The Stars Never Rise

by Rachel Vincent

  Jeans. A couple of plain cotton T-shirts. And beneath that, I found underwear, still in the package, a bra, still tagged, and a new toothbrush. “What is this?”

  Another shrug. “This guy’s sister looked about your size. The rest is from the dollar store down the street from your school. Not top quality, obviously, but better than…” His focus wandered down from my face and I was suddenly hyperaware of the fact that I wasn’t wearing a bra. “…whatever you’re not wearing now.”

  “You stole this?”

  “I didn’t.” Another indomitable grin. The boy had no shame, and I almost envied him that. “The assistant manager opening the store put them in a bag and set them just outside the back door for someone to pick up.” He patted his borrowed chest, indicating that Jacob was that someone. “At least, that’s what the cameras will show, if anyone ever realizes the store is missing a few pairs of underwear and the manager is missing a solid three and a half minutes from his morning routine.”

  “I…I don’t know what to say.” I’d always been the one who took care of Mellie, and it felt strange to let someone else take care of me. I wanted to return the favor. I wanted to be as much use to them as they’d been to me.

  “ ‘Thanks’ is the typical response when someone goes out of his way to supply you with new underwear so you can comfortably go into hiding because you’re wanted on two counts of murder.”

  I found it hard to believe that particular scenario was common enough to have a typical response, but…“Thanks. And wow.” No wonder they’d avoided getting caught for so long—securing food and supplies didn’t represent much of a risk when they could have them delivered by one of the locals, who wouldn’t rouse suspicion walking around town.

  “Yeah.” Devi slid the door chain home with an aggressive clank. “He knows a few clever party tricks. But he’s not supposed to bring them home with him.”

  “Finn?” Grayson opened the bedroom door, and her eyes widened when she found him in a new form. She padded across the floor barefoot, then ran one hand over his chest and down one arm. “What on earth are you wearing?”

  “Nina says his name is Jacob Gilbert. You like?”

  She nodded solemnly. “Very pretty…” Grayson frowned up at him. “But you know you can’t keep him.”

  “I know.” He grinned. “I’ll take him back right after I talk to Nina.”

  “Finn, man…” Reese frowned. “He’s gonna be missed.”

  “He’s probably already missed,” Maddock said, but I could hear the confliction in his voice. He didn’t want to deny Finn this outlet for expression—not to mention interaction with the physical world—but he understood the risk.

  Even I understood the risk.

  “Take him back.” Devi slid her knife back into the block. “Now.”

  Finn’s green eyes narrowed, and I recognized the stubborn set of his jaw—that expression had looked nearly the same on Maddock’s features when Finn had occupied them. “Ten minutes.” He turned to me. “Nina. Give me ten minutes.” His gaze was solemn and intense. He really wanted this.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I nodded.

  Devi ignored the pleading look Grayson threw her way. “If you haven’t gotten that walking liability out of here in ten minutes, I swear I’ll exorcise your ass right out of him.”

  “Devi!” Maddock sounded truly pissed for the first time since I’d met him. The real him, anyway.

  Finn’s expression hardened, but beneath his anger, his borrowed cheeks were pink with humiliation. He looked…bruised.

  “Can she do that?” I didn’t want to ask, but I had to know.

  “No.” Grayson glared at Devi. “Because he’s not a demon. But she can be a real bitch.”

  Devi scowled, and when no apology came for what was obviously a huge personal insult to Finn, I tamped down my own misgivings, then boldly took his hand and pulled him toward one of the bedrooms.

  “I’m sorry he’s so sensitive, but we can’t afford the kind of—”

  I closed the door behind us, cutting off Devi’s lukewarm attempt at damage control. Then I set the bag of clothing on the carpet and leaned against the door, studying the boy in front of me. Noting the differences between Finn and Jacob. The longer I stared, the more of them I found. It was like looking at a painting, picking out more intricate details with every passing second of study.

  “That’s amazing.” I stepped closer, staring up at him, examining familiar features that suddenly seemed new. A mouth that looked softer. A brow that was less furrowed. Eyes that looked…smarter. Kinder. Greener.

