Ana pulled herself up onto her knees and peered over the bench seat. “He’s still breathing,” she whispered, and when I blinked to clear my vision, I realized she was right. “He probably just messed in his blanket. Here.” She handed me the package of wet wipes. “Why don’t you clean him up while I see if Eli found anything else for him to wear.”
She got out of the car before I could object, and in my head the seconds ticked away. Seconds Adam couldn’t afford.
If I didn’t act soon, my sacrifice would be for nothing.
I pressed the lever to fold the right side of the bench seat in half, then laid the baby on the nearly flat back of the chair.
Adam woke up and started to fuss when I unswaddled him, and sure enough, the bottom of the makeshift blanket was full of a tarry black stool, which might have disgusted me if it had come out of any other creature in the world. I pulled a wet wipe from the package and folded the blanket up to enclose as much of the mess as I could, then began cleaning the baby up.
I rolled him carefully onto his left side, supporting his stomach with my free hand, then realized that the spot I’d been trying to wipe off wasn’t residual baby poo. It was a pale brown birthmark.
The patch stretched the length of Adam’s small spine and neck and faded into his hairline.
Goose bumps popped up all over my arms. Melanie had the same mark, in that same pale shade of brown. But she’d developed hers over our past few months in the badlands and had attributed it to a hormone-induced change in pigmentation.
How could her baby have been born with exactly the same mark?
Ana opened the door and climbed into the third row, where she sat on the unfolded half of the bench. “He didn’t find any diapers, but there’s this.” She handed me another T-shirt.
“Ana, look.” I lifted the baby and held him against my chest, so she could see his back. “Mellie had the same mark along her spine.”
Ana squinted to see in the dimly lit cargo area. Her eyes widened. “How weird that you all three have the same birthmark! It must be genetic.” She rolled up Adam’s soiled shirt and laid out the clean one for me.
“What? I don’t have that. And it can’t be a birthmark. Mellie didn’t have hers until a few months ago.”
“Well, whatever it is, you have it too,” Anabelle insisted as I laid the baby on his back on the clean shirt. “I saw it when we bathed in the river, back in Ashland.” She frowned. “That seems like a lifetime ago. So much has gone wrong since then.”
I couldn’t argue with that, but…“You’re sure? Here.” I swaddled the baby as best I could and handed him carefully to Ana, then turned my back to her. I lifted my shirt and angled my back toward the dim interior light. “Is there really something there?”
“Yes. A stripe straight up your spine. Light brown. Just a shade darker than your skin. It seems even weirder, knowing all three of you have it.”
I frowned, staring out the rear windshield into the darkened badlands. “And you’re sure it’s the same as Adam’s and Mellie’s?”
“Yes.” The SUV shifted, and her reflection in the glass leaned in for a closer look at my back. “It must be something you inherited, if all three of you have it.”
“Not unless you’re secretly related to Grayson,” Eli said. “Because she has the same mark.”
Startled, I let my shirt fall into place, then turned to find the sentinel standing in the open passenger’s doorway.
“What?”
Eli flushed. “I wasn’t…I didn’t…” He cleared his throat and started over. “She turned around to put on a fresh shirt after a sparring session a couple of days ago, and I saw it. A pale brown stripe up her spine. Lighter than my skin, but darker than the rest of hers. I wanted to ask, but…”
“But you didn’t want her to know you’d seen,” I guessed, and he nodded.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.” I took the baby back from Anabelle and noticed that Eli held a canister in one hand. “Is that what I think it is?”
He glanced down, as if he’d forgotten what had brought him back to the SUV. “Oh. Yes. I didn’t find any diapers, but this was in the bottom of a box with some protein bars and a jug of water. There’s a baby bottle too.”
When he held up the canister of powdered baby formula, I remembered that Reese had packed it in the box of emergency provisions and put it in the back of the SUV when we’d left Ashland, “just in case” our two vehicles got separated.
“Thanks,” I said when he set the canister on the folded bench seat. “Could you mix one up for me?”
