The Flame Never Dies

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.