And their clothing should have been in much worse shape. Yes, the degenerates we’d just exorcised were deformed in the typical ways and covered in dust and grime, but their clothes were only ripped, rather than shredded. They were dusty, rather than matted with mud, blood, and gore.
Something was…strange.
Reese knelt next to me. “They almost look like uniforms of some sort.”
“That’s it!” I stood so suddenly my head spun. “Jail uniforms.” The jogging pants and T-shirts looked just like what prisoners at the New Temperance jail wore. Except that these didn’t have the words New Temperance Jail printed on the back. “They’re generic jail uniforms.”
“They were prisoners?” Devi’s tone bled skepticism. “From where?” There was no more federal prison system of the sort the United States had had before the war, but each city had its own jail. “Verity’s the closest city, right? And we’re still…what? Half a day away?”
“At least,” Finn mumbled, and I noticed that he’d backed away from the monster to stand near Maddock, his rifle aimed at the ground.
They knew something.
“It doesn’t make sense for their bodies to be this deformed but their clothes to be this new. Or for them to have traveled this far in a pack,” Reese said.
However they’d escaped from wherever they had been kept, they shouldn’t have remained in a single group long enough to have been drawn to the same place. Degenerates were solitary creatures no longer sane enough to choose their company.
“They’re not prisoners,” Maddock said at last, and I looked up to find Finn frowning at him—a wordless warning to shut up. “They’re bloodhounds. Kastor’s bloodhounds.”
Finn closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.
“They’re what?” Devi turned to Maddy and Finn with tension in every line of her frame. “Okay, it’s past time to come clean. How do you know so much about Kastor? Why is he looking for you?”
“Why have you been lying?” I added softly, but my question was for Finn, not for Maddock.
“We haven’t been lying.” Finn’s intense eye contact begged me to believe him. “We’ve just been leaving things out. Private things.”
Things Maddock didn’t want to talk about.
Finn wasn’t withholding information on his own behalf, but on Maddy’s. He’d do anything to protect Maddock, just like he’d do anything to protect me. We were the only family he had.
“That is such bullsh—” Devi swallowed the rest of the word in surprise when I put one hand on her arm.
“You were his prisoners, weren’t you?” I said, and everyone except Maddock turned to look at me. “But I’m guessing Finn only stayed because Maddock was there.”
How else would Maddy know so much about Pandemonia? Why else would Kastor be after him?
“We escaped two weeks before my seventeenth birthday.” Maddock spoke so softly I could hardly hear him. “Kastor knew I was starting to transition.”
“You were supposed to be his host, weren’t you?” Devi said, and there was no hint of anger left in her voice. She sounded horrified.
Maddy nodded. “Finn got me out. Just in time.”
Devi stepped toward him and slid her arms around his neck. She laid her head on his shoulder and held him, comforting him the same way I’d seen him calm her down countless times. When he wrapped his arms around her in return, my vision blurred beneath tears.
I couldn’t even imagine what Maddock had been through at the hands of someone the Church had labeled a monster. Surely Finn’s lack of a body had been a blessing for once.
“How did he get you in the first place?” Reese asked.
“I’m guessing the Church got to him first, but then Kastor stole him.” And I was pretty sure I was right, considering what I already knew about Carey James. “Kastor probably raided a Church caravan.”
“The specifics don’t matter,” Finn said before anyone else could question my theory. “What matters is that we got out, but now Kastor knows we’re in the badlands, thanks to the Church’s news broadcasts, and he knows how to find us, thanks to Grayson’s transition.” Finn waved his bad hand at the corpses littering the ground. “That’s why he let out the bloodhounds.”
“That part I don’t understand,” I admitted. “I’m assuming he calls them bloodhounds because he uses them like bloodhounds—to hunt. But how is that possible?”
