The Flame Never Dies

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

THREE (#ulink_b78ac420-36f1-515c-a4e7-86758466b106)

“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?