Grayson and I understood. Finn should be visible, but untouchable.
We’d just begun to hear the racket from the marketplace when the first bystander recognized me, an event I’d been expecting but dreading. “Is that Nina Kane?” The man turned to walk backward in front of Kastor, the bright purple legs of his boxer shorts swishing with every step.
“Not anymore,” Finn said, and the man took a closer look at me as I bit off a chunk from a red rope of candy.
“Rufus?” he said, and I nodded. “I thought you didn’t like walking around…like that.” He held both hands in front of his chest in a cartoonish imitation of breasts.
Finn stepped in before I could answer. “My guard needed an upgrade.” He twisted to glance at me. “Show him the fire.”
I finally caught on when he glanced pointedly at my left hand. The man in purple gasped and stumbled backward when flames burst from my cupped palm.
“Holy shit!” he whispered.
I took another bite of licorice and maintained a gruff silence, trying to hide the fact that my pulse was racing with nerves and I was starting to sweat. Finn nodded and glanced back at Grayson. “A matched set,” he said, and she showed off her own handful of flames. “Gender is irrelevant. What matters is power. Make it known.”
The man’s eyes widened, and then he nodded and spun to run toward the market.
“Nice save,” Grayson whispered.
Finn made a satisfied noise deep in his throat. “This just might work.”
I wasn’t quite ready to agree, but we had no better plan.
Everyone turned to stare when we walked into the market, and my heart pounded deep in my chest. I saw the problem almost immediately. We wouldn’t be able to spread our contagion while everyone was watching us. “Kastor,” I said softly, and Finn stiffened. “Perhaps the people would like a demonstration of your power.”
Kastor had been in Carey’s body for at least a year, but if I was right, he hadn’t done much to show it off before, and if there was anything all of demonkind had in common, it was the love of a good spectacle.
“Of course. Gidri, help me give the people a show.”
He stepped into the center of the marketplace, and Grayson cleared a circle around him, as any good guard would. Then “Kastor” began to talk, and while he had the crowd’s attention, I slowly, quietly backed toward the edge of the gathering until I stood next to a meat vendor’s cart. When I was sure the vendor was captivated by the demonstration, I gave his cart several good sprays, concentrating mostly on the unused kabob sticks and paper cups, for fear that the heat cooking the meat itself would kill our virus.
I moved from one cart to the next while Finn and Grayson performed, listening for the oohs and aahs for timing, and contaminated every item of food and clothing I could find with a generous helping of my own germs.
“Show us the true power of fire!” someone from the crowd shouted as I worked my way back to Finn’s side, having infected every edible or wearable thing I could get my hands on. “Burn someone!”
Everyone else cheered, and the demand became a jovial but bloodthirsty chant.
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by their willingness to kill one of their own, considering how many humans had cheered when the Church lit poor Adam Yung on fire in New Temperance. But at least most of my fellow citizens had thought they were saving his immortal soul.
The demons just wanted a show.
“Rufus!” Finn shouted as soon as he saw that I was back. “Give the people what they want!” His eyes sparkled with amused irony, and with a secret jolt of excitement, I realized I’d just been given permission to exorcise a demon in the middle of the marketplace in Pandemonia with total impunity. In fact, the crowd was demanding that very thing.
“Do you have someone in mind, sir?” I asked, and “Kastor” shook his head.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sure you all recognize the infamous Nina Kane, scourge to our kind the world over. Now I present her as a host, defeated and worn by my own loyal guard Rufus, who will now wield her appropriated power for your entertainment. Rufus!” He turned back to me and gestured to the crowd. “Choose from among the volunteers.”
No one was actually volunteering. In fact, the crowd had gone silent, brimming with an almost tangible mix of fear and excitement.
I looked out over the possibilities and found Dione among them. I was seconds away from singling her out when I realized that she was blinking a lot. Heavily. Her eyes were struggling to focus, which told me that she’d already been infected through casual contact with me the day before. Until she figured out what was happening to her and abandoned the infected host body, she was a walking contagion. A soldier unknowingly fighting for the good guys.
