The Flame Never Dies (3 page)

In the end, we decided to leave the rusted, shot-up car in favor of the cargo truck.

It took nearly two hours to unload the boxes and set aside the ones we couldn't use—mostly household cleaners and clothing that fit no one—then divide the food and usable supplies between the truck and the back of the SUV in case we got separated.

None of our previous raids had yielded as much as this latest haul, but the new goods wouldn't last forever. We'd need the hunting and foraging techniques Ana and Mellie were learning in order to make it through the summer.

But what we needed even worse was fuel. The SUV and truck both guzzled gas at a rate we could not sustain, and the Church had crippled us by cutting off access to their fuel depots. Reese siphoned all the gas from the car we were abandoning while Mellie and Anabelle stocked backpacks full of “up front” supplies. Then Finn and I squeezed into the cab of the cargo truck with Ana and my sister, and we took off into the badlands again on yet another fractured strip of highway, this time headed south, with the descending sun on our right.

I sat as close to Finn as I could get, both to give Melanie more room and because touching him, even casually, still made my head spin and my stomach flip, like when I'd played on the swings as a kid. At first I'd thought that was because touching a boy I wasn't related to, for any reason other than medical necessity, was strictly forbidden by the Church. But even as the thrill of rebellion had faded, the rush I felt every time Finn looked at me had only grown.

We'd been on the road for about an hour, his arm stretched across the back of the seat so he could play with my hair, when Ana looked up from her book and sucked in a startled breath.

“Holy Reformation…!” she swore, and as Finn pressed on the brake I followed her gaze to a car parked on the side of the road a few hundred feet ahead. The windshield was generously splattered with mud, but I couldn't see any obvious damage to the vehicle. It had probably run out of gas, like dozens of other abandoned cars we'd come across in the badlands.

“Is that—?”

Static crackled from the handheld radio on my lap before I could finish the question, and I picked it up as Reese spoke into a matching radio from the SUV behind us. “You guys see it?” he asked, and Mellie nodded, though he couldn't see her.

“Yeah,” I said into the handset.

“It's a long shot, but let's pull over and check the tank for gas,” he said, and that was when I realized that those in the SUV couldn't see the detail that had drawn the exclamation from Anabelle. The detail that had captured my attention and Mellie's heart, and led Finn to put his right blinker on, even though there was no other traffic to warn of his intent to pull over.

“There's a kid,” I said into the radio, holding down the button with my thumb. The boy standing in the dirt beside the car was small, with dark skin and long, tightly curled hair. His navy pants might have been part of a uniform, but his arms were crossed over a faded, striped short-sleeved shirt instead of the white button-down required for school. “He's six or seven years old. Appears to be alone.”

Stunned silence dominated the radio channel.

“He can't have been there long,” Anabelle whispered, as if the child might overhear her through glass and steel from a good hundred feet away. “Where on earth are his parents?”

“In the car.” Finn pulled onto the side of the road several yards from the blue sedan. “Look closer.”

I squinted, and chills popped up all over my skin when I saw two forms slumped over in the front seat. What I'd mistaken for mud sprayed across the outside of the windshield turned out to be blood splattered across the inside.

It was too dark to be anything else.

“Oh
no
…
” If the kid's parents were in that car, they were either dead or dying.

“Stay here.” Finn shifted the truck into park and opened his door, then pulled his rifle from behind the bench seat on his way out of the vehicle. He tried to close the door, but I stopped its swing with my foot.

“Stay here.” I passed his instruction on to Mellie and Anabelle as I climbed down from the truck after Finn.

Seconds later Anabelle's door squealed open at my back; she'd ignored my instruction as readily as I'd ignored Finn's.

“Don't aim that thing,” I whispered when I caught up with him. “He's probably terrified already, and if there were still anything dangerous nearby, he would be dead.”

We stared at the car for one long moment, but the splatters were too thick to reveal anything except vague shapes behind the blood.

“This isn't right, Nina,” Finn murmured, and I knew he wasn't just talking about the gory windshield. Excursions beyond city walls were rare and discouraged, but they weren't actually prohibited by the Church as long as the proper permits were secured in advance. But…“If his parents are dead in that car, how'd they die? Demons in their prime don't pull people apart. That'd be wasting potential hosts. And degenerates wouldn't have left the boy alive.”

