The Flame Never Dies (13 page)

My baby sister was already dead.

I
woke up to a crick in my neck and the familiar rhythmic bumps of tires on cracked pavement.
The SUV.
We were on the road again, and I must have fallen asleep after…

What happened?

My eyes flew open, and when I lifted my head, pain shot through the left side of my skull. The entire world…wobbled.

I moaned, but that only made the pain worse. The daylight shining through the windshield was so bright that we might as well have been driving on the surface of the sun.

“Mellie?” I said, and the syllables came out all mushy, yet they slammed into my head with the force of a sledgehammer.

“You've got a hell of a concussion,” she said, and when I turned to face her—why was she driving?—the world spun around me again. “So you should probably sit still.”

“Why are you…?” I tried to touch my throbbing head, but my arm was stuck behind my back. When I wiggled my fingers, pins and needles shot through my hand, as if I'd been sitting on it for too long. “How did I…”

I closed my eyes and images flashed across the backs of my eyelids.

Mellie stepping into the light, holding Eli's crowbar.

Light glinting on the metal as it swung.

I moaned again as the pieces fell into place in my head. Shock tightened around me, threatening to squeeze all the air from my lungs, when I realized my hands weren't just stuck behind me, they were
tied
behind me. When I tried to move my feet, I discovered my ankles were bound as well.

I'd been abducted by the demon possessing my sister.

“Noooo…” I hardly recognized my own voice. “No, give my sister back.
Please.
”

“You know it doesn't work that way.” The monster wearing Melanie's face faked a sympathetic frown as she steered around the stripped-clean corpse of a Jeep blocking the center of the neglected highway. “She's not in here anymore. If I vacated this body, all the organs would shut down and within minutes her physical form would be as dead as the rest of her. Your sister's gone for good, Nina.”

Tears blurred the world in front of me, smearing wheat fields and the occasional rusted hulk of abandoned irrigation equipment. I sucked in breath after breath, trying to control the hitching sobs that shook my entire body and speared my head with fresh, sharp pain.

She
couldn't
be right. If the world we lived in could support demonic possession and flames spouting from the palms of mortal beings and a rift between the fabrics of
two entirely different realities,
surely there was some way to reverse what this monster had done and bring my sister back.

If Eli's God truly existed, how could he deny me one tiny little miracle?

“Eli…” The name snuck out on a sob before I even realized what I was thinking about.

Melanie's corpse gave a careless shrug. “He was still breathing when we left. He might make it.”

And if he did, he'd tell the others what had happened. That Mellie and I hadn't just run off and left them. He'd tell them, and they'd come after me.

Except that they couldn't, because they had to find…

I blinked to clear tears from my eyes, and then I twisted in my seat, trying to see into the back of the SUV. “Where's Grayson? You're working with whoever took her, aren't you?”

“Smart girl. Grayson is on an alternate route—part of a two-pronged attack to divide and conquer Anathema. Either your group will split up, weakening itself to go after both of its members separately, or they will all head to where they know they can find you both in the same place.”

“Pandemonia,” I said, and she nodded. “Who are you?” I squirmed, trying to take pressure off my numb hands. “How long ago did you kill my sister?”

How long had I been sleeping next to a monster?

“Give it some thought.” She steered around a century-old wreck on the right side of the crumbling road. “You'll figure it out eventually.”

My mouth was dry and my head throbbed fiercely, but I made myself think through the pain. We hadn't come into direct contact with any of the Unclean since…

Tobias.
Maddock had called the demon Aldric.

Except Aldric couldn't be possessing Mellie, because I'd fried him right out of our world. But the demon Eli had bashed with his crowbar…

“You're Meshara,” I said, and the demon laughed with Melanie's throat. With Melanie's voice. But not with her eyes. “You've been with us since that day in the courthouse. Almost a week ago.” Pain gripped my chest like a giant fist, and suddenly I couldn't breathe.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tears rolled down my face, but I couldn't use my hands to wipe them. My fingers dug into the seat behind me as I silently pleaded with reality to banish the cruel lie sitting next to me and return my sister. But when I opened my eyes, the demon was still there. Still wearing Melanie's body, as surely as it wore her sneakers.

My baby sister—the only true family I had left—had died alone in her sleep almost a week before, and
I hadn't noticed.
Her soul was being slowly devoured by an evil parasite, and
I couldn't tell.

My mom had been possessed since before I was conceived, so there was never any change in her for me to notice, but I was closer to Melanie than I'd ever been to anyone in my life. Including Finn. I knew her better than I knew
anyone,
but she'd died, and I'd had no clue.

I had
utterly
failed her.

Grief was a weight tied to my feet, dragging me beneath the current of denial. I was drowning, and I had no will to fight the tide.

“I
am
Meshara, but now I'm also Melanie, who came with this convenient little built-in insurance policy.” The demon laid one hand on my sister's bulging belly. “We both know you're not going to try anything that might hurt your sister's squirming progeny. Nor would you let someone else put the little monster in danger. Which means that even though I took you prisoner, you're my guardian angel, in case any of your friends catch up with us before we get to Pandemonia. Don't tell me you don't appreciate the irony.”

