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The Flame Never Dies
Rachel Vincent


‘Haunting, unsettling and eerily beautiful’ – Rachel CaineONE SPARK WILL RISENina Kane was born to be an exorcist. And since uncovering the horrifying truth—that the war against demons is far from over—seventeen-year-old Nina and her pregnant sister, Mellie, have been on the run, incinerating the remains of the demon horde as they go.In the badlands, Nina, Mellie, and Finn, the fugitive and rogue exorcist who saved her life, find allies in a group of freedom fighters. They also face a new threat: Pandemonia, a city full of demons. But this fresh new hell is the least of Nina’s worries. The well of souls ran dry more than a century ago, drained by the demons secretly living among humans, and without a donor soul, Mellie’s child will die within hours of its birth.Nina isn’t about to let that happen . . . even if it means she has to make the ultimate sacrifice.







RACHEL VINCENT is the New York Times bestselling author of many books for adults and for teens, including the Shifters, Unbound, and Soul Screamers series. A resident of Oklahoma, she has two teenagers, two cats, and a BA in English, each of which contributes in some way to every book she writes. When she’s not working, Rachel can be found curled up with a book or watching movies and playing video games with her husband.

Visit Rachel online at

rachelvincent.com (http://rachelvincent.com)

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To every intrepid real-world heroine out there who knows that one girl can make a difference. You, fearless ladies, make the world go round.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover (#u98d6c060-d552-5107-9482-dfa18b2637c5)

About the Author (#ud99f8143-0f41-5d0b-8e24-587a970ae7ee)

Title Page (#u8f3c3f5e-00b4-5cff-8e3e-560926e4f2a7)

Dedication (#u858a1f6d-204d-533b-920a-4c1e5fd87b21)

ONE (#ulink_c7206e08-b44a-5681-9ae4-6f493043b139)

TWO (#ulink_c082ee14-5d3e-5950-8774-23c55ce9b557)

THREE (#ulink_440d077a-4c3f-524b-aa9c-30b131fb64a0)

FOUR (#ulink_7b21c75b-df68-5c93-8eda-529414cda52a)

FIVE (#ulink_a4b7711e-b4f2-5316-b965-43681d55af45)

SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)

THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)







ONE (#ulink_33d84b73-85d7-5704-ae20-17e99f52e046)

I crouched, tense, in the derelict remains of a high school gymnasium, one of the last buildings still standing in the town of Ashland, which had been mostly burned to the ground during the demonic uprising more than a century before. Though standing might be giving the gymnasium too much credit. The walls were upright. The floor was buckled, but intact, and dotted with rotting insulation that had fallen through the ceiling long before I was born. A few weak beams of daylight shone through small holes in the roof, highlighting dust motes in the air, and as I turned slowly, I marveled at how still and quiet the huge room felt.

A footstep whispered behind me and the sound of my pulse swelled in my ears. I spun and drove my heel into my attacker’s solar plexus. He flew backward with a breathless “Oof!” and landed hard on the warped wooden floor, scraping the last flakes of paint from what had once been standard basketball court markings. Or maybe a cartoonish depiction of the school mascot, like the one still clinging to the gray brick wall.

The assailant tried to get up, but I dropped onto him, straddling his hips, and shoved my left palm down on his chest. My right fist was pulled back, ready to punch him in the face, just in case.

Maddock held both hands palms-out between us, his hazel eyes wide as they stared up at me. “Nina, I give!”

I laughed as I climbed off him, wiping sweat from my forehead in spite of the cool spring morning.

“You’re getting good at this.” He pushed himself to his feet for the sixth time in ten minutes, rubbing his flat stomach where my boot had connected with it. “You’re almost ready to take on Devi.”

I turned my back so he couldn’t see me roll my eyes. “I’ll try to contain my joy.”

We’d been sparring for nearly an hour, burning energy we had no way to replenish in order to hone skills we couldn’t survive without on our own in the badlands.

Growing up under the tyrannical thumb of the Unified Church had been no picnic, even before we’d discovered that we were actually being governed by demons, raising human citizens like cattle for the slaughter. But at least food had been easy to swipe from the corner store less than a mile from my house.

Outside the Church’s walled-in cities, survival required much stricter planning. And vigorous self-defense. After five months in the badlands, we were all lean and ragged from the meager diet and frequent exposure to the elements, yet I was faster and stronger than I’d ever been in my life.

Maddock used the short sleeve of a sun-bleached blue T-shirt to wipe sweat from his forehead. “Maybe we should take a break,” he said, in the quiet way he had of making a suggestion sound like an imperative. I’d been impressed by that ability from the moment I’d met him. Devi could shout and make demands, and, truth be told, she probably could have taken him in a fair fight if she weren’t until-death-rends-me-from-your-side in love with him. But she could not lead Anathema because we would not follow her.

Devi did, however, get credit for naming our motley band of outlaws. When the Church had declared us anathema—cast us out, claiming we’d been possessed—Devi had insisted we make the label ours. We’d been wearing it like a medal ever since.

Finn stepped out of the shadows behind a crumbling set of bleachers, the sun shining on his short-cropped dark curls. My pulse spiked when he pulled me into an embrace in spite of the layer of sweat and grime coating my training clothes. “If he’s too tired to take you to the ground, I’d be happy to step in,” he whispered into my ear, and warmth glowed beneath my skin at the scandalous subtext. My connection with Finn had grown bolder with every mile that stretched between Anathema and the authority of the Church, until daily, unchaperoned conversation with boys no longer made me glance fearfully over my shoulder.

Yet the novelty of that easy contact lingered, intensifying the excitement of my first serious relationship. As it turned out, indecency was terribly exhilarating. Devi had been right about that all along.

“Sounds like fun,” I whispered in return, and Finn’s embrace tightened. “If I weren’t afraid of hurting you, I would have been sparring with you in the first place.” But when his arms tensed around me, I recognized my mistake.

“I hate this fragile body,” he growled against the upper curve of my ear, and I felt his frustration like a gulf opening between us, widening with every reminder that unlike my own, the flesh he wore was borrowed, and limited by ordinary human abilities. He’d been in the body of a gate guard named Carter since the day we’d escaped New Temperance five months before, and though the guard was strong and fast, and tall enough that I could comfortably rest my chin on his shoulder, his body was no match for an exorcist’s speed or strength.

“I like this body,” I whispered, sliding my arms around his neck as I stared up into green eyes that looked even greener against the smooth, dark skin of his appropriated face. “And I like you in it. Strength and speed aren’t everything.” And even a weak “civilian” body was better than no body at all, which was Finn’s natural state. At least this way I could see him and talk to him and kiss him . . . when we weren’t surrounded by our fellow outlaws.

“We should save our energy for the raid anyway,” Maddy added with a sympathetic glance at his best friend. “Assuming there’s anything to raid.”

But there had to be. “If Reese and Devi don’t find a supply truck today, we’re screwed,” Finn said, and neither of us argued. “The disadvantage of having a body full-time is that it’s hungry all the time.”

We’d taken everything both vehicles could hold during our most recent heist, but a month later we were running on empty again. As were both cars. Most of us could go a couple of days without food, but Melanie . . .

My little sister and her unborn child had to eat every day. Several times a day. They needed good food—protein and vitamins we just didn’t know how to find in the badlands on our own, especially during the winter months, when there’d been little edible vegetation growing in the largely abandoned national landscape.

Now that spring had come we had hopes for foraging, but we were new to the art, and the learning curve was steep.

Yet Mellie and her baby faced an even greater challenge than hunger, and it was that need that kept me awake most nights. . . .

“Here. Hydrate.” Finn pressed a bottle of water into my hand and I gulped half of it. Fortunately, Ashland had several creeks, and they all ran clear and cold. The world’s water supply was probably cleaner than it had been before the war, now that humanity had stopped poisoning the planet.

The demon apocalypse had been good for the environment, if nothing else.

I pulled Finn closer and inhaled deeply, letting the feel of his arms around me and the scent of his hair—pilfered shampoo and fresh river water—push entrenched fears to the back of my mind. He’d been my anchor during our chaotic life on the run, and I’d grown comfortable with the arms that held me, even if they weren’t really his.

But the guilt from having stolen an innocent man’s body wore on Finn constantly. Unfortunately, we couldn’t let the guard go in the middle of the badlands. Within hours he’d be torn to pieces by degenerates—deranged demons trapped in mutated human bodies, roaming what was left of the United States in search of a fresh soul to devour.

I’d just finished my water when the growl of an approaching engine put all three of us on alert. Maddy raced for the exit and squeezed through a set of doors immobilized in the ajar position by the warped floor. Finn and I were right behind him, dust motes swirling around us.

We got to the sidewalk just as the black SUV slid to a halt on fractured pavement, inches from the bumper of the car we’d fled New Temperance in, which still bore the bullet hole and spiderwebbed glass from our escape. Dust puffed beneath the tires and settled onto our worn boots as Reese emerged from the passenger side. Maddy, Finn, and I practically strained our necks looking up at him.

Reese Cardwell was six and a half feet and two hundred thirty pounds of solid muscle, even after months of our paltry badlands diet.

“Maddy. Heads up,” Devi called as she climbed out of the driver’s seat and pushed her long, dark braid over her shoulder. She tossed a crowbar to him over the hood of the SUV. “Church caravan, ten minutes out. Two supply trucks and an escort vehicle. They’ve stepped up the security in response to our raids.”

That was inevitable. We’d hit three supply trucks in the past five months. The Church was evil, not stupid.

“We can’t handle a security escort,” Maddock insisted, testing the heft of the crowbar. “There aren’t enough of us.”

I propped my hands on my hips. “But we’re outnumbered by degenerates all the time.”

“Exorcising degenerates is easy,” Maddock said, though I had a knot on my head and a bandaged gash on my left arm that would argue otherwise. “Disabling innocent people without killing them—that’s the hard part. If the security detail’s all human, this’ll get complicated.”

“We don’t have any choice.” Reese grabbed a set of binoculars from the passenger-side dashboard. “They’ve posted guards at the gasoline depot”—a prewar relic kept functional by the Church to fuel their deliveries—“and they probably won’t be shipping provisions one truck at a time anymore. We need a haul big enough to let us lie low for a while, and we’ll have to siphon all three tanks to get us five hundred miles south.”

“South?” When had that been decided?

“We’ve worn out our welcome here.” Finn shrugged borrowed shoulders, but the green eyes that watched me were all his own, no matter whose body he wore. “The cities down south won’t be expecting us, so raids will be easier until they catch on.”

“Okay. So how many people are in this caravan?” I asked as Maddock counted the empty gas canisters lined up in the back of the battered black vehicle.

“About eight. Maybe more.” Devi tossed Reese the keys to the SUV. “All armed. Not sure how many are possessed. We’ll need Finn.”

And the assault rifle that had come with the gate guard’s body.

Devi slid behind the wheel of the smaller car and adjusted the mirrors. Maddock got in next to her and stuck the key into the ignition while Finn and I climbed into the backseat. Reese got into the SUV behind us, and as we took off across the badlands, Finn pulled the semiautomatic rifle from the floorboard and checked to make sure it was loaded.

“What’s the setup?” I asked, staring into the rearview mirror at the front of the decrepit school library, where my sister waited with the other two civilian members of our group, in the safest location we could find for them. Mellie was easily persuaded to stay out of the action if she had something to read.

