The Flame Never Dies

  “But it’ll make her easier to deal with.” The man with the rifle fired, and something slammed into my left side. I stumbled backward, thrown off balance, and the flames coming from my palm died. Atticus crumpled to the concrete floor in the aisle, unmoving, as the smell of scorched cotton rose from his body.

  Pain radiated from my side, just above my hip, and as darkness closed in on me from the edges of my vision I looked down to find a dart sticking out of my shirt. If I passed out, any demon who wanted me could jump into my body.

  Panic made my heart race, probably pumping the sedative through my body even faster. “Oh shi—”

  I didn’t even feel it when I hit the floor.

  Light glared red through my closed eyelids, and when I opened them, pain speared my head. I blinked rapidly, trying to adjust to the light, and it took me a couple of minutes to remember what had happened.

  I’d lost consciousness for the third time in…what? Two days? Three? I had no idea how long I’d sat in that basement cell, and no idea how long I’d been unconscious this time.

  I blinked again and took a deep breath, and finally my surroundings came into focus: A sideways chair, with intricately carved legs in the shape of an eagle’s claw grasping a ball. A musty-smelling rug with a repeating red-and-gold pattern hanging vertically. Against my face.

  After one more blink, I realized the rug and chair weren’t sideways. I was lying on the floor.

  When I tried to sit up, I discovered that my hands were bound at my back, this time with metal cuffs.

  Pandemonia.

  I was still in the demon city. Yet somehow, inexplicably, I was also still in my own body despite having lost consciousness surrounded by the Unclean.

  “You killed the captain of my guard.”

  I gasped, startled by the sudden voice, then rolled onto my opposite side to face the source. Kastor stood on the other side of a room ornately decorated with antique rugs and furnishings. I saw a velvet loveseat. A mirror with a golden beveled frame. Several small tables and a desk that all matched the chair behind me. The room looked like it had been frozen in time long before the war against the Unclean.

  It took me another second to remember Kastor’s guard—Atticus—and what had happened to him. The boss looked angry over his loss, in a detached sort of way, yet I saw no grief or distress. He’d lost an asset, not a friend. Which made sense because demons lack human emotions and attachments.

  “We’re nowhere near even.” I looked up at an awkward angle from the floor, watching for his reaction to see how scared I should be. “Your lapdog Meshara killed my sister.”

  Kastor’s brows rose. “The pregnant one?” My furious glare must have been enough of an answer because he chuckled. “Huh. She knew you wouldn’t burn her out, because of the baby. Clever. I wouldn’t have given her that much credit.”

  “You still shouldn’t. I sent her back to your homeland.” I sat up—the motion was awkward with my hands cuffed behind me, but not impossible. “Just like Aldric and the captain of your guard. But from what I understand, they’re still alive and well in your native land. You guys can’t really die, right?”

  “And you ‘guys’ are notoriously fragile.” Kastor crossed his arms over his chest and sank onto the arm of the stiff-looking sofa. “Even exorcists.” The implicit threat made my heart pound, but…

  “Then why am I still alive? And unpossessed?”

  Kastor crossed his toned arms across his chest. “Because you’re still useful to me. And because I haven’t yet decided whom to gift you to as a host.”

  I tucked my knees up to my chest, then rocked forward onto my feet and stood. “Better decide quickly. You don’t have much time left.”

  He laughed out loud, and my skin crawled.

  I squatted and stepped through the loop formed by my cuffed wrists with first my right, then my left leg, so that when I stood, my hands were bound in front of me. My captor looked surprised but made no objection. He clearly didn’t consider me much of a threat.

  “So, how exactly am I useful to you? Is this still about luring Maddock back to Pandemonia?”

  “Back?” Kastor’s brown eyes widened. He looked almost impressed. “He told you about his time here?”