In fact, the irony made me want to vomit up my own lungs. But Meshara was right. Mellie's baby was the only piece of her I had left.

“There was no early labor?” My thoughts felt sluggish, but my concussion was the least of my worries.

“Nope. This little parasite seems quite content where he is for now,” the demon wearing Mellie's face confirmed as we bumped over a crack in the highway. “Thank goodness. Playing sweet, knocked-up baby sister was hard enough, but faking uterine contractions is a bit beyond my ken. And there was nothing I could do about the whole cervical issue.”

“But you're sure the baby's okay?” The question was ultimately pointless because there was nothing to keep her from lying, but I had to ask.

“As sure as I can be without an ultrasound machine or a prenatal psychic connection. I can't read the little bastard's mind. Hell, I can hardly feel him kicking anymore. Your sister's stomach's gone kind of numb.”

“Numb? Is that normal?”

Meshara closed her eyes for a second, evidently searching through my sister's memories, then looked at the road again. “According to one of those stupid pregnancy books, it's from the stretching of the skin. Came on kind of sudden, though. And the book didn't mention the loss of sensation spreading into my limbs.” She took one hand off the steering wheel and pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her index finger, then shrugged as if she couldn't feel the touch. “Or that food would lose its flavor. Being pregnant sucks. That's why we usually let humanity bear the next generation for us. Except for a few sickos I know who get off on the whole ‘human experience' thing.”

Could pregnancy really dull a woman's taste buds and numb her fingers? Suddenly I wished I'd read more of Melanie's books.

“Then maybe you shouldn't have possessed a pregnant woman.”

Meshara rolled her eyes. “We both know Melanie's the only host you wouldn't have tried to burn me out of at the earliest opportunity.”

Which meant she clearly didn't expect me to remain tied up for long. Smart demon.

“So why did you fake…?” Suddenly I understood. “You were the distraction.” We were all supposed to be caught up with Mellie's early labor so Kastor's spies could get away with Grayson. Meshara had sent Grayson to the truck for her bag. She'd set the whole thing up, and we'd fallen for it.

“
Now
you're getting it. Good to know there's no permanent damage from the crowbar.”

“Does it even matter, if I'm just going to wind up as somebody's host?”

“Physical damage matters. A possessed body heals slower than normal, and brain damage is nearly impossible to recover from. That's why we don't possess the mentally impaired. Now, psychological damage—
that
just gives the new occupant an interesting backstory to work with.”

“Melanie isn't your backstory,” I snapped. “She's my sister.”

“She
was
your sister. Now she's a collection of unique memories and experiences, distinct from those of anyone else in the world. She's qualia for me to play with. And I have to say, pedestrian pregnancy aside, hers may be the most interesting life I've ever assumed. An aptitude for study, yet no fondness for it. Sex at the
scandalous
age of fifteen. And love!” Meshara twisted to look at me through my sister's eyes, and the car swerved to the right so hard that I smacked my shoulder on the window. “It wasn't just physical with the doomed Adam Yung. Mellie really loved him. And she loved their baby.”

“Stop.” Unshed tears stabbed at my eyes like needles, but Meshara obviously enjoyed my pain.

“Then the way he died! They made her watch, and it was too much for her, even just seeing it on the screen. He screamed her name at the end as the flames crisped his skin. She passed out cold. Hit her head on the floor. Did she tell you that? Her anguish must have been
delicious.
”

I clenched my teeth and tried to ignore her as I watched fields and small, burnt-out towns pass by my window.

“Melanie thought you'd left her. They told her you'd escaped the city, and that hurt her worse than anything. Worse than being tied to an exam table, prodded with equipment and poked with needles. The worst part of all was that she thought you let it happen.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, turning to stare straight out the windshield at the miles of splintered concrete stretching out before us.

“What? Stop mumbling.”

“I'm not mumbling. I have to pee.”

Meshara rolled Mellie's eyes again, and I realized she'd mastered the human gesture. “No, you don't.”

“Yes, I do,” I insisted, squirming in my seat to emphasize my discomfort, which allowed me to twist so that my wrist bindings touched the passenger's-side door.

“Cross your legs and hold it.” Meshara glanced at my bound ankles and laughed. “Okay, then just hold it.”

For the next few hours I tried to tune out the demon's torturous nostalgia-by-proxy while I watched the few remaining highway signs to estimate our distance from Pandemonia. To judge the dwindling window of opportunity I had to free myself and disable the demon without hurting Mellie's baby. I took advantage of every swerve and bump in the road to scrape the thin cord binding my wrists against a jagged edge of plastic in the broken passenger's-side armrest, but I couldn't tell whether or not the rope was fraying. I couldn't even be sure that I was hitting it in the same place with every bump, though I
was
sure I'd gouged my own skin several times.

According to Finn and Maddock, Pandemonia had grown out of a prewar city called Colorado Springs, which was about sixty miles south of the former Colorado state capital of Denver. Denver had burned to the ground during the war—I knew that much from history class. But what the sisters hadn't told us was that Colorado Springs had escaped major damage only to be taken over not by demons disguised as Church officials, as in the other surviving cities, but by demons in no disguise at all.