The Flame Never Dies (2 page)

Minutes after piling into the car, we raced down the main drag of what was once a tiny town called Palmersville, which boasted a grand total of four mostly paved streets. Devi turned right onto one of them, and behind us Reese parked the SUV sideways across the entire two-lane road.

Finn got out of the car with his rifle and took a quick look around the derelict town. He pointed at a crumbling storefront across the street. “I'll be in there. Center window, bottom floor.”

“Be careful.” I pulled him close for an adrenaline-fueled kiss, and when we let the moment linger, Devi grabbed the tail of my shirt and hauled me backward.

“Priorities,” she snapped as Finn grinned at me, then turned to jog across the street.

“We'll take out the escort vehicle first.” Reese towered over the rest of us, in a group too varied in height to form a true huddle. “Then Nina and I will take the first supply truck and you two take the second one.”

Maddock and Devi nodded, then headed into an alley across the way while Reese and I hid behind an industrial trash bin half-eaten with rust on our side of the street.

Seconds later we heard engines.

Our haphazardly parked SUV was dusty and dented enough to pass for abandoned, and I knew for certain that the ploy had worked when the caravan's escort vehicle, a police car, stopped ten feet away. The police car bore the stylized emblem of the Unified Church—four intertwined columns of flames—and the men who got out of it wore the long navy cassocks of police officers.

Even from a distance I could see the white embroidery on their full, bell-shaped sleeves. They were both consecrated Church leaders.

Which meant they were possessed.

A jolt of excitement shot up my spine, anticipation laced with an edge of fear, and I felt Reese tense beside me. He was as eager to fight as I was.

The cops were already headed toward our SUV, obviously intending to push it off the road, when a passenger got out of the second cargo truck and shouted, “What's the holdup?” He wore civilian clothes—a green jacket bearing the logo of the shipping company that owned the truck.

“Abandoned car,” the first cop shouted over his shoulder. “We'll have it out of the way in a minute.”

“We came through here last week and there was nothing in the road,” the civilian called, and both cops turned to eye our vehicle warily.

A gunshot thundered from Finn's hiding place as the civilian was climbing back into his truck. One of its tires exploded, and shouts erupted from both trucks.

The cops dove for cover behind their open car doors, pulling pistols from their holsters while they scanned the storefront for the source of the gunfire. Finn took two more shots in rapid succession, and one of them hit a second tire, effectively disabling the second cargo truck and trapping the two vehicles in front of it.

My pulse raced, my left fist clenching and unclenching in anticipation.

Maddock and Devi burst from their hiding place and crossed the distance quickly and quietly.

Reese and I came at the lead vehicle from the opposite direction, running crouched over, and the driver got out of the car when he saw us coming. Even if his robes hadn't been embroidered, I'd have known he was possessed from the way he moved, inhumanly quick and impossibly nimble. Daylight hid the demonic shine in his eyes—visible only to exorcists and fellow demons—but I saw recognition in his expression when he skidded to a stop in front of me, already reaching for the gun at his waist. He knew me.

But then, everyone knew Nina Kane. I was public enemy number one.

I lunged forward and pressed my left hand to his chest before he could pull his weapon. Light burst between us, and the demon screamed as he was burned from his human host while the body dangled from the fire kindled in my palm, weightless beneath the power of exorcism.

On my right, Maddock grunted. A form flew past me and crashed to the ground, unmoving. The light from my hand faded and the body suspended from it crumpled to the cracked pavement. I turned and found Maddy fighting a second possessed police officer, but before I could get to them, I was suddenly yanked from the ground and thrown backward through the air.

I screamed and flailed in flight, then crashed onto a patch of grass ten feet from the road. Before I could stand, another navy-robed demon sprang at me with an odd, squarish gun in his hand. I rolled out of the way, and the demon shoved the weapon into the ground where I'd been an instant earlier.

The weapon buzzed, and I realized it was a stun gun. They'd come armed not to kill, but to capture.

The Church still wanted us alive.

