The Flame Never Dies

  Aldric’s hands loosened around Carter’s throat, then fell away as his scream died. When he finally collapsed on top of the poor, shocked guard, I fell with him.

  For a moment no one moved. Then Carter gasped for air, blinking rapidly, and I scrambled off him on my hands and knees. “Are you okay?” I asked, disoriented by the lack of Finn in the guard’s features and mannerisms.

  “Where am I? What’s going on?” Carter shoved Aldric onto the floor with his swollen left hand, and flinched from the pain. Then he pushed himself to his feet with his good hand and backed away from the child’s still-smoking corpse, which—fortunately—put the rifle out of his reach.

  “What the hell just happened?” Eli demanded, and I stood to find him staring at us in total bewilderment.

  “Um…exorcist.” I laid one hand over my chest, while both of them stared at me. “Incineration of stolen souls. Sending demons back to hell.” I turned to Eli as he knelt to pick up his crowbar. “We’ve been over this.”

  Carter cradled his left hand, where an inflamed red streak spanned his palm. “Son of a bitch!” He tried to flex his fingers, then flinched again. “What happened to my hand? Where am I? Who are you people?”

  Eli stared, his jaw slack. “What’s wrong with Finn?”

  “Well…” I rubbed one hand over my face in frustration. “That’s not Finn anymore. That’s Heath Carter.”

  The guard glanced around, and when he noticed his rifle, I slid it out of his reach with my foot, just in case. “What happened to that kid? What the hell is going on?” His brown eyes were wide and glazed with shock.

  “Finn!” I called, hoping he could hear me. “You can come back anytime!”

  “Who’s Finn?” Carter demanded.

  “Nina…” Eli retrieved his crowbar, then backed away from the guard, and I could see that his confusion was making him dangerously nervous—he would start swinging again any second.

  “Calm down,” I said. “Carter’s human. So is Finn. He just doesn’t have a body of his own, so he’s been borrowing Carter’s. For several months.”

  “What?” Carter glanced at the rifle behind my heels, and Eli looked back and forth between us, one frayed nerve away from throwing his crowbar again—and I wasn’t sure I could catch it, even if I were willing to risk a broken hand.

  “Finn!” I shouted, and Carter closed his eyes. When they opened, they were green. Finn was back.

  “Sorry.” He blinked again, then stretched his arms as if testing the fit of a new shirt. “The pain woke him up and I got ejected.” He started to flex the guard’s injured left hand, then flinched and hissed in pain.

  Eli gripped the crowbar until his knuckles paled with the strain. “What in the holy hellfire is going on with you people? What kind of demon are you consorting with?”

  Finn snorted. “If I were a demon, Carter wouldn’t have been able to toss me out. He’s human. I’m human—but without a corporeal form of my own. Just like Nina said.”

  Eli eyed Finn warily as Finn picked up the rifle with his right hand. “Only demons lack bodies.”

  Finn bristled again, and I had to remind myself that I’d had a similar thought when I first found out about his…state. Then he braced the butt of the rifle against his chest with his left forearm and racked the slide to chamber a round.

  Eli’s eyes widened.

  “Look, there’s a lot of it that we don’t understand,” I said, before Finn’s temper could explode all over the sentinel. Not that he would have fired, even without a broken hand, but he wasn’t above scaring the immortal soul right out of anyone who implied he was one of the Unclean. “But what we do know is that Finn’s not a demon. He doesn’t eat souls. He has no access to his host’s memories. He doesn’t originate from hell. He’s just—”

  “Missing one of the defining characteristics of humanity?” Devi said, and I looked up as she and Maddock marched through an archway on the other side of the foyer, dust clinging to their combat boots, bold loyalty shining in their eyes. “Yeah. It’s endearing. Who the hell are you?”

  Maddock’s pistol was aimed at Eli’s head.

  Reese and Grayson weren’t with them.

  “I am a sentinel in the Lord’s Army,” Eli began. “We are the last of the true—”

  “This is Eli Woods. He saved my life”—I gestured at the dead man on the floor—“with the crowbar that just tenderized Finn’s hand. Eli’s one of the nomads,” I added, in case they couldn’t tell from the cowboy boots and hat.

