The Flame Never Dies (17 page)

“Nina, it's time,” Eli said, but I hardly heard him. “This is it.”

I propped Meshara up out of habit, still mentally mired in the Church's deception. “Time to push!” I shouted into her ear. I couldn't tell whether she had any awareness of her own position—if she couldn't feel her limbs, could she tell how they were situated?—and I only knew for sure that she'd heard me when she gave a great grunt of effort and curled around her own bulging stomach.

“Good!” Eli called. “Here comes the head!”

Anabelle peeked over his shoulder and her eyes widened. Then her gaze snapped up to my face, and I practically saw her mental gears shift as she tried to distract herself from what she'd seen. “Wait, Nina, you think we're actually carrying the disease?” She frowned. “But we've been through all our stuff over and over, consolidating. Repairing. Replacing. Restocking. Even if they were smart enough to send it in one of the supply trucks, knowing we'd raid it, surely we would have found…Wait, how does one store a virus?”

“It could have been in anything,” I said. “Probably in something they knew we'd keep. Like painkillers. Or Mellie's prenatal vitamins. They probably didn't stash it in something obvious, like vials or syringes.”

“But if it was in something we'd use, wouldn't we just be infecting ourselves?”

“Not if humans can't get the virus.” Which seemed to be the case, since only the possessed among us had gotten sick.

“Okay.” Anabelle nodded slowly. “But then wouldn't they just be wasting their virus on us, instead of using it on Pandemonia? And even if they weren't, how did they expect Kastor's people to actually get infected? Accidentally prick themselves on a suspicious syringe in our luggage after we were captured?”

Good question. And there were no syringes. Anabelle was right. We would have noticed….

Syringes.
Needles.

My hand fell from Meshara's shoulder as something she'd said earlier finally sank in. She'd said the Church had tied Melanie to the prenatal exam table and poked her with needles.

What if they hadn't been just running tests? What if they hadn't been just taking blood out of her, but putting something
into
her bloodstream?

“We
are
carrying the virus,” I said, my voice hollow with shock. “But you're right—it's not in a vial or a syringe. It's in
Melanie.
They injected her with it, then
let
us escape, knowing Kastor would come after us.

“My sister is the Church's Trojan horse, and Kastor is still trying like hell to bring her into his city.”

“A
re you serious?” The beam from Anabelle's flashlight wavered as she gaped at me over Eli's shoulder. “You think they infected your sister?”

“Nothing else makes sense. They had unlimited access to Melanie for several days, and they had two reasonable excuses to ‘examine' her—pregnancy and suspicion of possession. We assumed they were threatening Melanie to get me to turn myself in.” Which I'd done. “But what if they were really trying to get me to break her out?” Which I'd also done. “When we rescued her, there were almost no consecrated Church members in the courthouse. We assumed we'd successfully lured them out, but what if they were running on a skeleton crew already because any of the possessed were at risk of contracting and spreading the virus once Melanie had been infected?”

“Nina, you're about to become an aunt!” Eli called. “The rest can wait.”

He had no idea how wrong he was about that, and I couldn't tell him.

“Here comes the head! Push!”

Astonished, I repeated his order into Meshara's ear. Then I watched, shielded from the most graphic moments by my sister's stomach, while her baby came into the world as helpless and precious as I'd expected.

Though quite a bit messier.

“It's a boy!” Eli held the tiny infant up, one hand beneath the baby's head and back, the other holding his rump and feet, and my heart nearly exploded with…joy.

There was nothing else in that moment. No worry over what lay in wait in the badlands, or—worse—in the cities. No fury at Meshara for killing my sister and using her child as a human shield. No fear for myself. Not even grief for Melanie. In the moment her son was born, there was room inside me for nothing but celebration of the life she and Adam had created. The life she'd carried and protected. The very last member of the Kane family had arrived, in spite of countless odds stacked against him.

And he was
beautiful.
He was so amazingly, breathtakingly beautiful that it almost hurt to look at him. But it hurt even more not to be holding him.

When the baby didn't immediately begin to cry, Eli laid him on the clean cloth draping his lap, then folded it over the child and began to massage his limbs. The baby made a mewling sound so soft and weak that fear speared my chest like a bolt of lightning straight to my heart.

