The Stars Never Rise Page 8

  “I bred both Leona and her brother when I was in possession of their mother. The money from his sale kept me fed and clothed while I searched for your father.” She glanced at Melanie. “And your father. How else is an independent demon supposed to make a living?” She shrugged, and both of her shoulders creaked with the motion. “Leona was never really your mother, though. She never met either of your fathers. She never carried you, in her womb or in her arms. She never changed a diaper or warmed a bottle. That was all me.” The demon clutched a possessive handful of her shirt. “Leona was just a host and an incubator, who turned eighteen on the day I harvested her. The day I left her mother’s dying body in favor of her young, healthy one. She thought she hated her mother, like you thought you hated yours, but she never got the answers you have now.”

  “How could you sell your own children?” Melanie demanded from my left, one hand laid protectively over her abdomen.

  “We sell what we have.” The demon took in my look of horror and seemed to enjoy it. “We all sell what we have. And you don’t have much, do you, Nina? What did you sell?”

  “Shut up.” Was the demon seriously questioning my morals?

  “What did you sell, Nina?” she repeated, and Melanie looked at me with round, sad eyes.

  “I fed us,” I spat, backing away from her again. “I did what I had to do so we could eat, when you would have let us starve. What kind of business sense does that make, anyway? How were you going to sell half-starved host bodies?”

  “I wouldn’t have let you starve,” she insisted, but she was lying. I could see it. For whatever reason, maybe because she was sick—and she was obviously sick—she’d lost sight of the goal. She’d abandoned us as investments, like she’d abandoned us as children. “I know what I’m doing. She”—she glanced briefly at Melanie—“is worth enough that I won’t have to breed any more brats for another generation or two. Which is good, because you took that option right off the table, didn’t you?”

  I didn’t answer. I had no answer.

  “Sit.” She plucked the kitchen phone from its dock. “I have to make a call.”

  We didn’t sit. Melanie’s hand tightened around mine again, and we backed slowly toward the front door because we already knew what our not-mother was about to discover.

  “It’s dead!” She threw the phone across the room, and Mellie flinched when it smashed through the window over the kitchen sink.

  “The service was cut off six weeks ago.” I fought the urge to look back and see how close to the front door—and potential escape—we were. “That’s what happens when you stop paying.” We’d had to prioritize. Phone or heat.

  I didn’t have anyone to call, anyway.

  “Sit!” she roared. The demon actually roared, and my fingertips started to tingle with a strange warmth, like pinpricks of fire. When we didn’t move, she lunged through the kitchen and halfway into the living room in a single step, and though I’d seen it before—that very morning—I was startled all over again by a demon’s ability to make human bodies do things our physiology shouldn’t have been capable of.

  Our “mother” had abandoned her human guise entirely now. She moved as if her body had too many joints. As if her bones were too long. And maybe they were. She wasn’t yet as deformed and animalistic as a degenerate, but her body was no longer fully human either. When had that happened? Was that why she slept all day—so we wouldn’t notice?

  Melanie screeched and let go of my hand. She tried to run, and the demon lunged for her. I stepped between them, and the demon bowled me over. My head smacked against the floor—concrete covered by thin carpet—and the room spun around me.

  The demon launched herself off my abdomen, driving the air from my body as she pounced after Mellie like a cat. I forced myself up, gasping, when she dragged my sister away from the door and tossed her toward the couch. Melanie stumbled foot over foot and caught herself with one knee on the center cushion.

  “Run,” I gasped, still trying to catch my breath. But Melanie collapsed on the couch, crying, her knees tucked up to her chest.

  “Where would she go?” the demon demanded, hunched in an agile squat between me and my sister. “We are everywhere. Seen but unseen. Known but unknown.”

  “She’s lying.” I backed away from Melanie, trying to draw the mother-monster my way so my sister could run. But Mellie only cowered. “The war is over. We won.” The only surviving remnants of the demon hordes roamed the badlands as degenerates, and they were reportedly few and far between. And gradually dying off as they slowly starved for souls.

