The Stars Never Rise

Bennett frowned. “I saw your mother’s body. It wouldn’t have degenerated so quickly if your genetic gifts had come from her, so they must have come from your father. Your birth certificate names your mother’s late husband.” She opened the file on the table in front of her and glanced at the first page, then dropped the cover back into place. “Oliver Kane. Melanie’s reads the same. But if the late Oliver Kane had been an exorcist, or even a healthy normal man, he probably wouldn’t have died of…”—Bennett opened the file again, though that was probably just for show—“pneumonia, at the age of twenty-seven. The prevailing theory on your father’s death is that your mother poisoned him.”


I shrugged, trying to look like I was unaffected by hearing about the murder of one of the few people in the world who’d ever shown me kindness. “Sounds like he got off easy.”

“Who was your real father, Nina?” She looked straight into my eyes, and I could practically feel her hunger—for both my soul and my information. “More important, was he Melanie’s father as well?”

“Why should I answer that? What’s in it for me? Or for Mellie?”

“Nothing.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest again. “Tomorrow you’ll be on your way to Umbra, where the prelate will…well, he can’t exactly wear you, after your picture has been all over the news and you’ve been declared possessed. But I have no doubt he’ll find some use for you before he sees fit to turn on the camera and light a match. If you hadn’t already been sterilized, you might have been able to prolong your life by around nine months so your genetic gift might be passed on. But my point is that your fate is sealed, as is your sister’s. Her child, however…”

My voice came out low and more threatening than I’d ever heard it. “You’re threatening to kill my sister’s baby if I don’t cooperate?”

“I’m promising to let it live if you do.”

“Not good enough. I don’t want him raised as a ward of the Church. I don’t want him ordained or consecrated. Ever.”

Bennett’s eyes narrowed and her jaw tightened. “Fine. The baby will be sent to a children’s home somewhere outside of New Temperance.”

I studied her face for one long moment. Then I listened to my gut. “You’re lying. If Melanie’s an exorcist, her child might be too, and you won’t lose him. Which means I have no reason to answer your question.”

Bennett leaned back in her chair. Then she smiled slowly, an expression absent of warmth. “It was worth a shot.” She shrugged, and the gesture looked foreign and careless on a body I’d never once seen cast off the restraints of authority and formality. “We are a patient species. We’ll lock her in a cell for two years and see for ourselves.”

“But you have to make a deal with Umbra now, don’t you?” Long before she would know whether or not Melanie was an exorcist.

The demon’s scowl was as good as an answer. “If you’re not going to cooperate, I have only one more question: Why did you turn yourself in, Nina Kane?”

“I came for my sister.” I gave her a shrug to hide the fact that I was twisting my hands behind my back, tugging on the restraints Finn had already weakened with his borrowed knife. “But before I go, I think I’ll make time to kill you.”

“Foolish child.” The deacon shook her head slowly, like an instructor disappointed by ignorance. “I cannot die. With or without this body, and this world, and your arrogant ambition, I can never die, just as I was never born.” She stood, her eyes glinting with demonic light, and I twisted my hands faster, harder, as her speech became more formal, her posture more dignified. “My native language has no word for youth, because in our native realm we have not your cycle of birth and death, nor the waxing and waning of seasons, nor even the concepts of growth and decline. There are no more and no fewer of us now than there have ever been or will ever be, and that unchanging number is sufficient to swallow your world whole, ten times over.” The deacon glared down at me, and I made my hands go still so she could not notice my efforts. “We are both eternal and unchanging, and your simplistic human languages—all of them—lack the vocabulary necessary to express the tedium of millennia spent in stasis.”

“Poetry, every word,” I said, and her flashing eyes narrowed even further. “But even if I can’t kill you, I can send you back to the hell you—”

A knock interrupted my threat, and I groaned when a door opened at my back, halting my progress on the zip ties. “Deacon, reports are coming in from the south gate.”

Bennett circled me, headed for the hall. “Send Chief Kaughman in to watch her.”

The door closed, and I had less than a minute to twist my plastic bindings before it opened again, and Chief Kaughman settled into the chair across from mine. “Well, well, little girl. Looks like you’re in over your head.” His eyes shone, and his lips turned up in a leering grin.

I gave my hands one last, fierce twist, and the plastic snapped. I lunged across the table, my left hand already ablaze. Shackles bit into my ankles. The table slid beneath my weight.

Kaughman’s eyes widened. He stood and backed into his own chair. Then my glowing palm slammed into the police chief’s chest.