  “He didn’t have much choice, with you sending your henchmen all over the badlands to bring him in. Why do you want him, anyway?” I gave Kastor a long, assessing look. His host was young and healthy. And attractive, in a carefree, confident way boys in New Temperance had never been. His thick brown hair was longer than the Church would allow, and his thin T-shirt showed off defined arms and the outline of a toned chest. His eyelashes were thick and dark, and his skin was tanned to a golden brown. “Your host is, what? Eighteen?” Kastor made evil look good, in a way I hadn’t been prepared for.

  But evil was evil, no matter how pretty the package.

  “Nineteen,” he corrected.

  “And he’s the very picture of health and power.”

  He nodded, and the reflection of the overhead lights shone in his eyes. “More so than you even know.” He held out his left hand, and flames kindled in his palm.

  I jumped back, startled. “You’re wearing an exorcist.” Of course he was wearing an exorcist. Why would the most powerful demon in Pandemonia settle for anything less? “Wow. Okay, then I don’t get it.” I gestured at his form with my cuffed hands. “You have a body any other demon would kill for.” True, most demons would kill for a snow cone, but that was beside the point. “So why do you want Maddock so badly?”

  “You think I want to wear Maddock?” He shrugged, still perched on the scrolled sofa arm, and the realization that I had no clue what he was really up to chilled me from the inside out. “That might have been the plan once, but as you’ve pointed out, I’m no longer in need of a new host, and I won’t be for at least two decades, thanks to the longevity of an exorcist body.”

  I frowned, my brain racing as fast as my pulse. What was I missing? “So why go after Grayson and me as bait for Maddock?”

  Kastor laughed, and the sound grated against my spine like metal scraping metal. “Child, you’re not bait to draw Maddock into Pandemonia. Maddock isn’t even the fish I’m trying to catch. You and Maddock are both bait—for Finn.”

  “Finn?” I frowned, struggling to fit that new piece into the puzzle.

  “You don’t even know who I’m talking about, do you?” His voice oozed with condescension. “Finn is Maddock’s—”

  “Of course I know who Finn is,” I snapped. “Are you sure you do?” What could he possibly want with a human who had no body to be possessed?

  He gestured for me to take a seat in the chair with the eagle claw legs. I sat, but only because I hadn’t had real food or any true rest in at least two days. “Nina, I’ve known Finn since the moment he was born. Two minutes after Maddock. His brother.”

  “What?” If I hadn’t already been sitting, I would have fallen into the chair. “You’re lying.” Finn would have told me if he and Maddy were brothers. If he’d known Pandemonia’s demonic overlord all his life. If he’d once had a body, capable of being born in the traditional sense.

  Kastor leaned forward on the sofa arm, evidently fascinated by the conclusion I’d drawn. “Finn and Maddock are twins. Why would I lie about that?”

  “I don’t know. Because you’re evil?”

  He stood, then headed for a tall cabinet against one wall. “Evil is a human concept. Demons aren’t evil. We’re simply unburdened by the human conscience and moral codes.” He opened the top half of the cabinet and took a short glass from a high shelf. “Actually, we’re not really demons either. That’s a concept your species assigned to us, assuming us to be denizens of some mythological underworld. It’s all a bunch of bullshit.” Another shrug. “We’re simply the dominant species.” He opened a small refrigerator hidden behind a door in the lower half of the cabinet and scooped several ice cubes into his glass. “Would you like a drink?”

  I considered reminding him
that I was underage, but that felt like a ridiculous concept under the circumstances. “I could use a bathroom break, if you’re feeling civil.”

  He tilted his head to the left, as if considering. “I have lived in your world through many iterations of the concept of civility.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  He pointed toward a door at the back of the room. “Through there. Leave the door open.”

  The bathroom was small, but the toilet wasn’t in direct sight of the sitting room, even with the door open, and that was infinitely better than using the bucket from my cell.

  In the semi-privacy of the restroom, I considered my options. I could try to get close enough to Kastor to exorcise him, then free Grayson—assuming I could find her—but once his guard discovered their leader dead, there would be a citywide manhunt, which would complicate both our escape and my effort to infect as much of the city as possible.

  Also, with Kastor dead there’d be no one to keep the rest of the demons from trying to possess Grayson and me, and we couldn’t possibly fight the entire city, even if her transition had already been triggered.