“Is something wrong?”

“Nothing that I can see.” Eli continued to rub him gently with the cloth, and the baby let out a loud, warbling cry. A strong,
healthy
cry. “He's small, but those lungs sound great. Ten fingers, ten toes. Nothing missing, nothing extra. No club foot. No cleft in his lip or palate. Come meet your nephew!” I helped Meshara sit up long enough for me to slide off the bench seat, then close the door for her to lean against. Anabelle carried the baby to the back of the SUV, where I met her in front of the open cargo area, which we'd already emptied and staged as a receiving area for the baby.

I had to bite my tongue to keep from yelling at her to hurry. I was desperate to hold him, but if I waited too long to free my own soul, my sacrifice would be for nothing.

“What do you think she'd want to call him?” Anabelle laid my nephew on another clean cloth—this one a towel folded in half—while Eli tended to Meshara in the middle row.

I didn't have to think about that for long. Melanie had volleyed names for a girl back and forth, but she'd had a boy name picked out almost from the beginning.

“Adam,” I said, and when I looked up, I saw tears standing in Anabelle's eyes.

“After his father,” she whispered, and I nodded.

“He's a Kane, and he'll always be a Kane, but he's also part Yung.”

Anabelle warmed a wet wipe between her hands, then gave me the package to warm with my own body heat while she carefully and systematically cleaned the baby. If I hadn't known better, I might have thought she'd done it a thousand times, but the truth was that she and Melanie had done all the reading they could, and Anabelle had obviously learned even more from our time with the Lord's Army.

Adam cried until his bath was over and she swaddled him in the clean, soft T-shirt I'd laid out. In all the raids we'd carried out since escaping—being driven?—from New Temperance, we hadn't come across a single article of infant clothing, and the half-dozen baby blankets Melanie had collected were still somewhere in the back of the cargo truck. That old, soft shirt was the best I had to offer Adam.

That and a few minutes spent in the care of the aunt he would never know.

Anabelle put him in my arms, and the sound that bubbled up from my throat was half sob, half laugh. Adam was
so
beautiful. He had his father's straight, dark hair and almond-shaped eyes, but his irises were all Mellie. Light brown, almost golden, those eyes blinked up at me, and for a second I felt as if I had my sister back. As if I'd never failed her and her baby.

“Oh, your mother would have given anything to be here with you now,” I whispered as tears rolled down my cheeks. “She loved you so much. She would have done anything to keep you.”

“Nina.” Anabelle laid one hand on my arm, staring at the baby as he stared up at me. “We need to do something about Meshara.”

“She can wait.” I couldn't look away from Adam's precious face. “She's not a threat anymore.” And I wasn't looking forward to burning a hole through my sister's chest.

“We really shouldn't put it off,” Ana insisted. “When the sun goes down, light could draw degenerates, and we don't exactly have shelter out here.”

I made myself meet her gaze. “I don't have much time with Adam, and I want him to spend all of it staring at my face. Listening to my voice. That's as close as he's ever going to get to meeting his mother.”

“But…”

I shook my head, then sat in the cargo area and tucked my feet up onto the upholstery. “Just close the hatch so nothing can sneak up on us.”

Anabelle carefully closed the back of the SUV, leaving me wedged into the narrow rear of the vehicle with just enough space to cradle Adam comfortably. He seemed content for the moment, even with nothing to suck on, so I decided not to worry about the fact that we hadn't found either of the pacifiers Melanie had collected from the same shipment that had given us several canisters of powdered baby formula. Which were also in the delivery bag, unless I'd missed something in our luggage.

Having done what he could for Meshara, Eli was outside, going through our things for any baby supplies we might have missed—not that that he thought we'd actually need them—and packing what we couldn't do without into the car he and Anabelle had driven.

The SUV's rear passenger's-side door opened, and Anabelle climbed over the middle bench seat to settle sideways in the third row, from which she could peek into the cargo area for glimpses of Adam.

“He's so sweet,” she whispered, and I nodded as the baby's eyes fell closed.