“Watch out! Stun guns!” I shouted as I rolled over and leapt to my feet.

The demon was on me in an instant. I tried to kick the weapon from his grip but missed his hand entirely. He was too fast. Too strong. After fighting only mutated and relatively weak degenerates in the badlands, I was out of practice battling demons in their prime, and the number of pained grunts bursting from my fellow exorcists said I was not alone.

Time to step up my game.

The demon cop lunged again and I blocked his gun arm, then kicked him in the chest as hard as I could. Breath exploded from his mouth and the demon flew backward several feet. I was on him before he could stand, my palm already alight with the force that would scorch him from his stolen body and eject him from the human world. For just a second, as I pressed that living flame to his chest and listened to his flesh sizzle, I felt…peaceful.

Useful.

I was born for this.

Behind me, the grunts and thumps were winding down, and when the body beneath my hand fell limp, I turned to see that we had won the fight.

It wasn't even close, really. I counted six men in white-embroidered navy police cassocks, each now sporting a scorched and smoldering hole in his chest. The two survivors were the human deliverymen who'd been driving the cargo. Both now stood with their backs against the first of the two green supply trucks with their hands in the air, while Finn aimed his rifle at them.

“What's the plan for these two?” he asked, his aim unwavering.

Maddock considered the question for a moment. “Cuff 'em and leave 'em in the escort vehicle.”

“I'm on it.” Devi squatted next to one of the dead cops, then stood with his handcuffs. While she and Finn restrained the civilians, Maddock searched the bodies until he found the keys to the cargo compartments. He unlocked the rear of the first truck and rolled the door up to reveal the shipment.

Relief eased the most immediate of my fears. Our famine was over, at least for a while.

Reese rounded the back of the vehicle. “Holy hellfire.” The truck was stacked full of boxes, floor to ceiling, front to back. Even if the second vehicle was empty—and it wouldn't be—we'd found way more than we could carry.

Each box was clearly labeled, and at a glance I noticed crates of canned and dry goods, boxes of clothing bound for department stores, cleaning supplies, textbooks, and more toiletries than I'd ever seen in my life.

“They put all their eggs in one basket,” Maddock said, his voice hollow with surprise. “They must have thought we wouldn't attack an armed caravan.”

“Or they were hoping we would,” I guessed. “They came armed with stun guns, prepared to capture, not kill.”

“Well, too bad for them.” Devi stepped in front of me and pulled a clipboard from a hook on the wall of the cargo area. The inventory was several pages long.

“It'll be easier to drive this back than to try to unload it,” Reese said, and no one argued. We took turns siphoning the gasoline from the truck we wouldn't be taking, and then Maddock and Devi drove off in the other cargo truck. Reese followed them in our SUV, which left Finn and me to drive the shot-out car we'd “stolen” from a sympathetic cop back in New Temperance. As we passed the police vehicle on the way to our car, one of the cargo truck drivers stuck his head out of the backseat window.

“Carter?” he called, leaning at an odd angle because his hands were bound behind his back. The other civilian sat in the front seat, his left wrist handcuffed to the steering wheel. Neither man could get out of the car, but they would be able to drive it to the nearest city. “You used to be Heath Carter, right?” the man in the backseat repeated, staring at Finn. “I knew I recognized you.”

We'd ditched Carter's ID along with his unembroidered church cassock months ago, because even when Finn eventually released his body, returning to New Temperance would be a death sentence for the real Carter—he would know things the Church wouldn't want him to share.

“He's not possessed,” I said. “He just switched sides once he learned the truth.” Telling my little lie was much easier than trying to explain that Carter actually was possessed, but not by a demon. Beyond that, we didn't want the Church to know about Finn and his ability to inhabit any human body not already occupied by a demon. He was as close to a secret weapon as we had.

“What truth? What the hell happened out there?” the man cuffed to the steering wheel demanded, and I followed his gaze to where we'd lined up the scorched corpses on the grass. “What did you bastards do to them?”