So I selected a man from the gathering at random. “You.” It was the man in glittery purple boxers, who’d first spread the word about “Rufus” and “Gidri,” at “Kastor’s” request.
The crowd burst into fierce whispers, and several people pushed the man in purple to the front. He didn’t try to run, but he looked more terrified than I’d ever seen a demon look. I marched toward him, and the crowd backed away, widening the ring around us.
I held my left hand up in front of him, and flames leapt from my cupped palm.
The man in purple began to visibly sweat. I pulled him toward me by one arm—his shirt didn’t contain enough material to grab—and whispered into his ear. “I’m not Rufus. I’m still Nina Kane. Soon all your friends will join you in hell.” His eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to scream.
I slammed my hand onto his nearly bare chest.
The roar from the crowd around me almost drowned out the screams of the demon as I burned him from his host’s body. They cheered as if I’d won an election or lowered taxes, but as near as I could tell, they were actually celebrating their fellow citizen’s excruciating pain and expulsion from the human world. The same thing could happen to any one of them at “Kastor’s” whim, yet they reveled in the pain and terror of one of their own.
When the flames in my left hand died, the man in purple collapsed to the ground, smoke curling from the charred hole in his chest. I backed away, and the crowd descended on him, pulling off scraps of his clothing and handfuls of hair from his head. He was a celebrity in death, and everyone wanted a souvenir.
Finn, Grayson, and I slipped out of the crowd and into the nearest restaurant, where they repeated their exorcist exhibition while I went into the kitchen, ostensibly to prepare a snack for my revered boss, and took the opportunity to spray down everything edible with a generous helping of my germs.
We spent the next couple of hours touring the downtown district, going from party to party, each weirder than the last. Grayson and I took turns playing first the distraction, then the infector. Finn didn’t get to spray from his bottle at all because everywhere we went, everyone watched him.
In spite of his reluctance to let me go around kissing demons, he couldn’t entirely escape the same fate. Kastor, evidently, was popular with the lady demons, and several wanted to stake their claim on his mouth. Publicly.
I eased my rage at the sight with the knowledge that in less than a day, none of those women would be able to see, hear, taste, or feel a damn thing. Finn’s mouth was poison, and they were drinking straight from the bottle.
By midnight we’d hit the kitchen of every open restaurant and made a second trip through the marketplace. People were actively ingesting our germs. Part of me wanted to wait around long enough to see the virus take hold, but the rest of me knew better. Anyone who’d seen me spray from my bottle and dismissed it as an eccentricity of one of Kastor’s top men would know better the minute the virus became public knowledge.
We needed to be long gone before that happened.
“So, how do we get out of here?” I whispered to Finn as we headed back toward the converted hotel, ostensibly so that Kastor could take care of city business.
In the lobby he waved to some people
eating and blasting music I’d never heard before, and I hoped they’d all gotten their food from the infected hotel kitchen.
“Quietly. Covertly,” Finn said once the elevator doors had closed behind us. “Kastor and his guards never leave the city. Not once in the seventeen years Maddy and I lived here.”
“We need a distraction,” I said. “Something big that will draw everyone’s attention while we escape.”
“Something that doesn’t require Kastor’s presence, or that of his two top guards,” Grayson added. The elevator bonged as it came to a stop, and then the doors slid open. Finn led us back down the deserted hallway and into Kastor’s suite.
“Finn, do you have any idea where Maddy, Devi, and Reese are?” I asked as he locked the door of the sitting room behind us.
He shook his head. “They were tracking Grayson when I left. I told Maddock to stay away from Pandemonia at all costs. Considering how little he likes being ordered around, that probably means he’s right outside the gate.” He crossed into the bedroom and began rifling through Kastor’s dresser drawers. “But I have to hope he’s being smarter than that. We can’t count on their help.”
