The Flame Never Dies

  With a startling bolt of intuition, I realized the boy was one of the nomads—and he’d just killed the stranger who’d snuck up on me.

  “Don’t move.” Without looking away from me, he braced one boot on the dead man’s jaw and wrenched the crowbar free with a wet sucking sound. Then he wielded it like a bat on one shoulder, ready to swing again, blood dripping from the short, bent end of the metal.

  “I am Eli Woods, sentinel in the Lord’s Army.” His gaze narrowed on me. His grip tightened on the crowbar. “You have ten seconds to convince me you’re not one of the Unclean, or I will bury this in your skull.”

  Uh-oh.

  I took a step back and my spine hit the cool stone wall.

  Eli wasn’t a demon, so I couldn’t exorcise him, and I wasn’t going to hurt a fellow human in anything less than self-defense. Which was starting to look like a distinct possibility.

  “Five seconds.” He studied me, and I found no recognition in his eyes. “Who are you?”

  Obviously nomads didn’t watch the news. They didn’t have television. But if they had a radio and had picked up any of the Church’s broadcasts proclaiming the infamous Nina Kane to be possessed, giving him my name wouldn’t help him trust me.

  “Um…”

  “Three seconds.”

  I sucked in a deep breath and held his gaze. Then I spat out the truth. “I’m Nina Kane. But I’m not a demon, and I can prove it.”

  Eli’s dark brows rose beneath the wide brim of his hat. “You can prove you’re not a demon?” He was either surprised or skeptical, but I couldn’t tell which because his face only seemed capable of scowling. His grip on the crowbar tightened. “That’s a new one. Start talking.”

  But as I tried to figure out what to say, I realized that without a demon there to exorcise, proving my claim would be nearly impossible. I held my hands up, palms out, to remind him that I wasn’t armed. “Okay, I could prove it if there was another demon here for me to kill, but since there isn’t, you’ll just have to take my word for it.” In my whole life, I’d never wished for a demon, but in that moment, I got close. “I’m an exorcist.”

  “There are no exorcists.” He pulled the crowbar back to swing, and my heart fell into my stomach. “They’re all demons the so-called Unified Church uses to hunt down its enemies.” He shifted his weight and leaned into his swing. Pulse racing, I dropped to the ground on my knees. Pain radiated up my legs. The metal bar swung over my head with a fierce whoosh. I scrambled around the dead guy’s feet and stood, backing away from Eli with my arms out. Trying to look harmless.

  “No, wait! I’m not one of those exorcists.” I would have been relieved that he knew about the Church’s black-robed fakes if he didn’t think I was one of them. “I’m the real thing! So we’re actually on the same side—”

  “Drop it!” Finn shouted, and I turned to see him in the doorway, aiming his rifle at Eli.

  “Who are you?” the sentinel demanded, crowbar still held at the ready.

  “That’s a complicated question.” Finn’s focus on Eli never wavered. “Come any closer to her, and you won’t live long enough to hear the answer.”

  “Eli, please put the crowbar down.” I forced my voice to remain low-pitched and calm. “This is Finn. He’s with me. He’s not going to hurt you.” I turned to Finn. “This is Eli Woods. He killed the demon who snuck up on me, and I think we should all be friends.”

  Finn glanced at the corpse on the floor but looked unconvinced.

  “Finn, put the gun down,” I said.

  “Him first.” His aim at the center of Eli’s worn-thin button-up shirt was a steady threat.

  “Okay, boys, someone has to go first.” I turned back to the self-professed sentinel. “Since you obviously don’t recognize my face or my name, I’m guessing you haven’t seen or heard the news recently?”

  He shook his head. “We don’t have television or radio.”

  “We who? The Lord’s Army?” I said, and Finn gave me a confused look. “What is this army?”

  “We are the last of the true believers.” Eli’s words had the formal cadence of an official pledge or creed. It sounded a little too much like the Church for comfort, but Eli—and presumably his nomadic army—were no more fans of the Unified Church than I was. “We are a beacon of light and truth, shining in a world of darkness and corruption.”

  “Humble too,” Finn muttered.

