“Reese!” Maddock pulled on one of Reese’s massive arms. Finn took the other one, but Reese was too big. Too strong. Too terrified and angry.
“You let her go off by herself before her transformation was triggered. Before she was even trained to fight. You did this!”
“Reese, let him go!” I shouted as Eli kicked frantically and the crowd began to close in, many bearing blunt weapons.
Devi’s beautiful features sharpened into a scowl. She grabbed a handful of Reese’s light brown hair and pulled as hard as she could. Reese shouted as his head was jerked back. His hand opened, and Eli fell to the ground, gasping and rubbing his throat. Devi dragged Reese back several steps, then stood on her toes to speak as close to his ear as she could get.
“Reese. Eli didn’t take Grayson. In fact, we’re the reason three of his friends and relatives are dead. Five, if you count Tobias and Micah. Kastor’s after us.”
When he nodded awkwardly, jaw clenched, Devi finally let him go.
Reese immediately turned to Maddock. “Give me the keys.”
“Wait,” Eli croaked from the ground, rubbing his throat. “Even if you could track them in the dark with nothing but headlights, they’ll go off-road. Somewhere hooves can go but tires can’t. Why else would they leave on horseback?”
Reese’s cheeks were scarlet with fury. His eyes were narrowed, his jaw clenched. He was still close to losing it.
“We don’t have to follow them,” I pointed out. “We know where they’re taking her, and our cars will go faster than their horses. We’ll cut them off before they get to Pandemonia, and we’ll get her back, Reese. We’ll go as soon as Mellie’s had her baby.”
The last word was still hanging in the air when the problem hit me. I wouldn’t be going anywhere after my sister had her baby. Not ever again.
But even if Reese and the others waited for her, Mellie couldn’t go with them—I didn’t want her and the baby anywhere near Pandemonia. Yet Eli and his people were much less capable of protecting my last family members than Anathema was.
There were no good options. My death would give the baby life yet leave no one capable of defending that life.
Oblivious to the choice I was wrestling with, Reese glanced over my shoulder to where my sister was laboring next to our campfire with only Anabelle in attendance. “No. Nina, we have to go now,” he whispered. “She could be in labor all night. Grayson can’t wait that long.”
“Son, they’ve probably already claimed her as a host,” Brother Isaiah said, and I turned to find him watching our exchange with many of his followers fanned out behind him. “If that’s the case, the most you can offer her is the release of her immortal soul.”
“He’s an atheist.” Eli pushed himself to his feet, still rubbing his throat. “He doesn’t believe her soul can find peace.”
“It doesn’t matter. She’s not possessed,” Finn said, and we all turned to him in surprise. “Not yet.”
Reese swiped one thick arm across his face, wiping away tears that seemed to be part grief, part rage. “How do you know?”
“I know because Peter has a dent in his head rather than a smoking hole in his chest. She didn’t exorcise him, so she hasn’t triggered her transition yet, and she’s safe until she does. Exorcist hosts are a very rare luxury, even in Pandemonia, and they all know that if she’s possessed before she enters transition, she never will enter transition.”
“How much time do we have?” Reese asked, and I noticed that his gaze had lost focus. He was concentrating on the plan to get Grayson back.
“As much time as she gives us,” Finn said softly. “As long as she refuses to exorcise her first demon, they can’t possess her.” He cleared his throat and glanced at the ground. “But there’s nothing they won’t do to try to make her trigger her transition. They have no compassion and no boundaries. They have no souls.”
His last statement echoed into stunned silence as the rest of us considered what that might mean.
“I almost helped trigger her…,” Reese whispered, and I’m not sure anyone beyond our immediate circle heard him. “I could have gotten her killed.” He looked up suddenly, and his gaze found mine. “Stay with your sister, if you need to. I understand. But I’m going after Grayson now, and I’m taking the SUV. Any of you who want to come are welcome.” His gaze skipped over Finn—probably assuming we wouldn’t be split up—and found Maddock and Devi. Before they could answer, I laid one hand on Reese’s arm, panic swelling deep inside me.
