“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.