The Flame Never Dies

The man and woman, still buckled into the front seats of the car, were drenched in blood fresh enough to glisten in the afternoon sunlight. The dashboard, windows, windshield, and floorboard had all been heavily splattered with what could only have been an arterial spray.

Yet even through all the gore, two things were clear.

First, the man and woman in the blue car were not Tobias’s biological parents—their skin was as pale as mine, even accounting for the pallor of recent death. And second, based on the blood and bits of flesh caking their right hands, the couple’s wounds appeared to be self-inflicted.

The man and woman had simply pulled onto the side of the road, then ripped out their own throats.

THREE

“Who are they?” Grayson whispered, glancing at the gore-splattered car.

“They didn’t have any IDs.” Maddock ran one hand through his thick brown hair in a rare display of nerves. But then, the contents of that car had bothered us all. “They’re not his biological parents, but aside from that, who knows?”

Grayson sipped from a half-full bottle of water, then passed it left in our huddle, to Reese. “There’s not a drop of blood on Tobias.” She shrugged. “If he was far enough away to avoid the spray, I’m betting he didn’t see much of what happened.”

“I think he was in the trunk, but who knows when he crawled in there?” I’d fought demons, degenerates, and humans on a regular basis since finding out I was an exorcist, but I’d never seen anything like the carnage in that car.

“Why is no one asking the most obvious question?” Devi demanded, and Grayson shushed her with a sharp look. “Why the hell would a normal couple just pull onto the side of the road and rip their own throats out? I don’t even see how it’s physically possible!”

Finn accepted the water bottle from Reese but hardly sipped from it before passing it to me. “They hadn’t been normal for a long time. And they probably weren’t a couple.”

“But they were possessed.” Maddock’s voice was so soft that at first I didn’t even register the words. “They’d already started to degenerate.”

Devi frowned. “I didn’t notice anything weird about them. Other than their mutilated throats.”

“Their fingers were too long.” Finn exhaled slowly and propped his rifle over his left shoulder. “And their chins were too pointy.” He glanced at Maddock, who nodded to confirm some unspoken concern; Maddy and Finn had known each other for so long that sometimes they each seemed to know what the other was thinking. Which left the rest of us in the dark. “The mutations were subtle. They’d be hard to detect, especially under all that blood.”

“How did you two notice?” I asked, passing the water bottle to Devi.

“They’ve had a lot of practice.” Grayson turned to Maddy and Finn, and her eyes held a profound sadness that seemed to stretch even beyond the scope of the carnage we’d just discovered. I started to ask what she meant and how she knew that, but—

“Okay, but how do you know they weren’t a couple?” Devi demanded, frustration sharpening the ends of her words.

Maddy shrugged. “Demons don’t make commitments unless they need to blend in.” Like Grayson’s parents, whose simulation of a human marriage had allowed them to breed her and her older brother as future hosts to be possessed at maturity. “And there’s no one to blend in with in the badlands.”

Devi rolled her eyes. “That doesn’t mean any—”

“We should get going, unless you all want to sleep in the open tonight.” Finn swung his rifle down and aimed it at the ground, then headed for the cargo truck, where Mellie and Tobias sat snacking on the bench seat while Anabelle leaned on the open passenger’s-side door.

“What’s got his gun sling in a twist?” Devi grumbled while we watched Finn walk off.

Maddy accepted the bottle from her and drained the last inch of water. “He’s being cautious. The blood’s still wet, which means that whatever bodies the demons are wearing now, they’re probably still close.” Maddock gestured toward our vehicles, urging us all forward, and I jogged ahead of the group to catch up with Finn.

“Hey. You okay?”

“Yeah,” Finn said, too quickly to have given the answer any thought. “I just haven’t seen anything that gruesome in a really long time.”

“Wait.” I reached for his arm and pulled him to a stop facing me. “How long is a really long time?” When had he ever seen something that gruesome? “What are you and Maddock not telling us?”