“I’ll do my best.” Eli took the formula and headed back to the other vehicle for water and the bottle.
“I guess I’ll try to find a bag for this.” Ana held up the soiled shirt, wadded into a tight ball. “Until we can wash it.” When she followed Eli toward the other car, I cradled little Adam in my arms and paced a few steps between the vehicles.
“Okay, little man, this is it,” I whispered as I walked, and he closed his tiny eyes against the glare from the setting sun. “I love you. I know you can’t understand what I’m saying, but I hope you’ll always know that. And your mother—she would have moved heaven and earth with her own two hands to be here with you if she could have.”
I lifted the little bundle, and his eyes fluttered, then fell shut again. I laid a kiss on his impossibly soft cheek, and my tears left dark spots on the makeshift blanket.
“Nina, he might be okay,” Anabelle said, and I jumped, startled by her quiet approach. “You never know.”
“I do know.” I wiped my cheeks with my spare hand and tried to smile at her. “He will be okay. I need you to take him now.” I held the baby out to her, and she smiled and started to take him—then looked closer at my face.
“Nina…Noooo…” Her eyes widened and she crossed her arms over her chest, refusing to take the baby. “Don’t you even think about it.”
“There’s no other way. I failed Mellie—I can’t let her son down too. Take him, Anabelle.”
“No.” She shook her head and took another step back. “Just wait. He might make it on his own.”
But if that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t know until he’d already died, and by then I couldn’t help him.
“Take him. Please don’t make me put him on the ground, Ana.”
“Nina, please…” But she held out her arms, tears standing in her eyes. “Don’t do this to me. Don’t do this to him. He’s already lost his mother.”
“I need you to take care of him. Anathema will help you, and if they can’t, Eli’s people will. Tell Adam about Melanie for me. Tell him about his dad. Tell him how much he meant to all of us.”
“Nina, wait…,” she begged as I placed the baby in her arms.
“And tell Finn…” I sniffled and wiped tears from my face. “Tell him I love him.” I pulled the knife from my pocket and dropped the sheath onto the ground as I backed away from the edge of the road, toward the overgrown field beyond. “Tell him I love him so much. But this is how it has to—”
Gravel crunched at my back, but before I could turn to look, something whistled through the air behind me.
The world went dark again.
I woke up on the third-row bench seat, my knees tucked up to my chest. After a disorienting moment spent blinking into the dark, everything came back to me and I sat up straight, terror clawing at my insides like a cat in a cloth bag.
“Adam!”
But there was no one else in the car.
Eli had hit me. There was no other explanation for the crunch of gravel behind me before I’d lost consciousness.
I climbed over the seat and opened the back door, then stepped out into the night. Metal squealed behind me, and I turned to see the interior of Eli’s car light up as he opened the door and got out. Another silhouette sat in his passenger’s seat, and I recognized the outline of Anabelle’s hair.
“How could you?” I marched toward him, fire raging in my gut e
ven as agony squeezed blood from my heart one miserable beat at a time. “I wanted him to live! That was my choice!” Two feet from him I pulled back my fist, but Eli made no move to defend himself.
“Nina.” Anabelle pushed open the passenger’s-side door and stood. “Adam’s alive. He’s been waiting for you to wake up.”
“Wha…What?” Shock drained the blood from my face, but I didn’t believe her until I saw the squirming bundle cradled in the crook of her arm.
“He got lucky,” Eli said. “Sometimes there’s a soul or two in the well, Nina. The Lord knows we work hard to put them there.”
“But you didn’t know he’d live when you hit me.” Anger roiled within my voice. “You were willing to let him die.”
“I was willing to keep you alive,” he insisted. “The Lord isn’t done with you, Nina. He wouldn’t have given you the gift of exorcism if he wanted you to throw it away, and I trusted that if the Lord has a purpose for Adam as well, he’d find a soul for the child.” Eli shrugged and glanced over his shoulder at Anabelle and the baby. “I guess I was right.”
I didn’t even realize I still wanted to punch him until my fist crashed into his jaw. Eli’s head rocked to the side and he stumbled back a step, but he took the blow without complaint. “I guess I deserve that.”
