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.

The small crowd was moving on, slowly, reluctantly, except for one young boy and girl, standing side by side on my lawn. Wearing identical expressions of terror.

Melanie. And Adam Yung.

“Wait!” Mellie cried as a man in a black cassock took her by the arm.

“Don’t touch her!” Adam’s dark hair gleamed in the light from the front porch. He dodged the man reaching for him, then grabbed Melanie’s hand, but as the exorcists pulled her away from both me and Adam, Mellie began to struggle.

Then her mouth opened.

Don’t say it! I shouted in my head, but of course she didn’t hear me.

“That’s my house. That’s my sister!”

“No!” I yelled, drawing their attention back to me. If they thought there was something wrong with me, they might think there was something wrong with my sister too. “Leave her out of this. She has nothing to do with it.”

“Melanie!” Adam was being restrained at the edge of the yard.

“Nina!” Mellie tried to push her way past two of the exorcists, and at the exact moment a third turned to help them, wood splintered in the kitchen and someone kicked in my back door.

“Nina!” a new voice shouted. I whirled toward the sound of my name and saw the boy from the alley standing in my kitchen. The boy with the green eyes.

“Don’t move!” the exorcist team leader shouted again, and I turned to him on instinct, just in time to see one of the men on the lawn aim his gun at my sister, who’d become quite belligerent.

“No!” I screeched, and though I couldn’t hear the footsteps at my back over the shrill sound of my own voice, I could feel them reverberate in the floor beneath my feet. “Don’t touch her! She’s pregnant!”

I regretted it before the words even left my mouth, but I’d had no choice. They would have hurt her if she didn’t stop fighting, and she wouldn’t stop fighting until they hurt her.

At my last word, silence descended. Melanie stopped struggling. Adam blinked at her, stunned, from across our small yard. The exorcist lowered his gun, and the other two let my sister go. What remained of our lawn audience stared in shock because the skinny girl who traded favors for food, and who was now being arrested by a team of exorcists, also had a pregnant fifteen-year-old sister.