  “Wha—?” Maddock started to ask a question, but then his gaze found Tobias and his aggressive stance crumpled beneath a devastating comprehension. “The kid was possessed?” His expression seemed caught in the battle between what experience had taught him—that demons don’t possess children—and the irrefutable singed hole in the boy’s chest.

  Maddock lowered the pistol. “Why would a demon abandon an adult body to take a child?”

  Eli lowered his crowbar, but his grip on it did not loosen. “The boy was bait.”

  When Finn swung his rifle over his shoulder with his good hand, I exhaled slowly, relieved now that no weapons were being aimed. “It was Aldric,” he said. “He knew we wouldn’t suspect a kid. Kastor sent him.”

  Maddock froze. “He was leading us to Pandemonia.”

  Finn nodded.

  “Who’s Kastor?” Devi asked, and I was oddly reassured to realize that Maddock had been keeping the same secrets from her that Finn had been keeping from me. That made the wound feel much less personal—it wasn’t that Finn didn’t trust me specifically; it was that neither of them truly trusted anyone but the other.

  “How did he know where to look?” Maddock asked, as if he hadn’t even heard Devi’s question.

  “You were on the news in New Temperance.” Finn shrugged. “That probably told them where to start. They followed the degenerates flocking toward Grayson to narrow it down.”

  “Okay.” Maddock closed his eyes, the pistol hanging at his side. “Kastor will send more. I need to think.”

  “Maddy, what’s going on?” Devi demanded.

  When he seemed too lost in his own fears to answer, I turned to Finn. “Who’s Kastor, and why does he want Maddock? And does that have anything to do with him taking Carey James from a Church caravan?”

  “Carey, Grayson’s brother?” Devi scowled at me, clearly irritated that I knew more than she did.

  Finn gave us an apologetic glance. “Just give him a second to process.” He turned back to Maddock. “We have to tell them. They’re all involved now.”

  Maddy nodded slowly but made no reply.

  Eli slid the long end of the crowbar through a belt loop on the left side of his jeans, evidently satisfied that we weren’t a threat. “I don’t know any Kastor, but I can tell you exactly where this demon child was taking you.” He pulled a rag from his pocket and began scrubbing at the blood on his hands. “The Lion’s Den. And no matter what it says in the Bible, nobody walks out of there alive.”

  “The Lion’s Den. The Meat Market. Pandemonia.” Maddock thumbed the safety on the pistol and tucked it into his waistband. “Whatever you call it, we’re headed as far away as we can get, as fast as we can get there.” He turned to Finn and me. “Get everyone packed. Devi and I will help Reese and Grayson with the gas run—we turned back when we saw Eli headed this way.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be much help with the packing.” Finn stepped closer to the nearest window and held his hand in the pool of light. The red mark across his palm had widened, and the surrounding tissue was already turning a dark blue. “Damn it!”

  “Why did you catch the crowbar?” Eli asked. “It would have put a sizable dent in that little demon’s skull.”

  I suppressed a shudder at the thought, even though we’d never actually met the child. “Killing demons just releases them to look for another body,” I explained. “Finn was trying to stop you from releasing Aldric, so I could send him back to hell.”

  Fin
n groaned, trying to flex his fingers. “I think it’s broken.”

  “How did you catch it?” Eli began wiping blood from the crowbar with his rag. “I’ve never seen anyone move that fast.”

  “I spar with exorcists.”

  “So you’re really an exorcist? A true exorcist?” Eli qualified. “We didn’t think there was any such thing.”

  “But you’ve been following us for days,” I pointed out. “How did you think we were burning holes straight through degenerates?” They hadn’t come close enough to actually see us fight, but surely they’d seen the results.

  Eli shrugged. “We assumed your guns were some new technology.”

  And our disposal of the mutated monsters wouldn’t have convinced them that we weren’t possessed. Church demons kill degenerates too, to keep them from killing humans, which they saw as a waste of precious resources.