I shrugged. “Maybe he hid.”

Finn lowered the rifle but didn't engage the safety. “And maybe whatever killed his parents is still around.”

His words still hung in the air when Anabelle jogged past us, her blond curls flying, her jeans hanging low on her newly narrow hips. “Are you okay?” she called to the child, and I grabbed for her arm but missed.

Finn followed her to the car, the rifle aimed at the ground, and he peeked through the windows while Ana knelt in front of the boy without checking under or behind the vehicle.

I groaned on the inside. Why were the members of our group who were the least able to defend themselves always the most likely to put themselves in danger?

The boy nodded slowly.

“What's your name, sweetheart?” she asked, and I realized there would be no teaching her caution where children were concerned. Ana had spent five years as a grade-school teacher, and she'd found it harder than any of the rest of us to let go of what she'd learned during her Church ordination—not the bullshit creeds and oppressive rules, but the ways of life as we'd known it. Modesty. Service. Sacrifice.

“Tobias.” The boy's voice was soft and hoarse, as if he'd been crying. His gaze slid from Anabelle to me, and I decided the glazed look in his eyes was from shock.

He reminded me of the kindergartners I'd spent my service hour with every day of my senior year, until the Church had declared me a cancerous wart on mankind's collective hind end. Tobias could have been any kid in my class, terrified and traumatically orphaned.

We couldn't leave him alone in the badlands. Yet ours was no life for a kid.

The irony in that thought hit home when my sister waddled past me, one hand on her huge belly. “Melanie,” I called, but she waved off my warning. When I glanced at Finn, he nodded to give me the all clear, the rifle still aimed at the ground. He'd inspected the car from the outside and squatted to peer beneath it, and had found no immediate danger.

Still, Mellie was too pregnant to fight or to flee from sudden danger, so I followed her, ready to pull her out of the path of evil should a demon burst from the bloody car.

“Are you okay, Tobias?” my sister asked, kneeling in front of the child with Anabelle's help.

For a moment he only stared at her, studying her pale skin and even paler hair. Finally he nodded, his gaze fixated on her stomach, while I tried to calculate the mileage his family must have traveled in that doomed blue car. “You got a baby in there?”

Melanie laughed, and I marveled at the fact that she could find joy where the rest of us saw only tragedy and hardship. “Yes. And I like your name, Tobias.” She laid one hand on her stomach. “Maybe I'll borrow it if this little one's a boy.”

Assuming it lived.

Melanie was a tireless optimist, not blind to the dangers of the world, exactly, but not quite concerned enough about them. She refused to think about the overwhelming odds against her child's survival, and neither she nor Ana had even glanced at the carnage inside that blue car.

And I hadn't heard her mention Adam, the ill-fated father of her child, in weeks.

Reese pulled the SUV to a stop beside our truck, right in the middle of the road, and the other half of our group poured out of the vehicle. “What the hell?” Footsteps crunched in the dirt behind me, and then Reese and Grayson stopped at my side. She carried a plastic jug and he had a hose wrapped around his massive left arm.

“Looks like the parents are dead in the front seat,” I whispered. “Not sure what happened yet, but Finn hasn't found any immediate threat.”

“Poor thing!” Grayson cried.

Devi rolled her eyes and scuffed her boot in the dirt on the side of the road. “What the hell are we supposed to do with him?”

“We can't leave him here.” Maddock threaded his arm through hers, frowning as he watched the little boy. “It's a miracle he's still alive. He must not have been here long.”

“We're not even going to
think
about taking him with us until we know what killed his parents.” Devi circled the car toward the driver's side and used one hand to shield the sun from her face while she bent to peer through the window. When she stood a second later, she looked sick. “Nothin' but blood.”

While the rest of us took a closer look at the car, Grayson, Ana, and Mellie lured Tobias toward the cargo truck with promises of water and chocolate from a box of sweets that had been intended for the general store in New Temperance.

As Devi and Finn had said, the front windows were too caked with blood to show anything at all, and through the rear windshield we could see little more than the outlines of two bodies sitting in the front seats. The trunk door stood open a couple of inches, and when I lifted it, I saw that the narrow center seat had been folded down, creating a small path into the trunk from the backseat of the car. A path just wide enough for a six-year-old.