“Roadblock on the main drag of Palmersville.” Devi took a turn too fast on the splintered pavement and the tires squealed beneath us as I slid across the backseat into Finn. “They’ll have to go right through on their way to the gas depot, and the road’s narrow enough that Reese can block it with just the SUV. When the trucks stop, Finn will shoot out the tires of the rear vehicle to block their retreat. Then we melee.”

“That’s the best way to fight.” Maddock twisted in his seat to shoot a gleeful grin at us. “Trap them, then force them to brawl hand-to-hand. Because chaos—”

“—favors the militia,” I finished for him. “I know.” Obviously, we were the militia.

I’d never been in a fight in my life until the week of my seventeenth birthday, five months earlier, when I’d discovered I was an exorcist by frying a demon from my mother’s body. Naturally, she’d died in the process, and the Church had accused me of matricide, to cover up the fact that their army of “exorcists” was full of fakes. I’d gone from high school senior to the country’s most wanted fugitive in a single instant.

Since then, Melanie and I had been on the run with the rest of Anathema, armed with the dangerous knowledge that the all-powerful Unified Church, which claimed to have “saved” humanity from the invading demon horde a century before, actually was the demon horde, disguised with human faces and authorial robes.

Minutes after piling into the car, we raced down the main drag of what was once a tiny town called Palmersville, which boasted a grand total of four mostly paved streets. Devi turned right onto one of them, and behind us Reese parked the SUV sideways across the entire two-lane road.

Finn got out of the car with his rifle and took a quick look around the derelict town. He pointed at a crumbling storefront across the street. “I’ll be in there. Center window, bottom floor.”

“Be careful.” I pulled him close for an adrenaline-fueled kiss, and when we let the moment linger, Devi grabbed the tail of my shirt and hauled me backward.

“Priorities,” she snapped as Finn grinned at me, then turned to jog across the street.

“We’ll take out the escort vehicle first.” Reese towered over the rest of us, in a group too varied in height to form a true huddle. “Then Nina and I will take the first supply truck and you two take the second one.”

Maddock and Devi nodded, then headed into an alley across the way while Reese and I hid behind an industrial trash bin half-eaten with rust on our side of the street.

Seconds later we heard engines.

Our haphazardly parked SUV was dusty and dented enough to pass for abandoned, and I knew for certain that the ploy had worked when the caravan’s escort vehicle, a police car, stopped ten feet away. The police car bore the stylized emblem of the Unified Church—four intertwined columns of flames—and the men who got out of it wore the long navy cassocks of police officers.

Even from a distance I could see the white embroidery on their full, bell-shaped sleeves. They were both consecrated Church leaders.

Which meant they were possessed.

A jolt of excitement shot up my spine, anticipation laced with an edge of fear, and I felt Reese tense beside me. He was as eager to fight as I was.

The cops were already headed toward our SUV, obviously intending to push it off the road, when a passenger got out of the second cargo truck and shouted, “What’s the holdup?” He wore civilian clothes—a green jacket bearing the logo of the shipping company that owned the truck.

“Abandoned car,” the first cop shouted over his shoulder. “We’ll have it out of the way in a minute.”

“We came through here last week and there was nothing in the road,” the civilian called, and both cops turned to eye our vehicle warily.

A gunshot thundered from Finn’s hiding place as the civilian was climbing back into his truck. One of its tires exploded, and shouts erupted from both trucks.

The cops dove for cover behind their open car doors, pulling pistols from their holsters while they scanned the storefront for the source of the gunfire. Finn took two more shots in rapid succession, and one of them hit a second tire, effectively disabling the second cargo truck and trapping the two vehicles in front of it.

My pulse raced, my left fist clenching and unclenching in anticipation.

Maddock and Devi burst from their hiding place and crossed the distance quickly and quietly.

Reese and I came at the lead vehicle from the opposite direction, running crouched over, and the driver got out of the car when he saw us coming. Even if his robes hadn’t been embroidered, I’d have known he was possessed from the way he moved, inhumanly quick and impossibly nimble. Daylight hid the demonic shine in his eyes—visible only to exorcists and fellow demons—but I saw recognition in his expression when he skidded to a stop in front of me, already reaching for the gun at his waist. He knew me.

But then, everyone knew Nina Kane. I was public enemy number one.

I lunged forward and pressed my left hand to his chest before he could pull his weapon. Light burst between us, and the demon screamed as he was burned from his human host while the body dangled from the fire kindled in my palm, weightless beneath the power of exorcism.

On my right, Maddock grunted. A form flew past me and crashed to the ground, unmoving. The light from my hand faded and the body suspended from it crumpled to the cracked pavement. I turned and found Maddy fighting a second possessed police officer, but before I could get to them, I was suddenly yanked from the ground and thrown backward through the air.

I screamed and flailed in flight, then crashed onto a patch of grass ten feet from the road. Before I could stand, another navy-robed demon sprang at me with an odd, squarish gun in his hand. I rolled out of the way, and the demon shoved the weapon into the ground where I’d been an instant earlier.

The weapon buzzed, and I realized it was a stun gun. They’d come armed not to kill, but to capture.

The Church still wanted us alive.

“Watch out! Stun guns!” I shouted as I rolled over and leapt to my feet.

The demon was on me in an instant. I tried to kick the weapon from his grip but missed his hand entirely. He was too fast. Too strong. After fighting only mutated and relatively weak degenerates in the badlands, I was out of practice battling demons in their prime, and the number of pained grunts bursting from my fellow exorcists said I was not alone.

Time to step up my game.

The demon cop lunged again and I blocked his gun arm, then kicked him in the chest as hard as I could. Breath exploded from his mouth and the demon flew backward several feet. I was on him before he could stand, my palm already alight with the force that would scorch him from his stolen body and eject him from the human world. For just a second, as I pressed that living flame to his chest and listened to his flesh sizzle, I felt . . . peaceful.

Useful.

I was born for this.

Behind me, the grunts and thumps were winding down, and when the body beneath my hand fell limp, I turned to see that we had won the fight.

It wasn’t even close, really. I counted six men in white-embroidered navy police cassocks, each now sporting a scorched and smoldering hole in his chest. The two survivors were the human deliverymen who’d been driving the cargo. Both now stood with their backs against the first of the two green supply trucks with their hands in the air, while Finn aimed his rifle at them.

“What’s the plan for these two?” he asked, his aim unwavering.

Maddock considered the question for a moment. “Cuff ’em and leave ’em in the escort vehicle.”

“I’m on it.” Devi squatted next to one of the dead cops, then stood with his handcuffs. While she and Finn restrained the civilians, Maddock searched the bodies until he found the keys to the cargo compartments. He unlocked the rear of the first truck and rolled the door up to reveal the shipment.

Relief eased the most immediate of my fears. Our famine was over, at least for a while.

Reese rounded the back of the vehicle. “Holy hellfire.” The truck was stacked full of boxes, floor to ceiling, front to back. Even if the second vehicle was empty—and it wouldn’t be—we’d found way more than we could carry.

Each box was clearly labeled, and at a glance I noticed crates of canned and dry goods, boxes of clothing bound for department stores, cleaning supplies, textbooks, and more toiletries than I’d ever seen in my life.

“They put all their eggs in one basket,” Maddock said, his voice hollow with surprise. “They must have thought we wouldn’t attack an armed caravan.”

“Or they were hoping we would,” I guessed. “They came armed with stun guns, prepared to capture, not kill.”

“Well, too bad for them.” Devi stepped in front of me and pulled a clipboard from a hook on the wall of the cargo area. The inventory was several pages long.

“It’ll be easier to drive this back than to try to unload it,” Reese said, and no one argued. We took turns siphoning the gasoline from the truck we wouldn’t be taking, and then Maddock and Devi drove off in the other cargo truck. Reese followed them in our SUV, which left Finn and me to drive the shot-out car we’d “stolen” from a sympathetic cop back in New Temperance. As we passed the police vehicle on the way to our car, one of the cargo truck drivers stuck his head out of the backseat window.

“Carter?” he called, leaning at an odd angle because his hands were bound behind his back. The other civilian sat in the front seat, his left wrist handcuffed to the steering wheel. Neither man could get out of the car, but they would be able to drive it to the nearest city. “You used to be Heath Carter, right?” the man in the backseat repeated, staring at Finn. “I knew I recognized you.”

We’d ditched Carter’s ID along with his unembroidered church cassock months ago, because even when Finn eventually released his body, returning to New Temperance would be a death sentence for the real Carter—he would know things the Church wouldn’t want him to share.

“He’s not possessed,” I said. “He just switched sides once he learned the truth.” Telling my little lie was much easier than trying to explain that Carter actually was possessed, but not by a demon. Beyond that, we didn’t want the Church to know about Finn and his ability to inhabit any human body not already occupied by a demon. He was as close to a secret weapon as we had.

“What truth? What the hell happened out there?” the man cuffed to the steering wheel demanded, and I followed his gaze to where we’d lined up the scorched corpses on the grass. “What did you bastards do to them?”

The drivers didn’t recognize us as exorcists because their only exposure to the practice had come from the Church’s army of fake exorcists, who marched around in dramatic black robes, wearing crosses and chanting nonsense in Latin for show.

“Those cops were possessed,” I said. “We exorcised them.”

“Nina,” Finn whispered, warning me to shush, because just like with Carter, the more these civilians knew, the more danger they’d be in from the Church. But they’d already seen enough to get themselves killed, so my explanation might actually save their lives.

“You expect us to believe you’re exorcists and the cops were demons?” the man in the backseat spat. “Bullshit.” He leaned forward, appealing to his coworker in the front. “Demons are pathological liars. You can’t believe a word she says.”

“If we’re possessed, why would we let you live?”

Backseat Man lifted his eyebrows at me in challenge. “If they were possessed”—he nodded at the bodies lined up on the ground—“why were they going to let you live?”

“So they could deliver us to the Church.” I shrugged. That should have been obvious.

“Deliver you . . . ?” Front Seat Man stared up at me, surprised. “Where exactly were they going to put you?”

I frowned, considering the question. The backs of both cargo trucks were full of goods, and most of the available seats had been filled by the cops and drivers. They wouldn’t have had room to bring more than two of us back.

So why had they come armed with nonlethal weapons?

Before I could come up with any reasonable theories, Backseat Man made a show of glancing around what he could see of the ghost town. “Where’s your sister? She lose that baby yet?”

Finn held me back when I took an instinctive, aggressive step toward him. Melanie and her unlicensed, underage pregnancy, which constituted multiple prosecutable sins, had risen to infamy when the Church publicly questioned her humanity and broadcast her boyfriend’s immolation—death by fire—to the entire country.

For once, Finn’s hand on my shoulder failed to calm me. “She’s not going to lose the baby,” I growled through clenched teeth. Making sure of that had become my mission in life since escaping New Temperance. Mellie’s unborn child was the only family she and I had left in the world—thanks to routine sterilization by the Church, I could never have one of my own.

“Oh, we both know that’s not true,” Backseat Man taunted. “Even if it’s born breathing, how long will it live? The well is empty, and you have no donor. Without a soul, that baby will die out here in the dirt, and there’ll be nothing you or your sister or your gang of flame-wielding assassins can do about it.”

Assassins? My heart thumped harder. Only demons called exorcists assassins.

