Читать книгу The Flame Never Dies - Rachel Vincent - Страница 10

FIVE

“No.” Panic tightened my throat as the sentinel focused his destructive zeal on the child I’d committed all of Anathema to helping. The child I’d begun to think of as an older version of my unborn niece or nephew—an innocent, dependent upon us for survival. “No. He’s just a kid.”

“Tobias was my nephew,” Eli said, and shock surged like fire through my veins. I hadn’t told him the boy’s name. “Then an Unclean raiding party ambushed our division four days ago and took him. You’ve been traveling in the company of a demon, Nina Kane.”

I glanced at Tobias, expecting the child to deny the accusation. But then, he probably didn’t even understand what he was being accused of. “We found him on the side of the road. He’d been abandoned. Left to die.”

“He wasn’t left. He was bait,” Eli insisted.

“No.” I stepped toward Tobias, intending to shield him with my body, but Eli pulled me back again, and this time Finn didn’t object. I jerked free of the sentinel’s grip and reached for Tobias.

“Nina.” Finn suddenly turned and aimed his rifle at the child, backing slowly toward me and away from Tobias. “Eli’s right. The kid’s possessed.”

I froze. If anyone would know for sure, it’d be Finn. All he had to do was give a little psychic push in Tobias’s direction—as if to take over the child’s body—and he would only meet resistance if something else was already occupying that space.

A demon.

“But . . .” My pulse raced even as I tried to deny what I was hearing. A demon traveling in the company of exorcists, and not one of us had realized? How was that even possible? We hadn’t suspected him because . . . “Demons don’t take over children’s bodies,” I mumbled, still trying to come to terms with what I was hearing. “Everyone knows that.” The limitations were too great. The hosts failed to mature properly. Degeneration came much faster.

Tobias smiled slowly, eerily, and chills crawled across my skin. There was nothing left of the little boy we’d spent the past two days with. “Which is exactly why you’d never suspect a child.” His gaze—his very awareness—appeared to age right in front of me, and suddenly his chubby cheeks seemed an absurd and disturbing disguise.

“He’s your nephew?” I asked Eli, without taking my gaze from the pint-sized demon. No wonder the nomads were following us. We were traveling with the human husk of one of their children.

“He was,” Eli corrected, and I could practically feel the tension in his bearing. I could hear it in every word he spoke. “Until four days ago.”

Four days. That meant his division of the Lord’s Army—whatever that was—had been raided the very day Anathema had turned south to leave the New Temperance area. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

“You weren’t leading us to Verity, were you?” My words echoed in the empty foyer, my voice deep and still with the weight of the question. I knew Verity was out west, but without a map I’d never realized the child had led us off course. “Where were you taking us?”

Tobias’s smile decayed with a cloying sweetness, like fruit gone bad. “Ask your boyfriend.”

Finn cursed so passionately the words actually compromised his aim. Not that he would shoot a demon unless he had no other choice.

“Finn?” I said, but his jaw remained clenched.

“I didn’t recognize you at first,” Tobias said, still watching Finn, and even his speech sounded different. Ageless. His voice was infinity, granted sound. “Where did you find such a pretty host?”

Finn bristled at the comparison of his incorporeal state to that of a demon, but I was too startled by the implication to be offended for him. Tobias knew about Finn.

How the hell could he know? We’d been so careful not to reveal Finn’s uniquely incorporeal state in front of the monster we’d mistaken for a child.

“Identify yourself,” Finn whispered, and there was something strange in the demand. Some ageless formality, as if the words carried more power—more imperative—than I could possibly understand.

“Don’t you recognize me, child?” Tobias’s small brows arched over eyes that had once shone with human joy and innocence, and the irony was staggering.

“Aldric,” Finn said, and it didn’t sound like a guess. “And who was that?” He tossed his head at the man Eli had killed with the crowbar.

“Meshara. And you know how she abhors wearing the male form.”