“Let me check on Mellie. It could be false labor.” That was the only hope I had left to cling to. “And even if it’s not, maybe it won’t take as long as we expect.”
Reese nodded. “Check on her. But I’m going in fifteen minutes, with or without you.”
I jogged back to our campfire, Finn’s footsteps echoing at my back. Damaris was right behind him.
“What happened to Grayson?” Mellie asked when I knelt next to her. She had both hands on her belly, but she wasn’t sweaty or pale. She looked pretty good, considering.
“Some of Kastor’s demons possessed a few of the Lord’s Army’s members and took her.”
Melanie’s eyes widened. “Here? Kastor’s people are here? Now?”
“They were, but they’re gone, and I don’t want you to worry about that right now.” Nor did I want her to know that Reese would be leaving in minutes, with or without us. “How do you feel?” I glanced at Anabelle, who had stopped consulting her watch; then I turned to Damaris, who frowned as she felt my sister’s bulging stomach.
“I can’t feel any contractions,” the midwife said.
“Maybe she’s not having another one yet.”
“The first two were eight minutes apart,” Anabelle said. “But now she’s gone ten minutes without one.”
I studied my sister’s face, brushing her hair back from her forehead. She looked confused and scared but physically comfortable, and it was hard not to get my hopes up. “Is that unusual?”
“Not particularly. I’d like to check her cervix, to rule out false labor.” Damaris turned back to the patient. “Honey, we need to get your pants off.”
“No, I think I’m fine now.” Mellie’s arms tightened protectively around her stomach. “The contractions have stopped. It was probably false labor, just like you said. We have to go get Grayson.”
“Okay, but we need to be sure,” I insisted, while Damaris and Anabelle turned one of our mats to face the fire because no one had returned with a flashlight. “I mean, is there any chance of that? I don’t want to move her if she’s going to have a baby in the next day or so.”
“Nina, I’m fine,” Melanie insisted. “It was false labor—the books even have a fancy name for that—but it’s over now.” She sat up and reached around her belly for her shoes. “Let’s go.”
“How long would it take to check her cervix?” If I knew for sure that we had more time…
Please let us have more time….
Damaris glanced at one of the neighboring campfires. “We’re still trying to get water to boil so I can sterilize my equipment. That’ll take another ten or fifteen minutes.”
“I…” I frowned, glancing back at Reese, who was carrying a bag of supplies from the cargo truck to the SUV. “If it happens again while we’re on the road…”
“I’ll be there to help.” Eli stepped into the circle of light from our campfire with a backpack over one shoulder and a full duffel over the other. His voice was still hoarse and his neck was red. “I’m going with you.”
“The hell you are!” Reese stomped toward us from the direction of the truck, his thick arms swinging at his sides, his eyes narrowed in fury. “It’s your fault Grayson’s missing.”
“That’s part of the reason I’m going,” Eli insisted. “I owe Grayson a debt, and I’m going to help you get her back. And it’s my sacred duty to release Naomi’s and Serah’s souls. Also, if Melanie goes into labor, you’ll need me,” he added, tossing a reassuring glance at both
me and my sister.
“Reese,” Finn said, “he’s a good fighter, and we can’t afford to turn down help.”
“Fine.” Reese stomped backward toward the cargo truck. “But he’s riding with you.”
“Agreed. But we’re taking the SUV.” I turned back to Finn. “Could you move some of our stuff to the back of the cargo truck to make room for Eli in the SUV?”
“Of course.” Finn headed toward the edge of the campsite while Melanie and I said our goodbyes to the Lord’s Army, thanking Eli’s friends and family for everything they’d shown and taught us, as well as their company. With any luck, we’d be back with Grayson and my sister would still be pregnant. But we’d learned never to rely on luck in the badlands….
