The Flame Never Dies

  Anabelle frowned. “But the Church is run by demons. Why would they develop an illness that would target their own population?”

  “Here we go again.” Eli glanced at Meshara’s stomach, and I looked down to see it convulsing. I leaned toward her ear—the right was still functioning a little better than the left—and shouted for her to push.

  “I think Kastor’s population was their target,” I told Anabelle as the demon bore down against a pressure she could no longer feel. I couldn’t believe the change in Meshara. In the span of a few hours she’d gone from fiercely fast and deadly to disconnected and virtually helpless. “I’ve never heard of anyone—Church members or civilians—suffering from anything like this, in New Temperance or anywhere else. Not that they would have reported that on the news.” That would have made the Church look powerless in the face of a scary new illness.

  “But surely those of us in the Church would have heard about it,” Anabelle said. “And I don’t understand how they could be sure Kastor’s people would be infected but the Church’s wouldn’t.”

  “They couldn’t be sure,” Eli said. “Unless their members were never exposed but Kastor’s people were. Targeted exposure. Like biological warfare in wars of the past.” He looked up and nodded at me.

  “Okay, you can stop for now!” I shouted into Meshara’s ear.

  “How much longer?” she said, each word soft and slushy.

  “Getting close!” I shouted, without bothering to verify that with Eli.

  “How would they target a specific population?” Anabelle asked.

  “They’d need a delivery system.” Eli leaned against the back of his seat so he could see all three of us. “Someone to carry a vial of the virus—or something exposed to it—into Pandemonia.”

  I glanced at him in surprise, and Eli shrugged. “It’s been done like that in the past. Our textbooks are more than a century old and unedited by the Church.” Which meant he’d had history lessons my teachers would never have let me hear.

  Anabelle frowned. “If that’s their plan, how did Meshara get it? How did Aldric?”

  “Double agents?” Eli shrugged. “Maybe one of them was supposed to carry the vial but it broke and they got infected?”

  I shook my head. “Meshara said she’s never even been in a Church city.” Which could have been a lie, but I was unconscious for hours, and…“If she’s loyal enough to Kastor to resist possessing me on his order, why would she bring a vial of some deadly poison right into the heart of his community?”

  “It’s not actually deadly, though, right?” Eli said. “Wouldn’t anyone infected in Pandemonia just ditch the diseased host for a fresh one?”

  “Yes, as long as there were fresh ones available.” The fact that we were all conscious was the only thing keeping Meshara in Melanie’s compromised body. I closed my eyes, trying to follow Eli’s thread of logic back to the Church’s intentions. “But then those fresh bodies would just get infected. Eventually there wouldn’t be any healthy hosts left in Pandemonia. And based on how fast this thing has reduced Meshara to a senseless bag of bones, ‘eventually’ is starting to sound more like a week or two, tops. After that, where would they go?” I opened my eyes to frown at Eli. “Is Verity the only city near Pandemonia? How close is it?”

  “It’s about a day’s drive. So they could theoretically get there in time to find fresh hosts.” He sat up on his knees again when he noticed Meshara having another contraction. “Tell her to push. We’re almost there now.”

  I coaxed my sister’s killer through another round of pushing, and Eli announced that he could see the baby’s head. Goose bumps popped up all over my arms, and my heart got stuck in my throat.

  Melanie’s baby is almost here.

  My eyes filled with tears, and suddenly her death seemed terribly, unbearably real, because she would never get to hold her child. She would never even get to see the baby she’d carried for all those months. Her last connection to Adam, who’d died just because he’d loved a girl whose last name was Kane.

  The baby would have to make do with an aunt who was too much of a wimp to watch the business end of its birth. An aunt who would have less than an hour to spend with the precious new miracle…

  I wiped tears from my eyes before Eli could see them, and I refocused my attention.