“Because he doesn’t just use them like dogs. He trains them like dogs.” Finn slung his rifle over one shoulder by the strap, and when Maddy showed no desire to take over the explanation, he continued. “It’s a punishment and a scare tactic—one of the ways Kastor maintains control. People who piss him off get locked up until they start to degenerate. Once they’re too far gone to take another host, he throws them into the ‘pound’ with the other hounds and he starts training them.”
“You can’t train a degenerate,” Devi insisted. “They hunt humans by nature.”
“You can if you start when they’re only a little crazy,” Maddock whispered. “But the training deteriorates along with their minds.”
“It’s mostly teaching them not to attack the possessed,” Finn elaborated. “He’s had marginal success training a few of the fresher ones to corner potential hosts without attacking them, but that bit’s inconsistent.”
“So, he sent them after us expecting them to kill us?” Reese said. “I thought he wanted us alive.”
“He does,” Maddy said. “He sent them after us expecting us to kill them. The whole point of the exercise was to point him in the right direction. Like bloodhounds flushing out prey from the bush.”
“But if these are the hounds, that means…” Devi didn’t seem interested in finishing the thought, so I did.
“That means the hunters will be coming.” And they wouldn’t be degenerates, they’d be demons in their prime. “We need to be long gone when they get here.”
“I want a horse.” Grayson slid her knife through the belly of the last trout on her pile. One of Eli’s cousins had told us what kind of trout it was, but I couldn’t remember the fish’s proper name, because we’d heard twenty of them in the two hours Finn, Grayson, and I had spent practicing new fishing techniques that morning. “Brother Isaiah’s right,” she continued. “Horses don’t require gas.”
She looked up from the fish hemorrhaging its innards on her plastic mat to where Eli was brushing his large tan-and-white mottled mount across the campgrounds. Several feet away Melanie sat with a group of women roughly our mother’s age, listening to them discuss their own childbirth experiences while they cleaned wild greens and a few thin, edible roots.
“In the winter horses need hay,” Reese pointed out with weary patience from beneath the hood of the SUV. In the five days we’d been traveling with Eli’s division of the Lord’s Army—only one of several, according to Brother Isaiah—Grayson had become fascinated by them and by the skill with which they subsisted off the neglected American landscape. “And horses can’t carry as much as a car trunk.”
“Yes, but if and when they die, you can eat them and wear them.” Grayson ripped the innards from her fish and dropped them with a splat into the bucket we were sharing. “You can’t eat or wear a car.”
I refrained from pointing out that Eli’s group utilized both horses and vehicles, because that wasn’t the point. At least, not for Reese.
“And you can’t drive a horse eighty-five miles an hour to escape a contingent of Church exorcists.” He held the SUV’s dipstick up to the sunlight to check the oil level.
“True.” Grayson sliced the head from her fish with two confident cuts. “But you can’t feed apples and carrots to a car. A car cannot love you back or lick your face. A car is just a hunk of metal that can never need or be needed!” She stood and dropped her fish onto the pile of trout ready to be grilled, and her brown eyes lit up when Eli waved to her from across the park, carrying a leather pouch loaded with dull butter knives.
“Which is it you want?”
Reese called after Grayson as she took off for her knife-throwing lesson, leaving me to fumble my way through the last fish alone. “You want to eat a horse or be friends with it? You can’t have it both ways!”
When Grayson didn’t respond, Reese ducked beneath the hood of the SUV and let loose a soft string of heartily felt expletives.
“There was probably a better way to handle that.” I pulled the head off my trout and shuddered when its guts tumbled onto the ground perilously close to my boots. I was fine with burning the souls from deformed demons, but pulling the innards from fish never failed to make me cringe. “She loves you, Reese.”
“I know.” He unhooked the metal prop and let the hood fall closed. “But Eli can drop a degenerate with a crowbar. From horseback. He can live off the land and teach her hymns I’ve never heard of and stop her from poisoning herself with the wrong mushrooms. I can’t do any of that.”