The drivers didn't recognize us as exorcists because their only exposure to the practice had come from the Church's army of fake exorcists, who marched around in dramatic black robes, wearing crosses and chanting nonsense in Latin for show.

“Those cops were possessed,” I said. “We exorcised them.”

“Nina,” Finn whispered, warning me to shush, because just like with Carter, the more these civilians knew, the more danger they'd be in from the Church. But they'd already seen enough to get themselves killed, so my explanation might actually save their lives.

“You expect us to believe you're exorcists and the cops were demons?” the man in the backseat spat. “Bullshit.” He leaned forward, appealing to his coworker in the front. “Demons are pathological liars. You can't believe a word she says.”

“If we're possessed, why would we let you live?”

Backseat Man lifted his eyebrows at me in challenge. “If they were possessed”—he nodded at the bodies lined up on the ground—“why were they going to let you live?”

“So they could deliver us to the Church.” I shrugged. That should have been obvious.

“Deliver you…?” Front Seat Man stared up at me, surprised. “Where exactly were they going to put you?”

I frowned, considering the question. The backs of both cargo trucks were full of goods, and most of the available seats had been filled by the cops and drivers. They wouldn't have had room to bring more than two of us back.

So why had they come armed with nonlethal weapons?

Before I could come up with any reasonable theories, Backseat Man made a show of glancing around what he could see of the ghost town. “Where's your sister? She lose that baby yet?”

Finn held me back when I took an instinctive, aggressive step toward him. Melanie and her unlicensed, underage pregnancy, which constituted multiple prosecutable sins, had risen to infamy when the Church publicly questioned her humanity and broadcast her boyfriend's immolation—death by fire—to the entire country.

For once, Finn's hand on my shoulder failed to calm me. “She's not going to lose the baby,” I growled through clenched teeth. Making sure of that had become my mission in life since escaping New Temperance. Mellie's unborn child was the only family she and I had left in the world—thanks to routine sterilization by the Church, I could never have one of my own.

“Oh, we both know that's not true,” Backseat Man taunted. “Even if it's born breathing, how long will it live? The well is empty, and you have no donor. Without a soul, that baby will die out here in the dirt, and there'll be nothing you or your sister or your gang of flame-wielding assassins can do about it.”

Assassins? My heart thumped harder. Only demons called exorcists assassins.

I squinted against the sunlight for a better look at Backseat Man, and that time when I stepped toward him, Finn didn't try to stop me. He'd heard it too. The Church had sent one of its demons in disguise as a deliveryman—no official cassock, no telltale embroidery.

“Melanie's baby will live.” I held my left hand out so he could see the flame cradled in my palm. His eyes widened, and he tried to retreat across the bench seat but was trapped by the seat belt. “I will find a soul for it.” I shoved my fiery hand through the open window, and the demon screeched, an inhuman sound of agony, as the flame met his flesh. “And if I can't find a soul for my sister's baby,” I whispered so softly that no one else could hear me above the crackle of crisping skin, “I will damn well give that kid my own.”

W
e caught up with the other two vehicles on the way back to Ashland, and Finn must have known something was wrong, because he didn't tease me about my lead foot. “Try not to let them get to you,” he said, plucking my right hand from the wheel so he could intertwine his fingers with mine. “They're demons. They live to cause us pain.”

But I wasn't upset about what the backseat demon had said—I was upset because he was almost certainly right. The well of souls
was
empty. It had been quietly drained over the past millennia by demons secretly living among us. The soaring infant mortality rate at the end of the previous century had finally clued humanity in, leading to the war against the unclean, which had decimated two-thirds of the world's population.

Now pregnancies were licensed and regulated by the Church. People who were declared unfit to reproduce were sterilized at age fifteen, as I'd been because I was slightly nearsighted and prone to seasonal allergies. To make sure that every baby conceived would actually live, elderly citizens were expected to give up their souls in simultaneous birth/death events carefully orchestrated by city officials. What the rest of the world didn't know was that the Church only wanted those babies to live so they could be possessed and fed from as adults.

