The Flame Never Dies

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.”