Finn shot an anxious glance at the others over my shoulder, then lowered his voice. “If it were my secret, I’d tell you, but there are things Maddy’s not ready to talk about.” His conflicted gaze begged me to understand. “But it has nothing to do with whatever happened in that car. That dead couple just . . . they remind him of something.”

“Something you saw too,” I guessed. Because Maddy and Finn were never apart.

“Yeah, but . . .” His shrug made him look vulnerable, in spite of his soldier’s powerful build and the rifle slung over one shoulder, and I wanted to pull him into a hug.

“Just because you didn’t have a body at the time doesn’t mean you went through any less than he did.” Finn had spent countless nights curled up in the sleeping roll next to mine, listening to stories about my mother’s escalating abuse and neglect while a demon Mellie and I knew nothing about had ravaged her body and devoured her soul. I wanted Finn to trust me enough to let me return the favor. “Whatever it is, it’s your childhood trauma too,” I insisted.

“But not like it is his.”

“You know you can tell me anything, right?” I whispered as the footsteps at my back grew louder.

“Yes.” Finn pulled me into a hug to speak directly into my ear, and in spite of the grim circumstances, the feel of his body pressed against mine made my pulse rush. “And as soon as Maddock is ready to talk, I’ll tell you everything.”

Before I could argue, we were overtaken by the group again.

When we pulled back onto the abandoned highway, Mellie rode in the SUV so she could stretch out for a nap on the third-row bench seat, and Tobias sat in the truck between Anabelle and me, while Finn drove.

I wasn’t sure how to approach the questions we needed him to answer, but Anabelle—bless her heart—was finally in her element for the first time since we’d escaped from New Temperance.

“How old are you, Tobias?” she asked, and I could hear teacher-Ana in her voice again.

“Almost seven,” he said around a mouthful of chocolate, which Devi had vehemently objected to “wasting” on a kid.

“What grade are you in?”

“Second.”

“I used to teach second grade!” Anabelle said, and when Tobias’s eyes widened, she laughed. “I don’t look much like a teacher without my cassock, do I?”

Tobias shook his head and sucked the bit of chocolate on his tongue.

It had taken Anabelle nearly a month in the badlands to finally give up her Church robes in favor of a pair of jeans and a few T-shirts we’d liberated from our first supply raid, and she still didn’t quite look comfortable in the causal clothes.

“Look, I can prove it.” Ana held out her right hand to show him the brand on the back—four stylized, intertwined columns of flame, each representing one of the sacred obligations of the people to the Church. Together, those individual flames formed the symbolic blaze with which the Church claimed to have rid the world of the demon plague.

Though, as it turned out, that was a lie, the brand was a lie, and pretty much everything the Church had ever told us was a lie.

But Tobias didn’t know that. His eyes widened when he saw the brand, and trust opened his expression in a way that even chocolate hadn’t been able to.

Anabelle set him a little more at ease with a few funny stories from her days as a teacher, and then she gently switched gears. “Where did you go to school, Tobias?”

“At the Day School.”

“Which day school? Where are you from, sweetie? Solace? Diligencia?” Those were the two closest cities, other than New Temperance, and we knew for a fact that he hadn’t come from my hometown, because Anabelle would have recognized a second grader, even if he hadn’t been in her class.

“Verity,” he said at last, and Anabelle’s gaze snapped up to meet mine over his head, while Finn stiffened on the seat next to me. Verity was more than a thousand miles west of New Temperance, in the mountains of what was once called Colorado.

I’d never heard of anyone traveling so far, except as part of an armed Church caravan. How the hell had a little boy wound up so far from his hometown, with two possessed adults who were not his biological parents?

“Tobias, there were two people inside the car we found you next to,” Anabelle said, her voice almost fragile with tension. “Were those your parents?”

He nodded again. “They picked me over all the other boys at the children’s home.” His small chest puffed out with pride. “They said I could live with them in their house. Out east.”

Chills raced the length of my spine, then settled into my stomach. Tobias’s new “parents” couldn’t have adopted him without a parenting license. Were they unable to have children of their own? Had they adopted him for the same reason my mom had given birth to Melanie and me? If so, why would they rip out their own throats so soon after the adoption—much too soon for either of them to inherit their newly adopted host?

