The Flame Never Dies

by Rachel Vincent

  “I’m going to kill you,” I said through clenched teeth, glaring into eyes that had seen my most intimate moments of triumph and despair. Eyes that had laughed with me and cried with me and fallen closed in the bed next to me every night for fifteen years.

  Eyes that now held nothing of my sister’s light or love or beauty.

  Meshara laughed and let go of my chin. “No, you won’t, because even though I’m willing to kill this kid just to watch you scream, you’re not. You’re going to let me drive you straight into hell on just the chance that you might find an opportunity to save this baby, because hope is a disease festering inside you, compromising your aim and crippling your logic.”

  “You’re right about all of that.” I twisted in my seat until I felt the jagged bit of plastic against my wrists again. “But you’re wrong about the timing. You’ve had two contractions in the five or six minutes since you got back into the car.” She might not be able to feel them, but I could see them. “You’ve probably been having them for hours. You’re not going to make it to Pandemonia before the baby comes.”

  “The hell I’m not!” The first thread of anxiety laced her voice. Meshara shifted into gear and slammed her foot down on the gas.

  I sawed at the nylon cord as fast as I could while we barreled down the road, terrified all over again every time she rubbed her eyes. Something was wrong, beyond the surprise contractions. The numbness, blurry vision, and hearing loss were not part of a normal birth.

  “You can’t drive while you’re in labor, whether you can feel it or not.” I tried to remember everything Melanie had ever told me about the process. “You could vomit. At some point your water is going to break. And you might lose control of your bladder and bowels.”

  Meshara swerved around an ancient three-car pileup, and my shoulder slammed into the window again. “Okay. That’s disgusting. But at least I won’t be able to feel or smell it.” She stomped on the gas again, and the SUV bumped over a huge crack in the pavement. “That’s the only good thing about this stupid, failing body.”

  “Why can’t you feel it?” Blood trickled down my wrist, but I kept sawing at the cord.

  “Something’s wrong with your sister.” She squinted at the road. “Nothing feels right. Nothing tastes right. I can hardly hear you.” She turned to look at me, and it took a second for her eyes to focus. “If I’d known Melanie was sick, I’d have picked Anabelle, human shield or not.”

  Fear crawling up my spine, I sawed harder at my bindings. Something was seriously wrong. “Melanie was fine until you pushed her out of her own body. Something’s wrong with you.”

  Meshara shook her head, leaning as close to the windshield as she could get, obstructed by both the baby and the steering wheel. “Demons have no bodies of our own in your world, which means we’re at the mercy of human physiology.” She finally eased up on the gas pedal. “Looks like you were right about my not making it to Pandemonia, but labor isn’t the problem. This body is failing. Fast.”

  My mind raced as the car began to swerve slowly, erratically, while she blinked furiously. “Are you still going numb?”

  “Can’t feel the wheel at all now,” Meshara confirmed. Then she stomped experimentally on the gas, and the car shot forward again. “Can’t feel the pedals either. And my tongue is tingling.” She turned to look at me, and the car slowed again. “What the hell is wrong with your sister?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe this is what happens when a demon goes into labor.” Had this happened to my mother? To Grayson’s? How could it—they’d both survived to have a second in the same body.

  Meshara shook her head, and the car swerved again. “It’s not. I’ve hardly tasted anything in days.”

  I gave up sawing at the nylon cord and pulled my arms apart with as much force as I could summon. The cord creaked and several individual strands popped, but the binding didn’t give. “Days?” Details spun through my head, and one of them triggered a vague memory. Someone else had complained about taste….“How long, exactly?”

  “Since a couple of days after I took Melanie’s body.”

  And suddenly I remembered. Tobias/Aldric had started complaining about the way his food tasted a couple of days after we’d found him. Could he have been sick too? If I hadn’t exorcised him, would he have lost his sight and hearing?

  Two demons getting sick didn’t bother me in the least—surely sick was one step closer to dead—but could Meshara’s illness affect the baby?

