The Flame Never Dies

by Rachel Vincent

  At his protest, the memory surfaced of my mother trying to possess my body through a frigid, soul-sucking kiss, and I suddenly understood Nedes’s crime.

  “Kastor!” he shouted as hands grabbed for him. They tore his clothes and ripped hair from his head, each fighting for the privilege of hauling one of their own to the kennels, where—I assumed, based on what Finn had told me—Nedes would be locked up until his human host began to degenerate and he devolved into one of Kastor’s hounds.

  “Take Nina Kane to the stables,” Kastor ordered without even looking at me. “Lock her up alone.” With that, he turned his back on the crowd and returned to the loud, lavish party I could hear raging inside, without bothering to make sure his orders were carried out.

  While the crowd hauled a screaming, bleeding Nedes toward the kennels, Felix and Dione tugged me in the opposite direction, toward a stately three-story building crowned with a bell tower, which had probably been the city’s prewar courthouse. The building’s brick exterior might once have been white, but only the hardest-to-reach corners and crevices remained untouched after a century of unchecked graffiti and no structural maintenance at all, that I could see.

  “That was Kastor?” I twisted to glance at the now-empty balcony behind us as the market settled back into its ambient chaos. In spite of the apparent youth of most of his citizens and my understanding that a demon’s appearance said nothing about his strength or his true age, I was surprised by the face Kastor wore. “I expected him to look older.” More like a leader.

  “If he looked old, no one would listen to him,” Dione said. “No one respects the elderly.”

  I frowned as we approached the courthouse. “Human authority figures are always older because they have the most experience.”

  Dione laughed. “That doesn’t make any sense!”

  Felix gave her an exasperated look. “Throughout human history, age has been an indicator of good health and wisdom. Only the strongest and healthiest lived long enough to learn much.”

  “Well, here the younger a demon looks, the more power he has. Only the wealthy and influential can afford to trade in slightly used hosts for brand-new ones,” Dione said. “It’s an expensive lifestyle.”

  And incredibly wasteful.

  “Youth is a status symbol,” I said, and she nodded enthusiastically, as if she’d just taught a dog to speak.

  “Exactly.”

  “But it’s only the appearance of youth. You guys are all ancient, right?”

  “By human understanding, yes. We don’t really have that concept. We have no beginning and no end, so none among us is really old, just like none is truly young.”

  I knew that, but I didn’t truly understand it. I couldn’t imagine something that had always been and would always be, even if the earth were swallowed by a star or frozen into a ball of ice hurtling through the universe.

  But the reverse was not true. Demons seemed to have no problem grasping the concept of impermanence.

  Felix hauled me up the front stairs of the courthouse, and I stared in awe at the designs crawling over the steps, the stone railings, the bricks, and even the windows. Words in ancient languages. Pictures of forgotten lands. In places, just bright blobs of color in seemingly random arrangements. Some of them meant nothing, that I could understand, and others were familiar—if psychologically uncomfortable—renderings of the human condition. I recognized an arm here and an eye there, as if people were buried beneath the stones and the colors and only certain parts of them had managed to fight their way through.

  I’d seen something similar once, in a prewar art book Melanie had borrowed from Adam Yung’s father. The paintings inside were classified as “abstract,” and while some looked like very deliberate swirls of color, others looked like people made of odd shapes and angles.

  Pandemonia’s courthouse seemed to have popped up from the pages of that book, and the longer I looked, the more uncomfortable I became with the images. Strong strokes of red and yellow looked like flames. Crimson blotches looked like blood. Blues and greens and grays became trees, flowers, and storms, yet they were also eyes, bruises, and dead flesh.

  There was too much of…everything. Yet little logic to be found.

  “I don’t think she likes the decor.” Dione pulled open a door painted to look like a window opening into a world made up of fields of fire and skies full of ocean currents that never quite met the flames.