I squinted against the sunlight for a better look at Backseat Man, and that time when I stepped toward him, Finn didn’t try to stop me. He’d heard it too. The Church had sent one of its demons in disguise as a deliveryman—no official cassock, no telltale embroidery.

“Melanie’s baby will live.” I held my left hand out so he could see the flame cradled in my palm. His eyes widened, and he tried to retreat across the bench seat but was trapped by the seat belt. “I will find a soul for it.” I shoved my fiery hand through the open window, and the demon screeched, an inhuman sound of agony, as the flame met his flesh. “And if I can’t find a soul for my sister’s baby,” I whispered so softly that no one else could hear me above the crackle of crisping skin, “I will damn well give that kid my own.”







TWO (#ulink_07de914f-d3d9-56f3-bdf1-454e48d45b2e)

We caught up with the other two vehicles on the way back to Ashland, and Finn must have known something was wrong, because he didn’t tease me about my lead foot. “Try not to let them get to you,” he said, plucking my right hand from the wheel so he could intertwine his fingers with mine. “They’re demons. They live to cause us pain.”

But I wasn’t upset about what the backseat demon had said—I was upset because he was almost certainly right. The well of souls was empty. It had been quietly drained over the past millennia by demons secretly living among us. The soaring infant mortality rate at the end of the previous century had finally clued humanity in, leading to the war against the unclean, which had decimated two-thirds of the world’s population.

Now pregnancies were licensed and regulated by the Church. People who were declared unfit to reproduce were sterilized at age fifteen, as I’d been because I was slightly nearsighted and prone to seasonal allergies. To make sure that every baby conceived would actually live, elderly citizens were expected to give up their souls in simultaneous birth/death events carefully orchestrated by city officials. What the rest of the world didn’t know was that the Church only wanted those babies to live so they could be possessed and fed from as adults.

Escaping New Temperance had spared Melanie’s baby—and the rest of us—from that fate. Theoretically, at least. Unfortunately, our escape had also drastically lowered the chances of finding a soul for the baby. Without one, the youngest and most vulnerable of my two remaining family members would die within hours of his or her birth. We’d all known that from the beginning.

What I hadn’t told the rest of Anathema was that I was fully prepared to make the necessary sacrifice myself if I couldn’t find a willing donor before the birth.

“It’ll work out, Nina.” Finn squeezed my hand as I pressed on the brake to keep from rear-ending the cargo truck in front of us. “One way or another, it’ll all work out.”

But I knew better. Nothing in my life had ever just worked out. Good things never happened unless I made them happen, and five months spent wandering through the badlands hadn’t changed that.

Before we’d even pulled to a stop in front of the library, Grayson James burst through the cracked glass doors and raced down the crumbling steps without so much as a precautionary glance in either direction. I groaned as I shifted into park. One of these days her enthusiasm was going to get her killed. Or worse—possessed.

Reese got out of the SUV and pulled her into his massive embrace, then lifted her for a long, deep kiss. For a moment I was caught off guard by their demonstrative affection—a transgression worthy of arrest had we still been in New Temperance, or any other city. If Finn and I had become comfortable with our relationship, free from the enforced modesty of the Church, Reese and Grayson had grown bold.

Maddock and Devi’s connection had already been scandalous when I’d met them.

“Grace, you can’t just keep throwing yourself into unknown situations.” Reese set her on her feet on the crumbling concrete, and her head barely reached his shoulder. “Until you transition, you’re vulnerable.”

We’d seen an increase in degenerate activity over the past month as her seventeenth birthday approached, bringing with it the emergence of her exorcist abilities—a genetic inevitability because her brother and both of their parents had also been exorcists.

“I knew it was you,” Grayson insisted. “I didn’t hear any monsters.”

Degenerates could sense an exorcist in transition, like a cat scenting a mouse. Albeit, a mouse that would soon be able to burn the cat alive with a single touch. Grayson could “hear” degenerates in her mind, in the same way she could hear Finn talking even when he had no physical form. We didn’t understand her ability, but we couldn’t deny its existence.

Devi scowled, her dark brows drawing low over expressive black eyes that only seemed to venture beyond skepticism and disapproval when she was looking at Maddock. “Degenerates aren’t the only threat out here.”

“I was right, wasn’t I?” Grayson demanded.

Reese closed the SUV’s driver’s-side door. “That’s not the point.”

“That is the point. I’m not a civilian,” she whispered fiercely, trailing him around the vehicle as Melanie and Anabelle finally followed her out of the library now that they knew we weren’t under attack. “In a couple of weeks, I’ll be as strong and fast as the rest of you.”

“And we welcome the day,” he said. “But it’s not here yet.” Reese would willingly throw his own overgrown frame in front of her as both shield and weapon, but he worried that Grayson was vulnerable when he wasn’t around. I had the same concerns for my sister. And for Anabelle. Fortunately, neither of them was eager to start battling demons.

“It’s never too early to start training.” Devi shrugged. “Maybe if she knew what she was doing, she wouldn’t throw herself into unknown situations.”

That was one of the few things Devi and I agreed on, but Reese was afraid that training would encourage Grayson to put herself in danger.

Maddock unlocked the back of the cargo truck and rolled the door up as the last two members of our outlaw band made their way down the crumbling library steps. Anabelle had one arm around Mellie to help steady her. Every day Melanie’s stomach grew larger while the rest of her appeared to shrink, and the unborn child seemed determined to upset my fifteen-year-old sister’s balance. And to keep her up all night. And to make her feet swell, her ribs ache, and the circles beneath her eyes grow darker with every day spent on the run with inconsistent nutrition and nonexistent prenatal care.

Anabelle let go of Mellie on the bottom step. “That’s quite a haul!”

“This is only half,” I said, scanning the labels on the top row of boxes. “Cross your fingers that there’s a crate of vitamins in here, or we’ll have to go back for the other truck.”

Devi groaned—returning to the scene of the crime would be a huge risk for the group—but she didn’t argue. I’d made it clear since our escape from New Temperance that the health of my sister and her unborn child came first.

“We can’t carry all that.” Melanie stared with huge brown eyes up at the stack of crates.

Finn shrugged, and I could practically hear gears turning as he considered the problem. “We can if we ditch the shot-up car for this truck.”

“You want to drive across the badlands in a marked Church cargo truck?” My brows rose. “I guess that would be faster than actually painting targets on our backs.”

Maddock chuckled as he scanned the inventory, and I glanced from face to face. “By the way, am I the only one who didn’t know we’re heading south?”

“It’s news to me,” Anabelle said, but that was no surprise. I’d known her since I was a kid, but the others didn’t trust her like they trusted me, because I was a fellow exorcist, and they didn’t like her like they liked Melanie, because everyone liked Melanie. My sister’s gift—and her curse—was charisma. Which was how she’d wound up in love with and pregnant by a sweet but ultimately doomed boy two years her senior.

The oldest of our group by several years, Anabelle was a former ordained Church teacher who’d had to follow us into the badlands because knowing the truth about her superiors was as good as having a noose around her neck. She’d lost everything and everyone she’d ever had, just like the rest of us. But like Mellie, she was largely defenseless against the dangers of the badlands, and she was eager to earn her place in the group any way she could.

“First things first.” Finn pulled the collapsible stairs from a hidden shelf beneath the cargo hold, then stepped up into the truck. “Food. We’ll decide everything else once our brains are fueled.”

While Maddock, Devi, and I stood watch, Reese and Finn began pulling boxes from the truck and stacking them on the ground. Mellie and Anabelle made notes on the inventory sheet until they came to a crate of canned goods, and the chore was suspended in favor of lunch in the library’s vestibule, from which we could watch over our haul through tempered glass walls that appeared to have shattered, yet remained in place.

Finn and I sat down with a jar of peaches and a can of unidentifiable processed meat apiece. Next to us on the granite floor, Anabelle and Melanie shared cans of twisty pasta shapes in red sauce and a box of cheese-flavored crackers.

The remaining four members of Anathema paired off on the other side of the vestibule so that they could see the road leading into Ashland from the larger American wasteland.

Melanie tugged her bag closer and pulled out one of the books she’d scavenged from the library, then flipped through the yellowed pages while she chewed.

“How are your feet?” I asked around a bite of peach.

“Still kind of swollen, but they don’t hurt,” she answered, without looking up from the book. “My hips ache, though.”

“What about that mark on your back?” At first we’d thought it was a bruise—a small spot at the base of her backbone, slightly darker than the rest of her pale skin. But then it had started to stretch along her spine like the inverse of a skunk’s stripe.

Melanie shrugged, and sun-bleached blond hair fell over her shoulder. “I can’t feel it, and all the pregnancy books say some skin discoloration is normal. It’ll fade after the baby’s born.” When she found her place in the book, her pale brows furrowed and she settled in for the read.

“What’s she learning now?” Finn asked, eyeing Mellie with a brotherly affection that made me smile.

I tilted my sister’s book up so I could read the title. “Um . . . Hunting and Gathering for the Modern Paleo.” Another in her small collection of survivalist literature, rescued from multiple crumbling libraries across the small stretch of badlands we’d explored.

Mellie shrugged and held the book up so we could get a better look. “Plants are starting to grow, and we need to know which ones are edible.” She and Anabelle had already taught us to fish, to set basic traps for small game, to start a fire without matches, and to cook our meat evenly on a homemade spit. “Soon we’ll be able to spot wild-growing roots, tubers, and nuts to supplement all this aluminum-flavored cuisine.” She tapped the side of her pasta can and smiled. Then her gaze dropped to the page.

And with that, I lost Mellie to her book. Again.

* * *

In the end, we decided to leave the rusted, shot-up car in favor of the cargo truck.

It took nearly two hours to unload the boxes and set aside the ones we couldn’t use—mostly household cleaners and clothing that fit no one—then divide the food and usable supplies between the truck and the back of the SUV in case we got separated.

None of our previous raids had yielded as much as this latest haul, but the new goods wouldn’t last forever. We’d need the hunting and foraging techniques Ana and Mellie were learning in order to make it through the summer.

But what we needed even worse was fuel. The SUV and truck both guzzled gas at a rate we could not sustain, and the Church had crippled us by cutting off access to their fuel depots. Reese siphoned all the gas from the car we were abandoning while Mellie and Anabelle stocked backpacks full of “up front” supplies. Then Finn and I squeezed into the cab of the cargo truck with Ana and my sister, and we took off into the badlands again on yet another fractured strip of highway, this time headed south, with the descending sun on our right.

I sat as close to Finn as I could get, both to give Melanie more room and because touching him, even casually, still made my head spin and my stomach flip, like when I’d played on the swings as a kid. At first I’d thought that was because touching a boy I wasn’t related to, for any reason other than medical necessity, was strictly forbidden by the Church. But even as the thrill of rebellion had faded, the rush I felt every time Finn looked at me had only grown.

We’d been on the road for about an hour, his arm stretched across the back of the seat so he could play with my hair, when Ana looked up from her book and sucked in a startled breath.

“Holy Reformation . . . !” she swore, and as Finn pressed on the brake I followed her gaze to a car parked on the side of the road a few hundred feet ahead. The windshield was generously splattered with mud, but I couldn’t see any obvious damage to the vehicle. It had probably run out of gas, like dozens of other abandoned cars we’d come across in the badlands.

“Is that—?”

Static crackled from the handheld radio on my lap before I could finish the question, and I picked it up as Reese spoke into a matching radio from the SUV behind us. “You guys see it?” he asked, and Mellie nodded, though he couldn’t see her.

