Outrage seethed within me, demanding action. I could not just stand there while they set my friend and neighbor—the father of my unborn niece or nephew—on fire.
But there was nothing I could do or say without putting even more people in danger. Including Mellie and her baby.
The fake exorcists dumped both canisters of gasoline over Adam, and several people in the crowd gasped, as if they hadn’t expected that to actually happen. As if they’d thought the whole thing was a warning, or a prank that had finally gone too far.
Adam screamed as gasoline ran into his eyes and his mouth and every open cut on his body.
On the inside, I screamed with him. On the outside, I clutched handfuls of my uniform pants and clenched my jaw shut with staggering effort.
Then the screen shifted to a new angle to show the lead exorcist kneeling next to a little girl at the front of the crowd, still dressed in her school uniform, blond pigtails brushing her shoulders.
With a jolt of shock, I recognized Elena, from my kindergarten class, just an instant before the exorcist put a match in her small hand. He helped her strike the tip against the side of the box, and for a moment, like the rest of the live audience, I was transfixed by the glow of that tiny flame.
Then the exorcist stood and demonstrated a tossing motion for Elena. The men with the canisters stepped down from the dais and onto the sidewalk. And five-year-old Elena Phillips threw the lit match onto the gas-drenched stones.
Fire consumed Adam and most of the dais in the span of a single heartbeat. Flames masked his ruined face, but could not mute his screams or the crackle of his crisping skin, captured by multiple microphones and broadcast all over the country. He hunched forward, futilely trying to protect the most vulnerable parts of his body as smoke rose and disappeared into the rapidly darkening sky.
I choked on the scent of burning flesh and hair. Fresh horror melded with the memory of Clare Parker’s gruesome death, and together they obscured the courtyard around me, the crowd hiding me, and the trampled grass beneath my feet until I could see and hear nothing but the steady roar of a martyr’s flames.
My mouth dropped open beneath the force of shock and outrage I could no longer hold back, and I didn’t realize I’d intended to scream until a hand closed over my mouth, trapping my terror inside me. I bit one of the fingers and shoved the man off me, but didn’t notice his bright green eyes until he’d already stumbled into two other people.
They twisted to look, and he apologized. I pulled my hood as low on my face as it would go and turned just as Maddock took my arm. A second later, Finn had the other one, and I didn’t recognize the face he wore this time, because the man he’d been a second earlier was still trying to figure out how he’d stumbled backward into several people when he couldn’t even remember looking away from the screen.
“We have a problem,” Finn said as we pushed our way toward the back of the crowd. We weren’t trying to hide my face anymore because our withdrawal didn’t stand out. Everyone with a weak stomach—or a strong conscience—was retreating from the human torch who used to be one of my friends and classmates.
“Understatement of the century,” Maddock mumbled from my right as they guided me through the crowd without any spoken plan or direction, as if they could read each other’s minds. “They just lit a kid on fire, and I’m betting there’s more gasoline where that came from.”
Finn exhaled heavily. “That’s not the problem.”
“Wait!” I pulled away from them both and turned toward the side entrance of the courthouse, prepared to push my way back through the crowd, which had thinned but not dispersed. “I’m not leaving her.”
“Shhh, Nina, please.” Strong hands turned me, and I found myself staring at a dark, middle-aged face eyeing me with concern—through bright green eyes. Finn’s rapid body switches were making me dizzy. “I’m so sorry about your friend. But getting us caught won’t help him or your sister. Okay? It’s not safe for us here. It’s less safe than you can possibly imagine.”
“Why? What happened?”
“I’ll explain once we’re out of the crowd.” His voice was as loud as it could possibly be and still qualify as a whisper. “We’ll have to find another way to get to Melanie.”
We were two-thirds of the way through the crowd when a shrill scream pierced the steady crackle of flames, then was cut off abruptly.
At first I thought it was Adam. Then I realized he’d passed out from either the smoke or the pain almost a minute earlier. Or maybe—mercifully—he was already dead. People were looking around, craning their necks, but no one seemed to know where the scream had come from.
When a second person screamed, I stopped walking. Something was wrong.
I turned when several more voices joined the chorus of horror, shrieking in pain and fear, and both Maddock and Finn turned with me, but we couldn’t see the source through the throng.
On-screen, the camera panned the now-skittish crowd while an obviously startled Sister Pamela spoke in an inset window, demanding an answer to the question we were each asking ourselves. And finally the camera zoomed in on a rapidly expanding gap in the crowd, widening like the eye of a hurricane. We couldn’t see what was happening, but people were trying to get away, and as some ran, others fell and were trampled.
“Shit!” Maddock shouted, and I turned away from the screen to follow his gaze just as an inhuman snarl ripped through the crowd on my left. A new chorus of screams followed, and the horror was closer now. People were panicking. Fleeing. Falling. Some pulled their friends up, and others left them behind. Yet I still couldn’t see the source of the panic.
But I could smell it.
Rot. Filth. Fetid bodily fluids.
Degenerates. My transitional period was over; I hadn’t felt their approach.
I’d hardly processed that realization when another series of shrieks echoed from my right. I turned just as a male degenerate in tattered mechanic’s coveralls dropped from a courthouse balcony onto a man in a suit, driving him to the ground. People scrambled in all directions. Two of them ran into me, pushing me backward, but I ducked, then squeezed between the next two while the man in the suit screamed.
My hand was already glowing when I stepped into the ever-widening opening in the crowd, but no one stopped running long enough to notice.
The man was dead before I got to him, so instead of pulling the degenerate off him, I slammed my burning hand down on the demon’s back and pressed as hard as I could. The monster thrashed between me and the corpse of his own making, but I held my ground. This time I could feel the empty chill of his hunger—a maddening, ravenous existence—and I let the heat in my palm burn him up until there was nothing left in his mutated body but a charred, smoking hole the diameter of my hand.
The dead degenerate collapsed on top of his victim, and I stood, ready to run, certain that someone had seen what I’d done and that the fake exorcists were already closing in on me with guns drawn.
And people had seen, surely, but in their panic they’d had time for nothing but their own escape. No one was staring at me. No guns were aimed at me. People didn’t care who I was or what I was wanted for, as long as I stood between them and the monsters.
A flash of bright light exploded on my right and I turned, expecting to find Maddock exorcising another demon, but instead I found Reese, badass and scary in his police cassock, his navy blue hat half trampled on the ground at his feet.
Maddock was several yards away, pulling a degenerate off a screaming, bleeding woman, and from deeper within the crowd came another flash of light, and a shout of triumph that could only have come from Devi.
“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.
“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 on
e 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.
“Did you guys see that?” Each grinding thump of my shoes against pavement bounced back at me from the brick walls of yet another dark alley, and I wondered if I’d ever walk on Main Street again. Why hadn’t anyone told me that claiming my exorcist birthright and being declared anathema meant giving up daylight and sidewalks forever?
“See what?” Devi snapped. Finn was hanging back for me—I didn’t yet have their stamina—and since he was in Maddock’s body, she was hanging back for him, shooting us angry glances every couple of seconds while Reese maintained the lead she clearly wanted. “The part where a pack of degenerates attacked a large congregation on live television for the first time since the end of the war, or the part where you called the Church out in front of all those innocent people, further pissing them off and endangering yet more innocent lives?”
“I didn’t call anyone out!” I was huffing, though the rest of them sounded fine, and a glance back told me we’d finally zigged down enough alleys and zagged across enough open lots to lose our fake-exorcist pursuers.