One punch was the very least of what he deserved, but…
Adam’s cry pierced the night and I turned to him, startled. And that’s when it hit me. He was alive.
I was going to see Mellie’s baby grow up.
Anabelle smiled. “Get in the car. We can’t let him cry out here.”
I sat in the backseat, startled to see Meshara buckled in next to me, and Anabelle put Adam in the crook of my arm, then handed me a bottle. While he drank, she and Eli climbed back into the front.
“How long was I out?” I couldn’t tear my gaze from the baby’s face, and the soft little sounds of contentment he made while he ate touched some fragile part of me I hadn’t even known existed. I’d never seen anything so tiny and helpless. So utterly dependent upon the world to keep him alive.
But Adam was not born into a kind world.
Anabelle angled her watch into the moonlight. “Just less than an hour. He’s about eighty-five minutes old.”
Still so new. So fragile. So…precious. “And we’re sure…?”
“I’ve never seen one die after a full hour,” Eli assured me, rubbing the red mark across his jaw. “Hell of a punch,” he added as an afterthought.
“Exorcist, remember?” I decided not to tell him how badly my hand hurt. “How long has she been like that?” I nodded at Meshara, whose labored breathing had gotten loud.
“Since not long after you went down. We wanted to put her out of her misery—for Mellie’s sake—but couldn’t until you woke up.” Because if they’d released the demon while I was unconscious, Meshara would have gone right into my undefended body. She would have done that on her own, if she’d had any idea my body was undefended.
“She looks so miserable.” Her eyes were unfocused and she didn’t react to our voices or Adam’s cries. She wasn’t blinking anymore because she couldn’t feel how dry her eyes had become. When I put my hand on her shoulder, she didn’t jerk in surprise, or even look up. I gently pressed my thumbnail into her skin, leaving an indentation but not breaking the surface, and got no reaction at all.
My sister’s body had become a prison for the monster inside it, cut off from all sensory input, and though her breathing sounded horrible, it showed no sign of stopping. Meshara would live until her stolen form literally starved to death. Or choked on its own spittle. Or was torn apart by degenerates.
She was a startling, horrifying vision of what the Church had in mind for Kastor’s people, and it was no less than they deserved. But it was too hard to watch while it wore my sister’s face.
“I’m ready to let her go,” I said finally, and Ana took the baby without being asked. Eli carried Mellie’s body to the wrecked SUV, and her still form blurred beneath my tears as he laid her across the middle bench seat. He left me alone with her, and for several minutes I could only crouch on the floor, resting my head on her stomach. Listening to each labored inhalation.
“I’m so sorry, Mellie,” I said as tears rolled down my face to soak into her shirt. “I’m so sorry I let this happen to you. I hope there wasn’t any pain. I hope you didn’t even know….” I sat up and wiped snot from my face before it could fall on her. “I wish I could undo it all….”
But the only thing I could still do for her was set her free.
My entire body hitched with sobs as I placed my left hand over her chest. Twice I tried to call forth the flame that would fry the parasite from her ruined body, and twice I failed, because when I looked at her, I saw not the demon, but my sister.
Finally, I took a deep breath and spoke to Meshara. “From whence you came, bitch.” Fire burst from my palm and shot through her chest. Meshara’s eyes opened wide. She jerked once, twice, then a third time, but never made a sound.
“For Melanie,” I whispered as I removed my hand from the smoking hole in her chest. Then I pulled a blanket from the backseat and draped it over her.
I cried all the way back to the car.
While Anabelle and Eli cut an extra shirt into strips of cloth with which to pad the baby’s diaper area, I changed Adam’s soiled wrapping by moonlight on the backseat, suddenly wishing I’d paid more attention to what would happen after the baby came. At the current rate of consumption, we would run out of wipes in a few days, and I had no idea what to do with the messy clothes until we had a chance to clean them.
Adam sucked on his palm while I rolled him onto his side to make sure his back was clean, and the mark on his spine caught my eye again. “Hey Eli, have you ever seen anything like this, other than on Grayson’s back?” And on mine…?