  “Yes.” The demon advanced on me, swaying sluggishly like a bridge in the wind. As if she might pounce again at any second. “We did.”

  “What does that mean?” I said as Melanie finally climbed off the couch and crawled toward the kitchen, and suddenly I wished we’d found a way to pay the phone bill. The Church could already be on its way.

  “We are endless, Nina. We are legion.” The demon stood straighter and frowned, as if my lack of a reaction disappointed her. “That statement would have scared the shit out of your grandparents. But my point is that there are more of us than you could ever imagine. We outnumber the grains of sand on the beach, the drops of water in the ocean. The seas in hell rage with us, rising and falling in waves, cresting and crushing one another. We bleed and moan and starve, yet we cannot die. We think of nothing but escape, yet there is nowhere to go. Nowhere but here. And for every one of us that breaks through, anchored in your world by the souls we devour, there are thousands still waiting, begging, fighting for the chance. But souls are finite and your bodies are fragile hosts. There will never be enough of either to go around. The only way to stay here is to find a new host before the old one dies, and every time one of us fails in that endeavor, another will rise to take its place. You. Cannot. Win.”

  Despair pinned me to the spot where I stood. Was she telling the truth? Were there really thousands of demons in hell for every one that had broken into our world? If so, why bother to fight? Humanity would fold in the end anyway. How could it not?

  Then Melanie’s gaze met mine over our mother’s shoulder, and I remembered why we should fight. Why we’d been fighting for more than a century, though no one else seemed to realize the war was still raging.

  Demons might win in the long run. In the future. That seemed inevitable. But this demon wasn’t going to win this fight. She wasn’t going to sell my sister and claim my soul.

  This demon was going down.

  “Run!” I shouted at Melanie. My sister stared at me in surprise for the half second it took our mother to whirl toward her. Then she took off for the back door, sneakers squealing on the scratched, faded linoleum.

  The demon snarled and lurched after her, but I grabbed her thin arm.

  She turned to me, her eyes flashing with a cold, bright white light. Her mouth opened wider than should have been possible with a human jaw, and terror shot through me like a thousand bolts of lightning. Suddenly I realized I had no idea what to do next. I hadn’t thought beyond distracting her so Melanie could get out.

  The demon snarled again—at me this time—and the back door slammed shut as she jerked her arm free from my grasp and lunged for the door. And that was when I understood that she couldn’t hurt me. At least, she couldn’t kill me. Not if she still wanted my body.

  I sprinted several steps and grabbed a handful of my mother’s shirt, then jerked the material as hard as I could. She made a strange strangling sound as the collar pulled tight against her throat. I yanked again, and she stumbled backward toward me.

  “Keep running!” I shouted, with no idea whether or not Melanie could hear me. “Don’t stop and don’t come back! I’ll find you after—”

  After what? After I killed the demon?

  Demons couldn’t be killed; they could only be exorcised. But I wasn’t an exorcist. The best I could do was kill the host body—my own mother’s body—and even if I managed that, what was to stop the dem
on from then taking over my body? Which had been its plan all along.

  Exorcist. I needed an exorcist. For the first time in my life, I was desperate to get in touch with the Church. But the phone was dead.

  “Help!” I shouted, and the demon whirled on me, ripping her shirt from my grasp. “Someone call—” My mother’s bony hand clamped over my mouth.

  “They won’t get here in time,” she whispered, but her voice seemed to originate from inside my head, where the words echoed over one another in an endless, cacophonous loop. “By the time they arrive, this body will be dead and your body will be mine, and you—the part that makes you Nina Kane, anyway—will have been extinguished like the fragile, flickering candle flame you are.”

  My left hand burned, pinpricks of fire beneath my skin, a horrible itch I couldn’t reach to scratch. My jaw ached—her hand was crushing my face.