  “Are all of you exorcists?” Eli asked, and I realized that the nomads hadn’t just been following us. They’d been watching us, probably trying to decide how many of us were possessed, like his poor little nephew.

  “No. Just me, Maddock and Devi…” I gestured to each of them as I said their names. “And Reese. The big guy.”

  “Soon Grayson will be too,” Maddock added. “She’s the little one, with curly hair.”

  “And your other two women?”

  “Anabelle and Melanie are human,” I said, grateful that neither of them had come to investigate whatever noise our confrontation had made. And if Grayson were there, she would have come running and might have gotten hurt.

  “Which one is pregnant?”

  “Mellie. She’s my sister.” And the thought of losing her or her baby terrified me almost beyond words. “I’m so sorry about your nephew.” And even sorrier that Eli had been prepared—by necessity—to cave in the poor child’s skull himself. “I assume he’s the reason you and your army were following us?”

  “Not just for Tobias.” Eli stood straighter and shoved his blood-smeared rag into his back pocket. “When we were kids, my brother, Micah, and I swore that if either of us was ever taken by the Unclean, the other would personally find him and free his soul.” Eli’s fingers traced the short end of the crowbar hanging from his belt, as if touching it brought him comfort. “They took my brother and my little nephew four days ago.”

  His gaze fell heavily on the demon who’d snuck up on me. “Today, I’ve fulfilled my childhood oath.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s broken, but it’s badly bruised and swollen.” Devi sat on the marble floor across from Finn, examining his hand more gently than I’d have thought her capable of. “What we really need is some ice to ease the swelling. A couple of months ago we could have just given him a handful of snow.” She glared at me across the candle lit in the middle of our circle, as if Finn’s injury were somehow my fault. “But for today, we’re out of luck.”

  “Wait. Maybe I can help.” Eli stepped over the candle and headed into the hall while we all stared at him in surprise, and a second later his boots clomped down the stairs.

  “I can’t believe it.” Anabelle sniffled, her eyes still red from crying. “I can’t believe Tobias is dead.”

  “I can’t believe we never actually met him.” Melanie’s voice sounded strained, and she’d been staring at the floor, tears in her eyes, ever since we’d told her the news.

  “Don’t be sad for him,” Devi snapped. “Be disappointed in us. We’ve spent the past two days feeding chocolate to a pint-sized monster when no one on the planet was more qualified to see through his disguise than we were.”

  Melanie sobbed, and I slid my arm around her, glaring at Devi. “Well, maybe if we hadn’t developed a tolerance to everyday malice from overexposure to you, we would have recognized the real danger.”

  Devi stood, her fists clenched, and Finn grabbed the back of her shirt with his good hand to halt her angry advance, unfazed when she turned her glower on him instead.

  “So, what’s the story with this Lord’s Army?” Grayson’s subject change was less than subtle, but it broke the tension.

  “They think killing the Unclean is their life’s calling,” Maddock said, without looking away from the window, where he’d been watching both the nomad camp and the western horizon for nearly an hour. And largely ignoring the rest of us. “Yet they had no idea that by killing the hosts, they were actually just contributing to the problem.”

  Finn flexed his hand carefully. “They were moving in on Aldric when we found him and fell for his ruse. Only, Eli wasn’t sure whether we’d fallen for it or were part of it.”

  “And his brother?” Mellie was no longer even pretending to read the botany textbook lying open in what remained of her lap.

  “Meshara and Aldric didn’t actually possess Micah and Tobias until they got close enough to us to stage that scene at the car by killing the hosts they’d worn during the raid,” I explained. “Aldric was the bait, and Meshara hung back in Micah’s body to watch from afar. Eli followed her into the courthouse, evidently on her way to talk to Aldric, and killed her as she snuck up on me.”

  “Who is this Aldric?” Devi stared at Maddock as if she could will him to rejoin the group, and I almost felt sorry for her. He’d withdrawn from all of us, except for Finn, but she was taking it the hardest.