  And why hadn’t any of the rest of us caught it?

  “What the hell is happening to me?” Meshara demanded, panic trailing from her words as she squinted at the windshield. “It started out as dull taste buds and some tingling, and suddenly everything I like about being human is just”—she threw her hands into the air, and the car swerved again—“draining away.”

  I gave my arms another pull, and more strands of nylon popped. “Stop the car!”

  “What?” She squinted even harder as the SUV barreled between an off-kilter concrete barricade and the rusted hulk of an abandoned bus.

  “Stop the car before you get us both killed!”

  Instead, Meshara stomped on the gas, and the SUV lurched forward again while she alternately squinted and blinked furiously at the road, mumbling about making it to Pandemonia before my sister’s rotting hull of a body gave out.

  “Look out!” I shouted as she swerved around the burned-out frame of what might once have been a police car, and we careened toward a three-foot-high buckle in the concrete. Meshara screamed and took her foot off the gas, but she couldn’t hit the brake before the SUV slammed into the jagged fold of pavement.

  I flew forward, and my seat belt felt like an iron bar swung straight at my chest. For several seconds I couldn’t breathe. I blinked, but all I could see was the crumpled hood of the SUV, which had popped open to block the whole windshield.

  I twisted in my seat to find my sister slumped over, the steering wheel pressing a dent into the rounded top of her belly. “Melanie!” I cried, in the instant before I remembered that Mellie was dead and her body was possessed. And that her baby’s odds weren’t much better.

  “Meshara!” Her eyes fluttered open. She moaned, and her eyes closed again without ever focusing. “Hey!” Terrified and furious, I jerked my arms apart as hard as I could, and finally the cord popped, releasing my hands. “Meshara.” I flexed my fingers until the feeling came back, ignoring the blood caked on my wrists, and then I gently pushed my sister’s shoulders back until she sat upright in her seat. The demon opened her eyes again. She squinted, trying to focus. “Are you okay? Can you feel the baby?”

  “Can’t feel anything.” Her speech was thick and labored, as if she’d finally lost all feeling in her tongue. “Whass happening to me? I can hardly see you.”

  Fighting pins and needles of my own from the bindings, I lifted her shirt to expose the baby bump and found the top of her belly already beginning to bruise from the collision with the wheel. And as I watched, her stomach began to contract again, her muscles defining a tighter shape beneath her flesh.

  “You’re having another contraction.” How long had it been since the previous one? “Don’t move!” I shouted, to be sure she could hear me.

  I pulled my feet up onto my seat so I could free them, but the nylon knots were too tight and my fingers were still tingling.

  “I gotta get outta this body.” Her words were still labored, as if she were speaking around a mouthful of marbles.

  “You’d just get sucked back into hell.”

  “Thass where you’ll send me anyway.” She stared slightly to the left of my head, and I realized she couldn’t see the difference between my face and the headrest. “At leass I won’t see the fire coming.”

  Nor could she feel the baby kicking or her own bladder filling. She couldn’t taste cayenne and hadn’t been able to smell Grayson’s bread either.

  As the pieces began to come together in my head, I twisted onto my knees and leaned bet
ween the front seats to pull Eli’s backpack closer. “Meshara,” I said, rummaging in the zipper compartment. Surely he had some kind of small blade.

  But if he had a pocketknife, he obviously kept it in his actual pocket. There was nothing sharp in his backpack at all.

  I dropped back into the passenger’s seat, scanning the car for anything sharp enough to cut through nylon, and had almost decided to contort my body in order to use the broken armrest on my ankles too, when my gaze fell on the keys in the ignition.

  I snatched the ring and identified the key with the sharpest-looking teeth, then began sawing on the bindings around my ankles. “Okay, so you were fine for the first couple of days in Mellie’s body, and Tobias was fine for the first couple of days we had him…”

  “Tobias?”

  “Aldric,” I reminded her. “But after that, you both started to lose your sense of taste and the sensation in your skin.” I stopped sawing long enough to inspect the damaged nylon and was pleased with my progress.

