength to use against a demon.

“There’s only one,” Reese whispered from the kitchen, where he held a meat mallet in one hand and his chopping knife in the other. His gaze was focused on the front door.

“Not a degenerate,” Grayson added as she backed through the doorway into one of the bedrooms, and I wondered how on earth she knew that. Then I realized she was right. I felt no urge to either flee or fight.

But degenerates weren’t the only thing we had to fear.

I stood, my fists opening and closing at my sides, unsure what to do when no one offered me a weapon.

“It’s me,” someone called from outside.

Devi and Maddock frowned at each other from opposite sides of the front door. They obviously didn’t recognize the voice.

“Look through the damn peephole!” the voice said.

They both hesitated. Then Devi started to step forward, but Maddock slid in front of her, shielding her from whatever stood beyond the door while he closed one eye and peered through the peephole with his other.

Maddock groaned and fumbled with first the deadbolt, then the chain, ignoring Devi’s whispered demands to know what he’d seen. She backpedaled when he opened the door, then Maddock pulled the boy on the sidewalk into the apartment and slammed the door behind him.

Devi took one look at him and lowered her knife. “What the hell are you doing?”

Reese dropped his mallet into a kitchen drawer with a huff of exasperation.

“Relax. I come bearing gifts.” The boy turned, lifting a brown bag with twisted-paper handles, and with a jolt of shock that resonated through my entire body, I realized I knew him. Jacob Gilbert was a senior at my school. I’d known him since we were five.

But how did he know Maddock and Devi and the rest?

It was unnerving to see him in our secret apartment surrounded by my new exorcist outlaw friends, when all my memories of him involved either school uniforms, teachers, and textbooks or…bare flesh, muffled sounds, and awkward touches disembodied by a dark room.

“Jacob?” Confusion echoed in my voice.

“Not exactly.” He grinned at me, and I blinked. I’d never seen Jacob grin. Not even as he’d helped lower me from his bedroom window in the middle of the night, ending a single late-night encounter we hadn’t so much as acknowledged since.

Then I noticed that his eyes were green, when they should have been brown.

They were Finn-green.

“What…? What are you…?” My tongue felt almost as sluggish as my thoughts. “Why are you in Jacob Gilbert?”

“Is that his name?” Finn looked down at his borrowed body. “I found him on his way to school and thought it might be easier for you to talk to me if I looked like someone you know.”