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.”
“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 he
r 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.