The Flame Never Dies

“You expect us to believe you’re exorcists and the cops were demons?” the man in the backseat spat. “Bullshit.” He leaned forward, appealing to his coworker in the front. “Demons are pathological liars. You can’t believe a word she says.”

“If we’re possessed, why would we let you live?”

Backseat Man lifted his eyebrows at me in challenge. “If they were possessed”—he nodded at the bodies lined up on the ground—“why were they going to let you live?”

“So they could deliver us to the Church.” I shrugged. That should have been obvious.

“Deliver you . . . ?” Front Seat Man stared up at me, surprised. “Where exactly were they going to put you?”

I frowned, considering the question. The backs of both cargo trucks were full of goods, and most of the available seats had been filled by the cops and drivers. They wouldn’t have had room to bring more than two of us back.

So why had they come armed with nonlethal weapons?

Before I could come up with any reasonable theories, Backseat Man made a show of glancing around what he could see of the ghost town. “Where’s your sister? She lose that baby yet?”

Finn held me back when I took an instinctive, aggressive step toward him. Melanie and her unlicensed, underage pregnancy, which constituted multiple prosecutable sins, had risen to infamy when the Church publicly questioned her humanity and broadcast her boyfriend’s immolation—death by fire—to the entire country.

For once, Finn’s hand on my shoulder failed to calm me. “She’s not going to lose the baby,” I growled through clenched teeth. Making sure of that had become my mission in life since escaping New Temperance. Mellie’s unborn child was the only family she and I had left in the world—thanks to routine sterilization by the Church, I could never have one of my own.

“Oh, we both know that’s not true,” Backseat Man taunted. “Even if it’s born breathing, how long will it live? The well is empty, and you have no donor. Without a soul, that baby will die out here in the dirt, and there’ll be nothing you or your sister or your gang of flame-wielding assassins can do about it.”

Assassins? My heart thumped harder. Only demons called exorcists assassins.

I squinted against the sunlight for a better look at Backseat Man, and that time when I stepped toward him, Finn didn’t try to stop me. He’d heard it too. The Church had sent one of its demons in disguise as a deliveryman—no official cassock, no telltale embroidery.

“Melanie’s baby will live.” I held my left hand out so he could see the flame cradled in my palm. His eyes widened, and he tried to retreat across the bench seat but was trapped by the seat belt. “I will find a soul for it.” I shoved my fiery hand through the open window, and the demon screeched, an inhuman sound of agony, as the flame met his flesh. “And if I can’t find a soul for my sister’s baby,” I whispered so softly that no one else could hear me above the crackle of crisping skin, “I will damn well give that kid my own.”

TWO

We caught up with the other two vehicles on the way back to Ashland, and Finn must have known something was wrong, because he didn’t tease me about my lead foot. “Try not to let them get to you,” he said, plucking my right hand from the wheel so he could intertwine his fingers with mine. “They’re demons. They live to cause us pain.”

But I wasn’t upset about what the backseat demon had said—I was upset because he was almost certainly right. The well of souls was empty. It had been quietly drained over the past millennia by demons secretly living among us. The soaring infant mortality rate at the end of the previous century had finally clued humanity in, leading to the war against the unclean, which had decimated two-thirds of the world’s population.

Now pregnancies were licensed and regulated by the Church. People who were declared unfit to reproduce were sterilized at age fifteen, as I’d been because I was slightly nearsighted and prone to seasonal allergies. To make sure that every baby conceived would actually live, elderly citizens were expected to give up their souls in simultaneous birth/death events carefully orchestrated by city officials. What the rest of the world didn’t know was that the Church only wanted those babies to live so they could be possessed and fed from as adults.

Escaping New Temperance had spared Melanie’s baby—and the rest of us—from that fate. Theoretically, at least. Unfortunately, our escape had also drastically lowered the chances of finding a soul for the baby. Without one, the youngest and most vulnerable of my two remaining family members would die within hours of his or her birth. We’d all known that from the beginning.

What I hadn’t told the rest of Anathema was that I was fully prepared to make the necessary sacrifice myself if I couldn’t find a willing donor before the birth.