  I ignored him and focused on Eli. “It’s nice to meet you. And your army.” I cleared my throat and tossed a warning glance at Finn. “Are you familiar with the saying ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’? Because that’s kind of what we’re looking at here. The Church has been hunting you guys for decades, and now they’re hunting us too because of what we know and what we can do. Since we’re on the same side, maybe you could reconsider lowering your weapon?”

  Eli took one hand from his crowbar long enough to reseat his black cowboy hat, briefly revealing short, tight curls. Then he reclaimed his expert grip. “You’re exorcists.” It wasn’t a question. He was repeating the part he obviously found hard to believe.

  “We’re true exorcists. We hunt demons, just like you.” I gestured to the body at my feet. “But instead of puncturing skulls, we incinerate the bond between parasite and host and fry the demonic bastards back to hell.”

  His eyes widened. “You’re serious.”

  I nodded. “It’s kinda badass.”

  “Though most of us don’t object to blunt force trauma when the occasion calls for it.” Finn shrugged and gestured with the rifle he was still aiming. “Or bullets.”

  I glared at Finn, then turned back to Eli. “I need both of you to put down your weapons so we can focus on our mutual enemy.” I shrugged, aiming for casual confidence. “You know. Evil.”

  Both of them glanced at me. Then they glared at each other. Neither boy lowered his weapon.

  My temper spiked. “We’re in the middle of the badlands with a corpse on the floor and the Church on our tails. We are not each other’s biggest problem. So, Finn, put the damn gun down!”

  Finn’s bright green eyes narrowed and his jaw tensed. “Not until you back out of his reach.”

  “Striking a human would be a blight on my honor, and she’s obviously not possessed,” Eli said as I moved closer to Finn. “The jury’s still out on you.”

  Finn’s glare grew colder, but he flicked the safety switch on his rifle, then lowered it. But he didn’t sling it over his back.

  I turned back to Eli. “Your turn.”

  When the sentinel took a deep breath, I realized that trusting Finn and me was as much of a risk for him as the reverse was for us. Maybe more. He lowered his bloody crowbar but didn’t put it down, and I decided that was the best we were going to get.

  “Now I have to go find—” Something moved in the shadowy doorway behind Finn, and I exhaled in relief as Tobias stepped into the marble foyer from the back hall.

  But he wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t gloating over having escaped my custody, nor did he look chagrined. He didn’t even seem surprised to see the body on the floor, or Eli, with his gore-covered crowbar.

  Eli’s gaze tracked down from Finn to the boy now at Finn’s side. His eyes narrowed and his arms tensed as he raised the crowbar like a bat again. “Step away from the Unclean.”

  I tried to move in front of Eli, to shield Finn, but he pushed me aside.

  Finn lifted his gun again. “Do not touch her!”

  “I’m fine,” I insisted, my pulse racing as the tension between the two of them resurged. “Finn’s not possessed. He would never hurt—”

  “Not him,” Eli growled through clenched teeth. “The little one.”

  Chills rose the length of my spine as I turned to follow his intently focused gaze. He was staring right at Tobias.

  “No.” Panic tightened my throat as the sentinel focused his destructive zeal on the child I’d committed all of Anathema to helping. The child I’d begun to think of as an older v
ersion of my unborn niece or nephew—an innocent, dependent upon us for survival. “No. He’s just a kid.”

  “Tobias was my nephew,” Eli said, and shock surged like fire through my veins. I hadn’t told him the boy’s name. “Then an Unclean raiding party ambushed our division four days ago and took him. You’ve been traveling in the company of a demon, Nina Kane.”

  I glanced at Tobias, expecting the child to deny the accusation. But then, he probably didn’t even understand what he was being accused of. “We found him on the side of the road. He’d been abandoned. Left to die.”

  “He wasn’t left. He was bait,” Eli insisted.

  “No.” I stepped toward Tobias, intending to shield him with my body, but Eli pulled me back again, and this time Finn didn’t object. I jerked free of the sentinel’s grip and reached for Tobias.

  “Nina.” Finn suddenly turned and aimed his rifle at the child, backing slowly toward me and away from Tobias. “Eli’s right. The kid’s possessed.”