“Yeah,” I said into the handset.

“It’s a long shot, but let’s pull over and check the tank for gas,” he said, and that was when I realized that those in the SUV couldn’t see the detail that had drawn the exclamation from Anabelle. The detail that had captured my attention and Mellie’s heart, and led Finn to put his right blinker on, even though there was no other traffic to warn of his intent to pull over.

“There’s a kid,” I said into the radio, holding down the button with my thumb. The boy standing in the dirt beside the car was small, with dark skin and long, tightly curled hair. His navy pants might have been part of a uniform, but his arms were crossed over a faded, striped short-sleeved shirt instead of the white button-down required for school. “He’s six or seven years old. Appears to be alone.”

Stunned silence dominated the radio channel.

“He can’t have been there long,” Anabelle whispered, as if the child might overhear her through glass and steel from a good hundred feet away. “Where on earth are his parents?”

“In the car.” Finn pulled onto the side of the road several yards from the blue sedan. “Look closer.”

I squinted, and chills popped up all over my skin when I saw two forms slumped over in the front seat. What I’d mistaken for mud sprayed across the outside of the windshield turned out to be blood splattered across the inside.

It was too dark to be anything else.

“Oh no . . .” If the kid’s parents were in that car, they were either dead or dying.

“Stay here.” Finn shifted the truck into park and opened his door, then pulled his rifle from behind the bench seat on his way out of the vehicle. He tried to close the door, but I stopped its swing with my foot.

“Stay here.” I passed his instruction on to Mellie and Anabelle as I climbed down from the truck after Finn.

Seconds later Anabelle’s door squealed open at my back; she’d ignored my instruction as readily as I’d ignored Finn’s.

“Don’t aim that thing,” I whispered when I caught up with him. “He’s probably terrified already, and if there were still anything dangerous nearby, he would be dead.”

We stared at the car for one long moment, but the splatters were too thick to reveal anything except vague shapes behind the blood.

“This isn’t right, Nina,” Finn murmured, and I knew he wasn’t just talking about the gory windshield. Excursions beyond city walls were rare and discouraged, but they weren’t actually prohibited by the Church as long as the proper permits were secured in advance. But . . . “If his parents are dead in that car, how’d they die? Demons in their prime don’t pull people apart. That’d be wasting potential hosts. And degenerates wouldn’t have left the boy alive.”

I shrugged. “Maybe he hid.”

Finn lowered the rifle but didn’t engage the safety. “And maybe whatever killed his parents is still around.”

His words still hung in the air when Anabelle jogged past us, her blond curls flying, her jeans hanging low on her newly narrow hips. “Are you okay?” she called to the child, and I grabbed for her arm but missed.

Finn followed her to the car, the rifle aimed at the ground, and he peeked through the windows while Ana knelt in front of the boy without checking under or behind the vehicle.

I groaned on the inside. Why were the members of our group who were the least able to defend themselves always the most likely to put themselves in danger?

The boy nodded slowly.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” she asked, and I realized there would be no teaching her caution where children were concerned. Ana had spent five years as a grade-school teacher, and she’d found it harder than any of the rest of us to let go of what she’d learned during her Church ordination—not the bullshit creeds and oppressive rules, but the ways of life as we’d known it. Modesty. Service. Sacrifice.

“Tobias.” The boy’s voice was soft and hoarse, as if he’d been crying. His gaze slid from Anabelle to me, and I decided the glazed look in his eyes was from shock.

He reminded me of the kindergartners I’d spent my service hour with every day of my senior year, until the Church had declared me a cancerous wart on mankind’s collective hind end. Tobias could have been any kid in my class, terrified and traumatically orphaned.

We couldn’t leave him alone in the badlands. Yet ours was no life for a kid.

The irony in that thought hit home when my sister waddled past me, one hand on her huge belly. “Melanie,” I called, but she waved off my warning. When I glanced at Finn, he nodded to give me the all clear, the rifle still aimed at the ground. He’d inspected the car from the outside and squatted to peer beneath it, and had found no immediate danger.

Still, Mellie was too pregnant to fight or to flee from sudden danger, so I followed her, ready to pull her out of the path of evil should a demon burst from the bloody car.

“Are you okay, Tobias?” my sister asked, kneeling in front of the child with Anabelle’s help.

For a moment he only stared at her, studying her pale skin and even paler hair. Finally he nodded, his gaze fixated on her stomach, while I tried to calculate the mileage his family must have traveled in that doomed blue car. “You got a baby in there?”

Melanie laughed, and I marveled at the fact that she could find joy where the rest of us saw only tragedy and hardship. “Yes. And I like your name, Tobias.” She laid one hand on her stomach. “Maybe I’ll borrow it if this little one’s a boy.”

Assuming it lived.

Melanie was a tireless optimist, not blind to the dangers of the world, exactly, but not quite concerned enough about them. She refused to think about the overwhelming odds against her child’s survival, and neither she nor Ana had even glanced at the carnage inside that blue car.

And I hadn’t heard her mention Adam, the ill-fated father of her child, in weeks.

Reese pulled the SUV to a stop beside our truck, right in the middle of the road, and the other half of our group poured out of the vehicle. “What the hell?” Footsteps crunched in the dirt behind me, and then Reese and Grayson stopped at my side. She carried a plastic jug and he had a hose wrapped around his massive left arm.

“Looks like the parents are dead in the front seat,” I whispered. “Not sure what happened yet, but Finn hasn’t found any immediate threat.”

“Poor thing!” Grayson cried.

Devi rolled her eyes and scuffed her boot in the dirt on the side of the road. “What the hell are we supposed to do with him?”

“We can’t leave him here.” Maddock threaded his arm through hers, frowning as he watched the little boy. “It’s a miracle he’s still alive. He must not have been here long.”

“We’re not even going to think about taking him with us until we know what killed his parents.” Devi circled the car toward the driver’s side and used one hand to shield the sun from her face while she bent to peer through the window. When she stood a second later, she looked sick. “Nothin’ but blood.”

While the rest of us took a closer look at the car, Grayson, Ana, and Mellie lured Tobias toward the cargo truck with promises of water and chocolate from a box of sweets that had been intended for the general store in New Temperance.

As Devi and Finn had said, the front windows were too caked with blood to show anything at all, and through the rear windshield we could see little more than the outlines of two bodies sitting in the front seats. The trunk door stood open a couple of inches, and when I lifted it, I saw that the narrow center seat had been folded down, creating a small path into the trunk from the backseat of the car. A path just wide enough for a six-year-old.

My stomach twisted at the thought of what Tobias must have witnessed. How could any kid see that much carnage without being psychologically destroyed?

When the child was out of sight behind the cargo truck, Maddock opened the driver’s door while Finn aimed his rifle at the interior just in case. Nothing jumped out at us, but after one glance inside I gasped and stepped back. Finn’s jaw tightened, and even Devi covered her mouth in horror.

The man and woman, still buckled into the front seats of the car, were drenched in blood fresh enough to glisten in the afternoon sunlight. The dashboard, windows, windshield, and floorboard had all been heavily splattered with what could only have been an arterial spray.

Yet even through all the gore, two things were clear.

First, the man and woman in the blue car were not Tobias’s biological parents—their skin was as pale as mine, even accounting for the pallor of recent death. And second, based on the blood and bits of flesh caking their right hands, the couple’s wounds appeared to be self-inflicted.

The man and woman had simply pulled onto the side of the road, then ripped out their own throats.







THREE (#ulink_b78ac420-36f1-515c-a4e7-86758466b106)

“Who are they?” Grayson whispered, glancing at the gore-splattered car.

“They didn’t have any IDs.” Maddock ran one hand through his thick brown hair in a rare display of nerves. But then, the contents of that car had bothered us all. “They’re not his biological parents, but aside from that, who knows?”

Grayson sipped from a half-full bottle of water, then passed it left in our huddle, to Reese. “There’s not a drop of blood on Tobias.” She shrugged. “If he was far enough away to avoid the spray, I’m betting he didn’t see much of what happened.”

“I think he was in the trunk, but who knows when he crawled in there?” I’d fought demons, degenerates, and humans on a regular basis since finding out I was an exorcist, but I’d never seen anything like the carnage in that car.

“Why is no one asking the most obvious question?” Devi demanded, and Grayson shushed her with a sharp look. “Why the hell would a normal couple just pull onto the side of the road and rip their own throats out? I don’t even see how it’s physically possible!”

Finn accepted the water bottle from Reese but hardly sipped from it before passing it to me. “They hadn’t been normal for a long time. And they probably weren’t a couple.”

“But they were possessed.” Maddock’s voice was so soft that at first I didn’t even register the words. “They’d already started to degenerate.”

Devi frowned. “I didn’t notice anything weird about them. Other than their mutilated throats.”

“Their fingers were too long.” Finn exhaled slowly and propped his rifle over his left shoulder. “And their chins were too pointy.” He glanced at Maddock, who nodded to confirm some unspoken concern; Maddy and Finn had known each other for so long that sometimes they each seemed to know what the other was thinking. Which left the rest of us in the dark. “The mutations were subtle. They’d be hard to detect, especially under all that blood.”

“How did you two notice?” I asked, passing the water bottle to Devi.

“They’ve had a lot of practice.” Grayson turned to Maddy and Finn, and her eyes held a profound sadness that seemed to stretch even beyond the scope of the carnage we’d just discovered. I started to ask what she meant and how she knew that, but—

“Okay, but how do you know they weren’t a couple?” Devi demanded, frustration sharpening the ends of her words.

Maddy shrugged. “Demons don’t make commitments unless they need to blend in.” Like Grayson’s parents, whose simulation of a human marriage had allowed them to breed her and her older brother as future hosts to be possessed at maturity. “And there’s no one to blend in with in the badlands.”

Devi rolled her eyes. “That doesn’t mean any—”

“We should get going, unless you all want to sleep in the open tonight.” Finn swung his rifle down and aimed it at the ground, then headed for the cargo truck, where Mellie and Tobias sat snacking on the bench seat while Anabelle leaned on the open passenger’s-side door.

“What’s got his gun sling in a twist?” Devi grumbled while we watched Finn walk off.

Maddy accepted the bottle from her and drained the last inch of water. “He’s being cautious. The blood’s still wet, which means that whatever bodies the demons are wearing now, they’re probably still close.” Maddock gestured toward our vehicles, urging us all forward, and I jogged ahead of the group to catch up with Finn.

“Hey. You okay?”

“Yeah,” Finn said, too quickly to have given the answer any thought. “I just haven’t seen anything that gruesome in a really long time.”

“Wait.” I reached for his arm and pulled him to a stop facing me. “How long is a really long time?” When had he ever seen something that gruesome? “What are you and Maddock not telling us?”

Finn shot an anxious glance at the others over my shoulder, then lowered his voice. “If it were my secret, I’d tell you, but there are things Maddy’s not ready to talk about.” His conflicted gaze begged me to understand. “But it has nothing to do with whatever happened in that car. That dead couple just . . . they remind him of something.”

“Something you saw too,” I guessed. Because Maddy and Finn were never apart.

“Yeah, but . . .” His shrug made him look vulnerable, in spite of his soldier’s powerful build and the rifle slung over one shoulder, and I wanted to pull him into a hug.