  “Don’t take it personally,” I said. “I haven’t liked anything I’ve seen so far.”

  Felix pulled me through an empty, echoing lobby toward a staircase that spiraled down into an ominous darkness. “So then why did you come?” he asked, pushing me ahead of him onto the first slick-looking marble step.

  “You haven’t figured that out yet?” I glanced at Dione, who’d waited at the top of the stairs. “I’m only here to kill Kastor.”

  The “stables” turned out to be the courthouse basement, which had clearly been retrofitted as a prison after the war. Felix put me in a cell of my own, empty except for a filthy bucket against the back wall. The bars were roughly welded steel, and my cell shared one wall with the pen on my left and one with the pen on my right.

  The only source of light in the long, narrow basement was a series of wall sconces—torches, burning with actual fire—mounted well out of reach on the brick walls. The light wasn’t bright enough to reach the farthest corners, but the flames made the entire huge room seem to flicker. The effect was like being in the castle dungeon from one of the scary stories Melanie had loved as a child.

  Had Maddock been locked up here, waiting for Kastor to take him as a host? Had Finn sat here with him, unseen, his only friend throughout an ordeal that might otherwise have psychologically obliterated a boy taken from everything and everyone he’d ever known?

  How long had they been captives? Maddy had said Finn got him out. But how? Could I possibly effect my own escape without Finn’s body-hopping ability? Had it even helped him, if everyone with a key to the cell was already possessed, thus off-limits to him?

  Grayson wasn’t among the prisoners, and I couldn’t decide whether or not to be happy about that. I couldn’t imagine Kastor selling an exorcist on the auction block, so I was pretty sure that wherever she was, her conditions were better than mine.

  Unless he’d already given her to someone.

  For several minutes after Felix left the stables, I sat at the back of my cell and concentrated on bringing heat into my left hand. That was difficult, with no demons present to trigger the flames, but I finally managed by mentally reliving the moment I’d discovered Meshara in my sister’s body.

  Slowly, carefully, I angled the flames toward my right hand, blistering my palm in the process, and managed to soften the plastic zip tie holding my hands together, so that I could pull it apart.

  The blisters were worth it.

  A quick head count of my fellow prisoners told me there were at least forty of us, and based on the grime that had accumulated on about half of the population, I was guessing prisoner hygiene wasn’t a big priority for our captors. Normally, that would have disgusted and outraged me, but considering that I’d come to spread germs, I considered it a good sign.

  For hours I sat in my cell, ignored by my captors and prevented from distributing the contagion I carried. Kastor was obviously in no hurry to meet with me, and making me wait felt like an obvious display of power.

  I tried to introduce myself to the people in the adjoining cells, but they were too traumatized to tell me more than their names, and after several attempts at further communication, I understood why.

  The human hosts I’d seen up on the auction block had all been young and healthy. Most had been attractive, and they were all relatively clean. They’d obviously recently arrived in Pandemonia, but the prisoners all around me had clearly been in their cells for quite a while. They were grimy and thin. Many were pale and pasty from lack of sunlight. And they were all at least thirty years old.

/>   These were the hosts who hadn’t sold during previous auctions. They were leftovers—the bodies that the poorest and least powerful demons in Pandemonia would have to choose from when their current hosts started to degenerate.

  My suspicion was confirmed when Felix finally came down the stairs again, this time with a customer—a pale, thin woman in a short skirt and what appeared to be an athletic bra. Her knees and elbows had started to stand out from her flesh, and her hair had begun to thin—both signs of early degeneration I recognized in retrospect from seeing the process in my own mother before I’d known she was possessed.

  “The ones on the left are fifty.” Felix gestured to the row of cells across from mine with one outstretched arm. “The ones on the right are between seventy and eighty.” His next gesture encompassed my half of the basement.

  “Not one is worth half that,” the woman spat, as her gaze traveled over the men and women caged across from me. Most of them were in their forties, and they were all filthy and half-starved. “Does fifty cover a shower?”