“Finn?” My hands opened and closed, my left palm burning with the flames my body wanted to unleash, and I was suddenly hyperaware of every opportunity I’d had to burn this Aldric from Tobias’s young form. I’d given him my bedroll. I’d sung to him in the cab of the truck and shared my chocolate ration with him. He’d slept inches from my sister.

“What’s happening, Finn? Where was he leading us?” I hadn’t felt so distressingly uninformed since I’d discovered that my own mother was possessed.

Eli stepped closer on my right, crowbar still ready to swing. “He was taking you to Pandemonia.”

The name was unfamiliar, but I knew the meaning of the word.

Pandemonia.

All demons.

My chills became a full-body quaking I had to fight to restrict to my insides. “A city full of the Unclean?” In truth, all the surviving US cities were being governed by demons in the guise of Church officials, but a city populated by demons, advertising its presence with its very name? “When the Church finds out, they will wipe your demon city from the map.”

Aldric laughed, and the sound seemed to freeze as it slid down my spine. “She’s adorable, Finn. One doesn’t usually find such naïveté in an exorcist.”

Naïveté? “The Church knows?” The very existence of Pandemonia was a threat to the Unified Church’s biggest secret. Why would they let the city stand?

The answer came as soon as I’d thought the question. Because they can’t take it down. If the Church could raze Pandemonia, it would.

“Why are you here?” Finn demanded.

“Why do you think? He wants to see Maddock.” Aldric’s eerie smile slid my way. “He wants to meet all of Maddy’s little friends. Especially the exorcists.”

“Who’s he?” Eli asked, and if he hadn’t, I would have. But we got no answer. Whoever “he” was, he was obviously a demon, and his interest in the exorcist members of Anathema was painfully clear. Exorcists made much stronger, hardier, longer-lasting hosts than did normal people. Which was why my mother had chosen an exorcist to be my father—so that the child she raised to be her next host would be as durable as possible.

“He’ll never see Maddock again,” Finn growled. “And neither will you.” He turned to me. “Nina?”

I lifted my left hand, already cradling its flame.

“Grayson’s transitioning,” Aldric said, and I froze in the middle of my first step toward him, confused by the non sequitur. “No matter where you go, degenerates will flock to her, and he will follow them to you. How do you think we found you?” The child-demon nodded at the corpse of his former peer—obviously the other half of “we.”

“We’ll fry everyone he sends after us,” Finn promised.

“And your sister?” Aldric turned to me. “Is Melanie an exorcist? Will her baby be one?”

“Stay away from my sister and her—”

Finn lifted his rifle, revising his aim.

Aldric spread his chubby arms, inviting Finn to shoot. “Go ahead.” His focus found me and lingered. He looked . . . hungry. “I’m due for an upgrade anyway.”

Surely he was bluffing. It wasn’t easy for a disembodied demon to claim a healthy, conscious human host. But I wasn’t confident enough to bet on that, and neither was Finn.

“Nina!” Finn glanced at my hand, and then his gaze skipped to the demon.

I flipped a mental switch, and a handful of flickering flames kindled in my palm.

Aldric’s grin widened—a farce of childhood joy. “Kastor is going to love her.”

“Kastor?” I said, and Finn gave me the smallest, subtlest shake of his head. The “he” from Pandemonia who wanted to see Maddock was Kastor?

Finn looked sick. I’d told him in confidence that Kastor—whose name the former Deacon of New Temperance had invoked to scare us—had stolen Grayson’s brother from a Church caravan. But Finn had never mentioned that he knew this demon that other demons feared!

“You told her about Kastor?” Aldric said, then he read the answer in my expression. “You haven’t told her. Yet she knows something. . . .”

“Kastor is the wolf,” I said. And we were the sheep.

At least, that’s how Deacon Bennett had put it. She’d seen the Unified Church as a shepherd, slaughtering only the sheep they needed to survive, while the wolf, she’d claimed, would butcher us indiscriminately.

“Yes, the wolf.” Aldric’s eyes narrowed as they studied me. “I don’t suppose you own a red hooded riding cloak?”