“You could learn,” I pointed out. The rest of us were learning, but the more interest Grayson took in the Army’s lifestyle, the harder Reese resisted the new knowledge. “But Eli can’t teach her to pluck a demon from the air or scorch it from its human host. You have to play to your strengths.”
He picked up the bucket and held it while I dropped the discarded bits of fish inside. “You think I should help her trigger the transition?”
I shrugged and wiped my hands on a clean scrap of cloth. “Is she ready?”
“Maybe.” There was an odd bit of resistance in his voice.
“You’ve been putting it off. Intentionally,” I guessed, and he glanced at me in surprise. “Why?”
“Because once she transitions, she’ll be able to take care of herself. She won’t need me anymore.”
I stood and angled us so that Reese couldn’t see Eli teaching Grayson to throw butter knives at a tree trunk. “Even if protection was all she wanted from you, keeping her from her true potential will only make her resent you. If she’s really ready”—and based on the number of degenerates we’d been fending off, she was—“the best thing you can do for her is help her reach her potential.”
Reese blinked at me. “Okay, when you say it like that, it sounds kind of reasonable.”
“Good.” I reached up to give him a pat on one enormous shoulder. “Might I suggest sooner rather than later?”
“I’ll tell her tonight. After dinner.”
“Perfect.” I took the bucket of innards from him and waved one hand at the pile of cleaned fish. “I caught and cleaned. You cook and serve.”
“Voilà!” Reese handed Finn and me each a stainless steel camping plate with a raised lip around the edge. Each plate held a grilled trout fillet, a hunk of the flatbread Joanna and her mother had shown us how to make, and a scoop of wilted dandelion greens from the pot Melanie and Anabelle had made under Brother Isaiah’s supervision.
It was the best meal we’d made for ourselves since we’d lost access to New Temperance’s electricity and kitchen appliances.
I grabbed a steel spork from a can of camping utensils and dug in.
“That is impressive,” Devi said from the other side of the circle as Reese loaded two more plates from the foldable steel grill straddling our campfire.
“I made the bread!” Grayson used a knife to slice the last batch into pieces on a tray balanced on her lap. We’d been happy to share several bags of flour with Eli’s people in exchange for a demonstration of what could be done with it even without yeast.
Firelight flickered over Grayson’s wide smile as she handed the next slice to Melanie.
“It smells amazing.” Maddock sat on the ground next to Devi and accepted a plate from Reese.
Melanie frowned and held her bread up to her face, where she gave it a delicate sniff. She looked puzzled. “I don’t smell it.”
“My kingdom for a stick of butter,” Devi said around a bite of fish. “I miss hot buttered bread more than anything.”
Mellie took a tentative bite, then set her bread on her plate and poked at her fish with her spork.
“She’s lost her appetite again?” Finn said from my left. “I thought she was feeling better.”
Melanie leaned forward to give him a rare smile. “I’m fine. The bread’s just kind of…tasteless.” She whispered the last word with an apologetic glance at Grayson, who was oblivious. “Don’t you think?”
“Mine was good.” He’d finished his hunk in three bites. “You don’t like the fish either?”
Melanie shrugged. “Reese is better at killing things than cooking things.”
“I heard that,” Reese said with a self-deprecating smile. “But I think the baby’s messing with your taste buds. Everyone else likes my fish.”
In fact, mine was already half gone. Reese’s experimental salt, pepper, and thyme dry rub was a culinary triumph, in my opinion.
Melanie’s problem probably had nothing to do with the food. She’d been quiet and withdrawn since Tobias had been exposed as a demon, but Eli’s mother had assured us that fatigue was to be expected during the third trimester of her pregnancy. Especially for someone so young, who’d been through so much trauma. So I’d tried to leave her alone, watching her from a distance while she studied everything going on around her with eyes that seemed to grow larger every day.