  “What’s amazing?” His voice was a whisper, and though it was Jacob’s voice, it was Finn’s tone and resonance. Finn’s words.

  “The differences. You look just like Jacob, yet somehow you look nothing like Jacob. And it’s not just your eye color.”

  He smiled—a real smile—and I knew I’d said something right. Fortunately, it was also something true. “You can see me?”

  “Yeah, I can,” I said, and his smile grew. “I can hear you too. The real you.”

  “Well then…mission accomplished.” He sank onto the end of the twin bed, and I sat next to him, one leg folded beneath me, because there was nowhere else to sit. If Angela Reddy’s daughter owned chairs, she’d taken them with her to college. “So, you know him? Jacob?”

  My brows rose in surprise. “You can’t tell? You can’t…see his memories? Or whatever?”

  “Nope. Whatever you don’t want me to know about you and Jacob Gilbert is still unknown. I can’t see any of his memories of you or anyone else. Because I’m not a demon.”

  “Of course not.” I could feel myself flush, embarrassed both by the memory I didn’t want him to access and by the fact that he’d seen through my question. “Sorry.”

  “No need.” He took my hand, and I stared at his fingers folded around mine, fascinated to realize that Jacob’s was the third of Finn’s borrowed hands that I’d touched. They were each different. Yet they were each his. “Nina, I know that from the outside, what I do—what I am—looks a lot like demonic possession, but I swear it’s not the same. I can’t hear his thoughts. I’m not feeding from his soul. If I were to stay in here forever, his body wouldn’t start to degenerate. Not that I have any plans to stay here.”

  “Glad to hear it. Jacob has a life and a family and a consciousness. You can’t just…take his body.”

  “Obviously.” He gave me a perfunctory nod. “Still, for potential future reference, this is the general look you go for, right?” He spread his arms, giving me a good look at Jacob’s solid build, clear skin, and mass of thick, dark, wavy hair. “I picked him because he looks kind of like Maddy, and you seemed to like—”

  “Finn!” I could feel my face flush. “Boundaries! You don’t have to say everything you’re thinking!”

  He shrugged. “I have no body, Nina. Boundaries are kind of a difficult concept for me to grasp.”

  “Well, try,” I insisted, but he only smiled. “So, now what? What happens when you…take Jacob back?”

  “Nothing, really. He’ll just wake up, with no memory of what happened while he wasn’t in charge of his body.”

  “He’ll be…okay? Will he know he was…possessed, for lack of a better term?” But Finn obviously didn’t like that term, and I couldn’t blame him.

  “He’ll be missing about an hour of his life with no explanation, and I’m sure that will scare him. Worst-case scenario? Someone else could see him looking disoriented and unable to account for the past hour and decide he’s possessed. But I’ll make sure no one else is around when I give him back his body, and there won’t be any lasting side effects. He won’t be an empty shell,” Finn assured me. “Because I’m not a demon. You get that now, right?”

  “Yes.” I nodded decisively. “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to show me that you may have no verbal filter, but you’re not evil. Duly noted and appreciated.”

  He frowned. “That’s the best I’m going to
get, isn’t it?”

  “What else do you want?”

  “Can I kiss you?”

  I blinked, surprised. “You didn’t ask last time.”

  “Last time I was trying to keep you from fleeing the building. This time I just want to kiss you.”

  I thought about that for a second and decided that one small indulgence wouldn’t hurtle me toward death or damnation any faster than the course I was already on.

  I nodded.

  Then Finn kissed me, and I was pleased to discover that he made much better use of Jacob Gilbert’s mouth than the original owner probably ever would.

  “Hey.” Someone shook my shoulder gently. “Nina. It’s time to get up.”

  I opened my eyes to find Grayson staring at me from less than a foot away, kneeling next to the couch. When I sat up, fighting disorientation, she took the cushion next to mine and handed me a glass of orange juice.

