The Flame Never Dies (15 page)

But if he had a pocketknife, he obviously kept it in his actual pocket. There was nothing sharp in his backpack at all.

I dropped back into the passenger's seat, scanning the car for anything sharp enough to cut through nylon, and had almost decided to contort my body in order to use the broken armrest on my ankles too, when my gaze fell on the keys in the ignition.

I snatched the ring and identified the key with the sharpest-looking teeth, then began sawing on the bindings around my ankles. “Okay, so you were fine for the first couple of days in Mellie's body, and Tobias was fine for the first couple of days we had him…”

“Tobias?”

“Aldric,” I reminded her. “But after that, you both started to lose your sense of taste and the sensation in your skin.” I stopped sawing long enough to inspect the damaged nylon and was pleased with my progress.

“This is all your fault!” Meshara's words were slushy, but her tone was sharp. “I caught this plague from you and your friends!”

I worked the key back and forth as fast as I could, trying to ignore the friction burning into the pad of my right thumb. “The only people who've caught…whatever this thing is, are you and Aldric. Just the demons, Meshara.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Aldric and I were in Tobias and Micah for two days before we infiltrated your group, and we were
fine.
” Her words slid one into the next, and I had to listen closely to understand. “We got this from
your
people, and I wish I'd never laid eyes on any of you. I'd rather be crawling around in hell than trapped in a human body that doesn't work.”

“In that case, I hope your little plague spreads! Humanity couldn't ask for much more than demons voluntarily withdrawing from our world.” My hand froze as the last words fell from my lips, and I realized what I'd just said.

Humanity
couldn't
ask for much more than that. A disease that affects only demons, depriving them of the very senses they'd invaded our world in order to experience? That was too specific—too targeted—a plague to have natural origins.

Meshara's illness wasn't merely a miracle, it was a miracle of
science.

We were looking at the kind of manufactured illness that would have taken researchers years—maybe
decades
—to engineer back before the war. The kind of illness that was completely beyond the abilities of what few scientists and facilities had survived the restructuring of the United States from a democratic republic to a demonic theocracy.

Which led me back to “miracle.”

I only knew of one organization in the business of making miracles happen, scientific or otherwise.

The Unified Church.

M
y hands fell away from my ankles. The keys thumped to the floorboard. “It
is
a plague….”

“What?” Meshara demanded, furiously blinking her unfocused eyes, while I reached down for the keys.

“You've been poisoned by the Unified Church!” I resumed sawing, reinvigorated not just by the stunning—if puzzling—realization, but by the fact that Meshara's stomach was clenching and twisting again in its primitive prenatal dance. The baby was running out of time, and I had no idea what to do.

“Never been to church,” she mumbled, and I could hardly hear her over the racing of my own pulse. “Never even been in one of their cities.”

I gave the cord around my ankles one last, vigorous attack, and the nylon finally gave, freeing my ankles. I was out of the vehicle in an instant, but I had to brace myself against the roof of the SUV while I regained my balance after having been tied up for at least twelve hours. From outside the car, I could see the damage from the wreck in its mangled, smoking glory.

The SUV was totaled.

My heart hammered so hard I could feel each individual beat. We were stuck in the middle of an unmaintained prewar highway, with no gun, very little food, and no shelter to speak of, other than the smoking ruin of our wrecked vehicle.

“Okay. We need to get you into the backseat,” I said as I rounded the car, with no idea whether or not she could still hear me. Her speech was getting harder to understand, and as far as I could tell, she was almost completely blind. Seeing my sister's body fail was a special kind of torture, even though she was no longer in it. She wasn't even sixteen years old. She did
not
deserve what I'd let happen to her, and the worst was yet to come.

If the loss of sensation limited Meshara's control over her uterine muscles, Mellie's baby was in big trouble.

On the driver's side, I climbed onto the middle bench and began throwing things over the headrests into the backseat, keeping my eyes out for my sister's labor and delivery bag.

“Meshara, can you hear me?” I spread the only blanket I'd found across the bench seat.

“Unfortunately,” she called, slurring the syllables.