“Just because you didn’t have a body at the time doesn’t mean you went through any less than he did.” Finn had spent countless nights curled up in the sleeping roll next to mine, listening to stories about my mother’s escalating abuse and neglect while a demon Mellie and I knew nothing about had ravaged her body and devoured her soul. I wanted Finn to trust me enough to let me return the favor. “Whatever it is, it’s your childhood trauma too,” I insisted.

“But not like it is his.”

“You know you can tell me anything, right?” I whispered as the footsteps at my back grew louder.

“Yes.” Finn pulled me into a hug to speak directly into my ear, and in spite of the grim circumstances, the feel of his body pressed against mine made my pulse rush. “And as soon as Maddock is ready to talk, I’ll tell you everything.”

Before I could argue, we were overtaken by the group again.

When we pulled back onto the abandoned highway, Mellie rode in the SUV so she could stretch out for a nap on the third-row bench seat, and Tobias sat in the truck between Anabelle and me, while Finn drove.

I wasn’t sure how to approach the questions we needed him to answer, but Anabelle—bless her heart—was finally in her element for the first time since we’d escaped from New Temperance.

“How old are you, Tobias?” she asked, and I could hear teacher-Ana in her voice again.

“Almost seven,” he said around a mouthful of chocolate, which Devi had vehemently objected to “wasting” on a kid.

“What grade are you in?”

“Second.”

“I used to teach second grade!” Anabelle said, and when Tobias’s eyes widened, she laughed. “I don’t look much like a teacher without my cassock, do I?”

Tobias shook his head and sucked the bit of chocolate on his tongue.

It had taken Anabelle nearly a month in the badlands to finally give up her Church robes in favor of a pair of jeans and a few T-shirts we’d liberated from our first supply raid, and she still didn’t quite look comfortable in the causal clothes.

“Look, I can prove it.” Ana held out her right hand to show him the brand on the back—four stylized, intertwined columns of flame, each representing one of the sacred obligations of the people to the Church. Together, those individual flames formed the symbolic blaze with which the Church claimed to have rid the world of the demon plague.

Though, as it turned out, that was a lie, the brand was a lie, and pretty much everything the Church had ever told us was a lie.

But Tobias didn’t know that. His eyes widened when he saw the brand, and trust opened his expression in a way that even chocolate hadn’t been able to.

Anabelle set him a little more at ease with a few funny stories from her days as a teacher, and then she gently switched gears. “Where did you go to school, Tobias?”

“At the Day School.”

“Which day school? Where are you from, sweetie? Solace? Diligencia?” Those were the two closest cities, other than New Temperance, and we knew for a fact that he hadn’t come from my hometown, because Anabelle would have recognized a second grader, even if he hadn’t been in her class.

“Verity,” he said at last, and Anabelle’s gaze snapped up to meet mine over his head, while Finn stiffened on the seat next to me. Verity was more than a thousand miles west of New Temperance, in the mountains of what was once called Colorado.

I’d never heard of anyone traveling so far, except as part of an armed Church caravan. How the hell had a little boy wound up so far from his hometown, with two possessed adults who were not his biological parents?

“Tobias, there were two people inside the car we found you next to,” Anabelle said, her voice almost fragile with tension. “Were those your parents?”

He nodded again. “They picked me over all the other boys at the children’s home.” His small chest puffed out with pride. “They said I could live with them in their house. Out east.”

Chills raced the length of my spine, then settled into my stomach. Tobias’s new “parents” couldn’t have adopted him without a parenting license. Were they unable to have children of their own? Had they adopted him for the same reason my mom had given birth to Melanie and me? If so, why would they rip out their own throats so soon after the adoption—much too soon for either of them to inherit their newly adopted host?

The answer suddenly seemed obvious: they’d found other, older potential hosts, already ripe for harvesting.

We’d seen evidence of a few nomads roaming the badlands. They were few and far between, but it was entirely possible that Tobias’s parents had run across a small band and killed their mutating human hosts so they could claim fresher bodies. Maybe they’d planned to come back for Tobias and raise him as a future host. Or maybe they’d abandoned him entirely in the face of a new opportunity.

Finn clutched the steering wheel, and I realized he hadn’t said a word since we’d resumed our trek south. Something was wrong, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it until we had privacy.

“What were their names, sweetie?” Anabelle asked.

“Mommy and Daddy,” Tobias said, and I had to swallow a groan. They hadn’t told him their real names? “They died, didn’t they?” he asked softly, and my heart ached for him. I nodded, and when he only blinked at me, somber but accepting, I wondered if maybe losing another set of parents just didn’t come as much of a surprise to a child who’d already been orphaned once.

Though the manner of their deaths was obviously traumatic.

What if that were Mellie’s baby?

The sudden thought sent a new kind of terror slithering through my veins: helplessness.

What if Mellie’s baby were one day orphaned in the badlands—not a far-fetched scenario, since he or she would be raised among fugitives who sought out demons on a daily basis. How would my niece or nephew survive without Anathema’s protection and provision?

The inevitable, horrifying answer chilled me from the inside out: Melanie’s orphaned child would be little more than a snack for the first degenerate to find the poor thing. Giving the baby a soul wouldn’t be enough. Someone would have to teach him or her how to survive.

“Did you see what happened to your parents?” Finn asked Tobias, drawing me out of my own terrifying thoughts, but when Anabelle scowled at him, I realized she’d planned a more gentle buildup to that particular query.

Tobias shook his head. “Mommy told me to climb into the trunk and be as quiet as I could. She said if I won the quiet game, she’d open the trunk and give me a surprise. But she never came, so I had to open the trunk with the safety latch.” He bowed his head, reminding me of my kindergarten students when they were in trouble. “I guess I wasn’t quiet enough.”

“I’m sure you weren’t the problem, honey,” Anabelle said, and outrage burned deep in my soul as I thought of the boy hiding in the trunk while his new “parents” ripped out their own throats and abandoned him in the badlands in favor of other hosts.

But then I realized that the poor kid was actually pretty lucky—his worthless “parents” had left Tobias alive, which was a mercy, considering how his life would have ended if he’d grown up in their custody.

* * *

“You want to what?” Devi demanded, and I laid one finger over my lips to shush her. Across the dusty second-floor den of a long-abandoned house, Tobias was curled up on my bedroll in the glow of twice the number of candles we would normally have burned at night, in case he woke up and was afraid of the dark.

He’d fallen asleep in the truck around the time the sun set, so I’d carried him up the stairs myself.

Melanie slept just feet from him, on her own mat on the hard floor—we avoided carpet whenever possible, because after a century of neglect, most soft materials had become havens for mold, mildew, and entire colonies of parasitic insects.

We’d been lucky to find a ghost town so soon after the sun went down, and luckier still that that particular town had been abandoned during the war, rather than razed or torched. It wasn’t safe to drive across the badlands at night, because headlights could lure degenerates from miles away.

“I want to take him home,” I repeated. Then I held my breath, watching the others for their reactions as candlelight cast dancing shadows on the six other faces in our huddle.

“Okay, first of all, he doesn’t have a home,” Devi insisted, and though her voice was softer, it had lost none of its bite. “He’s an orphan twice over. He must be the unluckiest damn orphan in the world. I mean, who gets adopted by demons?”

“They spared his life, but you want to abandon him,” I pointed out. No need to note that demons only spare children so they can be possessed once they’ve suffered through puberty and can reach the high shelves. “Sounds like meeting you was his unluckiest blow yet.”

Grayson covered a grin with one hand, but Devi only scowled at me and continued. “Second of all, I’m not sure that returning him to a Church children’s home would be much of an improvement. Those are run by demons too. All we’d be doing is delaying his inevitable possession.”

“So your solution is to keep him?” Reese whispered, intentionally misunderstanding her to support my point, and I could have hugged him.

She abandoned the rest of her argument in surprise. “Of course not. A kid’s the last thing we need.”

My brows rose, and I aimed a pointed glance at my sister.

Devi pulled a long rope of dark hair over her shoulder and leaned back against a couch too musty to risk sitting on. “We don’t have any choice about that one. But that doesn’t mean we should start collecting more of them!”

But I could practically hear the part she hadn’t said out loud. Devi wasn’t worried about life in the badlands with an infant—in fact, she rarely even thought about that impending challenge—because she didn’t think Mellie’s baby would survive.

Despite my determination to see that baby live at all costs, the heartbreaking truth was that Devi was probably right. But Tobias was alive, and we couldn’t just leave him for the degenerates. So I took a deep breath and forged ahead. “Look, I know you all wanted to head south, but we don’t have a destination in mind, so what difference does it make if we head west instead?”

Finn squeezed my hand. “It’s nearly a thousand miles, Nina.” Because in our wanderings, we’d never strayed more than a hundred miles or so from New Temperance.

“So what?” I stared into the deep green of his eyes, trying to understand his reluctance. “Are we on some schedule I don’t know about?”

Maddock exhaled slowly as he painstakingly peeled the label from an empty bean can as if it deserved more of his attention than my suggestion did. “No, but it’s not safe. There’s too much empty space between the cities out west. Caravans will be few and far between.”

“We’ve never been better prepared for that,” Reese argued, and I gave him a grateful smile. “We just scored the biggest haul we’re ever going to have. That’ll give us some breathing room while we learn to spot those plants Mellie and Ana have been reading about. And it’s spring.” He shrugged. “Hunting will be easier.”

“Nina, what does it matter where we leave him?” Finn asked softly, stroking my knuckles with his thumb. “I hate to say it, but Devi’s right. He’ll be raised by demons no matter where we take him, so why not drop him in one of the cities on our way south?”

“Because he’s lost everything! Twice! The least we can do is return him to the only home he’s ever known, where at least he’ll have some friends.”

Maddock set his can down with a firm clank against the wood floor. “We’re not going west, Nina.”

I glanced at him in surprise. He’d always been a good leader precisely because he never made illogical, unilateral rulings, but something had changed. Something was wrong, and Maddock might not be willing to talk about it, but that didn’t mean the rest of us had to stop talking. “I say we vote on it.”

“No vote.” Maddy leaned back against the couch next to Devi and crossed his arms over the new T-shirt he’d found in the cargo shipment. “We’re not going.”

My gaze narrowed on him and I let go of Finn’s hand. “We’re a team. We decide together.” I glanced around our candlelit circle, hyperaware of the sudden tension in our ranks. “All in favor of taking Tobias back west, to Verity, raise your hand.” I held my left hand high above my head, and a second later Reese did the same.

Devi crossed her arms over her chest and raised one eyebrow at me in challenge. That was no surprise, and neither was Maddock’s nay stance, but what I couldn’t understand was why he looked genuinely sorry to be voting against me.

Anabelle raised her hand, and I smiled at her.

“You don’t get a vote!” Devi snapped.

“The hell she doesn’t! There’s a price on her head too, and she lost just as much as the rest of us when we fled New Temperance,” I said hotly.

“She gets a vote,” Maddock said. But he didn’t seem very pleased with his own ruling.

Fair enough.

But when Finn’s arm remained at his side, my chest suddenly felt tight. “Sorry, Nina. I vote we go south.” His deep gaze pleaded with me to understand, and I tried not to be hurt that he’d sided with Maddock rather than with me.

“That’s three to three,” Devi said, irritation flashing in her candlelit dark eyes, and we all turned to Grayson, who would have the deciding vote.

After a couple of seconds of contemplation, she raised her hand.