  Finally, Maddock turned from the window and laid Finn’s rifle on the floor at his feet. “Aldric was Kastor’s right-hand man. Now he’s just one of millions of demons crawling over one another in their native world, desperate for a way back into ours. But he’s not going to find one, because what Kastor doesn’t want anyone to know is that whatever interworld rift they crossed to get here in the first place doesn’t exist anymore. No new demons have come into our world in more than a decade.”

  What? No more demonic immigrants?

  That would have been news worth celebrating if there weren’t already millions of them roaming the world in stolen bodies, devouring one human soul after another.

  The rest of us were still staring at the ground in stunned silence when Devi spoke again. “And Kastor would be…?”

  Maddock glanced at Finn, who gave him a subtle shrug, and I wondered what they’d just agreed on.

  “Kastor runs Pandemonia,” Maddock said. “He’s not a deacon, or a president, or a king, or any kind of leader you guys would ever recognize. He’s more like a precariously perched celebrity-slash-despot. He’s in charge because the other demons are afraid of him and entertained by him, but if either of those ever stops being true, he will lose control of Pandemonia, and its Unclean citizens will be unleashed upon the rest of the world.”

  Finn cleared his throat while the rest of us tried to absorb what we were hearing, and then he continued their statement as Maddock turned back to the window. “The only thing worse than Kastor being in control of hundreds of demons who don’t play by the Church’s rules would be Kastor not being in control of hundreds of demons who don’t play by the Church’s rules.”

  For several long seconds no one spoke.

  “The Lion’s Den,” I whispered, and both Finn and Maddock nodded.

  Or the wolf’s den, if Deacon Bennett’s description of Kastor was more accurate.

  And Kastor had Grayson’s brother. If I thought there was a chance in hell that he was still alive, I would have told her right then, but the last thing she needed was to think about her brother dying in a city Maddock had described as a demonic meat market.

  “So, what does he want with Maddy?” Devi asked before I could vocalize the same question.

  Maddock’s mouth opened but no sound came out, so Finn answered for him. “Kastor wants the same thing from Maddy that he wants from every exorcist. The same thing the breeders want. The same thing the Church wants. A stronger, longer-lasting host. Specifically, one capable of producing a couple more just like him.”

  Which was exactly what my mother had wanted with me—until the Church had me sterilized and ruined my demonic sire’s evil scheme. Ironi
cally, my pregnant sister was not an exorcist, and her child wouldn’t be one either.

  A scuffling sound echoed from outside the courthouse, and Maddock turned to look out the window. “Eli’s back.”

  A moment later boots clomped up both flights of stairs, and then Eli appeared in the doorway carrying a worn-soft cardboard box. Melanie looked up from her can of breakfast pears and watched him in silence, one hand rubbing her bulging stomach. She couldn’t seem to trust the new stranger after having been betrayed by the child she’d doted on for two days.

  “The demons who raided our division had to abandon some of their supplies to get away. We’ve found these particularly useful.” Eli set his box on the floor and pulled out a small, stiff-looking plastic bag. He shook it for a few seconds, then tossed it to Finn, who caught it out of instinct. With his bad hand.

  “That’s the kind of impulse that got you hurt in the first place.” Eli chuckled while Finn ground his teeth together against the pain, still clutching the bag.

  “A cold pack?” I peeked into the box and found several more, along with a roll of gauze and some loose adhesive bandages.

  Eli shrugged. “Hardly a fair trade for my brother and my nephew, but we take what we can get.”

  Devi nodded. “We too observe the ‘finders, keepers’ principle—the universally acknowledged law of the badlands, and of kindergartners everywhere.”

  “Thanks.” Finn tried to curl his hand around the bag cradled in his palm. When he flinched, I scooted closer and threaded my fingers through his so he could feel the warmth of my skin around the cold pack pressed between our hands. He smiled and laid his free hand over mine, stroking my knuckles with his thumb, and the heat building behind his eyes echoed deep and low in my stomach.

  I hated seeing him in pain, but I relished the excuse to touch him.

  Eli turned to Melanie. “When is your baby due?”

  “Just over a month,” she said as Anabelle put one protective arm around her shoulders.