The Stars Never Rise

“Get down!” the fake exorcist repeated, and I counted six of them, all aiming guns at us while Deacon Bennett and Sister Pamela watched in shock from near the dais, where the last of the gasoline was now burning out over Adam’s charred corpse.

The huge screen overhead was blank except for a slowly scrolling message alerting viewers to “technical difficulties,” which the network promised would be resolved very soon.

Now that the crowd had cleared, I could count the television cameras. Two on huge mounted tripods had been abandoned entirely. On a courthouse balcony, a dead cameraman was slumped over the railing behind a third camera, still aimed at the ground. A fourth, shoulder-mounted camera was still rolling, focused on us, though nothing was currently being broadcast on the news.

“Last warning!” the lead exorcist shouted, adjusting his aim at me. “We don’t want to shoot you, but we will.”

If they didn’t want to shoot us, why were they pointing guns at us?

No one seemed to know what to do. We couldn’t let them take us into custody, but being shot in the back as we fled didn’t seem like much of a viable alternative. So I tried something rash.

“Wait!” I shouted when the fake exorcist aiming at me cocked his gun. “We’re not demons. We—”

“Nina, shhh!” Maddock hissed from ten feet away, and people on the ground all around me murmured my name, just then realizing who I was. “That won’t help.”

“It has to!” I turned back to the Church officials, then glanced around at the civilians staring up at me in shock and fear. “We weren’t fighting against you, we were fighting for you! We were protecting you. We’re not demons, we’re—”

The deafening crack of gunfire came half an instant before a man threw himself in front of me, facing the guns. The bullet hit his left shoulder, and I gasped as he stumbled backward, off balance but still upright. For a moment, no one moved. I forgot how to breathe. Then the man turned to look at me as more gunfire thundered into the quiet night. He jerked with each impact, and I flinched, tears rolling down my face, but I was too stunned and terrified to move.

The man’s hands landed heavily on my shoulders. Shock froze my feet in place. His eyes were Finn-green.

Finn had thrown an innocent man’s body between me and certain death.

“Nina…run.” His whole body jerked again, then fell toward me as bullet after bullet tried to punch through him to get to me.

Eyes wide, heart pounding, I caught him beneath his arms as he fell, and though the degenerates were all dead, I didn’t even stagger beneath his weight. Tears blurred my vision, and wordless rage shrieked inside me. Then someone grabbed my arm and nearly pulled me off my feet.

Maddock ran, hauling me with him, and now he had Finn’s green eyes. I couldn’t keep up with all the body hopping and flying bullets. “Run, Nina!” Finn shouted in Maddock’s voice, and I made my legs move, yet I could hardly keep up with him.

More gunfire and footsteps echoed behind us, and Reese and Devi raced ahead of us. Finn tugged me left, then right, and as I stumbled after him, faster than I could have imagined running two days earlier, I realized that our enhanced speed and crazy zigzagging made us difficult targets to hit. Bullets flew past us on either side, chipping chunks of brick from the courthouse wall, and Finn seemed to know just how to avoid them.

Why were we still so fast and strong if we’d killed all the degenerates?

As we fled around the corner of the courthouse, I turned to glance at the square, convinced we’d missed at least one of the monsters. How else could our proximity strength still be active? In the second before Finn pulled me out of sight, I noticed three things.

First, the square was still littered with shocked, innocent civilians, most injured, many dead.

Second, the fake exorcists were racing after us now, two of them trying to slide fresh clips into the grips of their guns, and they weren’t alone. Sister Pamela and Deacon Bennett were running as well, along with several other, older Church officials, and none of them looked the least bit winded from the sprint.

Third—and most terrifying of all—every single one of the Church officials chasing us stared back at me with eyes that shone in the dark like a cat’s. And suddenly I understood why our proximity strength hadn’t faded. The surviving degenerates may have fled, but there was no shortage of the Unclean in the town square.

The town of New Temperance—my hometown—was being run by demons.