“Damn it!” Devi snapped.

Grayson only shrugged. “If we don’t go with Nina, she’ll go on her own, and we’re safer together than apart, no matter where we wind up.”

She was right on all counts.

Maddock glanced over my shoulder to where my sister lay snoring lightly on the wood floor. I could see what he was thinking, but I shook my head. “If you wake her up, she’ll vote to take him home,” I said, and no one disagreed.

Maddy sighed. “I’ll take first watch. The rest of you get some sleep.” His eyebrows dipped low. “In the morning we’re westward bound.”

* * *

When everyone but Maddock and Finn had curled up on their sleeping mats, I checked on Tobias and found him fast asleep on my bedroll, which meant I’d have to double up with someone. I grabbed Finn’s mat and tossed my head toward the door, silently asking him to join me in another room.

He nodded with a steamy smile, his pupils dilating as he picked up one of the candles, and heat flooded my cheeks when I realized he’d misread my request for privacy. Finn followed me into the dark hallway, then through another door and into a bedroom where most of the linens had long ago rotted away from the mattress.

“Are you mad at me?” he whispered, pushing the door closed at his back. I turned to find that the candle cast only a small dome of light around us, leaving the rest of the room in deep shadows. The lit space between us felt as intimate as his softly spoken question, and suddenly I realized I could count on both hands the number of times we’d been alone together.

“If I were mad at you, I’d be cuddling with my sister right now.” I watched the candlelight flicker in his eyes, thankful that they stayed the same no matter whose body he wore. If the eyes truly were the windows to the soul, at least I could be sure I was seeing some real part of him even when the rest belonged to someone else.

I’d first met him in Maddock’s body, and the revelation that his form wasn’t really his own had come as a shock to me. But I’d grown used to the guard he’d worn for months now, in part because I had no previous association of those arms or hands or face with another person. And in part because he wore the body easily and used it well. As his comfort level had risen, so had mine.

“I would like to know why, though,” I confessed as he set the candle on a dust-coated dresser. “Why does it matter whether we go south or west?”

Finn sighed and tucked a fallen strand of brown hair behind my ear. “Maddy was born out west.” His hands trailed slowly over my shoulders and down my arms, and I fought the urge to lean into his touch in that rare private moment. “He had it rough as a kid, and he doesn’t want to go back.”

“I get it. I don’t want to go back to New Temperance either.” Yet the doubt in Finn’s eyes told me that I couldn’t possibly understand. Not really. “But we’re not taking him home. We’re taking Tobias home.”

“I know. But Verity’s too close for comfort.”

My brows rose and I studied his gaze. That was the closest he’d ever come to mentioning a hometown. “Is Maddy from Verity? Are you?”

“No. And I don’t know.” He took his sleeping mat from me and unrolled it on the floor a few feet from the door. “I don’t remember anything from before I met Maddock.” Which he’d insisted over and over.

His early memories were as strange and inexplicable as his incorporeal state. Though playing with Maddy was the oldest thing Finn could remember, no one else had been able to see or hear him. Maddock’s family had assumed he was talking to and playing with an imaginary “friend,” which was how Finn got his name—that was as close as toddler Maddock could come to properly pronouncing the word.

Finn sank onto the bedroll and patted the spot next to him. “What I do know is that when Maddy’s upset, I’m upset.”

“That makes eight of us,” I said, settling in next to him, and Finn’s green eyes took on a grateful shine as he leaned in to kiss me. He was as glad that I liked Maddock as I was that he liked Melanie. “Mind if I share your sleep roll tonight?” I whispered against Finn’s mouth as his hand slid into my hair, gently tilting my head for a more accessible angle. “Tobias is using mine.”

“You can share everything I own.” Finn’s mouth met mine, and he sucked my lower lip between his for one heart-pounding second. “Which is pretty much just this sleep roll,” he admitted, his lips brushing mine with every syllable. He kissed me again, and I decided that if the Church was right and carnal contact really was a sin, it was a sin well worth paying for. . . .

* * *

It was still dark outside when I woke up with Finn’s hoodie folded beneath my head for a pillow. I turned back one of the blankets from our recent Church raid, and when my hand brushed his warm, bare chest, my touch lingered. I didn’t want to leave our private cocoon, but nature called.

Finn stirred when I stood, but he didn’t wake up, so I draped the blanket over him.

While we’d slept, our candle had burned out, which meant I had to feel my way down the hall in the dark.

Two candles were burning in the den, and by their light I saw that Maddock still stood watch, though my biological clock told me hours had passed since the rest of us had gone to bed. Since we had no actual clocks and I didn’t own a watch, my body and the sun were all I had with which to measure the passage of time.

Those and the rate at which a candle burned.

Maddock sat on the arm of an ancient, mildewy couch, peering behind a dusty set of blinds at the street out front. He didn’t notice me until I sank onto a wooden desk chair two feet from him. “Need a break?” I whispered, and when I shifted on the chair, peeling flakes of varnish caught on the seat of my worn jeans.

“I don’t think I could sleep if I tried,” he admitted, and I squinted for a better look at his face. Maddock looked tense and sad, but what worried me was the new edge of fear lining his brow and crinkling in the corners of his eyes.

“Finn told me why you don’t want to go west.”

He turned sharply to look at me. “What did he tell you?”

I shrugged. “That you were born out west and that Verity is too close for comfort.”

Maddock relaxed visibly, and I frowned.

“There’s more to it, isn’t there?” I said, and he nodded but offered nothing more. “We’ll head back east as soon as we’ve dropped Tobias off,” I assured him. “None of us is eager for a family reunion. Except maybe Reese.” His father had been burned as a heretic—otherwise known as a skeptic—in Diligencia, and his mother had sent him with Anathema to save him from the same fate.

“Or maybe Grayson,” Maddy added, and a sudden memory burned bright from the back of my mind.

Grayson’s parents had been exposed as breeders when her older brother, Carey, came into his exorcist abilities earlier than expected. The Church executed her parents and took her brother. Grayson was the only member of the James family to escape intact, and if not for Anathema, she’d probably be in Church custody, just like her brother.

Except that Carey James was no longer in Church custody.

During our escape from New Temperance, I’d discovered that the Church had lost him in a raid by a group of demons led by someone named Kastor.

For a while, I’d debated telling Grayson what I’d learned about her brother, but in the end, I’d decided not to say anything because I’d uncovered more questions than answers about Carey, and I was afraid that would only make his absence harder to bear. Then we had become overwhelmed by constant cold and hunger, and roaming degenerates, and I’d forgotten I even had that unfortunate bit of information.

Until Maddock’s mention of her family sparked the memory.

A flash of light caught my eye from between two of the slats in the mini blinds, yanking me from my thoughts. “What’s that?” I stood and peeked through the glass, my heart thumping rapidly. Usually Grayson woke up when she sensed that degenerates were closing in on us.

But Maddock didn’t seem worried. “I think they’re nomads.”

Supposedly, after the war several groups chose a dangerous, migratory life in the badlands over the totalitarian protection of the Church-run cities. In school we were taught that the nomads had succumbed to starvation and degenerate attacks decades ago, yet the half-dozen abandoned campsites we’d found seemed to suggest otherwise.

Maddock shifted uncomfortably on the arm of the couch. “They’ve been on the edge of town for hours and they don’t seem to know we’re here.” Which was why he hadn’t alerted the rest of us. Any movement we made now would only bring us to their attention.

The only people we’d actually seen in the badlands were uniformed Church cargo drivers and scavengers sent to “reclaim” resources from our past. They tended to work quickly and scurry back to the safety of tall steel walls, and they never veered off course.

By contrast, the nomads weren’t scared of the landscape they lived in, but they did seem to be shy. “That’s the closest they’ve ever come.”

Maddy shrugged. “It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

“Maybe we should make contact.” After all, for more than a century nomads had been living off a landscape the Church told us could not be conquered. They’d been fishing, hunting, and harvesting—surviving among roving hordes of degenerates, presumably without exorcist abilities. “They could probably teach us a lot faster than Mellie’s books have.”

Maddock shook his head, still staring out the window at the bright flicker of what looked like a single candle. “Helping us would put them on the Church’s radar. If the ‘exorcists’ find us with those nomads, they’ll kill every one of them to get to us.”







FOUR (#ulink_de823cb2-9904-5ef4-8133-2850ba3de107)

“Incoming!” Reese shouted, and I ducked as a degenerate flew over my head, its tattered cassock trailing through the air behind it. The torn and filthy Church robe was once navy blue, which meant that the host had been a policeman before he’d been possessed by the Unclean.

The mutated monster landed barefoot on the crumbling sidewalk four feet from me. His elongated toes were broken and oozing fresh blood, but he didn’t seem to notice. He howled, his sharply pointed chin dropping to reveal a mouth full of broken, rotting teeth. Then he lunged.

The beast slammed into my chest, driving me onto the chipped steps of an abandoned small-town courthouse. A chunk of concrete dug into my back, just left of my spine. The monster’s jaws snapped at me, drool dripping onto my shirt, and I shoved my right forearm against his emaciated throat, narrowly preventing him from tearing mine out with his teeth.

I pressed my left hand against the beast’s chest, and bright light surged between us. The monster screeched, his bald head thrown back, dark hollows stretching beneath his cheekbones, and the fire from my palm blazed deep into his flesh, burning the demon from its soulless, mutated human host.

When the light faded and the monster sagged against me, I shoved him onto the fractured courthouse steps, then rose to assess the fight still going on all around me. Finn stood guard with his rifle in front of the courthouse’s massive double doors, which no longer quite closed because the building had both settled and begun to rot in the century since it last saw use. Ana, Grayson, Mellie, and Tobias watched from a first-floor window, despite instructions to stay on the top floor, at a safer distance.

Reese, Devi, and Maddock were each locked in combat with other degenerates in the street—Reese was fending off three at once—and as I took stock, one of them abandoned the fight and darted across the overgrown lawn on all fours, her thin, matted hair flying out behind her.

As she hit the courthouse steps, I grabbed her by the tail of her torn, filthy shirt, then shoved her facedown onto the concrete and pressed my glowing hand against the back of her ribs. She screamed and flailed beneath me, and I could only ride out her violent death throes even as another monster lunged at Finn.

He swung the rifle like a bat—reluctant to kill a human host, because that would free the demon within—and the thunk of the steel barrel against skull made me flinch.

I backed away from the dead host beneath my hand and grabbed the degenerate he’d just bashed, then pressed my still-burning left palm against its bare, filthy flesh. The demon thrashed, caught by the flames blazing between us, and on the edges of my vision the other members of Anathema gathered to watch me burn out the last of the small horde.

Grayson pushed the courthouse door open as the monster crumpled to the ground. She ran past Finn and down the steps to throw herself into Reese’s arms. “I’m a walking monster magnet,” she groaned into his shoulder while he stroked her brown curls. “They won’t stop coming until I exorcise one and trigger my transition.”

I knew how she felt. During my transition a few months before, two small hordes of degenerates had managed to breach the walls of New Temperance, drawn to the emergence of my exorcist abilities like fish to a wriggling worm. But in the badlands, there was no wall standing between Grayson and the monsters. There was nothing but us.

Unfortunately, she was right; that wouldn’t stop until her hand began to burn in response to their presence, allowing her to actually exorcise a demon, which would usher in the full speed and strength that came with her new ability.