My stomach twisted at the thought of what Tobias must have witnessed. How could any kid see that much carnage without being psychologically destroyed?

When the child was out of sight behind the cargo truck, Maddock opened the driver's door while Finn aimed his rifle at the interior just in case. Nothing jumped out at us, but after one glance inside I gasped and stepped back. Finn's jaw tightened, and even Devi covered her mouth in horror.

The man and woman, still buckled into the front seats of the car, were drenched in blood fresh enough to glisten in the afternoon sunlight. The dashboard, windows, windshield, and floorboard had all been heavily splattered with what could only have been an arterial spray.

Yet even through all the gore, two things were clear.

First, the man and woman in the blue car were not Tobias's biological parents—their skin was as pale as mine, even accounting for the pallor of recent death. And second, based on the blood and bits of flesh caking their right hands, the couple's wounds appeared to be self-inflicted.

The man and woman had simply pulled onto the side of the road, then ripped out their own throats.

“W
ho are they?” Grayson whispered, glancing at the gore-splattered car.

“They didn't have any IDs.” Maddock ran one hand through his thick brown hair in a rare display of nerves. But then, the contents of that car had bothered us all. “They're not his biological parents, but aside from that, who knows?”

Grayson sipped from a half-full bottle of water, then passed it left in our huddle, to Reese. “There's not a drop of blood on Tobias.” She shrugged. “If he was far enough away to avoid the spray, I'm betting he didn't see much of what happened.”

“I think he was in the trunk, but who knows when he crawled in there?” I'd fought demons, degenerates, and humans on a regular basis since finding out I was an exorcist, but I'd never seen
anything
like the carnage in that car.

“Why is no one asking the most obvious question?” Devi demanded, and Grayson shushed her with a sharp look. “Why the hell would a normal couple just pull onto the side of the road and rip their own throats out? I don't even see how it's physically possible!”

Finn accepted the water bottle from Reese but hardly sipped from it before passing it to me. “They hadn't been normal for a long time. And they probably weren't a couple.”

“But they
were
possessed.” Maddock's voice was so soft that at first I didn't even register the words. “They'd already started to degenerate.”

Devi frowned. “I didn't notice anything weird about them. Other than their mutilated throats.”

“Their fingers were too long.” Finn exhaled slowly and propped his rifle over his left shoulder. “And their chins were too pointy.” He glanced at Maddock, who nodded to confirm some unspoken concern; Maddy and Finn had known each other for so long that sometimes they each seemed to know what the other was thinking. Which left the rest of us in the dark. “The mutations were subtle. They'd be hard to detect, especially under all that blood.”

“How did you two notice?” I asked, passing the water bottle to Devi.

“They've had a lot of practice.” Grayson turned to Maddy and Finn, and her eyes held a profound sadness that seemed to stretch even beyond the scope of the carnage we'd just discovered. I started to ask what she meant and how she knew that, but—

“Okay, but how do you know they weren't a couple?” Devi demanded, frustration sharpening the ends of her words.

Maddy shrugged. “Demons don't make commitments unless they need to blend in.” Like Grayson's parents, whose simulation of a human marriage had allowed them to breed her and her older brother as future hosts to be possessed at maturity. “And there's no one to blend in with in the badlands.”

Devi rolled her eyes. “That doesn't mean any—”

“We should get going, unless you all want to sleep in the open tonight.” Finn swung his rifle down and aimed it at the ground, then headed for the cargo truck, where Mellie and Tobias sat snacking on the bench seat while Anabelle leaned on the open passenger's-side door.

“What's got his gun sling in a twist?” Devi grumbled while we watched Finn walk off.

Maddy accepted the bottle from her and drained the last inch of water. “He's being cautious. The blood's still wet, which means that whatever bodies the demons are wearing now, they're probably still close.” Maddock gestured toward our vehicles, urging us all forward, and I jogged ahead of the group to catch up with Finn.

“Hey. You okay?”

“Yeah,” Finn said, too quickly to have given the answer any thought. “I just haven't seen anything that gruesome in a really long time.”

“Wait.” I reached for his arm and pulled him to a stop facing me. “How long is a really long time?” When had he
ever
seen something that gruesome? “What are you and Maddock not telling us?”

