The Stars Never Rise

“Nina, look out!” Reese shouted, and I turned as another degenerate pounced on a child in school clothes—eight years old, at the most—shoving him into me. I pulled the kid from the demon and accidentally hurled him ten feet away, where Reese lunged and caught him, then set the terrified child on his feet.

The degenerate was on me in a second. He drove me to the ground, snapping at my face, but my hand was already warmed up. I shoved my left palm into his chest and the monster screamed. He tried to scramble off me, but the fire in my hand had captured him, and the demon was stuck there, convulsing in the throes of death as his rotting flesh fried.

When my light faded, I wedged my bent legs between me and the demon and kicked the body as far as I could. It flew over the crowd as I jumped to my feet. I didn’t see where it hit, but I heard the grotesque thud of its impact with the ground and the screams of those near where it landed.

When I turned back to Reese, he had one degenerate pinned to the ground, his fiery hand burning a hole in the monster’s ripped shirt, and he held a second at arm’s length by its neck, while it clawed and snapped at his arm.

“Reese, I’m open!” I shouted. He looked up, then shoved the second degenerate at me. I ran forward to meet it, and the moment my hand touched its back, that fire exploded between us. When the monster fell with a blackened hole smoldering in its chest, I stood and took a deep breath. People still screamed and ran all around me, but I felt…focused. Driven. My hand burned, my head rang with the cacophony of terror en masse, and my nostrils were flared from the stench, but for the first time in my life, I knew where I belonged.

I knew what I was supposed to do.

And I knew exactly how this was destined to end—with a pile of dead degenerates, hopefully much bigger than the pile of their victims.

“Why aren’t they shooting?” I called to Reese as I dodged fleeing civilians, then lunged for another degenerate. “The Church’s ‘exorcists’?” Why were they willing to shoot me in my own home, but not these monsters tearing into the civilian congregation?

“They don’t shoot demons,” he called back, pulling another monster off its feet. “Not in public, anyway. They pretend to exorcise them with holy water and pointless Latin chanting. Shooting these degenerates without all the pomp and circumstance would expose them as fakes.”

“So they’re just going to let us do all the work?” Claws ripped through my coat sleeve and drew blood from my arm. My hand blazed to life, and then another monster fell dead beneath me. “Won’t that expose them as fakes?”

Reese shrugged and tossed another dead demon aside. “My dad always said the Church does its best work covering up its own crimes….”

For several minutes, the monsters kept coming and we kept burning them out. Two managed to pin me, and a third ripped right through my hood and pulled out a chunk of my hair, but that proximity strength—as Maddock called it—was in full effect with this many degenerates around. I’d never been stronger or faster. My reflexes had never been sharper.

After each exorcism, I scanned the rapidly thinning crowd for other points of light, and twice, a stranger with familiar green eyes shoved terrified onlookers out of my way or pushed degenerates into my path, away from fleeing groups of civilians. Without an exorcist’s body to inhabit, Finn lacked super strength and speed, and he couldn’t banish any of the demons, but he was there every time I turned around, in a different large, capable body, pulling demons off of women and children and shouting for them to run. Then shoving them in the safest direction.

Finn made heroes out of a dozen different men in less than ten minutes.

The whole thing was over almost as soon as it had begun, and only when the last of the degenerates were lying dead on the grass or fleeing into the night—we couldn’t get them all—did I begin to feel the toll the night’s battle would take on my exhausted body. But there was only time for a single deep breath before more yelling began.

This was angry shouting, not terrified screaming, and when I turned toward it, I found the Church’s fake exorcists pouring from the nearest courthouse exit, confidently aiming guns at us now that the demons were all gone.

Not one of the casualties wore a black cassock.

“Down on the ground!” the closest of the exorcists yelled, and what few civilians still remained—most injured and bleeding—dropped onto the cold grass, some just feet from the putrefying degenerate corpses.

Reese, Devi, Maddock, and I froze. I glanced at each of them, spread out across the courtyard, hoping for some sign of what I should do, but I wasn’t yet tapped into whatever strange connection—experience?—made them such great silent communicators.

I’d lost sight of Finn. Several of the bodies he’d confiscated, then abandoned, sat on the ground, staring around in confusion.