“Maybe if I help fight them, the close proximity will trigger my flame?” She held out her left hand with a hopeful look up at him, but he only shook his head.

“I’m not going to put you in danger to test a theory. When you’re ready, it’ll happen.”

Until then, all we could do was wait.

“Lemme see the bodies!” Tobias tried to run down the steps but tripped over a loose chunk of concrete and crashed to the ground instead. When he stood, blood welled from a gash on his right knee.

“Careful!” Anabelle knelt to examine the cut. “Hold still and let me get a bandage.” We’d found a crate of them in the cargo truck, and Tobias had gone through half a box in the two days since we’d found him.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he said while she rummaged through her satchel. “I can’t even feel it.”

“You’ve got to hand it to him,” Melanie whispered from my right, rubbing her belly with one hand. “That kid’s tough. Last night he burned his arm when he got too close to the campfire. It blistered, but he insists it doesn’t hurt at all.”

“This one’s still smoking!” Tobias squealed as Anabelle pulled him away from a corpse lying in the street. It was indeed still leaking smoke from the hole in the center of its back.

“Don’t touch,” Mellie scolded, leaving my side to tug him even farther from the body. “They’re probably crawling with germs.” Not that we were exactly clean since leaving the abundance of clear creeks and small lakes behind.

“Does the hole go all the way through? Let’s roll it over!”

Melanie distracted Tobias with a bottle of water and the bag of cookies she now kept at the ready. I wasn’t sure what we’d do with the precocious little boy when we ran out of sweets with which to bribe him.

“You okay?” I asked Finn when I noticed blood dripping from his arm. He blinked, then frowned at me until I showed him the long scratch across his forearm. “That last one had claws.”

“Oh. Yeah. I’m fine.” He swiped at the blood with the sleeve of his other arm, and then his focus strayed back toward the road. I followed his gaze to find Maddock staring westward into the setting sun, both fists clenched at his sides.

* * *

“I said no.” Anabelle plucked the chocolate bar from Tobias’s grip and tucked it into the front pocket of her backpack. “That’s the last one, and you can’t have it until you’ve eaten some real food.”

“I’m tired of beans for breakfast.” Tobias poked at the contents of his can with a stainless steel spoon. “I want bacon.”

Devi rolled two half-burned candles in an extra T-shirt, then stuffed them into her bag. “Do you see any pigs running around?”

Tobias’s bright brown eyes widened. “Bacon comes from pigs?”

“And from little boys who don’t do what they’re told,” she said, supporting my theory that she probably hadn’t liked children even when she’d been one of them. The child stuck his tongue out at her. Devi laughed and knelt to roll up her sleeping mat.

“I gave you beans because you said you were tired of stewed tomatoes,” Anabelle pointed out as she wiped her own spoon clean with a damp rag.

“They don’t taste good anymore.” Tobias pouted. “They don’t taste like anything. I think they went bad.”

I picked up his nearly full can of beans and read from the back. “They’re two years from their expiration date, like all the rest. You just don’t want to eat anything that’s actually good for you.”

“Yet he never grows tired of candy.” Reese winked at the boy and slid him a secreted chocolate bar from his own bag. Tobias grinned at him and took another small bite of beans.

I stood to gather the cans we’d emptied at breakfast and at dinner the night before, and my gaze fell on Melanie, still lightly snoring on top of her sleep roll. The further her pregnancy progressed, the more easily she tired, yet the harder it was for her to rest. We let her sleep late whenever we could afford to.

As I cleaned up I noticed that Maddock and Finn were both staring out the window. “What’s up?” I said, plucking the empty peach can from Maddy’s grip.

“They’re back.” Finn scooted to make room for me at the window, and I saw the problem immediately. We’d slept on the third floor of what was once a small-town courthouse, and the vantage point gave us a view of half the town, and of the crumbling two-lane road leading into the badlands.

About a mile outside of town the nomads had set up camp with four vehicles, two dozen tents, and about twenty horses. They hadn’t been there when we’d settled in the night before.

“Two days in a row.” Maddock frowned. “We can’t keep calling it a coincidence. They’re following us.”

I picked up the empty can at his feet. “Maybe they want to help us. Or warn us about something.”

“Or rob us blind and kill us in our sleep,” Devi offered from across the room, where she was stuffing her bedroll into her bag.

“If that’s the case, why make their presence so obvious?”

She shrugged. “It can’t be easy to hide an entire herd of horses.”

I stood by my theories, but Finn and Maddock hardly seemed to know I was there. The farther west we’d come—two-thirds of the way in two days, thanks to prewar roads kept passable by the Church—the more tense they’d grown.

Tobias, on the other hand, seemed happier with each mile that passed beneath our tires.

“How are we fixed for gas?” Reese added Devi’s duffel to the three others hanging from his shoulders.

“Too low to pass by the next station without filling up,” Finn said. “If I remember correctly, there’s a fuel depot a couple of miles south of town. With any luck, it’ll be locked but unguarded.”

Assuming the Church hadn’t anticipated our westward shift.

Maddock stood and hefted his pack onto his back. “Devi and I will take the SUV. Reese, you take the truck.”

“I’ll go with him.” Grayson rushed ahead before anyone could object. “I’ll stay in the truck, but I’m going. You can’t keep leaving me behind.”

“Oh, let her go,” I said. “Finn and I will hold down the fort here.”

Reese only relented when he realized he was outvoted.

“Watch the nomads,” Maddock said on his way out the door. “If they come any closer, call on this.” He tossed me one of our handheld radios.

I gave him a mock salute and clipped the radio to my waistband. As soon as they were gone, Finn took up watch at the window while I knelt to help Tobias with his—formerly my—sleep roll.

“Hey, Tobias, how long had you been with your new parents before we found you? Do you remember?”

He shrugged, and I held my finger in place over a length of black cord holding the bedroll closed so he could form a clumsy bow. “I dunno.”

“And you don’t remember your new parents’ names?”

Anabelle shook her head at me from across the room, where she was taking inventory of our hygiene supplies. But I couldn’t leave it alone. If demons adopting kids was going to be a new trend, I wanted to know as much as I could about how they were pulling it off.

“They just said to call them Mommy and Daddy.” Tobias stood from his messy but functional nylon bow and pressed his knees together in a stance any first grader would recognize. “I gotta go.”

The courthouse had half a dozen restrooms, but none of them had been functional in decades. “Hang on, and I’ll take you out—”

But he was out of the room and halfway down the first of two dusty marble staircases before I could even stand.

“Tobias, wait!” I called, and Mellie rolled over on her bedroll but didn’t quite shake off sleep.

The rapid patter of the child’s footsteps echoed below me as I stomped down the spiral stairs after him. A second later Finn’s boots clomped from above as he followed both of us. “Tobias!” he shouted, but the boy’s footsteps didn’t slow.

When I hit the first-floor landing, I stopped to listen for the echo of small shoes to figure out which way he’d gone.

Down the back hall, toward the rear door.

I followed Tobias into the back of the building, marveling at how well the courthouse had held up under a century of neglect. Stone floors and walls didn’t crumble or mold like carpet and drywall, and though many of the windows were broken, most of the doors were still intact, which had kept out the larger animals. And because the building had been stripped of furnishings shortly after the war, there was nothing left inside to rot or mildew.

“Tobias?” I called, my boots nearly silent on the grimy marble tiles.

Muffled footsteps whispered against the floor at my back, and a grunt exploded behind me, followed by a blunt crack. My heart hammering, I spun to find an unfamiliar man splayed across the floor at my feet, the short end of a crowbar lodged in the side of his skull.

I jumped back, startled, and my pulse raced so fast my vision swam.

Standing over the dead man was a boy about my age, wearing torn jeans and a dusty black cowboy hat, his feet spread for balance, his jaw set in a firm line. He wore prewar vintage Western boots, absent the spurs I’d seen in history textbooks, and despite my shock—or perhaps because of it—I wondered how he’d managed to walk so softly in footwear that looked stiff and unyielding.

His skin was dark, his eyes a piercing golden brown, and he wore a simple silver cross on a thin chain around his neck.

With a startling bolt of intuition, I realized the boy was one of the nomads—and he’d just killed the stranger who’d snuck up on me.

“Don’t move.” Without looking away from me, he braced one boot on the dead man’s jaw and wrenched the crowbar free with a wet sucking sound. Then he wielded it like a bat on one shoulder, ready to swing again, blood dripping from the short, bent end of the metal.

“I am Eli Woods, sentinel in the Lord’s Army.” His gaze narrowed on me. His grip tightened on the crowbar. “You have ten seconds to convince me you’re not one of the Unclean, or I will bury this in your skull.”

Uh-oh.

I took a step back and my spine hit the cool stone wall.

Eli wasn’t a demon, so I couldn’t exorcise him, and I wasn’t going to hurt a fellow human in anything less than self-defense. Which was starting to look like a distinct possibility.

“Five seconds.” He studied me, and I found no recognition in his eyes. “Who are you?”

Obviously nomads didn’t watch the news. They didn’t have television. But if they had a radio and had picked up any of the Church’s broadcasts proclaiming the infamous Nina Kane to be possessed, giving him my name wouldn’t help him trust me.

“Um . . .”

“Three seconds.”

I sucked in a deep breath and held his gaze. Then I spat out the truth. “I’m Nina Kane. But I’m not a demon, and I can prove it.”

Eli’s dark brows rose beneath the wide brim of his hat. “You can prove you’re not a demon?” He was either surprised or skeptical, but I couldn’t tell which because his face only seemed capable of scowling. His grip on the crowbar tightened. “That’s a new one. Start talking.”

But as I tried to figure out what to say, I realized that without a demon there to exorcise, proving my claim would be nearly impossible. I held my hands up, palms out, to remind him that I wasn’t armed. “Okay, I could prove it if there was another demon here for me to kill, but since there isn’t, you’ll just have to take my word for it.” In my whole life, I’d never wished for a demon, but in that moment, I got close. “I’m an exorcist.”

“There are no exorcists.” He pulled the crowbar back to swing, and my heart fell into my stomach. “They’re all demons the so-called Unified Church uses to hunt down its enemies.” He shifted his weight and leaned into his swing. Pulse racing, I dropped to the ground on my knees. Pain radiated up my legs. The metal bar swung over my head with a fierce whoosh. I scrambled around the dead guy’s feet and stood, backing away from Eli with my arms out. Trying to look harmless.

“No, wait! I’m not one of those exorcists.” I would have been relieved that he knew about the Church’s black-robed fakes if he didn’t think I was one of them. “I’m the real thing! So we’re actually on the same side—”

“Drop it!” Finn shouted, and I turned to see him in the doorway, aiming his rifle at Eli.

“Who are you?” the sentinel demanded, crowbar still held at the ready.

“That’s a complicated question.” Finn’s focus on Eli never wavered. “Come any closer to her, and you won’t live long enough to hear the answer.”

“Eli, please put the crowbar down.” I forced my voice to remain low-pitched and calm. “This is Finn. He’s with me. He’s not going to hurt you.” I turned to Finn. “This is Eli Woods. He killed the demon who snuck up on me, and I think we should all be friends.”

Finn glanced at the corpse on the floor but looked unconvinced.

“Finn, put the gun down,” I said.

“Him first.” His aim at the center of Eli’s worn-thin button-up shirt was a steady threat.