The answer suddenly seemed obvious: they’d found other, older potential hosts, already ripe for harvesting.

We’d seen evidence of a few nomads roaming the badlands. They were few and far between, but it was entirely possible that Tobias’s parents had run across a small band and killed their mutating human hosts so they could claim fresher bodies. Maybe they’d planned to come back for Tobias and raise him as a future host. Or maybe they’d abandoned him entirely in the face of a new opportunity.

Finn clutched the steering wheel, and I realized he hadn’t said a word since we’d resumed our trek south. Something was wrong, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it until we had privacy.

“What were their names, sweetie?” Anabelle asked.

“Mommy and Daddy,” Tobias said, and I had to swallow a groan. They hadn’t told him their real names? “They died, didn’t they?” he asked softly, and my heart ached for him. I nodded, and when he only blinked at me, somber but accepting, I wondered if maybe losing another set of parents just didn’t come as much of a surprise to a child who’d already been orphaned once.

Though the manner of their deaths was obviously traumatic.

What if that were Mellie’s baby?

The sudden thought sent a new kind of terror slithering through my veins: helplessness.

What if Mellie’s baby were one day orphaned in the badlands—not a far-fetched scenario, since he or she would be raised among fugitives who sought out demons on a daily basis. How would my niece or nephew survive without Anathema’s protection and provision?

The inevitable, horrifying answer chilled me from the inside out: Melanie’s orphaned child would be little more than a snack for the first degenerate to find the poor thing. Giving the baby a soul wouldn’t be enough. Someone would have to teach him or her how to survive.

“Did you see what happened to your parents?” Finn asked Tobias, drawing me out of my own terrifying thoughts, but when Anabelle scowled at him, I realized she’d planned a more gentle buildup to that particular query.

Tobias shook his head. “Mommy told me to climb into the trunk and be as quiet as I could. She said if I won the quiet game, she’d open the trunk and give me a surprise. But she never came, so I had to open the trunk with the safety latch.” He bowed his head, reminding me of my kindergarten students when they were in trouble. “I guess I wasn’t quiet enough.”

“I’m sure you weren’t the problem, honey,” Anabelle said, and outrage burned deep in my soul as I thought of the boy hiding in the trunk while his new “parents” ripped out their own throats and abandoned him in the badlands in favor of other hosts.

But then I realized that the poor kid was actually pretty lucky—his worthless “parents” had left Tobias alive, which was a mercy, considering how his life would have ended if he’d grown up in their custody.

* * *

“You want to what?” Devi demanded, and I laid one finger over my lips to shush her. Across the dusty second-floor den of a long-abandoned house, Tobias was curled up on my bedroll in the glow of twice the number of candles we would normally have burned at night, in case he woke up and was afraid of the dark.

He’d fallen asleep in the truck around the time the sun set, so I’d carried him up the stairs myself.

Melanie slept just feet from him, on her own mat on the hard floor—we avoided carpet whenever possible, because after a century of neglect, most soft materials had become havens for mold, mildew, and entire colonies of parasitic insects.

We’d been lucky to find a ghost town so soon after the sun went down, and luckier still that that particular town had been abandoned during the war, rather than razed or torched. It wasn’t safe to drive across the badlands at night, because headlights could lure degenerates from miles away.

“I want to take him home,” I repeated. Then I held my breath, watching the others for their reactions as candlelight cast dancing shadows on the six other faces in our huddle.

“Okay, first of all, he doesn’t have a home,” Devi insisted, and though her voice was softer, it had lost none of its bite. “He’s an orphan twice over. He must be the unluckiest damn orphan in the world. I mean, who gets adopted by demons?”

“They spared his life, but you want to abandon him,” I pointed out. No need to note that demons only spare children so they can be possessed once they’ve suffered through puberty and can reach the high shelves. “Sounds like meeting you was his unluckiest blow yet.”