  I froze. If anyone would know for sure, it’d be Finn. All he had to do was give a little psychic push in Tobias’s direction—as if to take over the child’s body—and he would only meet resistance if something else was already occupying that space.

  A demon.

  “But…” My pulse raced even as I tried to deny what I was hearing. A demon traveling in the company of exorcists, and not one of us had realized? How was that even possible? We hadn’t suspected him because…“Demons don’t take over children’s bodies,” I mumbled, still trying to come to terms with what I was hearing. “Everyone knows that.” The limitations were too great. The hosts failed to mature properly. Degeneration came much faster.

  Tobias smiled slowly, eerily, and chills crawled across my skin. There was nothing left of the little boy we’d spent the past two days with. “Which is exactly why you’d never suspect a child.” His gaze—his very awareness—appeared to age right in front of me, and suddenly his chubby cheeks seemed an absurd and disturbing disguise.

  “He’s your nephew?” I asked Eli, without taking my gaze from the pint-sized demon. No wonder the nomads were following us. We were traveling with the human husk of one of their children.

  “He was,” Eli corrected, and I could practically feel the tension in his bearing. I could hear it in every word he spoke. “Until four days ago.”

  Four days. That meant his division of the Lord’s Army—whatever that was—had been raided the very day Anathema had turned south to leave the New Temperance area. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

  “You weren’t leading us to Verity, were you?” My words echoed in the empty foyer, my voice deep and still with the weight of the question. I knew Verity was out west, but without a map I’d never realized the child had led us off course. “Where were you taking us?”

  Tobias’s smile decayed with a cloying sweetness, like fruit gone bad. “Ask your boyfriend.”

  Finn cursed so passionately the words actually compromised his aim. Not that he would shoot a demon unless he had no other choice.

  “Finn?” I said, but his jaw remained clenched.

  “I didn’t recognize you at first,” Tobias said, still watching Finn, and even his speech sounded different. Ageless. His voice was infinity, granted sound. “Where did you find such a pretty host?”

  Finn bristled at the comparison of his incorporeal state to that of a demon, but I was too startled by the implication to be offended for him. Tobias knew about Finn.

  How the hell could he know? We’d been so careful not to reveal Finn’s uniquely incorporeal state in front of the monster we’d mistaken for a child.

  “Identify yourself,” Finn whispered, and there was something strange in the demand. Some ageless formality, as if the words carried more power—more imperative—than I could possibly understand.

  “Don’t you recognize me, child?” Tobias’s small brows arched over eyes that had once shone with human joy and innocence, and the irony was staggering.

  “Aldric,” Finn said, and it didn’t sound like a guess. “And who was that?” He tossed his head at the man Eli had killed with the crowbar.

  “Meshara. And you know how she abhors wearing the male form.”

  “Finn?” My hands opened and closed, my left palm burning with the flames my body wanted to unleash, and I was suddenly hyperaware of every opportunity I’d had to burn this Aldric from Tobias’s young form. I’d given him my bedroll. I’d sung to him in the cab of the truck and shared my chocolate ration with him. He’d slept inches from my sister.

  “What’s happening, Finn? Where was he leading us?” I hadn’t felt so distressingly uninformed since I’d discovered that my own mother was possessed.

  Eli stepped closer on my right, crowbar still ready to swing. “He was taking you to Pandemonia.”

  The name was unfamiliar, but I knew the meaning of the word.

  Pandemonia.

  All demons.

  My chills became a full-body quaking I had to fight to restrict to my insides. “A city full of the Unclean?” In truth, all the surviving US cities were being governed by demons in the guise of Church officials, but a city populated by demons, advertising its presence with its very name? “When the Church finds out, they will wipe your demon city from the map.”

  Aldric laughed, and the sound seemed to freeze as it slid down my spine. “She’s adorable, Finn. One doesn’t usually find such naïveté in an exorcist.”

  Naïveté? “The Church knows?” The very existence of Pandemonia was a threat to the Unified Church’s biggest secret. Why would they let the city stand?

  The answer came as soon as I’d thought the question. Because they can’t take it down. If the Church could raze Pandemonia, it would.

  “Why are you here?” Finn demanded.