  The only other option I could think of involved getting close enough to Kastor to be sure he was infected, then somehow disabling him so Grayson and I could make our break. With Kastor infected but alive, he would transmit the virus for us, as would anyone else we managed to contaminate during our escape.

  “Did you fall in?” Kastor called from the sitting room.

  I finished up in the bathroom and washed my hands out of habit—awkward, because of the cuffs—then immediately wished I hadn’t. I was trying to spread germs, not kill them.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink?” Kastor held up a short glass half-full of amber liquid when I came out of the restroom. “Our status as mortal enemies doesn’t have to mean we can’t share a beverage.”

  I was pretty sure that was the very least of what our status meant. But the more chances I had to physically interact with him—up to a point—the better my chances of infecting him.

  “Um…sure. Water would be great. Service in your stable was disgraceful.”

  “Alas, we no longer have bottled water. We can grow our own food and raise our own livestock, but for everything else we have to make do with what we’re able to confiscate. I suspect you and your friends have been living much the same way?” I nodded as Kastor took another glass from the cabinet. “You’re welcome to fill this from the sink in the bathroom.”

  In spite of the anxious rush of my pulse in my ears, I let my fingers brush his as I took the glass, desperately wishing I knew whether or not the virus could be spread by such casual contact.

  “Are Maddock and Finn really brothers?” I called as I ran water into the glass with my wrists still cuffed together—if he wanted to pretend this was some kind of social visit, I could certainly oblige him with some self-serving gossip. “Were you really there when they were born?” I drained the short glass in three long gulps, then refilled it.

  “I was.” Kastor watched me through the open doorway. “They were born right here, almost eighteen years ago, to a human woman about your age. She was an exorcist named Abigail. A beautiful woman. The boys both got her eyes.”

  Finn had eyes? And they were hazel, like Maddock’s? Not green?

  So presumably he’d had a body too?

  “Abigail was human? Not a breeder?” Instead of returning to the chair with the eagle claw legs, I boldly crossed the room to sit on the loveseat, opposite the arm he’d perched on. “Why wasn’t she possessed?”

  Kastor’s brows arched over my decision to move closer, but he made no comment. “I didn’t award her to anyone as a host in part because she was completely insane, and we couldn’t be sure that the problem was purely psychological.”

  As Meshara had told me, if any of Abigail’s issues stemmed from brain damage, she would not have made a suitable host.

  “And in part because she was carrying my child,” he continued, as if that first bombshell hadn’t already blown me away. “We didn’t realize there were two of them in there”—his vague gesture at my stomach gave me the creepy-crawlies—“until they came out.”

  “Insane…? Two of…?” Phrases swirled through my head like debris caught in a storm, and nothing seemed to settle long enough for me to grab on to. I could no longer feel the glass in my grip. “Your child?”

  He nodded perfunctorily, and a strand of brown hair fell over his forehead. “We weren’t sure it would be a boy, but we were hopeful.” His smile took on a boastful cast, and for a second it was hard to keep in mind that he was actually an ancient evil being rather than an arrogant teenage boy. He’d selected his host very well—Kastor’s stolen face was coldly handsome, and difficult to look away from. “As it turns out, it was actually two boys. I believe your people would call that a miracle.”

  He was right about that—in fact, the only miracles I believed in anymore were babies.

  “We?” I took another sip of water, then cleared my throat. “Who’s we?” Did an insane pregnant exorcist count as part of a demon’s “we”?

  “Everybody.” Kastor’s grand, wide-armed gesture seemed to take in the entire planet. “All of Pandemonia knew about Abigail’s pregnancy. It was celebrated. She was revered. It isn’t every day that a human woman carries a demon’s child.”

  “It isn’t any day that I can conceive of.” I looked up from my half-full glass to frown at him. “In what sense could Maddock and Finn possibly be your children?” Demons didn’t have any true physical form in the human world, which meant they had neither the parts nor the…fluids necessary to create a child. “Did you possess their biological father’s body?” I couldn’t see any other way for the conception to have happened.