  “Even if Kastor’s people could get to Verity before they went blind, there’s no guarantee they could get inside the city,” I said. “If the Church is really behind this, officials in Verity would see that coming. They’d be fortified, and willing to do anything to keep the virus from spreading.” My eyes widened as the potential fallout sank in. “When they’re out of fresh bodies to hop into, demons would have to leave our world on their own, or live in useless bodies until they starve and then get sucked out of our world en masse.” Which was surely exactly what the Church had intended. “They’ve come up with a plague that will cause a voluntary evacuation of demons from our world, and they cannot afford for it to backfire on them.”

  “Okay, I understand that,” Anabelle said, when that round of pushing had ended. “But I’m still not sure how Meshara got the disease if the rest of Kastor’s people haven’t. She’d know if they were sick in Pandemonia, right?”

  Meshara’s shock and terror over her own predicament felt real, and I couldn’t help but believe she’d never seen anything like what was happening to her. “Meshara thinks she got it from us,” I said. “Both she and Aldric were fine until they came into contact with Anathema.”

  “You escaped from New Temperance, right?” Eli said, and I nodded. “So maybe the Church sent something contagious into the badlands with you, hoping you’d infect the degenerate population.”

  “I think Kastor was their goal,” I said, thinking back to the report I’d read and the hatred in Deacon Bennett’s voice when she’d mentioned him. Suddenly that memory triggered a chilling realization. “Holy shit. Kastor was their goal. Deacon Bennett actually said she hoped Kastor got his hands on us!”

  “Yeah, but she didn’t mean it like that,” Anabelle said. “She was just kind of…cursing us. Like when I used to tell my little brother that I hoped the monsters under his bed got him in his sleep.”

  “Except that Kastor is real, and the Church really hates him. They’re scared of him. What if she wasn’t just cursing us?” I blinked, and for a moment I saw not the interior of our wrecked SUV in the rapidly darkening badlands, but the inside of the New Temperance courthouse, from which Mellie, Finn, Anabelle, and I had made a miraculous escape.

  “What if we didn’t truly escape? What if they had let us go? What if they had pretended to play into our hands so we could ‘escape,’ knowing Kastor would come after us? Relying on that very thing? Think about it.” I counted off the points on my fingers. “They knew Kastor had been raiding their caravans, specifically looking for exorcists to be used as hosts. They knew he had taken Carey James—Grayson’s brother—for that very reason. And they have to know that the citizens of Pandemonia have been watching their television broadcasts since…forever. Which means that announcing on the news that Anathema had escaped into the badlands was like ringing the dinner bell for Kastor. The Church didn’t have to send its virus to Pandemonia. They just had to plant it on us somewhere, then let us go. They knew Kastor would do the rest of the work for them. And they were right.”

  “Nina, it’s time,” Eli said, but I hardly heard him. “This is it.”

  I propped Meshara up out of habit, still mentally mired in the Church’s deception. “Time to push!” I shouted into her ear. I couldn’t tell whether she had any awareness of her own position—if she couldn’t feel her limbs, could she tell how they were situated?—and I only knew for sure that she’d heard me when she gave a great grunt of effort and curled around her own bulging stomach.

  “Good!” Eli called. “Here comes the head!”

  Anabelle peeked over his shoulder and her eyes widened. Then her gaze snapped up to my face, and I practically s
aw her mental gears shift as she tried to distract herself from what she’d seen. “Wait, Nina, you think we’re actually carrying the disease?” She frowned. “But we’ve been through all our stuff over and over, consolidating. Repairing. Replacing. Restocking. Even if they were smart enough to send it in one of the supply trucks, knowing we’d raid it, surely we would have found…Wait, how does one store a virus?”

  “It could have been in anything,” I said. “Probably in something they knew we’d keep. Like painkillers. Or Mellie’s prenatal vitamins. They probably didn’t stash it in something obvious, like vials or syringes.”

  “But if it was in something we’d use, wouldn’t we just be infecting ourselves?”

  “Not if humans can’t get the virus.” Which seemed to be the case, since only the possessed among us had gotten sick.