  “Why do you think? He wants to see Maddock.” Aldric’s eerie smile slid my way. “He wants to meet all of Maddy’s little friends. Especially the exorcists.”

  “Who’s he?” Eli asked, and if he hadn’t, I would have. But we got no answer. Whoever “he” was, he was obviously a demon, and his interest in the exorcist members of Anathema was painfully clear. Exorcists made much stronger, hardier, longer-lasting hosts than did normal people. Which was why my mother had chosen an exorcist to be my father—so that the child she raised to be her next host would be as durable as possible.

  “He’ll never see Maddock again,” Finn growled. “And neither will you.” He turned to me. “Nina?”

  I lifted my left hand, already cradling its flame.

  “Grayson’s transitioning,” Aldric said, and I froze in the middle of my first step toward him, confused by the non sequitur. “No matter where you go, degenerates will flock to her, and he will follow them to you. How do you think we found you?” The child-demon nodded at the corpse of his former peer—obviously the other half of “we.”

  “We’ll fry everyone he sends after us,” Finn promised.

  “And your sister?” Aldric turned to me. “Is Melanie an exorcist? Will her baby be one?”

  “Stay away from my sister and her—”

  Finn lifted his rifle, revising his aim.

  Aldric spread his chubby arms, inviting Finn to shoot. “Go ahead.” His focus found me and lingered. He looked…hungry. “I’m due for an upgrade anyway.”

  Surely he was bluffing. It wasn’t easy for a disembodied demon to claim a healthy, conscious human host. But I wasn’t confident enough to bet on that, and neither was Finn.

  “Nina!” Finn glanced at my hand, and then his gaze skipped to the demon.

  I flipped a mental switch, and a handful of flickering flames kindled in my palm.

  Aldric’s grin widened—a farce of childhood joy. “Kastor is going to love her.”

  “Kastor?” I said, and Finn gave me the smallest, subtlest shake of his head. The “he” from Pandemonia who wanted to see Maddock was Kastor?

  Finn looked sick. I’d told him in confidence that Kastor—whose name the former Deacon of New Temp
erance had invoked to scare us—had stolen Grayson’s brother from a Church caravan. But Finn had never mentioned that he knew this demon that other demons feared!

  “You told her about Kastor?” Aldric said, then he read the answer in my expression. “You haven’t told her. Yet she knows something….”

  “Kastor is the wolf,” I said. And we were the sheep.

  At least, that’s how Deacon Bennett had put it. She’d seen the Unified Church as a shepherd, slaughtering only the sheep they needed to survive, while the wolf, she’d claimed, would butcher us indiscriminately.

  “Yes, the wolf.” Aldric’s eyes narrowed as they studied me. “I don’t suppose you own a red hooded riding cloak?”

  “What?” I frowned.

  The demon child shrugged. “No matter. He will devour you just the same, and Finn will be forced to watch. Eli knows all about the torment of spectators, don’t you?” Aldric said, and I felt Eli tense at my back. “He saw poor little Tobias wake up from an afternoon nap with a wicked smile and a voracious appetite for pain.”

  Eli grunted, and something whistled through the air, end over end, so fast my gaze couldn’t quite track it.

  “No!” Finn’s hand shot out, and Eli’s crowbar slammed into his palm hard enough to throw him off his feet. He landed in front of Aldric, his eyes shut tight, clutching the steel bar in his left fist and the barrel of the rifle in his right. Pain was drawn in every line of his face.

  Aldric pounced, straddling Finn, his tiny hands around Finn’s throat. The muscles in his small arms bulged with more strength than a child should have had. He hardly looked human in that moment, and I didn’t understand why Finn didn’t fight back, until his eyes opened and they were no longer Finn-green.

  They were Carter-brown, and terrified. Sudden, excruciating pain had driven Finn from the body of the New Temperance gate guard.

  Eli lunged for them, and his movement broke through my shock. I lurched in front of him and shoved my left hand down on the demon child’s back. Light exploded between us. Aldric threw his head back. The screech that erupted from his small throat filled me with a savage satisfaction, and I was certain all over again that even on the run in the badlands, I was doing what I was meant to do.