The Stars Never Rise

“I know I have chills.” Brother Jonathan’s sincerity echoed across the crowd.

I had chills too. I’d seen Clare Parker’s soul “cleansed.” I’d heard her scream. I’d smelled her flesh roasting.

It was not an honor.

“Oh, here they come!” Sister Pamela pivoted to her right, and while the crowd turned, the camera focused on a procession coming from the front of the courthouse. Half a dozen fake exorcists escorted a man with his arms cuffed at his back, his head covered by a burlap hood. His feet were bare, and he wore a white school shirt, ripped in places and stained with blood.

He was a student.

My heart beat too hard. My chest ached. My vision started to blur until I realized I needed to blink. My gaze was glued to the screen. To the man—the boy—being paraded toward the dais, stumbling, tripping, and ultimately pulled along by the “exorcists” who held his arms.

They marched him up onto the stone platform, then forced him to kneel like Matthew Mercer had knelt two days before. Like my sister was kneeling even then, in her cell in the courthouse. They slapped the metal cuffs over his legs, just below his knees, and we could hear him now, his breath hitching as if he couldn’t get enough air. Or couldn’t get it fast enough.

We watched in near silence, at least two thousand of us in person and millions at home, waiting to see his face. To see who among us knew the “demon” the Church claimed to have found. Was he a real demon, like the woman whose apartment Anathema had seized? Or was he like us—unlucky enough to have pissed off the Church, and now paying with a fabricated charge?

Could Mellie see this? Were they making her watch from her cell? Did she know how close she was to sharing this poor boy’s fate?

Deacon Bennett directed the last two exorcists in the procession to set large black plastic canisters on the edge of the dais, just feet from where the boy was locked into place, his hands still at his back, his chest heaving with each labored breath.

I felt like I could throw up.

“It turns out the demon is actually…,” Sister Pamela said as the lead “exorcist” pulled the hood from the doomed boy’s head, “…the father of Melanie Kane’s unborn child.”

Oh no, no, no…Please, no.

The camera zoomed in on Adam Yung’s face, bruised and bloody. His left eye was swollen shut. He’d fought someone and lost. Had he fought for himself or for Mellie?

I’d stopped searching the crowd entirely. Sister Pamela was still talking, but I couldn’t process anything in that moment. All I could see was Adam’s puffy face. All I could hear was the word he wasn’t truly saying. The word I recognized on his lips, even though it carried no real sound.

Melanie.

He was calling for Melanie.

Deacon Bennett demanded that he confess to having a demon inside him, but Adam only murmured my sister’s name into the microphone shoved in front of his face. The exorcists threw holy water over him, and he screamed as if it burned. The crowd gasped and my heart stopped beating for just a second until I realized that didn’t mean anything.

Demons aren’t hurt by holy water. Finn had said so. Because demons aren’t “unholy.” They were just plain evil.

“He’s not possessed,” I whispered into Maddock’s ear, our gazes glued to the farce of an exorcism being broadcast all over the country, live from my hometown.

“I know.” His words were so soft I could hardly hear them.

“So why does holy water hurt him?” We were taking a risk in the middle of the crowd, but no one was looking at us. They were all staring at the screen, engrossed, listening to Deacon Bennett explain that Adam was no longer the Adam Yung many of us knew. Adam was dead, and a demon had control of his body, and that demon must be cleansed from Adam’s body and his soul so he could find eternal peace.

“It’s saltwater,” Maddock said. “Burns in every open wound. That’s why they beat him first.”

“This can’t be happening.” I shook my head. “This isn’t real.” I couldn’t stop thinking it. I couldn’t stop saying it, though any minute my whispered denials could get us caught.