  “Okay.” Anabelle nodded slowly. “But then wouldn’t they just be wasting their virus on us, instead of using it on Pandemonia? And even if they weren’t, how did they expect Kastor’s people to actually get infected? Accidentally prick themselves on a suspicious syringe in our luggage after we were captured?”

  Good question. And there were no syringes. Anabelle was right. We would have noticed….

  Syringes. Needles.

  My hand fell from Meshara’s shoulder as something she’d said earlier finally sank in. She’d said the Church had tied Melanie to the prenatal exam table and poked her with needles.

  What if they hadn’t been just running tests? What if they hadn’t been just taking blood out of her, but putting something into her bloodstream?

  “We are carrying the virus,” I said, my voice hollow with shock. “But you’re right—it’s not in a vial or a syringe. It’s in Melanie. They injected her with it, then let us escape, knowing Kastor would come after us.

  “My sister is the Church’s Trojan horse, and Kastor is still trying like hell to bring her into his city.”

  “Are you serious?” The beam from Anabelle’s flashlight wavered as she gaped at me over Eli’s shoulder. “You think they infected your sister?”

  “Nothing else makes sense. They had unlimited access to Melanie for several days, and they had two reasonable excuses to ‘examine’ her—pregnancy and suspicion of possession. We assumed they were threatening Melanie to get me to turn myself in.” Which I’d done. “But what if they were really trying to get me to break her out?” Which I’d also done. “When we rescued her, there were almost no consecrated Church members in the courthouse. We assumed we’d successfully lured them out, but what if they were running on a skeleton crew already because any of the possessed were at risk of contracting and spreading the virus once Melanie had been infected?”

  “Nina, you’re about to become an aunt!” Eli called. “The rest can wait.”

  He had no idea how wrong he was about that, and I couldn’t tell him.

  “Here comes the head! Push!”

  Astonished, I repeated his order into Meshara’s ear. Then I watched, shielded from the most graphic moments by my sister’s stomach, while her baby came into the world as helpless and precious as I’d expected.

  Though quite a bit messier.

  “It’s a boy!” Eli held the tiny infant up, one hand beneath the baby’s head and back, the other holding his rump and feet, and my heart nearly exploded with…joy.

  There was nothing else in that moment. No worry over what lay in wait in the badlands, or—worse—in the cities. No fury at Meshara for killing my sister and using her child as a human shield. No fear for myself. Not even grief for Melanie. In the moment her son was born, there was room inside me for nothing but celebration of the life she and Adam had created. The life she’d carried and protected. The very last member of the Kane family had arrived, in spite of countless odds stacked against him.

  And he was beautiful. He was so amazingly, breathtakingly beautiful that it almost hurt to look at him. But it hurt even more not to be holding him.

  When the baby didn’t immediately begin to cry, Eli laid him on the clean cloth draping his lap, then folded it over the child and began to massage his limbs. The baby made a mewling sound so soft and weak that fear speared my chest like a bolt of lightning straight to my heart.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing that I can see.” Eli continued to rub him gently with the cloth, and the baby let out a loud, warbling cry. A strong, healthy cry. “He’s small, but those lungs sound great. Ten fingers, ten toes. Nothing missing, nothing extra. No club foot. No cleft in his lip or palate. Come meet your nephew!” I helped Meshara sit up long enough for me to slide off the bench seat, then close the door for her to lean against. Anabelle carried the baby to the back of the SUV, where I met her in front of the open cargo area, which we’d already emptied and staged as a receiving area for the baby.

  I had to bite my tongue to keep from yelling at her to hurry. I was desperate to hold him, but if I waited too long to free my own soul, my sacrifice would be for nothing.

  “What do you think she’d want to call him?” Anabelle laid my nephew on another clean cloth—this one a towel folded in half—while Eli tended to Meshara in the middle row.

  I didn’t have to think about that for long. Melanie had volleyed names for a girl back and forth, but she’d had a boy name picked out almost from the beginning.

  “Adam,” I said, and when I looked up, I saw tears standing in Anabelle’s eyes.

  “After his father,” she whispered, and I nodded.

  “He’s a Kane, and he’ll always be a Kane, but he’s also part Yung.”