I tensed for a moment, afraid that he'd already slipped from the world after less than fifteen minutes spent in it. But then his tiny chest rose and fell, and I realized he was just napping. I resisted the urge to wake him up so I could stare at his eyes, because I was afraid that would make him cry, and we had nothing with which to console him.

We didn't even have any of the cloth diapers Melanie had made. Not that I would have known how to put them on, anyway. Hopefully, Eli would know what to do about that.

“I wish Mellie could have seen him. I wish he could have seen her.”
I wish he wasn't about to lose his last living relative.

Tears filled my eyes, and every time I blinked them away, they came back. I had to clench my jaw to hold back the sob fighting to be heard. The knife sheath poking me through my pocket was a constant reminder of what little time we had together and exactly how it would have to end.

Then, suddenly, Adam's whole body tensed.

“Ana!” I whispered, terrified, and when her eyes flew open, I realized she'd dozed off, sitting straight up.

“What?”

“He just went really stiff. I need you to take him.” Adam's tiny face blurred beneath the tears filling my eyes. “I think this is the end.”

Ana pulled herself up onto her knees and peered over the bench seat. “He's still breathing,” she whispered, and when I blinked to clear my vision, I realized she was right. “He probably just messed in his blanket. Here.” She handed me the package of wet wipes. “Why don't you clean him up while I see if Eli found anything else for him to wear.”

She got out of the car before I could object, and in my head the seconds ticked away. Seconds Adam couldn't afford.

If I didn't act soon, my sacrifice would be for nothing.

I pressed the lever to fold the right side of the bench seat in half, then laid the baby on the nearly flat back of the chair.

Adam woke up and started to fuss when I unswaddled him, and sure enough, the bottom of the makeshift blanket was full of a tarry black stool, which might have disgusted me if it had come out of any other creature in the world. I pulled a wet wipe from the package and folded the blanket up to enclose as much of the mess as I could, then began cleaning the baby up.

I rolled him carefully onto his left side, supporting his stomach with my free hand, then realized that the spot I'd been trying to wipe off wasn't residual baby poo. It was a pale brown birthmark.

The patch stretched the length of Adam's small spine and neck and faded into his hairline.

Goose bumps popped up all over my arms. Melanie had the same mark, in that same pale shade of brown. But she'd developed hers over our past few months in the badlands and had attributed it to a hormone-induced change in pigmentation.

How could her baby have been born with exactly the same mark?

Ana opened the door and climbed into the third row, where she sat on the unfolded half of the bench. “He didn't find any diapers, but there's this.” She handed me another T-shirt.

“Ana, look.” I lifted the baby and held him against my chest, so she could see his back. “Mellie had the same mark along her spine.”

Ana squinted to see in the dimly lit cargo area. Her eyes widened. “How weird that you all three have the same birthmark! It must be genetic.” She rolled up Adam's soiled shirt and laid out the clean one for me.

“What? I don't have that. And it can't be a birthmark. Mellie didn't have hers until a few months ago.”

“Well, whatever it is, you have it too,” Anabelle insisted as I laid the baby on his back on the clean shirt. “I saw it when we bathed in the river, back in Ashland.” She frowned. “That seems like a lifetime ago. So much has gone wrong since then.”

I couldn't argue with that, but…“You're sure? Here.” I swaddled the baby as best I could and handed him carefully to Ana, then turned my back to her. I lifted my shirt and angled my back toward the dim interior light. “Is there really something there?”

“Yes. A stripe straight up your spine. Light brown. Just a shade darker than your skin. It seems even weirder, knowing all three of you have it.”

I frowned, staring out the rear windshield into the darkened badlands. “And you're sure it's the same as Adam's and Mellie's?”

“Yes.” The SUV shifted, and her reflection in the glass leaned in for a closer look at my back. “It
must
be something you inherited, if all three of you have it.”

“Not unless you're secretly related to Grayson,” Eli said. “Because she has the same mark.”

Startled, I let my shirt fall into place, then turned to find the sentinel standing in the open passenger's doorway.

“What?”

Eli flushed. “I wasn't…I didn't…” He cleared his throat and started over. “She turned around to put on a fresh shirt after a sparring session a couple of days ago, and I saw it. A pale brown stripe up her spine. Lighter than my skin, but darker than the rest of hers. I wanted to ask, but…”