  “This is all your fault!” Meshara’s words were slushy, but her tone was sharp. “I caught this plague from you and your friends!”

  I worked the key back and forth as fast as I could, trying to ignore the friction burning into the pad of my right thumb. “The only people who’ve caught…whatever this thing is, are you and Aldric. Just the demons, Meshara.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Aldric and I were in Tobias and Micah for two days before we infiltrated your group, and we were fine.” Her words slid one into the next, and I had to listen closely to understand. “We got this from your people, and I wish I’d never laid eyes on any of you. I’d rather be crawling around in hell than trapped in a human body that doesn’t work.”

  “In that case, I hope your little plague spreads! Humanity couldn’t ask for much more than demons voluntarily withdrawing from our world.” My hand froze as the last words fell from my lips, and I realized what I’d just said.

  Humanity couldn’t ask for much more than that. A disease that affects only demons, depriving them of the very senses they’d invaded our world in order to experience? That was too specific—too targeted—a plague to have natural origins.

  Meshara’s illness wasn’t merely a miracle, it was a miracle of science.

  We were looking at the kind of manufactured illness that would have taken researchers years—maybe decades—to engineer back before the war. The kind of illness that was completely beyond the abilities of what few scientists and facilities had survived the restructuring of the United States from a democratic republic to a demonic theocracy.

  Which led me back to “miracle.”

  I only knew of one organization in the business of making miracles happen, scientific or otherwise.

  The Unified Church.

  My hands fell away from my ankles. The keys thumped to the floorboard. “It is a plague….”

  “What?” Meshara demanded, furiously blinking her unfocused eyes, while I reached down for the keys.

  “You’ve been poisoned by the Unified Church!” I resumed sawing, reinvigorated not just by the stunning—if puzzling—realization, but by the fact that Meshara’s stomach was clenching and twisting again in its primitive prenatal dance. The baby was running out of time, and I had no idea what to do.

  “Never been to church,” she mumbled, and I could hardly hear her over the racing of my own pulse. “Never even been in one of their cities.”

  I gave the cord around my ankles one last, vigorous attack, and the nylon finally gave, freeing my ankles. I was out of the vehicle in an instant, but I had to brace myself against the roof of the SUV while I regained my balance after having been tied up for at least twelve hours. From outside the car, I could see the damage from the wreck in its mangled, smoking glory.

  The SUV was totaled.

  My heart hammered so hard I could feel each individual beat. We were stuck in the middle of an unmaintained prewar highway, with no gun, very little food, and no shelter to speak of, other than the smoking ruin of our wrecked vehicle.

  “Okay. We need to get you into the backseat,” I said as I rounded the car, with no idea whether or not she could still hear me. Her speech was getting harder to understand, and as far as I could tell, she was almost completely blind. Seeing my sister’s body fail was a special kind of torture, even though she was no longer in it. She wasn’t even sixteen years old. She did not deserve what I’d let happen to her, and the worst was yet to come.

  If the loss of sensation limited Meshara’s control over her uterine muscles, Mellie’s baby was in big trouble.

  On the driver’s side, I climbed onto the middle bench and began throwing things over the headrests into the backseat, keeping my eyes out for my sister’s labor and delivery bag.

  “Meshara, can you hear me?” I spread the only blanket I’d found across the bench seat.

  “Unfortunately,” she called, slurring the syllables.

  “Come on.” I backed out of the vehicle and took her by the arm, overwhelmed by my mental list of things we needed but didn’t have. Not the least of which was a midwife. And a soul. “I need you to stand up. Can you walk?”

  “What’s the point?” she demanded, staring over my shoulder, and with a fresh bolt of terror I realized she’d gone completely blind. This plague, whatever it was, was progressing even faster than the birth.

  “The point is that if you don’t get your ass up and deliver my sister’s baby, I won’t have any choice but to roast you alive, then cut the baby out of you!” But I really, really didn’t want to do that.