“Fire.” Grayson sank onto the loveseat, running one hand over the red velvet upholstery, and I glanced at her in question. “For the distraction. I suggest fire. They’re fascinated with it here, in case you haven’t noticed. They cook meat over open flames. They set alcoholic drinks on fire before they drink them. While you were in the kitchen at that last place, they offered Finn and me some kind of flambéed dessert. It was basically sugared bananas set on fire, then served over ice cream. It was good. But in an evil kind of way.” She shrugged, and I couldn’t resist a small smile. She was starting to sound more like herself and less like a kidnapping victim who’d just discovered her brother had been killed and possessed by their worst enemy.
Hopefully, seeing the demon run out of her brother’s body had helped with that.
“Hang on,” Finn called from the bedroom. “I have to get out of this shirt. It smells like whatever that demon sycophant in the gold bra spilled on me.” He shrugged out of Kastor’s button-up shirt and was reaching for a tee from the second drawer when the overhead light shone on his back, and I froze.
A jolt of astonishment shot through me, all warm and tingly. “Finn, wait!” I jogged into the bedroom, and Grayson glanced at me in surprise.
“What?” He frowned as I turned him by his shoulders.
“Grayson, look at this.” I touched the base of his spine, where a small but distinctive pale brown line had just begun to stretch toward his neck. It was only an inch and a half long, but I would have recognized that mark anywhere.
“But…” Grayson knelt for a closer look at her brother’s back. “But he’s infected. And that wasn’t there before. I saw Kastor change shirts earlier. Or yesterday. Or whenever that was.”
“There’s a mark on my back?” Finn asked. “Like the ones on yours?”
“Yes.” Grayson stood. “I thought only human carriers got that mark.”
I shrugged, frowning. “That’s what I thought too. Unless…” My eyes widened as the implication of Finn’s carrier mark finally sank in. “Carey’s not possessed anymore. Maybe this means the infection has been halted. I think that as long as Finn stays in Carey’s body…he’s just a carrier.”
“Wait, are you saying I can keep him?” Grayson’s eyes were as wide as I’d ever seen them. “I mean, I know Carey’s dead, but he still looks like my brother, and Finn’s always been like a brother to me, so…this kind of fits.”
Finn pulled Kastor’s shirt on and smiled. “So you’re okay with this?” He spread her brother’s arms, and she stepped into the hug. “Because you only get to keep him as long as I get to keep him.” If Finn left Carey’s body for more than a few minutes, Carey’s organs would shut down and he would die.
“Keep him,” she sobbed against Finn’s shoulder. “This is what Carey would have wanted, considering the circumstances.”
When she finally let him go, Finn turned to me. “So, do you approve? Would you be okay with it if I looked like this for the rest of my life?” His green eyes were practically glowing. I could see how badly he wanted a body of his own, and an exorcist’s body was more than he’d ever hoped for, because he would never have stolen one from someone else.
I pulled him close, and my eyes closed when his hands slid slowly down my back. “It’s like this was meant to be.” I glanced at Grayson over his broad, firm shoulder and grinned. “Your brother’s not bad-looking. Now let’s see if we can get him out of here in one piece.”
“You’re sure about this?” I asked as Finn pulled a match from the box. The gasoline fumes were giving me a headache, and honestly, I knew we’d already gone too far to back out. But I had to ask.
“There is no building I’d rather burn.” He dropped the match onto the gasoline-soaked loveseat, then stepped back as it burst into flames. “Let’s go.” Finn ushered Grayson and me out the door and into the hall as flames crackled behind us, already well on their way to devouring Kastor’s apartment.
I’d never committed arson before, but evidently it really was as simple as “pour accelerant; light match.” Especially if leaving evidence wasn’t a concern.
We were much more concerned with leaving town.
On the bottom floor we lit secondary blazes in several custodial closets and unused offices, avoiding the kitchen and lobby areas, which were the only parts of the downstairs still regularly used.