  “They’ll think I’m you. Melanie will think so too. She’ll think she’s safe until the day I sell her to the highest bidder. Which will have to be before she starts to show, since ‘Nina’ wouldn’t make her end the pregnancy.”

  Melanie would never fall for that, even if the demon did have access to my memories. But my sister’s knowledge wouldn’t save her.

  Terror skittered through every inch of me. I grabbed the demon’s arm but couldn’t make her let go. I tried to scream, but only a muffled moan escaped through her fingers. I tried to shove her, but she couldn’t be moved.

  “Shhh,” she breathed into my ear, walking me backward. My pulse raced in terror and I stumbled, fighting to remain upright. “This shouldn’t hurt a bit.”

  But it already hurt. My heart beat so hard it was surely about to burst. My silent screams bounced around in my head, bruising me in places that shouldn’t have been able to feel pain.

  She pushed harder, faster, and my feet couldn’t keep up. I tripped, and she lifted me with her free hand, without uncovering my mouth. My feet no longer touched the floor.

  An instant later, my back slammed into the wall. Pain shot along my spine and air burst from my lungs, through my nose. White dust drifted around us; she’d dented the drywall with my body.

  Her hand left my mouth, but before I could scream—before I could even suck in a desperate breath—her lips closed over mine. Her mouth was cold, and her chill threatened to invade my warmth. My skin already tingled with the cold everywhere she touched me. But then she exhaled, and her chill crawled inside me, her life force invading mine. Soon whatever it was that made her a demon would overwhelm whatever it was that made me human. Then I would be gone. Extinguished like the candle flame she’d called me.

  And I couldn’t fight her. I couldn’t make it stop.

  I pushed, but she stood firm. I pulled, but she resisted. I kicked, but my feet found no target.

  I could feel that warmth—my soul—being absorbed. She was swallowing me whole.

  I screamed, and she swallowed that too.

  Then, in the distance, I heard the sirens. Melanie had gotten to a phone, even though I’d told her not to stop. She’d called someone. Help was coming. But it would be too late.

  Tears poured down my face, leaking beneath my closed eyelids, and still the mother-monster sucked at my soul. I opened my eyes, but she was all I could see. The sirens still wailed in the distance, but time seemed to have slowed. The world sounded…stretched. Warped.

  And finally I understood. I was losing consciousness.

  No. I was dying.

  The only thing I could feel, other than my mother’s freezing lips and the dwindling warmth of my own soul being devoured, was the hot tingling in my left hand and the frantic ticking of my internal clock, counting down toward the end of my life. I had seconds left. I could feel it.

  One more try. I owed it to Melanie. If the demon possessed me before the authorities arrived, she’d be alone with a monster. Or in Church custody.

  I tried to push the monster off again, this time with my tingling left hand. The moment my fingers touched her chest, something exploded between us. Something brighter than light and hotter than fire. Something I’d only seen in person once—that morning, when the rogue exorcist had saved my life.

  The demon screeched and dropped me, and my feet finally hit the floor. Normal human warmth returned, like a flood washing over me. The monster tried to back away but couldn’t disconnect from the fierce light still shining between us, so bright I wanted to close my eyes. But I couldn’t look away from her or from the light glowing beneath my hand, still pressed to her chest.

  She tried to scream and choked on the sound. She tried to run but was frozen in place.

  Sight and sound zoomed back into focus around me. The wailing sirens abruptly stopped altogether, and distantly, I realized the police had never even gotten close.

  Were they out on a different call? Had Mellie not stopped to call them? I was both relieved and terrified by that thought.

  My hand still burned. That tingling beneath my skin had become the roar of a blaze that should have devoured my fingers but consumed the demon instead. She hung from the fierce light between us now, like a coat on a hook, limp and slowly swaying, though she seemed to weigh nothing.

  I wanted to make it stop but didn’t know how, and my ignorance scared me almost as badly as the fire I couldn’t explain. As badly as the demon hanging from my open hand.