“Okay, boys, someone has to go first.” I turned back to the self-professed sentinel. “Since you obviously don’t recognize my face or my name, I’m guessing you haven’t seen or heard the news recently?”

He shook his head. “We don’t have television or radio.”

“We who? The Lord’s Army?” I said, and Finn gave me a confused look. “What is this army?”

“We are the last of the true believers.” Eli’s words had the formal cadence of an official pledge or creed. It sounded a little too much like the Church for comfort, but Eli—and presumably his nomadic army—were no more fans of the Unified Church than I was. “We are a beacon of light and truth, shining in a world of darkness and corruption.”

“Humble too,” Finn muttered.

I ignored him and focused on Eli. “It’s nice to meet you. And your army.” I cleared my throat and tossed a warning glance at Finn. “Are you familiar with the saying ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’? Because that’s kind of what we’re looking at here. The Church has been hunting you guys for decades, and now they’re hunting us too because of what we know and what we can do. Since we’re on the same side, maybe you could reconsider lowering your weapon?”

Eli took one hand from his crowbar long enough to reseat his black cowboy hat, briefly revealing short, tight curls. Then he reclaimed his expert grip. “You’re exorcists.” It wasn’t a question. He was repeating the part he obviously found hard to believe.

“We’re true exorcists. We hunt demons, just like you.” I gestured to the body at my feet. “But instead of puncturing skulls, we incinerate the bond between parasite and host and fry the demonic bastards back to hell.”

His eyes widened. “You’re serious.”

I nodded. “It’s kinda badass.”

“Though most of us don’t object to blunt force trauma when the occasion calls for it.” Finn shrugged and gestured with the rifle he was still aiming. “Or bullets.”

I glared at Finn, then turned back to Eli. “I need both of you to put down your weapons so we can focus on our mutual enemy.” I shrugged, aiming for casual confidence. “You know. Evil.”

Both of them glanced at me. Then they glared at each other. Neither boy lowered his weapon.

My temper spiked. “We’re in the middle of the badlands with a corpse on the floor and the Church on our tails. We are not each other’s biggest problem. So, Finn, put the damn gun down!”

Finn’s bright green eyes narrowed and his jaw tensed. “Not until you back out of his reach.”

“Striking a human would be a blight on my honor, and she’s obviously not possessed,” Eli said as I moved closer to Finn. “The jury’s still out on you.”

Finn’s glare grew colder, but he flicked the safety switch on his rifle, then lowered it. But he didn’t sling it over his back.

I turned back to Eli. “Your turn.”

When the sentinel took a deep breath, I realized that trusting Finn and me was as much of a risk for him as the reverse was for us. Maybe more. He lowered his bloody crowbar but didn’t put it down, and I decided that was the best we were going to get.

“Now I have to go find—” Something moved in the shadowy doorway behind Finn, and I exhaled in relief as Tobias stepped into the marble foyer from the back hall.

But he wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t gloating over having escaped my custody, nor did he look chagrined. He didn’t even seem surprised to see the body on the floor, or Eli, with his gore-covered crowbar.

Eli’s gaze tracked down from Finn to the boy now at Finn’s side. His eyes narrowed and his arms tensed as he raised the crowbar like a bat again. “Step away from the Unclean.”

I tried to move in front of Eli, to shield Finn, but he pushed me aside.

Finn lifted his gun again. “Do not touch her!”

“I’m fine,” I insisted, my pulse racing as the tension between the two of them resurged. “Finn’s not possessed. He would never hurt—”

“Not him,” Eli growled through clenched teeth. “The little one.”

Chills rose the length of my spine as I turned to follow his intently focused gaze. He was staring right at Tobias.







FIVE (#ulink_691537e4-a7be-54d6-b17d-278fcdeb8ce0)

“No.” Panic tightened my throat as the sentinel focused his destructive zeal on the child I’d committed all of Anathema to helping. The child I’d begun to think of as an older version of my unborn niece or nephew—an innocent, dependent upon us for survival. “No. He’s just a kid.”

“Tobias was my nephew,” Eli said, and shock surged like fire through my veins. I hadn’t told him the boy’s name. “Then an Unclean raiding party ambushed our division four days ago and took him. You’ve been traveling in the company of a demon, Nina Kane.”

I glanced at Tobias, expecting the child to deny the accusation. But then, he probably didn’t even understand what he was being accused of. “We found him on the side of the road. He’d been abandoned. Left to die.”

“He wasn’t left. He was bait,” Eli insisted.

“No.” I stepped toward Tobias, intending to shield him with my body, but Eli pulled me back again, and this time Finn didn’t object. I jerked free of the sentinel’s grip and reached for Tobias.

“Nina.” Finn suddenly turned and aimed his rifle at the child, backing slowly toward me and away from Tobias. “Eli’s right. The kid’s possessed.”

I froze. If anyone would know for sure, it’d be Finn. All he had to do was give a little psychic push in Tobias’s direction—as if to take over the child’s body—and he would only meet resistance if something else was already occupying that space.

A demon.

“But . . .” My pulse raced even as I tried to deny what I was hearing. A demon traveling in the company of exorcists, and not one of us had realized? How was that even possible? We hadn’t suspected him because . . . “Demons don’t take over children’s bodies,” I mumbled, still trying to come to terms with what I was hearing. “Everyone knows that.” The limitations were too great. The hosts failed to mature properly. Degeneration came much faster.

Tobias smiled slowly, eerily, and chills crawled across my skin. There was nothing left of the little boy we’d spent the past two days with. “Which is exactly why you’d never suspect a child.” His gaze—his very awareness—appeared to age right in front of me, and suddenly his chubby cheeks seemed an absurd and disturbing disguise.

“He’s your nephew?” I asked Eli, without taking my gaze from the pint-sized demon. No wonder the nomads were following us. We were traveling with the human husk of one of their children.

“He was,” Eli corrected, and I could practically feel the tension in his bearing. I could hear it in every word he spoke. “Until four days ago.”

Four days. That meant his division of the Lord’s Army—whatever that was—had been raided the very day Anathema had turned south to leave the New Temperance area. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

“You weren’t leading us to Verity, were you?” My words echoed in the empty foyer, my voice deep and still with the weight of the question. I knew Verity was out west, but without a map I’d never realized the child had led us off course. “Where were you taking us?”

Tobias’s smile decayed with a cloying sweetness, like fruit gone bad. “Ask your boyfriend.”

Finn cursed so passionately the words actually compromised his aim. Not that he would shoot a demon unless he had no other choice.

“Finn?” I said, but his jaw remained clenched.

“I didn’t recognize you at first,” Tobias said, still watching Finn, and even his speech sounded different. Ageless. His voice was infinity, granted sound. “Where did you find such a pretty host?”

Finn bristled at the comparison of his incorporeal state to that of a demon, but I was too startled by the implication to be offended for him. Tobias knew about Finn.

How the hell could he know? We’d been so careful not to reveal Finn’s uniquely incorporeal state in front of the monster we’d mistaken for a child.

“Identify yourself,” Finn whispered, and there was something strange in the demand. Some ageless formality, as if the words carried more power—more imperative—than I could possibly understand.

“Don’t you recognize me, child?” Tobias’s small brows arched over eyes that had once shone with human joy and innocence, and the irony was staggering.

“Aldric,” Finn said, and it didn’t sound like a guess. “And who was that?” He tossed his head at the man Eli had killed with the crowbar.

“Meshara. And you know how she abhors wearing the male form.”

“Finn?” My hands opened and closed, my left palm burning with the flames my body wanted to unleash, and I was suddenly hyperaware of every opportunity I’d had to burn this Aldric from Tobias’s young form. I’d given him my bedroll. I’d sung to him in the cab of the truck and shared my chocolate ration with him. He’d slept inches from my sister.

“What’s happening, Finn? Where was he leading us?” I hadn’t felt so distressingly uninformed since I’d discovered that my own mother was possessed.

Eli stepped closer on my right, crowbar still ready to swing. “He was taking you to Pandemonia.”

The name was unfamiliar, but I knew the meaning of the word.

Pandemonia.

All demons.

My chills became a full-body quaking I had to fight to restrict to my insides. “A city full of the Unclean?” In truth, all the surviving US cities were being governed by demons in the guise of Church officials, but a city populated by demons, advertising its presence with its very name? “When the Church finds out, they will wipe your demon city from the map.”

Aldric laughed, and the sound seemed to freeze as it slid down my spine. “She’s adorable, Finn. One doesn’t usually find such naïveté in an exorcist.”

Naïveté? “The Church knows?” The very existence of Pandemonia was a threat to the Unified Church’s biggest secret. Why would they let the city stand?

The answer came as soon as I’d thought the question. Because they can’t take it down. If the Church could raze Pandemonia, it would.

“Why are you here?” Finn demanded.

“Why do you think? He wants to see Maddock.” Aldric’s eerie smile slid my way. “He wants to meet all of Maddy’s little friends. Especially the exorcists.”

“Who’s he?” Eli asked, and if he hadn’t, I would have. But we got no answer. Whoever “he” was, he was obviously a demon, and his interest in the exorcist members of Anathema was painfully clear. Exorcists made much stronger, hardier, longer-lasting hosts than did normal people. Which was why my mother had chosen an exorcist to be my father—so that the child she raised to be her next host would be as durable as possible.

“He’ll never see Maddock again,” Finn growled. “And neither will you.” He turned to me. “Nina?”

I lifted my left hand, already cradling its flame.

“Grayson’s transitioning,” Aldric said, and I froze in the middle of my first step toward him, confused by the non sequitur. “No matter where you go, degenerates will flock to her, and he will follow them to you. How do you think we found you?” The child-demon nodded at the corpse of his former peer—obviously the other half of “we.”

“We’ll fry everyone he sends after us,” Finn promised.

“And your sister?” Aldric turned to me. “Is Melanie an exorcist? Will her baby be one?”

“Stay away from my sister and her—”

Finn lifted his rifle, revising his aim.

Aldric spread his chubby arms, inviting Finn to shoot. “Go ahead.” His focus found me and lingered. He looked . . . hungry. “I’m due for an upgrade anyway.”

Surely he was bluffing. It wasn’t easy for a disembodied demon to claim a healthy, conscious human host. But I wasn’t confident enough to bet on that, and neither was Finn.

“Nina!” Finn glanced at my hand, and then his gaze skipped to the demon.

I flipped a mental switch, and a handful of flickering flames kindled in my palm.

Aldric’s grin widened—a farce of childhood joy. “Kastor is going to love her.”

“Kastor?” I said, and Finn gave me the smallest, subtlest shake of his head. The “he” from Pandemonia who wanted to see Maddock was Kastor?

Finn looked sick. I’d told him in confidence that Kastor—whose name the former Deacon of New Temperance had invoked to scare us—had stolen Grayson’s brother from a Church caravan. But Finn had never mentioned that he knew this demon that other demons feared!

“You told her about Kastor?” Aldric said, then he read the answer in my expression. “You haven’t told her. Yet she knows something. . . .”

“Kastor is the wolf,” I said. And we were the sheep.

At least, that’s how Deacon Bennett had put it. She’d seen the Unified Church as a shepherd, slaughtering only the sheep they needed to survive, while the wolf, she’d claimed, would butcher us indiscriminately.

“Yes, the wolf.” Aldric’s eyes narrowed as they studied me. “I don’t suppose you own a red hooded riding cloak?”




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