  Anabelle warmed a wet wipe between her hands, then gave me the package to warm with my own body heat while she carefully and systematically cleaned the baby. If I hadn’t known better, I might have thought she’d done it a thousand times, but the truth was that she and Melanie had done all the reading they could, and Anabelle had obviously learned even more from our time with the Lord’s Army.

  Adam cried until his bath was over and she swaddled him in the clean, soft T-shirt I’d laid out. In all the raids we’d carried out since escaping—being driven?—from New Temperance, we hadn’t come across a single article of infant clothing, and the half-dozen baby blankets Melanie had collected were still somewhere in the back of the cargo truck. That old, soft shirt was the best I had to offer Adam.

  That and a few minutes spent in the care of the aunt he would never know.

  Anabelle put him in my arms, and the sound that bubbled up from my throat was half sob, half laugh. Adam was so beautiful. He had his father’s straight, dark hair and almond-shaped eyes, but his irises were all Mellie. Light brown, almost golden, those eyes blinked up at me, and for a second I felt as if I had my sister back. As if I’d never failed her and her baby.

  “Oh, your mother would have given anything to be here with you now,” I whispered as tears rolled down my cheeks. “She loved you so much. She would have done anything to keep you.”

  “Nina.” Anabelle laid one hand on my arm, staring at the baby as he stared up at me. “We need to do something about Meshara.”

  “She can wait.” I couldn’t look away from Adam’s precious face. “She’s not a threat anymore.” And I wasn’t looking forward to burning a hole through my sister’s chest.

  “We really shouldn’t put it off,” Ana insisted. “When the sun goes down, light could draw degenerates, and we don’t exactly have shelter out here.”

  I made myself meet her gaze. “I don’t have much time with Adam, and I want him to spend all of it staring at my face. Listening to my voice. That’s as close as he’s ever going to get to meeting his mother.”

  “But…”

  I shook my head, then sat in the cargo area and tucked my feet up onto the upholstery. “Just close the hatch so nothing can sneak up on us.”

  Anabelle carefully closed the back of the SUV, leaving me wedged into the narrow rear of the vehicle with just enough space to cradle Adam comfortably. He seemed content for the moment, even with nothing to su
ck on, so I decided not to worry about the fact that we hadn’t found either of the pacifiers Melanie had collected from the same shipment that had given us several canisters of powdered baby formula. Which were also in the delivery bag, unless I’d missed something in our luggage.

  Having done what he could for Meshara, Eli was outside, going through our things for any baby supplies we might have missed—not that that he thought we’d actually need them—and packing what we couldn’t do without into the car he and Anabelle had driven.

  The SUV’s rear passenger’s-side door opened, and Anabelle climbed over the middle bench seat to settle sideways in the third row, from which she could peek into the cargo area for glimpses of Adam.

  “He’s so sweet,” she whispered, and I nodded as the baby’s eyes fell closed.

  I tensed for a moment, afraid that he’d already slipped from the world after less than fifteen minutes spent in it. But then his tiny chest rose and fell, and I realized he was just napping. I resisted the urge to wake him up so I could stare at his eyes, because I was afraid that would make him cry, and we had nothing with which to console him.

  We didn’t even have any of the cloth diapers Melanie had made. Not that I would have known how to put them on, anyway. Hopefully, Eli would know what to do about that.

  “I wish Mellie could have seen him. I wish he could have seen her.” I wish he wasn’t about to lose his last living relative.

  Tears filled my eyes, and every time I blinked them away, they came back. I had to clench my jaw to hold back the sob fighting to be heard. The knife sheath poking me through my pocket was a constant reminder of what little time we had together and exactly how it would have to end.

  Then, suddenly, Adam’s whole body tensed.

  “Ana!” I whispered, terrified, and when her eyes flew open, I realized she’d dozed off, sitting straight up.

  “What?”

  “He just went really stiff. I need you to take him.” Adam’s tiny face blurred beneath the tears filling my eyes. “I think this is the end.”