By the time we got to the SUV, Finn was on his way to the truck with our extra supplies and Eli was wedging his belongings into the SUV’s cargo hold.
“Here, some of that can come up front with me.” Melanie handed me her bag, then headed toward the rear of the vehicle, where Eli had dropped his crowbar on the ground to free up both hands for wedging luggage into the tight space.
“Thanks,” he said as I leaned into the third row to set my sister’s bag on the floorboard.
A thud echoed from the back of the car, and I froze, startled. “Mellie?” Goose bumps rose on my arms as I stood. The back hatch closed with a heavy clunk, and the light from the cargo area went out, which left me staring into the darkness behind the SUV. “Eli?”
“He was in the way.” My sister stepped into the light pouring from the backseat of the car, and the first thing I noticed was that she held herself strangely. Instead of caressing or rubbing her stomach, which she’d been doing nonstop for months, Mellie stood with both arms hanging at her sides. Her right hand held Eli’s crowbar. “I might have swung a little too hard. Let’s hope I get it right this time.”
She raised the crowbar, and fear leapt into the back of my throat, bitter and acidic. “Mellie?” I tried to back away but bumped into the open rear door of the SUV. Melanie raised the crowbar with a grunt, and in the instant before it hit the side of my head and darkness slammed into me, I realized Mellie wasn’t the one swinging a metal club at my head.
My baby sister was already dead.
I woke up to a crick in my neck and the familiar rhythmic bumps of tires on cracked pavement. The SUV. We were on the road again, and I must have fallen asleep after…
What happened?
My eyes flew open, and when I lifted my head, pain shot through the left side of my skull. The entire world…wobbled.
I moaned, but that only made the pain worse. The daylight shining through the windshield was so bright that we might as well have been driving on the surface of the sun.
“Mellie?” I said, and the syllables came out all mushy, yet they slammed into my head with the force of a sledgehammer.
“You’ve got a hell of a concussion,” she said, and when I turned to face her—why was she driving?—the world spun around me again. “So you should probably sit still.”
“Why are you…?” I tried to touch my throbbing head, but my arm was stuck behind my back. When I wiggled my fingers, pins and needles shot through my hand, as if I’d been sitting on it for too long. “How did I…”
I closed my eyes and images flashed across the backs of my eyelids.
Mellie stepping into the light, holding Eli’s crowbar.
Light glinting on the metal as it swung.
I moaned again as the pieces fell into place in my head. Shock tightened around me, threatening to squeeze all the air from my lungs, when I realized my hands weren’t just stuck behind me, they were tied behind me. When I tried to move my feet, I discovered my ankles were bound as well.
I’d been abducted by the demon possessing my sister.
“Noooo…” I hardly recognized my own voice. “No, give my sister back. Please.”
“You know it doesn’t work that way.” The monster wearing Melanie’s face faked a sympathetic frown as she steered around the stripped-clean corpse of a Jeep blocking the center of the neglected highway. “She’s not in here anymore. If I vacated this body, all the organs would shut down and within minutes her physical form would be as dead as the rest of her. Your sister’s gone for good, Nina.”
Tears blurred the world in front of me, smearing wheat fields and the occasional rusted hulk of abandoned irrigation equipment. I sucked in breath after breath, trying to control the hitching sobs that shook my entire body and speared my head with fresh, sharp pain.
She couldn’t be right. If the world we lived in could support demonic possession and flames spouting from the palms of mortal beings and a rift between the fabrics of two entirely different realities, surely there was some way to reverse what this monster had done and bring my sister back.
If Eli’s God truly existed, how could he deny me one tiny little miracle?
“Eli…” The name snuck out on a sob before I even realized what I was thinking about.
Melanie’s corpse gave a careless shrug. “He was still breathing when we left. He might make it.”
And if he did, he’d tell the others what had happened. That Mellie and I hadn’t just run off and left them. He’d tell them, and they’d come after me.
