The Stars Never Rise

“We have a problem,” Finn said as we pushed our way toward the back of the crowd. We weren’t trying to hide my face anymore because our withdrawal didn’t stand out. Everyone with a weak stomach—or a strong conscience—was retreating from the human torch who used to be one of my friends and classmates.

“Understatement of the century,” Maddock mumbled from my right as they guided me through the crowd without any spoken plan or direction, as if they could read each other’s minds. “They just lit a kid on fire, and I’m betting there’s more gasoline where that came from.”

Finn exhaled heavily. “That’s not the problem.”

“Wait!” I pulled away from them both and turned toward the side entrance of the courthouse, prepared to push my way back through the crowd, which had thinned but not dispersed. “I’m not leaving her.”

“Shhh, Nina, please.” Strong hands turned me, and I found myself staring at a dark, middle-aged face eyeing me with concern—through bright green eyes. Finn’s rapid body switches were making me dizzy. “I’m so sorry about your friend. But getting us caught won’t help him or your sister. Okay? It’s not safe for us here. It’s less safe than you can possibly imagine.”

“Why? What happened?”

“I’ll explain once we’re out of the crowd.” His voice was as loud as it could possibly be and still qualify as a whisper. “We’ll have to find another way to get to Melanie.”

We were two-thirds of the way through the crowd when a shrill scream pierced the steady crackle of flames, then was cut off abruptly.

At first I thought it was Adam. Then I realized he’d passed out from either the smoke or the pain almost a minute earlier. Or maybe—mercifully—he was already dead. People were looking around, craning their necks, but no one seemed to know where the scream had come from.

When a second person screamed, I stopped walking. Something was wrong.

I turned when several more voices joined the chorus of horror, shrieking in pain and fear, and both Maddock and Finn turned with me, but we couldn’t see the source through the throng.

On-screen, the camera panned the now-skittish crowd while an obviously startled Sister Pamela spoke in an inset window, demanding an answer to the question we were each asking ourselves. And finally the camera zoomed in on a rapidly expanding gap in the crowd, widening like the eye of a hurricane. We couldn’t see what was happening, but people were trying to get away, and as some ran, others fell and were trampled.

“Shit!” Maddock shouted, and I turned away from the screen to follow his gaze just as an inhuman snarl ripped through the crowd on my left. A new chorus of screams followed, and the horror was closer now. People were panicking. Fleeing. Falling. Some pulled their friends up, and others left them behind. Yet I still couldn’t see the source of the panic.

But I could smell it.

Rot. Filth. Fetid bodily fluids.

Degenerates. My transitional period was over; I hadn’t felt their approach.

I’d hardly processed that realization when another series of shrieks echoed from my right. I turned just as a male degenerate in tattered mechanic’s coveralls dropped from a courthouse balcony onto a man in a suit, driving him to the ground. People scrambled in all directions. Two of them ran into me, pushing me backward, but I ducked, then squeezed between the next two while the man in the suit screamed.

My hand was already glowing when I stepped into the ever-widening opening in the crowd, but no one stopped running long enough to notice.

The man was dead before I got to him, so instead of pulling the degenerate off him, I slammed my burning hand down on the demon’s back and pressed as hard as I could. The monster thrashed between me and the corpse of his own making, but I held my ground. This time I could feel the empty chill of his hunger—a maddening, ravenous existence—and I let the heat in my palm burn him up until there was nothing left in his mutated body but a charred, smoking hole the diameter of my hand.

The dead degenerate collapsed on top of his victim, and I stood, ready to run, certain that someone had seen what I’d done and that the fake exorcists were already closing in on me with guns drawn.

And people had seen, surely, but in their panic they’d had time for nothing but their own escape. No one was staring at me. No guns were aimed at me. People didn’t care who I was or what I was wanted for, as long as I stood between them and the monsters.

A flash of bright light exploded on my right and I turned, expecting to find Maddock exorcising another demon, but instead I found Reese, badass and scary in his police cassock, his navy blue hat half trampled on the ground at his feet.

Maddock was several yards away, pulling a degenerate off a screaming, bleeding woman, and from deeper within the crowd came another flash of light, and a shout of triumph that could only have come from Devi.