While I watched Mellie, I’d also been getting to know our gracious hosts. Particularly the elders, who had even more to offer than priceless decades of experience. I felt guilty when I asked Brother Isaiah’s gray-haired wife to show me how she sewed together scraps of leather to make a knife-carrying pack, but not too guilty to notice that her thin, fragile hands shook and she had to hold the materials mere inches from her face to see them.
The elderly man who taught me how to layer kindling and tinder for a proper campfire couldn’t stand straight because of the hunch in his spine, and the sweet old lady who showed me how to prepare rendered animal fat to be used in soap-making had a persistent wet cough.
They were all three in their late sixties, according to Eli, which made them a full decade older than the oldest person I’d ever met in New Temperance, thanks to mandatory soul donations. I didn’t want any of them to die. In fact, the more time I spent with the army’s senior citizens, the harder it became to imagine saying goodbye to them. But if one of them was nearing the conclusion of a natural life span, I was determined to make sure that Melanie’s baby honored the end of one life with the beginning of another.
The only one who seemed to have noticed my sudden interest in the elderly was Finn, and I was afraid to ask if he knew what I was thinking, because then he might ask me what my backup plan was. I couldn’t lie to Finn. I wouldn’t lie to him.
But even as I watched firelight flicker over our joined hands, I knew I wouldn’t let him talk me out of it either.
“Eli!” Grayson called when she spotted the sentinel walking toward his family’s campfire, one of several scattered around the clearing. “Come eat with us! I made bread!”
“Are you sure you have enough?” he asked, already headed our way.
Reese shook his head in the dark, but Grayson jumped up and grabbed Eli’s arm, then pulled him down next to her. “We’re short one plate,” Reese grumbled.
She shrugged. “He can share with me.”
“No, take mine.” Reese shoved the last full plate at Eli. “You’re our guest.”
Finn and I exchanged glances as we chewed in silence, but neither Grayson nor Eli seemed to notice Reese’s irritation. Or the fact that he had no food.
When Eli bowed his head to pray silently over his plate, everyone but Grayson stopped eating to watch.
Grayson bowed her head and closed her eyes.
It wasn’t that the rest of us objected to Eli’s faith. It was that most of us had little of our own after discovering that generations of our ancestors’ souls had been consumed by those claiming to be our spiritual leaders. Everything we’d ever been taught to believe in had been proven not just false, but foul.
The only things
we knew could save us were vigilance and violence. The only people we knew we could count on were those gathered around our campfire.
“What did you pray for?” Maddock asked when Eli looked up, and his thoughtful tone caught my attention. Reese would have asked the same question with sarcasm. Devi would have asked it out of skepticism. But Maddock…
As usual, Maddy was merely curious.
“I was giving thanks and asking the Lord to put more demons in my path so I can strike them down in His name.” Eli took the spork Grayson handed him and dug a flake of fish from his fillet.
Anabelle gaped at him. “You were asking for more demons?”
Eli laughed at her horrified expression. “I wasn’t asking for a second demonic invasion. I just asked the Lord to keep pushing the ones that are already here into my path so I can fulfill my life’s purpose by killing them.”
“You just mean the degenerates, right?” Reese said. “Because you guys seem to need help with Kastor’s people.”
“My fellow sentinels and I are perfectly capable of taking on any of the lions from the pit, but the oldest among us have already served their purpose and the youngest—like Tobias—are not yet ready. I ask only that the worst of the horde be put in my path rather than theirs.”
“Sounds reasonable,” I said. I felt the same way about protecting Mellie.
“But do you really think that’s your purpose?” Devi asked around a bite of bread.
“It’s ours, just like it is yours. There is no more noble pursuit, considering the state of the world. Every demon we strike down is felled through the strength the Lord has bestowed upon us, and—”
“Well, then he bestowed it all wrong.” Reese’s voice was so sharp I actually choked on a bite of greens and had to cough it up.
Eli’s spork clattered onto his plate, his meal suddenly forgotten. “Excuse me?”
The Flame Never Dies Page 10