  Bacon sizzled in a skillet on the stove, and my stomach growled. Only Reese’s lower half was visible while he dug in the fridge, but Maddock smiled at me as he stuffed cans from an upper cabinet into a worn backpack.

  Grayson gestured for me to drink my juice. “You’re a deep sleeper.”

  “I’m not normally.” I took a sip, and my mouth puckered.

  “It’s your transition.” Maddock zipped the backpack and set it on a chair at the table. “I think you just slept off the last of it.”

  “Thank goodness.” I drank more juice. The pulp was growing on me.

  Devi came out of the nearest bedroom, carrying two more backpacks by their handles. “You snore, and you have bedhead.”

  “I don’t snore.” Bedhead was a definite possibility.

  Grayson laughed. “Finn says you do but it’s cute.”

  “It’s not cute.” Devi handed the bags to Maddock, then headed back into the bedroom.

  I drained my glass and ran my hands through my morning hair. “Where is Finn?”

  “Um…” Grayson’s gaze trailed slowly back and forth across the living room. “He seems to be pacing.” She turned back to me and took my empty glass. “Today he’s more frustrated than usual by his inability to interact with the world. I think he wants to talk to you.”

  “Wait, you can hear him? How?” I stared at the empty living room, but I had no idea where I was supposed to be looking.

  Grayson shrugged.

  “She can hear things the rest of us can’t.” Devi crossed the living room with a stack of clothing. “Like degenerates. And Finn.”

  “I hear him like he’s talking from inside my head,” Grayson clarified. “Like I’m hearing his thoughts, but only the ones he wants me to hear. It’s different with the degenerates, though. I can feel them when they get close enough.”

  “Weird.”

  She stood with my empty glass. “Maddy can hear him too.”

  I turned to Maddock, fascinated.

  He nodded. “Yeah, but not like Gray does. I actually hear Finn, like I hear you. As if he’s standing right next to me.” He frowned and dropped another can into a new bag. “Or shouting from the other room, as he’s doing right now.”

  “Make yourself useful.” Devi emerged from the bathroom and shoved a toiletry bag at me. It was nearly full of half-used tubes of toothpaste, rolls of floss, and sticks of deodorant. “Take everything we could possibly use in the badlands. We can’t risk breaching another town until we’re no longer a national headline.”

  I stood, suddenly relieved to realize I’d slept fully clothed. “Wait, you’re leaving? Today?”

  “We’re leaving,” Maddock corrected. “You have to come with us, Nina. If you stay here, they’ll find you. They’ve locked down the town and they’re patrolling the wall. Our only chance to get out is during the press conference.”

  “Which is where these come in,” Devi added from the bedroom doorway, where she held a white school blouse in one hand and a pair of navy slacks in the other. “The daughter’s closet is full of old school clothes, which should help us blend into the crowd on the way to the south gate.”

  “What crowd?” I set the toiletry bag on the bathroom counter and dropped a bottle of acetaminophen into it.

  “The press conference is shaping up to be a public spectacle.” Reese set a platter of bacon on the table. “They’re going to reveal the identity of whatever demon they claim to have found hiding among your friends and neighbors. The Church is ramping up the drama with the ‘monsters among you’ angle, and they’ve set the press conference for five o’clock so they’ll catch parents on their way home from work and kids lingering after school for the drama.”

  “They’re expecting a turnout of a couple thousand.” Grayson snagged a slice of bacon. “It’s our best chance to blend in. Thus the school clothes.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “You slept through the news,” Maddock said around a slice of bacon.

  “You snored through the news,” Devi corrected.

  “Five o’clock…” My thoughts raced. We had less than an hour. “I’m not going without my sister.” I said it softly, but everyone heard. All sound ceased, except for the sizzle of eggs frying in the kitchen. “How hard could it be for Finn to jump inside some Church official and unlock her cell? We’ll take a set of those for Mellie too”—I pointed at the uniform hanging on the bedroom door—“and we’ll leave as soon as we have her. She’ll fit right into your plan.”