Escaping New Temperance had spared Melanie's baby—and the rest of us—from that fate. Theoretically, at least. Unfortunately, our escape had also drastically lowered the chances of finding a soul for the baby. Without one, the youngest and most vulnerable of my two remaining family members would die within hours of his or her birth. We'd all known that from the beginning.

What I hadn't told the rest of Anathema was that I was fully prepared to make the necessary sacrifice myself if I couldn't find a willing donor before the birth.

“It'll work out, Nina.” Finn squeezed my hand as I pressed on the brake to keep from rear-ending the cargo truck in front of us. “One way or another, it'll all work out.”

But I knew better. Nothing in my life had ever just worked out. Good things never happened unless I
made
them happen, and five months spent wandering through the badlands hadn't changed that.

Before we'd even pulled to a stop in front of the library, Grayson James burst through the cracked glass doors and raced down the crumbling steps without so much as a precautionary glance in either direction. I groaned as I shifted into park. One of these days her enthusiasm was going to get her killed. Or worse—possessed.

Reese got out of the SUV and pulled her into his massive embrace, then lifted her for a long, deep kiss. For a moment I was caught off guard by their demonstrative affection—a transgression worthy of arrest had we still been in New Temperance, or any other city. If Finn and I had become comfortable with our relationship, free from the enforced modesty of the Church, Reese and Grayson had grown
bold.

Maddock and Devi's connection had already been scandalous when I'd met them.

“Grace, you can't just keep throwing yourself into unknown situations.” Reese set her on her feet on the crumbling concrete, and her head barely reached his shoulder. “Until you transition, you're vulnerable.”

We'd seen an increase in degenerate activity over the past month as her seventeenth birthday approached, bringing with it the emergence of her exorcist abilities—a genetic inevitability because her brother and both of their parents had also been exorcists.

“I knew it was you,” Grayson insisted. “I didn't hear any monsters.”

Degenerates could sense an exorcist in transition, like a cat scenting a mouse. Albeit, a mouse that would soon be able to burn the cat alive with a single touch. Grayson could “hear” degenerates in her mind, in the same way she could hear Finn talking even when he had no physical form. We didn't understand her ability, but we couldn't deny its existence.

Devi scowled, her dark brows drawing low over expressive black eyes that only seemed to venture beyond skepticism and disapproval when she was looking at Maddock. “Degenerates aren't the only threat out here.”

“I was right, wasn't I?” Grayson demanded.

Reese closed the SUV's driver's-side door. “That's not the point.”

“That
is
the point. I'm not a civilian,” she whispered fiercely, trailing him around the vehicle as Melanie and Anabelle finally followed her out of the library now that they knew we weren't under attack. “In a couple of weeks, I'll be as strong and fast as the rest of you.”

“And we welcome the day,” he said. “But it's not here yet.” Reese would willingly throw his own overgrown frame in front of her as both shield and weapon, but he worried that Grayson was vulnerable when he wasn't around. I had the same concerns for my sister. And for Anabelle. Fortunately, neither of them was eager to start battling demons.

“It's never too early to start training.” Devi shrugged. “Maybe if she knew what she was doing, she wouldn't throw herself into unknown situations.”

That was one of the few things Devi and I agreed on, but Reese was afraid that training would encourage Grayson to put herself in danger.

Maddock unlocked the back of the cargo truck and rolled the door up as the last two members of our outlaw band made their way down the crumbling library steps. Anabelle had one arm around Mellie to help steady her. Every day Melanie's stomach grew larger while the rest of her appeared to shrink, and the unborn child seemed determined to upset my fifteen-year-old sister's balance. And to keep her up all night. And to make her feet swell, her ribs ache, and the circles beneath her eyes grow darker with every day spent on the run with inconsistent nutrition and nonexistent prenatal care.

Anabelle let go of Mellie on the bottom step. “That's quite a haul!”