  “Child, they weren’t conceived by a human father, possessed or otherwise.” His patronizing tone felt extra insulting coming from a face not much older than my own. “Finn and Maddock are the first—and as far as I know, the only—children ever fathered by a demon in his natural state. And they were conceived in my native world.”

  What?

  “How is that possible?” I was so stunned I could hardly get the question out. Surely he was lying.

  Kastor shrugged, but the gesture was too casual to be believable; he was bursting with pride over whatever he was about to say. “Abigail is the first human in history to survive a trip to our world. And she came back pregnant. Insane.” Another shrug, from the arm of the velvet loveseat. “But pregnant.”

  “I don’t…” I took a deep breath, and my tongue suddenly felt dry in spite of the water. He couldn’t be serious. “Do you have any proof?”

  “Finn is the proof.” His brown eyes shone with feverish excitement. “Haven’t you ever wondered how he’s survived without a body of his own? How he can take over anyone else’s whenever he wants?”

  “No…” I wasn’t answering his question. I was denying the implication. “He’s not a demon. He’s not!” The only thing Finn had ever been truly sure of in his entire life was that he was human. “He has a conscience. And he never gets sucked into hell. And he can’t access his hosts’ memories. And he doesn’t hurt their souls!”

  “I know!” Kastor looked almost insanely giddy. “He’s a very nearly perfect hybrid of our two species. The best of both worlds—except that he can’t access human memories. But that’s an acceptable loss, considering that he doesn’t need a physical form to stay in your world, and that the hosts he takes are reusable, because he doesn’t have to consume their souls!”

  Finn was half-demon. So was Maddock. Their insane exorcist mother had been impregnated by the ruler of a secret all-demon city, in the demons’ native world. My horror on their behalf was so profound it defied expression.

  “How?” I asked at last, and the question sounded hollow with shock. “Why doesn’t he need a body?”

  “We assume it has something to do with his demon genetics. He has an incorporeal form, like his father….” Kastor laid on
e hand over his chest. “But he’s native to this world, like his mother. However it happened, Finn is the key to unlocking the same abilities in the rest of us.”

  “You want to study him?” I really should have seen that coming. Why else would he try so hard to orchestrate a reunion with a son he couldn’t even see?

  But Kastor shook his head on his way across the room toward a large, neat desk. “I don’t just want to study him. I want to replicate him.” He plucked a notebook from the desk and held it up so that I could see a handwritten list of names, most of which had been crossed off. “I’ve been collecting the Church’s scientists as hosts, to give us access to what they know. One day one of them will help us understand Finn’s unusual state and figure out how to bestow it upon the rest of us.”

  He’d kidnapped Church scientists and turned them into demons, and now he was grinning at me from across the room like a child eager for his parents’ praise. Could he actually think I would approve of what he was doing?

  Although I didn’t hate the idea of the Church having fewer scientists to use against what was left of the human population….

  Wait. Church scientists…

  Did any of them know about the virus? Did Kastor know? Surely if he did know about the plan to drive Pandemonia’s demons from our world, he couldn’t know it had already been implemented….

  “But we can’t study him until he comes home,” Kastor continued, oblivious to the turn my thoughts had taken. “That’s why I need Maddock, as well as anyone else Finn has grown to care about during his sojourn.”

  Which was why he’d abducted Grayson and me. “How do you plan to study Finn if his natural state is incorporeal?”

  He shrugged, but the gesture looked stiff and forced. “That is for the scientists to figure out. I won’t pretend to understand the specifics, because I’ve never possessed a scientist. Hell, I didn’t know about Finn’s incorporeal potential until he died.”

  “He…died?” It took a second for the horror of that thought to truly sink in. I’d never met anyone as alive as Finn. Even stuck in a body with only average physical abilities, he conspicuously enjoyed every warm breeze, every cold dip in a river, and every single time we’d ever touched. When others had only complaints about our living conditions, Finn was quick to point out that cold, hard, and dusty just made warm, soft, and clean feel even better by comparison.