  Devi was the first to break the near silence. “I told you she’d be a pain in the ass. I knew the minute I saw her with her mouth all over my boyfriend that she’d be nothing but—”

  “Devi, shut up!” Grayson snapped, and we all turned to her in surprise. “That was from Finn,” she clarified. “But I second the motion.”

  “Nina.” Maddock set the second full backpack next to the first, practically begging me with his gaze to cooperate. “I’m sorry, but your sister’s beyond our reach. Even if we could get her out of Church custody—and we can’t—the whole world has seen Devi, Reese, Melanie, and you on the news. If any one of you is recognized, we’re screwed.”

  Devi squeezed her arms crossed over her chest. “Which is why we’re going to skirt the edge of the crowd on our way out of town, not march through the heart of the assembly and into the courthouse, where we’re most likely to be recognized, then arrested.”

  “Then executed,” Reese added.

  “So you’re going to run,” I said flatly.

  “No.” Devi spread her arms to take in the entire room and everyone in it. “This is regrouping, so we can come at them again. That’s not the same as running. April ran.”

  “April?” And suddenly I understood. “April Walden?” The girl from Solace who’d died in the badlands. “She was an exorcist?”

  “She would have been. When the degenerates started flocking north, we followed them, but they weren’t leading us to New Temperance. First they led us to Solace.” Which would have been between them and my hometown, coming from the south. “Finn and Reese found her, and she hadn’t been triggered yet, which should have been good, except that she didn’t know what she was. When they told her, she didn’t believe them. Until the degenerates found her. Finn and Reese tried to get her to fight—she had to kill a demon to trigger the rest of the transition—but she ran.”

  “Into the badlands? How is that any better than fighting degenerates? The badlands are crawling with them, right?”

  Grayson nodded. “I think she panicked. She was terrified, but she knew a way out of the town. Reese held off the degenerates so Finn could follow her. She made it through the wall before he caught up with her, but when he did, he had no way to talk to her. So he took over her body. He was just going to bring her back to us so we could help her, but…”

  “But more degenerates found us before I could get her back inside the town,” Reese said, and I glanced into the kitchen to see him leaning against the counter while the eggs sizzled behind him. Only it wasn’t really Reese. “I fought them, in
her body, but there were too many of them, and I’d never been in her before, so…”

  “There’s nothing else you could have done,” Grayson said when his voice faded.

  “If I had a body…”

  Grayson actually rolled her eyes and managed to make the gesture look comforting. “If you had a body of your own, things would have been different from the start, but we work with what we have. That’s the best we can do.”

  “Right now the best we can do is get the hell out of dodge and regroup, then come back for your sister when we’ve faded from the headlines,” Devi insisted. “We can’t get to her now.”

  I set the case on the bathroom counter, frustration raging deep inside me. “We’re faster and stronger than anyone I’ve ever met. We can get to Melanie. We’re the only ones who can. But if you badass, super-strong demon hunters are too scared of a handful of human jailers to help me, I’ll damn well do it myself.”

  For a moment, silence reigned. Even the eggs were quiet, draining on a paper towel–covered plate, where Reese had put them now that he was back in his own body. Then Grayson whispered from the couch, “I love her fight.” When everyone turned to her, she gave us a sheepish shrug. “That was from Finn. Also, he says he’s in. And so am I.”

  Maddock shrugged. “If Finn’s in, I’m in.”

  “No!” Devi shouted, and I hoped everyone in the apartment next door was still at work. “Your bullshit plan is tantamount to suicide, and that’s one sin I’m not eager to try out.”

  Maddock covered his ears with both hands. “I can’t think with you both shouting at once.” Grayson looked uncomfortable too, and I realized that Finn was trying to be heard. “Finn says he’s staying to help Nina, and that if the rest of us leave her, he’ll…never forgive us.”

  “Only his version was slightly more profane and much more entertaining,” Grayson added.

  “Fine. He’s made his decision. We’re leaving.” Devi reached past me to scoop an armful of pill bottles into the toiletry bag from the open medicine cabinet.