The Flame Never Dies

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.

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.