  Felix shrugged. “You pick one out, and we’ll hose him down for you. Five more will get him deloused.”

  “Outrageous…,” the woman mumbled as she turned to my side of the basement. Her eyes widened when her gaze fell on me.

  I stood and wrapped my hands around the bars at the front of my cage. The woman limped closer and stopped just feet away. Her greedy gaze roamed my body, and I had to stifle a shiver of disgust when she seemed to see right through my clothes to assess what lay beneath. “Can I get this one for eighty?”

  “Hell, no, Tullia. She’s not for—”

  “She’s skinny,” the woman insisted, but I could see the bluff in her face. “I don’t think she’s worth more than seventy-five.”

  “That’s Nina Kane,” Felix snapped, and Tullia’s eyes widened. Then they narrowed as she stepped closer to study my face.

  “Nina Kane the exorcist? From the Church broadcasts?”

  “The very one. She’s not for sale. Kastor’s just keeping her here until he gets around to dealing with her.”

  “He’ll never get around to it,” I said, and they both glanced at me in surprise. Evidently the other prisoners didn’t talk much. “He knows I’ve come to kill him, and he’s afraid.” I stuck my left hand through the bars.

  Felix frowned at my unbound hands. “How did you…?” But the woman was bolder. She stared into my cupped palm as if it might hold the secret to eternal youth, and I let loose the flames waiting just beneath my skin.

  Tullia shrieked and jumped back, but the thin tuft of hair over her brow was already ablaze.

  Felix cursed and smacked at her forehead to smother the flames while Tullia screamed.

  People in the other pens began to murmur softly to their cellmates, as if they’d all just woken up.

  When Felix finally put the fire out, Tullia’s thin bangs were scorched and her forehead was blistered. Fury danced in her dark eyes. Or maybe that was the reflection from the torches.

  “You had that coming.” Felix pulled her farther from my cage. “I told you she was an exorcist. Now pick out a host or stop wasting my time.”

  Tullia growled, then turned to the woman caged across the aisle from me. “Fifty?”

  “Fifty-five with the lice shampoo.”

  “I’ll take her.” The demon woman dug some cash from her sports bra—I didn’t recognize the currency—while Felix unlocked the unlucky host’s cage. He dragged the poor human woman from her cell while she kicked and screamed.

  Tullia followed Felix as he pulled the host down the aisle into a room at one end of the basement. She closed the door behind them, and seconds later I heard running water as pipes groaned and squealed behind the brick wall at the back of my cell.

  Several of my fellow prisoners stared at the door with their hands over their ears. Some cried silently, and others made high-pitched whining noises deep in their throats.

  After a while the water and the screaming from behind the door stopped. Several minutes later the door opened and the human woman stepped out unrestrained. Her hair hung down her back in wet strands, dripping on the concrete beneath her feet as she marched down the aisle toward the marble steps leading up to the courthouse lobby. She wore Tullia’s clothes, and when she passed my cage, she paused and turned to glare at me.

  I stuck my hand through the bars again and flames burst from my palm.

  Tullia flinched. Then she scuttled across the aisle and jogged up the steps as fast as her new middle-aged legs would carry her.

  At the other end of the basement the door still stood open. Movement in the room beyond caught my gaze, and a chill raced the length of my spine when Felix pulled the body Tullia had just abandoned past the door by one arm.

  I didn’t want to know what they were going to do with the corpse.

  I had no way to measure the time that passed while I sat in the dark, watching torchlight flicker against cinderblock walls, steel bars, and the grimy flesh and dirty hair of my fellow prisoners. After a while my mouth went dry and my stomach started to rumble. The pressure from my full bladder became urgent, but I refused to use the bucket at the back of my cage on general principle.

  My thoughts strayed to Melanie, and I wondered if she’d had it better or worse in her jail cell in New Temperance. I was pretty sure they’d fed her, but they’d also bound her to the floor on her knees—the posture of penitence—for hours on end. Maybe for the entire two days she’d been there.

