Rachel Vincent - The Flame Never Dies

“Yes.” Finn pulled me into a hug to speak directly into my ear, and in spite of the grim circumstances, the feel of his body pressed against mine made my pulse rush. “And as soon as Maddock is ready to talk, I’ll tell you everything.”

Before I could argue, we were overtaken by the group again.

When we pulled back onto the abandoned highway, Mellie rode in the SUV so she could stretch out for a nap on the third-row bench seat, and Tobias sat in the truck between Anabelle and me, while Finn drove.

I wasn’t sure how to approach the questions we needed him to answer, but Anabelle—bless her heart—was finally in her element for the first time since we’d escaped from New Temperance.

“How old are you, Tobias?” she asked, and I could hear teacher-Ana in her voice again.

“Almost seven,” he said around a mouthful of chocolate, which Devi had vehemently objected to “wasting” on a kid.

“What grade are you in?”

“Second.”

“I used to teach second grade!” Anabelle said, and when Tobias’s eyes widened, she laughed. “I don’t look much like a teacher without my cassock, do I?”

Tobias shook his head and sucked the bit of chocolate on his tongue.

It had taken Anabelle nearly a month in the badlands to finally give up her Church robes in favor of a pair of jeans and a few T-shirts we’d liberated from our first supply raid, and she still didn’t quite look comfortable in the causal clothes.

“Look, I can prove it.” Ana held out her right hand to show him the brand on the back—four stylized, intertwined columns of flame, each representing one of the sacred obligations of the people to the Church. Together, those individual flames formed the symbolic blaze with which the Church claimed to have rid the world of the demon plague.

Though, as it turned out, that was a lie, the brand was a lie, and pretty much everything the Church had ever told us was a lie.

But Tobias didn’t know that. His eyes widened when he saw the brand, and trust opened his expression in a way that even chocolate hadn’t been able to.

Anabelle set him a little more at ease with a few funny stories from her days as a teacher, and then she gently switched gears. “Where did you go to school, Tobias?”

“At the Day School.”

“Which day school? Where are you from, sweetie? Solace? Diligencia?” Those were the two closest cities, other than New Temperance, and we knew for a fact that he hadn’t come from my hometown, because Anabelle would have recognized a second grader, even if he hadn’t been in her class.

“Verity,” he said at last, and Anabelle’s gaze snapped up to meet mine over his head, while Finn stiffened on the seat next to me. Verity was more than a thousand miles west of New Temperance, in the mountains of what was once called Colorado.

I’d never heard of anyone traveling so far, except as part of an armed Church caravan. How the hell had a little boy wound up so far from his hometown, with two possessed adults who were not his biological parents?

“Tobias, there were two people inside the car we found you next to,” Anabelle said, her voice almost fragile with tension. “Were those your parents?”

He nodded again. “They picked me over all the other boys at the children’s home.” His small chest puffed out with pride. “They said I could live with them in their house. Out east.”

Chills raced the length of my spine, then settled into my stomach. Tobias’s new “parents” couldn’t have adopted him without a parenting license. Were they unable to have children of their own? Had they adopted him for the same reason my mom had given birth to Melanie and me? If so, why would they rip out their own throats so soon after the adoption—much too soon for either of them to inherit their newly adopted host?

The answer suddenly seemed obvious: they’d found other, older potential hosts, already ripe for harvesting.

We’d seen evidence of a few nomads roaming the badlands. They were few and far between, but it was entirely possible that Tobias’s parents had run across a small band and killed their mutating human hosts so they could claim fresher bodies. Maybe they’d planned to come back for Tobias and raise him as a future host. Or maybe they’d abandoned him entirely in the face of a new opportunity.

Finn clutched the steering wheel, and I realized he hadn’t said a word since we’d resumed our trek south. Something was wrong, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it until we had privacy.

“What were their names, sweetie?” Anabelle asked.

“Mommy and Daddy,” Tobias said, and I had to swallow a groan. They hadn’t told him their real names? “They died, didn’t they?” he asked softly, and my heart ached for him. I nodded, and when he only blinked at me, somber but accepting, I wondered if maybe losing another set of parents just didn’t come as much of a surprise to a child who’d already been orphaned once.

Though the manner of their deaths was obviously traumatic.

What if that were Mellie’s baby?

The sudden thought sent a new kind of terror slithering through my veins: helplessness.

What if Mellie’s baby were one day orphaned in the badlands—not a far-fetched scenario, since he or she would be raised among fugitives who sought out demons on a daily basis. How would my niece or nephew survive without Anathema’s protection and provision?

The inevitable, horrifying answer chilled me from the inside out: Melanie’s orphaned child would be little more than a snack for the first degenerate to find the poor thing. Giving the baby a soul wouldn’t be enough. Someone would have to teach him or her how to survive.

“Did you see what happened to your parents?” Finn asked Tobias, drawing me out of my own terrifying thoughts, but when Anabelle scowled at him, I realized she’d planned a more gentle buildup to that particular query.

Tobias shook his head. “Mommy told me to climb into the trunk and be as quiet as I could. She said if I won the quiet game, she’d open the trunk and give me a surprise. But she never came, so I had to open the trunk with the safety latch.” He bowed his head, reminding me of my kindergarten students when they were in trouble. “I guess I wasn’t quiet enough.”

“I’m sure you weren’t the problem, honey,” Anabelle said, and outrage burned deep in my soul as I thought of the boy hiding in the trunk while his new “parents” ripped out their own throats and abandoned him in the badlands in favor of other hosts.

But then I realized that the poor kid was actually pretty lucky—his worthless “parents” had left Tobias alive, which was a mercy, considering how his life would have ended if he’d grown up in their custody.

* * *

“You want to what ?” Devi demanded, and I laid one finger over my lips to shush her. Across the dusty second-floor den of a long-abandoned house, Tobias was curled up on my bedroll in the glow of twice the number of candles we would normally have burned at night, in case he woke up and was afraid of the dark.

He’d fallen asleep in the truck around the time the sun set, so I’d carried him up the stairs myself.

Melanie slept just feet from him, on her own mat on the hard floor—we avoided carpet whenever possible, because after a century of neglect, most soft materials had become havens for mold, mildew, and entire colonies of parasitic insects.

We’d been lucky to find a ghost town so soon after the sun went down, and luckier still that that particular town had been abandoned during the war, rather than razed or torched. It wasn’t safe to drive across the badlands at night, because headlights could lure degenerates from miles away.

“I want to take him home,” I repeated. Then I held my breath, watching the others for their reactions as candlelight cast dancing shadows on the six other faces in our huddle.