Except that they couldn’t, because they had to find…
I blinked to clear tears from my eyes, and then I twisted in my seat, trying to see into the back of the SUV. “Where’s Grayson? You’re working with whoever took her, aren’t you?”
“Smart girl. Grayson is on an alternate route—part of a two-pronged attack to divide and conquer Anathema. Either your group will split up, weakening itself to go after both of its members separately, or they will all head to where they know they can find you both in the same place.”
“Pandemonia,” I said, and she nodded. “Who are you?” I squirmed, trying to take pressure off my numb hands. “How long ago did you kill my sister?”
How long had I been sleeping next to a monster?
“Give it some thought.” She steered around a century-old wreck on the right side of the crumbling road. “You’ll figure it out eventually.”
My mouth was dry and my head throbbed fiercely, but I made myself think through the pain. We hadn’t come into direct contact with any of the Unclean since…
Tobias. Maddock had called the demon Aldric.
Except Aldric couldn’t be possessing Mellie, because I’d fried him right out of our world. But the demon Eli had bashed with his crowbar…
“You’re Meshara,” I said, and the demon laughed with Melanie’s throat. With Melanie’s voice. But not with her eyes. “You’ve been with us since that day in the courthouse. Almost a week ago.” Pain gripped my chest like a giant fist, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tears rolled down my face, but I couldn’t use my hands to wipe them. My fingers dug into the seat behind me as I silently pleaded with reality to banish the cruel lie sitting next to me and return my sister. But when I opened my eyes, the demon was still there. Still wearing Melanie’s body, as surely as it wore her sneakers.
My baby sister—the only true family I had left—had died alone in her sleep almost a week before, and I hadn’t noticed. Her soul was being slowly devoured by an evil parasite, and I couldn’t tell.
My mom had been possessed since before I was conceived, so there was never any change in her for me to notice, but I was closer to Melanie than I’d ever been to anyone in my life. Including Finn. I knew her better than I knew anyone, but she’d died, and I’d had no clue.
I had utterly failed her.
Grief was a weight tied to my feet, dragging me beneath the current of denial. I was drowning, and I had no will to fight the tide.
“I am Meshara, but now I’m also Melanie, who came with this convenient little built-in insurance policy.” The demon laid one hand on my sister’s bulging belly. “We both know you’re not going to try anything that might hurt your sister’s squirming progeny.
Nor would you let someone else put the little monster in danger. Which means that even though I took you prisoner, you’re my guardian angel, in case any of your friends catch up with us before we get to Pandemonia. Don’t tell me you don’t appreciate the irony.”
In fact, the irony made me want to vomit up my own lungs. But Meshara was right. Mellie’s baby was the only piece of her I had left.
“There was no early labor?” My thoughts felt sluggish, but my concussion was the least of my worries.
“Nope. This little parasite seems quite content where he is for now,” the demon wearing Mellie’s face confirmed as we bumped over a crack in the highway. “Thank goodness. Playing sweet, knocked-up baby sister was hard enough, but faking uterine contractions is a bit beyond my ken. And there was nothing I could do about the whole cervical issue.”
“But you’re sure the baby’s okay?” The question was ultimately pointless because there was nothing to keep her from lying, but I had to ask.
“As sure as I can be without an ultrasound machine or a prenatal psychic connection. I can’t read the little bastard’s mind. Hell, I can hardly feel him kicking anymore. Your sister’s stomach’s gone kind of numb.”
“Numb? Is that normal?”
Meshara closed her eyes for a second, evidently searching through my sister’s memories, then looked at the road again. “According to one of those stupid pregnancy books, it’s from the stretching of the skin. Came on kind of sudden, though. And the book didn’t mention the loss of sensation spreading into my limbs.” She took one hand off the steering wheel and pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her index finger, then shrugged as if she couldn’t feel the touch. “Or that food would lose its flavor. Being pregnant sucks. That’s why we usually let humanity bear the next generation for us. Except for a few sickos I know who get off on the whole ‘human experience’ thing.”