The Flame Never Dies

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.

FIVE (#ulink_691537e4-a7be-54d6-b17d-278fcdeb8ce0)

“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 version 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.