  My front door flew open and crashed into the living room wall. I screamed, and the light in my hand blinked out through no conscious effort of mine.

  My mother’s body crumpled to the floor like a heap of clothes.

  Smoke rose from a jagged, scorched hole in her sternum, where my hand had been an instant before.

  I’d burned a hole into my mother’s chest.

  No, that wasn’t my mother. My real mother died before I was ever born.

  The room spun. My lungs refused to expand. My vision swam and blurred.

  “Don’t move!” The man in the doorway aimed his gun at me, and the world snapped back into focus. His black linen cassock was fastened with distinctive silver buckles matching the elaborate silver embroidery on the dramatic flare of his wide cuffs. The tails of his cassock were split up both sides to his hips, for ease of movement, and that split revealed his snug black pants.

  His right cheek was branded with a stylized column of fire, scarred into his very flesh.

  Even standing there in total shock, I recognized him instantly. Him, and the three others behind him, fanned out on my front lawn—a terrifying sight in their black Church robes and silver-buckled boots.

  Exorcists.

  No wonder the police hadn’t come. They’d called in a team of specialists. Real exorcists, trained, dressed, branded, and given authority by the Church.

  But the cavalry had arrived too late. I’d already…

  What had I done?

  It had looked for all the world like I’d done to the mother-monster what Katherine Abbot had famously done to that demon on television nearly a century ago. But that wasn’t possible. She was an exorcist. She was the exorcist. A naturalist, the Church had called her, because she’d needed no training. She was born an exorcist. There hadn’t been one like her since.

  Except maybe the Church was wrong about that, because what else could you call the boy in the alley, if not a natural-born exorcist?

  That thought led to an even bigger question as I stared at the black-clad men aiming guns at my head.

  What the hell were they going to call me?

  “Put your hands up!” the man at the door shouted. “Did you see what she just did?” he said in a softer voice, that part obviously aimed at the men behind him. “She lit that bitch up!”

  Yes, that was what I’d done. I’d lit the bitch up, as if my hand were a match and my mother were a kerosene-soaked rag. I’d lit her up, and now she was dead, and the demon inside her was fried. I’d lit her up, and that was when the world stopped making sense, because my mother was a demon, and I had a five-fingered torch for a left hand,
and the exorcists were obviously scared of me.

  A second man in a black cassock crowded the first, trying to see over his shoulder and into my house, where I still stood like an idiot, not sure what to do other than keep breathing.

  In and out. In and out. Not so fast, Nina. You’re going to pass out.

  “She’s a—”

  “Yeah, she is.” The first man cut the second one off before he could say something I was pretty sure I wanted to hear. I was a what?

  “We have to take her to—”

  “Yeah, we do,” the first man snapped.

  Whatever happened in the next few moments would change everything for me, and for Mellie. Everything. I knew that. Yet I felt powerless to influence the outcome.

  “Turn and face the wall, and put your hands over your head!” the first man shouted, and I realized his aim had never wavered. There was a dead demon on the floor¸ but he was pointing his gun at me. As if I were the bad guy.

  “But I didn’t—”

  “Silence!” he shouted, and I jumped, startled. “Turn around and put your palms flat on the wall.”

  Before I could decide whether to obey, something moved on the lawn at his back. The neighbors had come to watch our private drama, but they were being herded back to their own houses by the remaining two exorcists, in cassocks so dark they seemed to be part of the night itself.

  The onlookers went willingly, because exorcists were rare and scary and carried nearly infinite authority. But they also went slowly because exorcists were rare and scary, and they might never have another chance to gawk at one. Or at the skinny girl across the street whose mother never left the house during the day. The girl who traded what little she had—what did you sell, Nina?—for food and wiped snotty noses on weekends to keep the lights and the heat on. The girl who was about to be taken away in handcuffs by real, live exorcists, which few in New Temperance had ever seen in person.