Originally, there had probably been a sprinkler system and an alarm built into the hotel, but those had ceased functioning several decades earlier, by Finn’s best guess, so when we fled the burning hotel through a little-used side entrance, no one else had yet realized the building was on fire.
No alarm had been raised.
We took several narrow back alleys on our path away from the hotel, avoiding the crowds still gathered at the auction square and the outdoor market, and when we finally turned back to look up at the building in which Finn and Maddock had spent their childhood, the flames were just becoming visible through windows on the top floor.
“They’ll see that soon,” Grayson whispered, fear and awe echoing in her voice.
“And I’ll make sure they know exactly who’s to blame.”
We spun as one, startled by the voice behind us, to find an unfamiliar group of about a dozen fairly conservatively dressed demons facing us from the other end of the alley.
“Finn?” The one in front stared right into Finn’s green eyes. “You always were the troublemaker,” he said, and we all came to the same conclusion at once.
“Kastor,” Finn said.
The leader of Pandemonia was the demon who’d escaped us in the stairwell, and he’d since convinced a dozen of his citizens that the Kastor they’d all loved in the marketplace that evening was an impostor.
“Assuming you haven’t already been infected,” I said, stepping up to Finn’s right side, flames tingling just beneath the surface of my left palm, “your best bet would be to flee the city. Now. We’re all three highly contagious, and by this point, so is most of your city.”
“We’ve been spraying our saliva on your food all night,” Grayson added, and I almost laughed at how ridiculous our plan sounded, boiled down to its basics. But it was a good plan, and I had no doubt it would work, assuming no one warned the citizens in time for them to flee the city.
Kastor’s brows rose, and I recognized the expression, even on his new face. “So you think we’re just going to let you walk out into the badlands and spread your disease worldwide?”
But I could see through his intentions as if they were made of glass. “You know the Church won’t let that happen. As soon as they’re sure we’ve taken out Pandemonia, they’ll hunt us down like dogs in the street. They wanted a targeted exposure.” But we were willing to spend the rest of our lives widening that target.
Kastor didn’t give a shit whether we spread the demon plag
ue to his enemies or not. The anger raging in his eyes said he was after revenge, pure and simple.
“If you think you can stop us from leaving…” Finn spread his arms. “Come—”
Kastor pulled something from the waistband of his jeans.
“No!” I shouted, the instant I realized he held a pistol.
Grayson lunged as Kastor fired at Finn. If she hadn’t been triggered, she would have been too slow to get in front of the gun. But exorcist Grayson was just fast enough to catch the bullet high on her right side.
She flew backward from the force and landed on her back on the pavement. “Nina…,” Grayson gasped, and I dropped to her side.
A rage-filled sound ripped from Finn’s throat. He lunged at Kastor, faster than I’d ever seen him, or anyone, move. He was amazing in Carey’s body—but he couldn’t fight twelve demons on his own.
I charged down the alley half an instant behind him.
Finn slammed into his father’s new, young body, and the gun went off again. One of Kastor’s men screamed and stumbled into the wall of the alley, blood blooming high on his chest from the bullet hole. Four others fled, evidently terrified to make contact with us and our contagions.
The other five all pounced at once.
I kicked aside the first demon who came at me. My left hand burst into flames. Finn’s was already burning. The alley flickered with shadows of violence, cast by fire.
Finn growled and tossed a demon over his back. He threw a punch, and Kastor’s gun slid down the pavement toward Grayson, where none of his men were willing to go while she leaked contaminated blood all over the ground.
I burned through the next demon that lunged at me, then used his flailing body to deflect the next. When the first demon collapsed, I turned my flames toward the next. A third grabbed my neck from behind, and when he hauled me off my feet, the monster hanging from my palm came with me, stuck to the flames like a magnet to metal. Blisteringly hot, flesh-melting metal.
The Flame Never Dies Page 24