Finn shot an anxious glance at the others over my shoulder, then lowered his voice. “If it were my secret, I'd tell you, but there are things Maddy's not ready to talk about.” His conflicted gaze begged me to understand. “But it has nothing to do with whatever happened in that car. That dead couple just…they remind him of something.”

“Something you saw too,” I guessed. Because Maddy and Finn were never apart.

“Yeah, but…” His shrug made him look vulnerable, in spite of his soldier's powerful build and the rifle slung over one shoulder, and I wanted to pull him into a hug.

“Just because you didn't have a body at the time doesn't mean you went through any less than he did.” Finn had spent countless nights curled up in the sleeping roll next to mine, listening to stories about my mother's escalating abuse and neglect while a demon Mellie and I knew nothing about had ravaged her body and devoured her soul. I wanted Finn to trust me enough to let me return the favor. “Whatever it is, it's your childhood trauma too,” I insisted.

“But not like it is his.”

“You know you can tell me anything, right?” I whispered as the footsteps at my back grew louder.

“Yes.” Finn pulled me into a hug to speak directly into my ear, and in spite of the grim circumstances, the feel of his body pressed against mine made my pulse rush. “And as soon as Maddock is ready to talk, I'll tell you everything.”

Before I could argue, we were overtaken by the group again.

When we pulled back onto the abandoned highway, Mellie rode in the SUV so she could stretch out for a nap on the third-row bench seat, and Tobias sat in the truck between Anabelle and me, while Finn drove.

I wasn't sure how to approach the questions we needed him to answer, but Anabelle—bless her heart—was finally in her element for the first time since we'd escaped from New Temperance.

“How old are you, Tobias?” she asked, and I could hear teacher-Ana in her voice again.

“Almost seven,” he said around a mouthful of chocolate, which Devi had vehemently objected to “wasting” on a kid.

“What grade are you in?”

“Second.”

“I used to teach second grade!” Anabelle said, and when Tobias's eyes widened, she laughed. “I don't look much like a teacher without my cassock, do I?”

Tobias shook his head and sucked the bit of chocolate on his tongue.

It had taken Anabelle nearly a month in the badlands to finally give up her Church robes in favor of a pair of jeans and a few T-shirts we'd liberated from our first supply raid, and she still didn't quite look comfortable in the causal clothes.

“Look, I can prove it.” Ana held out her right hand to show him the brand on the back—four stylized, intertwined columns of flame, each representing one of the sacred obligations of the people to the Church. Together, those individual flames formed the symbolic blaze with which the Church claimed to have rid the world of the demon plague.

Though, as it turned out, that was a lie, the brand was a lie, and pretty much everything the Church had ever told us was a lie.

But Tobias didn't know that. His eyes widened when he saw the brand, and trust opened his expression in a way that even chocolate hadn't been able to.

Anabelle set him a little more at ease with a few funny stories from her days as a teacher, and then she gently switched gears. “Where did you go to school, Tobias?”

“At the Day School.”

“Which day school? Where are you from, sweetie? Solace? Diligencia?” Those were the two closest cities, other than New Temperance, and we knew for a fact that he hadn't come from my hometown, because Anabelle would have recognized a second grader, even if he hadn't been in her class.

“Verity,” he said at last, and Anabelle's gaze snapped up to meet mine over his head, while Finn stiffened on the seat next to me. Verity was more than a thousand miles west of New Temperance, in the mountains of what was once called Colorado.

I'd never heard of anyone traveling so far, except as part of an armed Church caravan. How the hell had a little boy wound up so far from his hometown, with two possessed adults who were not his biological parents?

“Tobias, there were two people inside the car we found you next to,” Anabelle said, her voice almost fragile with tension. “Were those your parents?”

He nodded again. “They picked me over all the other boys at the children's home.” His small chest puffed out with pride. “They said I could live with them in their house. Out east.”

Chills raced the length of my spine, then settled into my stomach. Tobias's new “parents” couldn't have adopted him without a parenting license. Were they unable to have children of their own? Had they adopted him for the same reason my mom had given birth to Melanie and me? If so, why would they rip out their own throats so soon after the adoption—much too soon for either of them to inherit their newly adopted host?

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.