Grayson covered a grin with one hand, but Devi only scowled at me and continued. “Second of all, I’m not sure that returning him to a Church children’s home would be much of an improvement. Those are run by demons too. All we’d be doing is delaying his inevitable possession.”

“So your solution is to keep him?” Reese whispered, intentionally misunderstanding her to support my point, and I could have hugged him.

She abandoned the rest of her argument in surprise. “Of course not. A kid’s the last thing we need.”

My brows rose, and I aimed a pointed glance at my sister.

Devi pulled a long rope of dark hair over her shoulder and leaned back against a couch too musty to risk sitting on. “We don’t have any choice about that one. But that doesn’t mean we should start collecting more of them!”

But I could practically hear the part she hadn’t said out loud. Devi wasn’t worried about life in the badlands with an infant—in fact, she rarely even thought about that impending challenge—because she didn’t think Mellie’s baby would survive.

Despite my determination to see that baby live at all costs, the heartbreaking truth was that Devi was probably right. But Tobias was alive, and we couldn’t just leave him for the degenerates. So I took a deep breath and forged ahead. “Look, I know you all wanted to head south, but we don’t have a destination in mind, so what difference does it make if we head west instead?”

Finn squeezed my hand. “It’s nearly a thousand miles, Nina.” Because in our wanderings, we’d never strayed more than a hundred miles or so from New Temperance.

“So what?” I stared into the deep green of his eyes, trying to understand his reluctance. “Are we on some schedule I don’t know about?”

Maddock exhaled slowly as he painstakingly peeled the label from an empty bean can as if it deserved more of his attention than my suggestion did. “No, but it’s not safe. There’s too much empty space between the cities out west. Caravans will be few and far between.”

“We’ve never been better prepared for that,” Reese argued, and I gave him a grateful smile. “We just scored the biggest haul we’re ever going to have. That’ll give us some breathing room while we learn to spot those plants Mellie and Ana have been reading about. And it’s spring.” He shrugged. “Hunting will be easier.”

“Nina, what does it matter where we leave him?” Finn asked softly, stroking my knuckles with his thumb. “I hate to say it, but Devi’s right. He’ll be raised by demons no matter where we take him, so why not drop him in one of the cities on our way south?”

“Because he’s lost everything! Twice! The least we can do is return him to the only home he’s ever known, where at least he’ll have some friends.”

Maddock set his can down with a firm clank against the wood floor. “We’re not going west, Nina.”

I glanced at him in surprise. He’d always been a good leader precisely because he never made illogical, unilateral rulings, but something had changed. Something was wrong, and Maddock might not be willing to talk about it, but that didn’t mean the rest of us had to stop talking. “I say we vote on it.”

“No vote.” Maddy leaned back against the couch next to Devi and crossed his arms over the new T-shirt he’d found in the cargo shipment. “We’re not going.”

My gaze narrowed on him and I let go of Finn’s hand. “We’re a team. We decide together.” I glanced around our candlelit circle, hyperaware of the sudden tension in our ranks. “All in favor of taking Tobias back west, to Verity, raise your hand.” I held my left hand high above my head, and a second later Reese did the same.

Devi crossed her arms over her chest and raised one eyebrow at me in challenge. That was no surprise, and neither was Maddock’s nay stance, but what I couldn’t understand was why he looked genuinely sorry to be voting against me.

Anabelle raised her hand, and I smiled at her.

“You don’t get a vote!” Devi snapped.

“The hell she doesn’t! There’s a price on her head too, and she lost just as much as the rest of us when we fled New Temperance,” I said hotly.

“She gets a vote,” Maddock said. But he didn’t seem very pleased with his own ruling.

Fair enough.

But when Finn’s arm remained at his side, my chest suddenly felt tight. “Sorry, Nina. I vote we go south.” His deep gaze pleaded with me to understand, and I tried not to be hurt that he’d sided with Maddock rather than with me.

“That’s three to three,” Devi said, irritation flashing in her candlelit dark eyes, and we all turned to Grayson, who would have the deciding vote.

After a couple of seconds of contemplation, she raised her hand.