“It’ll work out, Nina.” Finn squeezed my hand as I pressed on the brake to keep from rear-ending the cargo truck in front of us. “One way or another, it’ll all work out.”

But I knew better. Nothing in my life had ever just worked out. Good things never happened unless I made them happen, and five months spent wandering through the badlands hadn’t changed that.

Before we’d even pulled to a stop in front of the library, Grayson James burst through the cracked glass doors and raced down the crumbling steps without so much as a precautionary glance in either direction. I groaned as I shifted into park. One of these days her enthusiasm was going to get her killed. Or worse—possessed.

Reese got out of the SUV and pulled her into his massive embrace, then lifted her for a long, deep kiss. For a moment I was caught off guard by their demonstrative affection—a transgression worthy of arrest had we still been in New Temperance, or any other city. If Finn and I had become comfortable with our relationship, free from the enforced modesty of the Church, Reese and Grayson had grown bold.

Maddock and Devi’s connection had already been scandalous when I’d met them.

“Grace, you can’t just keep throwing yourself into unknown situations.” Reese set her on her feet on the crumbling concrete, and her head barely reached his shoulder. “Until you transition, you’re vulnerable.”

We’d seen an increase in degenerate activity over the past month as her seventeenth birthday approached, bringing with it the emergence of her exorcist abilities—a genetic inevitability because her brother and both of their parents had also been exorcists.

“I knew it was you,” Grayson insisted. “I didn’t hear any monsters.”

Degenerates could sense an exorcist in transition, like a cat scenting a mouse. Albeit, a mouse that would soon be able to burn the cat alive with a single touch. Grayson could “hear” degenerates in her mind, in the same way she could hear Finn talking even when he had no physical form. We didn’t understand her ability, but we couldn’t deny its existence.

Devi scowled, her dark brows drawing low over expressive black eyes that only seemed to venture beyond skepticism and disapproval when she was looking at Maddock. “Degenerates aren’t the only threat out here.”

“I was right, wasn’t I?” Grayson demanded.

Reese closed the SUV’s driver’s-side door. “That’s not the point.”

“That is the point. I’m not a civilian,” she whispered fiercely, trailing him around the vehicle as Melanie and Anabelle finally followed her out of the library now that they knew we weren’t under attack. “In a couple of weeks, I’ll be as strong and fast as the rest of you.”

“And we welcome the day,” he said. “But it’s not here yet.” Reese would willingly throw his own overgrown frame in front of her as both shield and weapon, but he worried that Grayson was vulnerable when he wasn’t around. I had the same concerns for my sister. And for Anabelle. Fortunately, neither of them was eager to start battling demons.

“It’s never too early to start training.” Devi shrugged. “Maybe if she knew what she was doing, she wouldn’t throw herself into unknown situations.”

That was one of the few things Devi and I agreed on, but Reese was afraid that training would encourage Grayson to put herself in danger.

Maddock unlocked the back of the cargo truck and rolled the door up as the last two members of our outlaw band made their way down the crumbling library steps. Anabelle had one arm around Mellie to help steady her. Every day Melanie’s stomach grew larger while the rest of her appeared to shrink, and the unborn child seemed determined to upset my fifteen-year-old sister’s balance. And to keep her up all night. And to make her feet swell, her ribs ache, and the circles beneath her eyes grow darker with every day spent on the run with inconsistent nutrition and nonexistent prenatal care.

Anabelle let go of Mellie on the bottom step. “That’s quite a haul!”

“This is only half,” I said, scanning the labels on the top row of boxes. “Cross your fingers that there’s a crate of vitamins in here, or we’ll have to go back for the other truck.”

Devi groaned—returning to the scene of the crime would be a huge risk for the group—but she didn’t argue. I’d made it clear since our escape from New Temperance that the health of my sister and her unborn child came first.

“We can’t carry all that.” Melanie stared with huge brown eyes up at the stack of crates.

Finn shrugged, and I could practically hear gears turning as he considered the problem. “We can if we ditch the shot-up car for this truck.”

“You want to drive across the badlands in a marked Church cargo truck?” My brows rose. “I guess that would be faster than actually painting targets on our backs.”