“This is only half,” I said, scanning the labels on the top row of boxes. “Cross your fingers that there's a crate of vitamins in here, or we'll have to go back for the other truck.”

Devi groaned—returning to the scene of the crime would be a huge risk for the group—but she didn't argue. I'd made it clear since our escape from New Temperance that the health of my sister and her unborn child came first.

“We can't carry all that.” Melanie stared with huge brown eyes up at the stack of crates.

Finn shrugged, and I could practically hear gears turning as he considered the problem. “We can if we ditch the shot-up car for this truck.”

“You want to drive across the badlands in a marked Church cargo truck?” My brows rose. “I guess that
would
be faster than actually painting targets on our backs.”

Maddock chuckled as he scanned the inventory, and I glanced from face to face. “By the way, am I the only one who didn't know we're heading south?”

“It's news to me,” Anabelle said, but that was no surprise. I'd known her since I was a kid, but the others didn't trust her like they trusted me, because I was a fellow exorcist, and they didn't like her like they liked Melanie, because everyone liked Melanie. My sister's gift—and her curse—was charisma. Which was how she'd wound up in love with and pregnant by a sweet but ultimately doomed boy two years her senior.

The oldest of our group by several years, Anabelle was a former ordained Church teacher who'd had to follow us into the badlands because knowing the truth about her superiors was as good as having a noose around her neck. She'd lost everything and everyone she'd ever had, just like the rest of us. But like Mellie, she was largely defenseless against the dangers of the badlands, and she was eager to earn her place in the group any way she could.

“First things first.” Finn pulled the collapsible stairs from a hidden shelf beneath the cargo hold, then stepped up into the truck. “Food. We'll decide everything else once our brains are fueled.”

While Maddock, Devi, and I stood watch, Reese and Finn began pulling boxes from the truck and stacking them on the ground. Mellie and Anabelle made notes on the inventory sheet until they came to a crate of canned goods, and the chore was suspended in favor of lunch in the library's vestibule, from which we could watch over our haul through tempered glass walls that appeared to have shattered, yet remained in place.

Finn and I sat down with a jar of peaches and a can of unidentifiable processed meat apiece. Next to us on the granite floor, Anabelle and Melanie shared cans of twisty pasta shapes in red sauce and a box of cheese-flavored crackers.

The remaining four members of Anathema paired off on the other side of the vestibule so that they could see the road leading into Ashland from the larger American wasteland.

Melanie tugged her bag closer and pulled out one of the books she'd scavenged from the library, then flipped through the yellowed pages while she chewed.

“How are your feet?” I asked around a bite of peach.

“Still kind of swollen, but they don't hurt,” she answered, without looking up from the book. “My hips ache, though.”

“What about that mark on your back?” At first we'd thought it was a bruise—a small spot at the base of her backbone, slightly darker than the rest of her pale skin. But then it had started to stretch along her spine like the inverse of a skunk's stripe.

Melanie shrugged, and sun-bleached blond hair fell over her shoulder. “I can't feel it, and all the pregnancy books say some skin discoloration is normal. It'll fade after the baby's born.” When she found her place in the book, her pale brows furrowed and she settled in for the read.

“What's she learning now?” Finn asked, eyeing Mellie with a brotherly affection that made me smile.

I tilted my sister's book up so I could read the title. “Um…
Hunting and Gathering for the Modern Paleo.
” Another in her small collection of survivalist literature, rescued from multiple crumbling libraries across the small stretch of badlands we'd explored.

Mellie shrugged and held the book up so we could get a better look. “Plants are starting to grow, and we need to know which ones are edible.” She and Anabelle had already taught us to fish, to set basic traps for small game, to start a fire without matches, and to cook our meat evenly on a homemade spit. “Soon we'll be able to spot wild-growing roots, tubers, and nuts to supplement all this aluminum-flavored cuisine.” She tapped the side of her pasta can and smiled. Then her gaze dropped to the page.

And with that, I lost Mellie to her book. Again.