“Come on.” I backed out of the vehicle and took her by the arm, overwhelmed by my mental list of things we needed but didn't have. Not the least of which was a midwife. And a soul. “I need you to stand up. Can you walk?”

“What's the point?” she demanded, staring over my shoulder, and with a fresh bolt of terror I realized she'd gone completely blind. This plague, whatever it was, was progressing even faster than the birth.

“The point is that if you don't get your ass up and deliver my sister's baby, I won't have any choice but to roast you alive, then cut the baby out of you!” But I really,
really
didn't want to do that.

I'd held it together so far because I had no other choice. Because Mellie's baby was still depending on me. But if I had to perform an amateur caesarean only to watch the child die without a soul, I would
lose
it.

How much more could the world expect me to survive?

Meshara didn't resist when I turned her legs toward the road, but she didn't help either.

“You're going to cut the baby out?” Her laughter sounded forced, but skeptical. “With what? A car key?”

“Listen to me.” I pulled her out of the driver's seat, and she wobbled for a moment on legs she obviously couldn't feel. “If you don't bring that baby into this world safely, I
will
dig through the car for a glass bottle or a hunk of metal or a tool from the tire changing kit until I find
something
that will cut through human flesh.”

Meshara tried to shrug, but her shoulders hardly moved. “I can't feel anything anyway.”

I had to clench my teeth to keep from screaming in frustration, afraid to attract degenerates while I was still trying to bring Mellie's baby into the world.

“Okay. Let's make a deal.” I half tugged, half carried her three steps to the middle row, where I helped her sit on the edge of the bench seat, facing me. I looked straight into eyes that couldn't see me, hoping she could still hear me well enough to understand what I was about to offer. “You help me deliver the baby, and I'll take you to Pandemonia so Kastor can give you a new body.”

She rolled her unfocused eyes. “You're an exorcist. You would
never
let a human die so a demon could have a new body.”

I took her by the shoulders and leaned in close, even though she couldn't see me. “There is
nothing
I wouldn't do for a chance to hold Melanie's baby.” To make sure that the
only
thing the poor kid would feel in its horrifyingly short life was love.

And heaven help anyone who got in my way.

“If you don't believe me, look back through her memories,” I demanded. “I risked prison to steal food for her. I risked my life to rescue her from the Church. Mellie's baby is all I have left of her, and the child won't live long. Maybe an hour. Give me that hour, and I'll give you another human
lifetime.
”

“Swear.”

“I already—”

“Swear on your sister's name,” she whispered, and her tongue seemed to be in its own way. “Swear on her baby's life.”

“I swear on the name of my only sister, Melanie Kane. I swear on the soul of her dead lover, Adam Yung. And I swear on the life of their unborn child. Please, Meshara. Help me deliver this baby.”

“Fine,” she relented. “But I can hardly move my own tongue.”

That would have to be enough.

“So, what do we do?”

“Um…” I propped both hands on my hips, wishing for the millionth time in the past half hour that I'd paid more attention to the endless series of childbirth discussions. But I'd thought that even if I was present when the baby came, my role would be that of cheerleader.

In truth, I'd always assumed the aunt's chief duty in the whole affair would be cuddling the newborn. I was highly prepared for that.

“Okay, scoot all the way in and lean back against the door. Make sure it's locked. Then I need you to pull up your shirt and put your hand on your stomach, and concentrate, to see if you can feel the contractions. Can you do that?”

She couldn't, and the fact that I had to help her scoot across the bench seat didn't bode well for her ability to push a baby out through girl parts she couldn't feel.

While Meshara scowled at a stomach she couldn't see, I threw open the back hatch and started going through everything Eli had packed before the demon had felled him with his own crowbar.

Melanie's delivery bag wasn't there; it must have stayed in the truck. But I found a clean maternity T-shirt in her personal bag and set that aside, mentally earmarking it for the baby's first—and likely last—swaddle.

Eli's duffel held not one, but two sharp knives, each stored in its own handmade leather sheath, and I wanted to kick myself for not hopping around the car to search the luggage when I'd needed to cut through my ankle bindings. I slid the cleaner of the two knives into the largest of my cargo pockets, intending to use it to cut the umbilical cord.