Maddock chuckled as he scanned the inventory, and I glanced from face to face. “By the way, am I the only one who didn’t know we’re heading south?”

“It’s news to me,” Anabelle said, but that was no surprise. I’d known her since I was a kid, but the others didn’t trust her like they trusted me, because I was a fellow exorcist, and they didn’t like her like they liked Melanie, because everyone liked Melanie. My sister’s gift—and her curse—was charisma. Which was how she’d wound up in love with and pregnant by a sweet but ultimately doomed boy two years her senior.

The oldest of our group by several years, Anabelle was a former ordained Church teacher who’d had to follow us into the badlands because knowing the truth about her superiors was as good as having a noose around her neck. She’d lost everything and everyone she’d ever had, just like the rest of us. But like Mellie, she was largely defenseless against the dangers of the badlands, and she was eager to earn her place in the group any way she could.

“First things first.” Finn pulled the collapsible stairs from a hidden shelf beneath the cargo hold, then stepped up into the truck. “Food. We’ll decide everything else once our brains are fueled.”

While Maddock, Devi, and I stood watch, Reese and Finn began pulling boxes from the truck and stacking them on the ground. Mellie and Anabelle made notes on the inventory sheet until they came to a crate of canned goods, and the chore was suspended in favor of lunch in the library’s vestibule, from which we could watch over our haul through tempered glass walls that appeared to have shattered, yet remained in place.

Finn and I sat down with a jar of peaches and a can of unidentifiable processed meat apiece. Next to us on the granite floor, Anabelle and Melanie shared cans of twisty pasta shapes in red sauce and a box of cheese-flavored crackers.

The remaining four members of Anathema paired off on the other side of the vestibule so that they could see the road leading into Ashland from the larger American wasteland.

Melanie tugged her bag closer and pulled out one of the books she’d scavenged from the library, then flipped through the yellowed pages while she chewed.

“How are your feet?” I asked around a bite of peach.

“Still kind of swollen, but they don’t hurt,” she answered, without looking up from the book. “My hips ache, though.”

“What about that mark on your back?” At first we’d thought it was a bruise—a small spot at the base of her backbone, slightly darker than the rest of her pale skin. But then it had started to stretch along her spine like the inverse of a skunk’s stripe.

Melanie shrugged, and sun-bleached blond hair fell over her shoulder. “I can’t feel it, and all the pregnancy books say some skin discoloration is normal. It’ll fade after the baby’s born.” When she found her place in the book, her pale brows furrowed and she settled in for the read.

“What’s she learning now?” Finn asked, eyeing Mellie with a brotherly affection that made me smile.

I tilted my sister’s book up so I could read the title. “Um . . . Hunting and Gathering for the Modern Paleo.” Another in her small collection of survivalist literature, rescued from multiple crumbling libraries across the small stretch of badlands we’d explored.

Mellie shrugged and held the book up so we could get a better look. “Plants are starting to grow, and we need to know which ones are edible.” She and Anabelle had already taught us to fish, to set basic traps for small game, to start a fire without matches, and to cook our meat evenly on a homemade spit. “Soon we’ll be able to spot wild-growing roots, tubers, and nuts to supplement all this aluminum-flavored cuisine.” She tapped the side of her pasta can and smiled. Then her gaze dropped to the page.

And with that, I lost Mellie to her book. Again.

* * *

In the end, we decided to leave the rusted, shot-up car in favor of the cargo truck.

It took nearly two hours to unload the boxes and set aside the ones we couldn’t use—mostly household cleaners and clothing that fit no one—then divide the food and usable supplies between the truck and the back of the SUV in case we got separated.

None of our previous raids had yielded as much as this latest haul, but the new goods wouldn’t last forever. We’d need the hunting and foraging techniques Ana and Mellie were learning in order to make it through the summer.

But what we needed even worse was fuel. The SUV and truck both guzzled gas at a rate we could not sustain, and the Church had crippled us by cutting off access to their fuel depots. Reese siphoned all the gas from the car we were abandoning while Mellie and Anabelle stocked backpacks full of “up front” supplies. Then Finn and I squeezed into the cab of the cargo truck with Ana and my sister, and we took off into the badlands again on yet another fractured strip of highway, this time headed south, with the descending sun on our right.