“Damn it!” Devi snapped.

Grayson only shrugged. “If we don’t go with Nina, she’ll go on her own, and we’re safer together than apart, no matter where we wind up.”

She was right on all counts.

Maddock glanced over my shoulder to where my sister lay snoring lightly on the wood floor. I could see what he was thinking, but I shook my head. “If you wake her up, she’ll vote to take him home,” I said, and no one disagreed.

Maddy sighed. “I’ll take first watch. The rest of you get some sleep.” His eyebrows dipped low. “In the morning we’re westward bound.”

* * *

When everyone but Maddock and Finn had curled up on their sleeping mats, I checked on Tobias and found him fast asleep on my bedroll, which meant I’d have to double up with someone. I grabbed Finn’s mat and tossed my head toward the door, silently asking him to join me in another room.

He nodded with a steamy smile, his pupils dilating as he picked up one of the candles, and heat flooded my cheeks when I realized he’d misread my request for privacy. Finn followed me into the dark hallway, then through another door and into a bedroom where most of the linens had long ago rotted away from the mattress.

“Are you mad at me?” he whispered, pushing the door closed at his back. I turned to find that the candle cast only a small dome of light around us, leaving the rest of the room in deep shadows. The lit space between us felt as intimate as his softly spoken question, and suddenly I realized I could count on both hands the number of times we’d been alone together.

“If I were mad at you, I’d be cuddling with my sister right now.” I watched the candlelight flicker in his eyes, thankful that they stayed the same no matter whose body he wore. If the eyes truly were the windows to the soul, at least I could be sure I was seeing some real part of him even when the rest belonged to someone else.

I’d first met him in Maddock’s body, and the revelation that his form wasn’t really his own had come as a shock to me. But I’d grown used to the guard he’d worn for months now, in part because I had no previous association of those arms or hands or face with another person. And in part because he wore the body easily and used it well. As his comfort level had risen, so had mine.

“I would like to know why, though,” I confessed as he set the candle on a dust-coated dresser. “Why does it matter whether we go south or west?”

Finn sighed and tucked a fallen strand of brown hair behind my ear. “Maddy was born out west.” His hands trailed slowly over my shoulders and down my arms, and I fought the urge to lean into his touch in that rare private moment. “He had it rough as a kid, and he doesn’t want to go back.”

“I get it. I don’t want to go back to New Temperance either.” Yet the doubt in Finn’s eyes told me that I couldn’t possibly understand. Not really. “But we’re not taking him home. We’re taking Tobias home.”

“I know. But Verity’s too close for comfort.”

My brows rose and I studied his gaze. That was the closest he’d ever come to mentioning a hometown. “Is Maddy from Verity? Are you?”

“No. And I don’t know.” He took his sleeping mat from me and unrolled it on the floor a few feet from the door. “I don’t remember anything from before I met Maddock.” Which he’d insisted over and over.

His early memories were as strange and inexplicable as his incorporeal state. Though playing with Maddy was the oldest thing Finn could remember, no one else had been able to see or hear him. Maddock’s family had assumed he was talking to and playing with an imaginary “friend,” which was how Finn got his name—that was as close as toddler Maddock could come to properly pronouncing the word.

Finn sank onto the bedroll and patted the spot next to him. “What I do know is that when Maddy’s upset, I’m upset.”

“That makes eight of us,” I said, settling in next to him, and Finn’s green eyes took on a grateful shine as he leaned in to kiss me. He was as glad that I liked Maddock as I was that he liked Melanie. “Mind if I share your sleep roll tonight?” I whispered against Finn’s mouth as his hand slid into my hair, gently tilting my head for a more accessible angle. “Tobias is using mine.”

“You can share everything I own.” Finn’s mouth met mine, and he sucked my lower lip between his for one heart-pounding second. “Which is pretty much just this sleep roll,” he admitted, his lips brushing mine with every syllable. He kissed me again, and I decided that if the Church was right and carnal contact really was a sin, it was a sin well worth paying for. . . .

* * *

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.