Cutting the baby out was a last resort. But now it was actually possible, should it prove necessary.

I was rummaging through Reese's bag full of spare parts for a flashlight and some batteries when Meshara called out from the middle row, and her words were now nearly atonal, as well as mushy. “I think it's happening again.”

Nearly panicked, I pulled every sleep roll and blanket I could find from the cargo area and set them on the third-row seat, to keep them out of the dusty badlands air. “I need you to start counting the passing seconds as soon as the contraction ends. I don't have a watch, so we'll have to use the revered one-Mississippi method, which I learned in kindergarten.” Sister Margaret had been teaching us to estimate the drying time for white school glue, but I was sure she'd be pleased by my unconventional application of the knowledge.

While the demon counted silently, laboriously moving her numb lips with each unspoken number, I spread another blanket beneath her and across the rest of the middle bench seat. Then I dove into the cargo area again in search of the last packet of wet wipes, which Melanie had been saving for the baby's first badlands bath, in case we weren't within reach of a freshwater source when her labor began.

As near as I could tell, we weren't within reach of anything.

When I'd laid out everything we could possibly need—at least, everything we had on hand—I sat on the end of the bench seat and spent the next hour alternately watching for hostile company from the badlands and reading from the pregnancy book I'd found wedged between the passenger's seat and the center console, with one hand on my sister's belly so I could feel the onset of the next contraction. Meshara couldn't feel them anymore, either from the inside or the outside, but she was still able to count out the seconds between spasms.

The contractions started out at six-minute intervals, and I got good at mentally dividing seconds into minutes. But by the time the sun began to sink toward the western horizon, Meshara's water had broken, her stolen uterus was contracting every three minutes, and she was almost sure she felt a little pressure in her pelvic floor.

Even after reading the emergency delivery section of the book four times, I wasn't sure exactly what the “pelvic floor” was, but if she was feeling anything at all, the sensation must have been quite strong.

I told myself that when the contractions were two minutes apart, I'd make myself “check” her cervix. Or at least make sure the baby wasn't about to fall out.

I was trying to wrestle Meshara out of Mellie's maternity pants, with little help from the increasingly useless demon, when the soft growl of an engine startled me upright so fast I actually hit my head on the roof of the SUV.

“Hang tight!” I shouted, to be sure she'd hear me, as I scrambled out of the vehicle and stared down the unmaintained highway at the miles we'd already driven.

“Wha…?” Meshara called, and I wasn't sure whether she was asking a question or starting the contraction count all over again.

Within seconds the approaching vehicle came into sight, a small, dark blur in the distance, speeding around obstacles and spitting up clouds of dust beneath its tires every time it veered off the road to avoid a collision.

My heart thumping painfully, I squinted, trying to decide what kind of car it was, or at least what color. It was coming from the general direction of the Lord's Army, if my understanding of the map was accurate, but that didn't mean that whoever was in it was friendly. Meshara had left Anathema with only one vehicle, and two missing members to chase. Considering that hoofprints would be easier to track through the dirt than tires on pavement, I held out no hope that they'd come after me instead of Grayson.

Not that I would have wanted them to. Grayson was much less able to defend herself.

As the car sped closer I decided it was a dark-colored sedan. Black, gray, or blue. I couldn't swear it wasn't one of the Lord's Army's cars, but I couldn't imagine them coming after me. They'd be busy enough trying to make sure that no more of their own were possessed, then trying to bring peace to the souls of Naomi and Serah.

A minute later I was able to make out two shapes through the windshield. Seconds after that I realized the car wasn't slowing. It hadn't seen me.

Or maybe it had and the plan was to run me down.

“Meshara!” I shouted, backing toward the wrecked SUV, afraid to look away from the car speeding toward us. “Brace for impact!”

The dark car was less than one hundred feet from us when the driver suddenly slammed on the brakes. The vehicle began to skid, and the driver overcorrected. The car spun off the road into the grass and did a complete revolution before sliding to a stop at the edge of the road, its nose ten feet from the bumper of our SUV.