I sat as close to Finn as I could get, both to give Melanie more room and because touching him, even casually, still made my head spin and my stomach flip, like when I’d played on the swings as a kid. At first I’d thought that was because touching a boy I wasn’t related to, for any reason other than medical necessity, was strictly forbidden by the Church. But even as the thrill of rebellion had faded, the rush I felt every time Finn looked at me had only grown.

We’d been on the road for about an hour, his arm stretched across the back of the seat so he could play with my hair, when Ana looked up from her book and sucked in a startled breath.

“Holy Reformation . . . !” she swore, and as Finn pressed on the brake I followed her gaze to a car parked on the side of the road a few hundred feet ahead. The windshield was generously splattered with mud, but I couldn’t see any obvious damage to the vehicle. It had probably run out of gas, like dozens of other abandoned cars we’d come across in the badlands.

“Is that—?”

Static crackled from the handheld radio on my lap before I could finish the question, and I picked it up as Reese spoke into a matching radio from the SUV behind us. “You guys see it?” he asked, and Mellie nodded, though he couldn’t see her.

“Yeah,” I said into the handset.

“It’s a long shot, but let’s pull over and check the tank for gas,” he said, and that was when I realized that those in the SUV couldn’t see the detail that had drawn the exclamation from Anabelle. The detail that had captured my attention and Mellie’s heart, and led Finn to put his right blinker on, even though there was no other traffic to warn of his intent to pull over.

“There’s a kid,” I said into the radio, holding down the button with my thumb. The boy standing in the dirt beside the car was small, with dark skin and long, tightly curled hair. His navy pants might have been part of a uniform, but his arms were crossed over a faded, striped short-sleeved shirt instead of the white button-down required for school. “He’s six or seven years old. Appears to be alone.”

Stunned silence dominated the radio channel.

“He can’t have been there long,” Anabelle whispered, as if the child might overhear her through glass and steel from a good hundred feet away. “Where on earth are his parents?”

“In the car.” Finn pulled onto the side of the road several yards from the blue sedan. “Look closer.”

I squinted, and chills popped up all over my skin when I saw two forms slumped over in the front seat. What I’d mistaken for mud sprayed across the outside of the windshield turned out to be blood splattered across the inside.

It was too dark to be anything else.

“Oh no . . .” If the kid’s parents were in that car, they were either dead or dying.

“Stay here.” Finn shifted the truck into park and opened his door, then pulled his rifle from behind the bench seat on his way out of the vehicle. He tried to close the door, but I stopped its swing with my foot.

“Stay here.” I passed his instruction on to Mellie and Anabelle as I climbed down from the truck after Finn.

Seconds later Anabelle’s door squealed open at my back; she’d ignored my instruction as readily as I’d ignored Finn’s.

“Don’t aim that thing,” I whispered when I caught up with him. “He’s probably terrified already, and if there were still anything dangerous nearby, he would be dead.”

We stared at the car for one long moment, but the splatters were too thick to reveal anything except vague shapes behind the blood.

“This isn’t right, Nina,” Finn murmured, and I knew he wasn’t just talking about the gory windshield. Excursions beyond city walls were rare and discouraged, but they weren’t actually prohibited by the Church as long as the proper permits were secured in advance. But . . . “If his parents are dead in that car, how’d they die? Demons in their prime don’t pull people apart. That’d be wasting potential hosts. And degenerates wouldn’t have left the boy alive.”

I shrugged. “Maybe he hid.”

Finn lowered the rifle but didn’t engage the safety. “And maybe whatever killed his parents is still around.”

His words still hung in the air when Anabelle jogged past us, her blond curls flying, her jeans hanging low on her newly narrow hips. “Are you okay?” she called to the child, and I grabbed for her arm but missed.

Finn followed her to the car, the rifle aimed at the ground, and he peeked through the windows while Ana knelt in front of the boy without checking under or behind the vehicle.