  I’d held it together so far because I had no other choice. Because Mellie’s baby was still depending on me. But if I had to perform an amateur caesarean only to watch the child die without a soul, I would lose it.

  How much more could the world expect me to survive?

  Meshara didn’t resist when I turned her legs toward the road, but she didn’t help either.

  “You’re going to cut the baby out?” Her laughter sounded forced, but skeptical. “With what? A car key?”

  “Listen to me.” I pulled her out of the driver’s seat, and she wobbled for a moment on legs she obviously couldn’t feel. “If you don’t bring that baby into this world safely, I will dig through the car for a glass bottle or a hunk of metal or a tool from the tire changing kit until I find something that will cut through human flesh.”

  Meshara tried to shrug, but her shoulders hardly moved. “I can’t feel anything anyway.”

  I had to clench my teeth to keep from screaming in frustration, afraid to attract degenerates while I was still trying to bring Mellie’s baby into the world.

  “Okay. Let’s make a deal.” I half tugged, half carried her three steps to the middle row, where I helped her sit on the edge of the bench seat, facing me. I looked straight into eyes that couldn’t see me, hoping she could still hear me well enough to understand what I was about to offer. “You help me deliver the baby, and I’ll take you to Pandemonia so Kastor can give you a new body.”

  She rolled her unfocused eyes. “You’re an exorcist. You would never let a human die so a demon could have a new body.”

  I took her by the shoulders and leaned in close, even though she couldn’t see me. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for a chance to hold Melanie’s baby.” To make sure that the only thing the poor kid would feel in its horrifyingly short life was love.

  And heaven help anyone who got in my way.

  “If you don’t believe me, look back through her memories,” I demanded. “I risked prison to steal food for her. I risked my life to rescue her from the Church. Mellie’s baby is all I have left of her, and the child won’t live long. Maybe an hour. Give me that hour, and I’ll give you another human lifetime.”

  “Swear.”

  “I already—”

  “Swear on your sister’s name,” she whispered, and her tongue seemed to be in its own way. “Swear on her baby’s life.”

  “I swear on the name of my only siste
r, Melanie Kane. I swear on the soul of her dead lover, Adam Yung. And I swear on the life of their unborn child. Please, Meshara. Help me deliver this baby.”

  “Fine,” she relented. “But I can hardly move my own tongue.”

  That would have to be enough.

  “So, what do we do?”

  “Um…” I propped both hands on my hips, wishing for the millionth time in the past half hour that I’d paid more attention to the endless series of childbirth discussions. But I’d thought that even if I was present when the baby came, my role would be that of cheerleader.

  In truth, I’d always assumed the aunt’s chief duty in the whole affair would be cuddling the newborn. I was highly prepared for that.

  “Okay, scoot all the way in and lean back against the door. Make sure it’s locked. Then I need you to pull up your shirt and put your hand on your stomach, and concentrate, to see if you can feel the contractions. Can you do that?”

  She couldn’t, and the fact that I had to help her scoot across the bench seat didn’t bode well for her ability to push a baby out through girl parts she couldn’t feel.

  While Meshara scowled at a stomach she couldn’t see, I threw open the back hatch and started going through everything Eli had packed before the demon had felled him with his own crowbar.

  Melanie’s delivery bag wasn’t there; it must have stayed in the truck. But I found a clean maternity T-shirt in her personal bag and set that aside, mentally earmarking it for the baby’s first—and likely last—swaddle.

  Eli’s duffel held not one, but two sharp knives, each stored in its own handmade leather sheath, and I wanted to kick myself for not hopping around the car to search the luggage when I’d needed to cut through my ankle bindings. I slid the cleaner of the two knives into the largest of my cargo pockets, intending to use it to cut the umbilical cord.

  Cutting the baby out was a last resort. But now it was actually possible, should it prove necessary.

  I was rummaging through Reese’s bag full of spare parts for a flashlight and some batteries when Meshara called out from the middle row, and her words were now nearly atonal, as well as mushy. “I think it’s happening again.”