Gasps echoed all around me. I blinked blood from my eyes, and Bennett’s form came into focus, bent over a body on the ground. Blood pooled beneath her, flowing around the soles of her shoes, soaking into the tails of her cassock. She looked up at me and hissed like an angry cat, but I hardly saw the lips curled back from her teeth or the inhuman gleam in her eyes.

I could only look at the man I’d just sacrificed to expose the deacon. He lay dead on the ground, blood still pouring through the gaping hole in his throat. He’d died so fast he never had a chance to drop his gun.

I reached for Bennett, my hand already glowing, but before I could make contact, guns thwuped from my left—one, two, three, four shots—and I flinched with each one.

Bennett convulsed with the impacts, then fell over dead.

“No!” I shouted.

My ears rang with the echo of suppressed gunfire, and the bright light faded from my hand. I blinked again, trying to make sense of the past two minutes, but the only things I was sure of were that I was still breathing and that Deacon Bennett was dead.

Well, evicted from her body, at least. The demon itself could be anywhere, in search of a new host.

I stared at the corpse, horrified to realize I’d lost the chance to exorcise the highest-ranking demon in New Temperance. To send the biggest threat to my sister’s safety back to the hell from which she’d sprung.

“She killed him,” one of the politicians muttered, wiping blood from the back of his hand onto his plain gray cassock, and I finally recognized him as one of Bennett’s clerks—I’d seen him standing behind her during several recent press conferences.

“She wasn’t a she.” I grabbed a tissue from a box on the unmanned receptionist’s desk to my right and finally realized I was in the front lobby of the police station. “She was a demon.”

“And you’re…?” The third cop still had his gun aimed at Bennett’s lifeless body, as if she might come back to life at any moment.

“An exorcist.” I wiped my face with the tissue, and it came away smeared with blood. “A real exorcist. I’m human, and so is my sister. If you don’t help me get her out of here, they’ll kill her.” That wasn’t exactly true, but I didn’t have time to explain the Church’s entire nefarious plot to a bunch of traumatized civilians.

And that was when I realized I no longer thought of myself as one of them.

They were citizens.

I was a soldier.