I groaned on the inside. Why were the members of our group who were the least able to defend themselves always the most likely to put themselves in danger?

The boy nodded slowly.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” she asked, and I realized there would be no teaching her caution where children were concerned. Ana had spent five years as a grade-school teacher, and she’d found it harder than any of the rest of us to let go of what she’d learned during her Church ordination—not the bullshit creeds and oppressive rules, but the ways of life as we’d known it. Modesty. Service. Sacrifice.

“Tobias.” The boy’s voice was soft and hoarse, as if he’d been crying. His gaze slid from Anabelle to me, and I decided the glazed look in his eyes was from shock.

He reminded me of the kindergartners I’d spent my service hour with every day of my senior year, until the Church had declared me a cancerous wart on mankind’s collective hind end. Tobias could have been any kid in my class, terrified and traumatically orphaned.

We couldn’t leave him alone in the badlands. Yet ours was no life for a kid.

The irony in that thought hit home when my sister waddled past me, one hand on her huge belly. “Melanie,” I called, but she waved off my warning. When I glanced at Finn, he nodded to give me the all clear, the rifle still aimed at the ground. He’d inspected the car from the outside and squatted to peer beneath it, and had found no immediate danger.

Still, Mellie was too pregnant to fight or to flee from sudden danger, so I followed her, ready to pull her out of the path of evil should a demon burst from the bloody car.

“Are you okay, Tobias?” my sister asked, kneeling in front of the child with Anabelle’s help.

For a moment he only stared at her, studying her pale skin and even paler hair. Finally he nodded, his gaze fixated on her stomach, while I tried to calculate the mileage his family must have traveled in that doomed blue car. “You got a baby in there?”

Melanie laughed, and I marveled at the fact that she could find joy where the rest of us saw only tragedy and hardship. “Yes. And I like your name, Tobias.” She laid one hand on her stomach. “Maybe I’ll borrow it if this little one’s a boy.”

Assuming it lived.

Melanie was a tireless optimist, not blind to the dangers of the world, exactly, but not quite concerned enough about them. She refused to think about the overwhelming odds against her child’s survival, and neither she nor Ana had even glanced at the carnage inside that blue car.

And I hadn’t heard her mention Adam, the ill-fated father of her child, in weeks.

Reese pulled the SUV to a stop beside our truck, right in the middle of the road, and the other half of our group poured out of the vehicle. “What the hell?” Footsteps crunched in the dirt behind me, and then Reese and Grayson stopped at my side. She carried a plastic jug and he had a hose wrapped around his massive left arm.

“Looks like the parents are dead in the front seat,” I whispered. “Not sure what happened yet, but Finn hasn’t found any immediate threat.”

“Poor thing!” Grayson cried.

Devi rolled her eyes and scuffed her boot in the dirt on the side of the road. “What the hell are we supposed to do with him?”

“We can’t leave him here.” Maddock threaded his arm through hers, frowning as he watched the little boy. “It’s a miracle he’s still alive. He must not have been here long.”

“We’re not even going to think about taking him with us until we know what killed his parents.” Devi circled the car toward the driver’s side and used one hand to shield the sun from her face while she bent to peer through the window. When she stood a second later, she looked sick. “Nothin’ but blood.”

While the rest of us took a closer look at the car, Grayson, Ana, and Mellie lured Tobias toward the cargo truck with promises of water and chocolate from a box of sweets that had been intended for the general store in New Temperance.

As Devi and Finn had said, the front windows were too caked with blood to show anything at all, and through the rear windshield we could see little more than the outlines of two bodies sitting in the front seats. The trunk door stood open a couple of inches, and when I lifted it, I saw that the narrow center seat had been folded down, creating a small path into the trunk from the backseat of the car. A path just wide enough for a six-year-old.

My stomach twisted at the thought of what Tobias must have witnessed. How could any kid see that much carnage without being psychologically destroyed?

When the child was out of sight behind the cargo truck, Maddock opened the driver’s door while Finn aimed his rifle at the interior just in case. Nothing jumped out at us, but after one glance inside I gasped and stepped back. Finn’s jaw tightened, and even Devi covered her mouth in horror.