He turned to look at Adam from between the front seats. “I’ve seen some interesting birthmarks, but—”
“It’s not a birthmark. Mellie, Grayson, and I didn’t have it until…” I frowned. “Actually, I don’t know when Grayson and I developed the discoloration, but Melanie’s showed up a couple of weeks after we escaped from New Temperance. It was just a small spot at first. Like a bruise.” But Adam had been born with the full version.
Eli folded his stack of cotton strips laid across one knee. “Maybe it’s an allergic reaction to something you came across in the badlands.”
“But Grayson lived out here with the rest of Anathema for months before they found me and Mellie.” My thoughts flew so fast my head spun. “We all three got the mark after we left New Temperance, but none of the guys did.” Reese, Finn, and Maddock regularly sparred with their shirts off, and while the scandalous display of flesh had shocked me at first, after a month or so it had seemed routine. And…nice.
“But it can’t be gender specific, because Adam has the mark but Devi and I don’t.” Anabelle added her strips of cotton to Eli’s pile. “And it can’t be something that affects just exorcists, because Melanie wasn’t an exorcist but Devi is.”
“We had an outbreak once, when I was a kid,” Eli said while I carefully reswaddled the baby the way he had shown me. “Two of our members died, but everyone who got sick developed a rash.”
Anabelle stuffed the soiled blanket into the bag of clothes Adam had already gone through. “What kind of sickness?”
“Sore throat. Fever. Brother Isaiah said it was some kind of virus—lots of them cause rashes.”
My goose bumps doubled in size. “You think the demon virus could have caused the stripe on Mellie’s back?”
Eli shrugged. “It’s all conjecture, but for Melanie to transmit the virus, she’d have to be infected with it, even if she’s just a carrier. Or was just a carrier, until Meshara possessed her. If that’s true, then humans actually can get the virus—they just don’t exhibit the full range of symptoms until and unless they’re possessed.”
“Then how come the rest of Anathema isn’t
infected?” If that was what the mark indicated.
Eli shrugged. “We won’t know that until we know how it’s transmitted.”
“Well, obviously Mellie transmitted the virus to the baby in utero. So we know it’s blood-borne.” Anabelle tied the stack of cotton strips into a bundle with a piece of twine from Eli’s backpack. “If the virus were airborne, the Church wouldn’t need a carrier, and using one would be too dangerous—any demon she breathed on would be infected. But she passed it to you, Nina, which suggests that it can be transmitted through direct contact.” Anabelle shrugged. “You’re the one she had the most direct contact with.”
“She spent a lot of time with you too,” I pointed out as I stroked Adam’s soft cheek with my thumb. “And Grayson spent most of her time with Reese, yet she’s evidently infected and he’s not.” The baby stared up at me, and when I slid my pinkie finger against the tiny palm that had escaped the T-shirt blanket, his fingers curled around mine.
“So, what’s the connection between you three Kanes and Grayson?” Anabelle asked, kneeling on the front bucket seat so she could see the baby over the headrest. “Grayson’s the outlier. You three are all genetically related, and she’s not. You’re from New Temperance—even Adam was conceived there—and she’s not.”
“Grayson is from Constance, right?” Eli asked with a glance at the baby.
“Yeah. She and her brother, Carey, were bred as hosts there, just like…” Just like Melanie and I were. “That’s it!” I sat up straight with the revelation, startling Adam, who began to fuss. “Grayson, Melanie, and I were all born to demons.” I stared through the window at the darkened SUV, where my sister’s body still lay. “And so was Adam.”
Melanie hadn’t passed the virus on to her son. Meshara had done that. “Growing inside a possessed body must do something to us genetically. Or at least physically. Something that enables us to carry the virus. And the Church would have known that about Melanie. The second our mother was exposed, they’d have known Mellie was an ideal carrier for their plague. But my guess is that they didn’t expect Kastor to take so long to get his hands on us. And they probably didn’t expect Melanie to get possessed.”