  Thinking about Melanie led to thinking about her death, and about how I’d failed to prevent it. How I’d failed her. How I’d lost her, and how I might not survive in Pandemonia long enough to ever see her son again.

  But at least I got to say goodbye to him, and to Anabelle and Eli. But Finn…

  If I didn’t make it back, he might never find out what had actually happened to me.

  When I realized I was crying, I forced myself to redirect my thoughts toward the reason I was in the demon city in the first place. To figure out how to effectively spread a virus I knew almost nothing about to the population of an entire city. The most obvious answer seemed to be poisoning the water supply, but I had no idea where that was or how to gain access to it, or how to poison it, other than drowning myself in the reservoir.

  None of my other ideas—sneezing, kissing, or licking the face of everyone I came into contact with—seemed as effective on a large scale, and if transmission actually required direct contact with contaminated bodily fluids, the only person I was sure I’d infected since I’d walked through the gates was Nedes, who’d effectively committed suicide via sloppy kiss.

  My plan needed work. Not that any plan would help if I never got out of my cell.

  While I waited, thinking over everything I’d ever learned about the prevention and communication of contagions in health class, Felix brought two more down-and-out customers into the basement, and there was nothing I could do to stop them from picking out inexpensive hosts and leaving their dead, used-up former bodies in the room at the end of the aisle.

  At some point I fell asleep on the floor, using my arm for a pillow, and I have no idea how long I slept. With no windows or doors open to the outside world and no meals to establish the time of day, I’d lost all track of time.

  By the time the four-person contingent marched down the marble stairs and headed for my cell, I thought I was going out of my mind.

  “Nina Kane?” the young man in front asked, and it was immediately obvious that these men—these demons—were cut from a different cloth than were the anarchy-prone buyers in the market and at the auction. These men all wore long black pants and snug black shirts—easily the most clothing I’d seen on anyone since entering Pandemonia—and they moved with purpose. With an intent that clearly went beyond the hedonistic search for pleasure.

  “That’s her.” Felix stepped out of the room at the end of the aisle, where he’d been hosing down what appeared to be a room-sized shower stall. “You’d better u
se cuffs. She burned right through the plastic zip tie.”

  “What kind of idiot would put an exorcist in plastic restraints?” the young man in front demanded, and Felix shrugged, as if he weren’t the one who’d done that very thing. “Turn around and put your hands through the bars.”

  I took me a second to realize he was talking to me now. “Why on earth should I do that?”

  “This is your chance to kill Kastor,” Felix called. “These meat sacks are his personal guard.”

  Kastor had a personal guard? Meshara hadn’t mentioned that. So he wasn’t in power solely because he kept his word.

  “Kill Kastor?” The man holding the key to my cell laughed with his head thrown back, his tight, dark curls bobbing with the movement. “Child, put your hands through the bars before I break them off.”

  “I’m an exorcist.” I stared boldly up at him. “Do you have any idea how many of you I’ve fried?”

  “Do you have any idea how many exorcists Kastor has kept as pets over the years until he’s ready to take them as host?” the man with the cuffs asked. “Or how many he’s killed?”

  “The question”—I stepped forward until the bars actually brushed my nose—“is how many have you killed?” Flames burst from my palm as I shoved my left hand between the bars and pressed it to his chest. He screamed, then thrashed as he hung from the fire blazing between us as if he weighed nothing.

  His fellow guards backed away, and one of them pulled a strange-looking rifle. “Shoot her!” one of the others shouted, and soft shuffling noises came from all around the basement as my fellow prisoners turned to watch the commotion.

  Felix jogged toward us from the end of the aisle. “Shooting her won’t save Atticus,” he yelled as Atticus the guard convulsed in front of me, his eyes rolled back into his head, smoke rising from his scorched clothing.