Could pregnancy really dull a woman’s taste buds and numb her fingers? Suddenly I wished I’d read more of Melanie’s books.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have possessed a pregnant woman.”
Meshara rolled her eyes. “We both know Melanie’s the only host you wouldn’t have tried to burn me out of at the earliest opportunity.”
Which meant she clearly didn’t expect me to remain tied up for long. Smart demon.
“So why did you fake…?” Suddenly I understood. “You were the distraction.” We were all supposed to be caught up with Mellie’s early labor so Kastor’s spies could get away with Grayson. Meshara had sent Grayson to the truck for her bag. She’d set the whole thing up, and we’d fallen for it.
“Now you’re getting it. Good to know there’s no permanent damage from the crowbar.”
“Does it even matter, if I’m just going to wind up as somebody’s host?”
“Physical damage matters. A possessed body heals slower than normal, and brain damage is nearly impossible to recover from. That’s why we don’t possess the mentally impaired. Now, psychological damage—that just gives the new occupant an interesting backstory to work with.”
“Melanie isn’t your backstory,” I snapped. “She’s my sister.”
“She was your sister. Now she’s a collection of unique memories and experiences, distinct from those of anyone else in the world. She’s qualia for me to play with. And I have to say, pedestrian pregnancy aside, hers may be the most interesting life I’ve ever assumed. An aptitude for study, yet no fondness for it. Sex at the scandalous age of fifteen. And love!” Meshara twisted to look at me through my sister’s eyes, and the car swerved to the right so hard that I smacked my shoulder on the window. “It wasn’t just physical with the doomed Adam Yung. Mellie really loved him. And she loved their baby.”
“Stop.” Unshed tears stabbed at my eyes like needles, but Meshara obviously enjoyed my pain.
“Then the way he died! They made her watch, and it was too much for her, even just seeing it on the screen. He screamed her name at the end as the flames crisped his skin. She passed out cold. Hit her head on the floor. Did she tell you that? Her anguish must have been delicious.”
I clenched my teeth and tried to ignore her as I watched fields and small, burnt-out towns pass by my window.
“Melanie thought you’d left her. They told her you’d escaped the city, and that hurt her worse than anything. Worse than being tied to an exam table, prodded with equipment and poked with needles. The worst part of all was that she thought you let it happen.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, turning to stare straight out the windshield at the miles of splintered concrete stretching out before us.
“What? Stop mumbling.”
“I’m not mumbling. I have to pee.”
Meshara rolled Mellie’s eyes again, and I realized she’d mastered the human gesture. “No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do,” I insisted, squirming in my seat to emphasize my discomfort, which allowed me to twist so that my wrist bindings touched the passenger’s-side door.
“Cross your legs and hold it.” Meshara glanced at my bound ankles and laughed. “Okay, then just hold it.”
For the next few hours I tried to tune out the demon’s torturous nostalgia-by-proxy while I watched the few remaining highway signs to estimate our distance from Pandemonia. To judge the dwindling window of opportunity I had to free myself and disable the demon without hurting Mellie’s baby. I took advantage of every swerve and bump in the road to scrape the thin cord binding my wrists against a jagged edge of plastic in the broken passenger’s-side armrest, but I couldn’t tell whether or not the rope was fraying. I couldn’t even be sure that I was hitting it in the same place with every bump, though I was sure I’d gouged my own skin several times.
According to Finn and Maddock, Pandemonia had grown out of a prewar city called Colorado Springs, which was about sixty miles south of the former Colorado state capital of Denver. Denver had burned to the ground during the war—I knew that much from history class. But what the sisters hadn’t told us was that Colorado Springs had escaped major damage only to be taken over not by demons disguised as Church officials, as in the other surviving cities, but by demons in no disguise at all.
No wonder the Church didn’t want people to travel very far beyond its walled cities. They couldn’t afford for us to know about Pandemonia, nor could they afford to lose any of their human cattle to Kastor.
When I gasped at the latest cut in my arm, Meshara glanced at me with a frown.
“I still have to pee,” I said, and before she could question my bladder as the source of my pain, I changed the subject. “So, what’s the plan when we get to Pandemonia? I’m assuming if you were going to possess me, you would have already tried.”
“I would have already succeeded.” She reached back between the front seats, and the car swerved while she felt around for something I couldn’t see. “I could have taken you while you slept, just like I took your sister.”
“Watch out!” I shouted, and she looked up just in time to swerve around a long-stalled minivan on the side of the road. Meshara held a snack-sized bag of cayenne-flavored peanuts, the last from a box no one but Reese could stand to eat because they were so hot. She ripped the bag open with her teeth and dumped an eighth of the contents into her mouth.
Mellie would have been crying from the heat, but Meshara looked disgusted as she chewed. “Cayenne, my ass. False advertising is what that is. These have no flavor.” She dropped the bag into the center console, and red-powdered nuts spilled into the empty drink holder. “I can’t wait to get out of this body. Nothing feels right. Nothing tastes right. Nothing even looks right.” She leaned forward to peer over the steering wheel at the sky. “Is it getting cloudy? Why does everything look so…dull?”
I glanced out the window and found only a few wispy white clouds. “The windshield’s tinted at the top. So, why didn’t you possess me?” I asked. “Why go for a pregnant human who may or may not survive childbirth when you could have had a healthy exorcist body, which will last much longer?” When her jaw clenched and she stopped talking for the first time in hours, I understood what she wasn’t saying. “You don’t have enough rank to claim an exorcist host, do you? Why would you go to this much trouble for Kastor if he won’t let you profit?”
“If this errand is successful and I survive, I will have my choice from a selection of beautiful young bodies that have not been stretched and weakened and dulled by pregnancy.” Meshara laid one hand on Melanie’s belly, and I wanted to rip her entire arm off. “Anything I want from the stables. Kastor gave his word,” she said as we passed another highway mileage sign.
Neither Finn nor Maddock had been willing to talk about geography in any way associated with Pandemonia, so in the interest of avoiding the demon city in future travels, I’d borrowed a very old, very well-worn map from Brother Isaiah. It had taken me two hours to memorize all the highways leading to Colorado Springs, as well as the names of several of the nearby towns.
“And something about the fact that he’s a soulless monster makes you think he can be trusted?” I eyed a faded sign lying in the middle of the exit lane, its pole bent almost in half.
Oakley, Kansas. Prewar geography had never been my best subject, but that was enough to tell me we hadn’t hit Colorado yet.
“The fact that he wants to maintain his control of the city means I can believe him. Unfulfilled promises lead to revolt, which is how he came into power in the first place,” Meshara said. “If Kastor says I get a new body, I get a new body. And that day can’t come fast enough.” She squinted at the road. “Is your sister nearsighted?”
“No.” But I had a mild case of myopia. “So what kind of hoops does a demon have to jump through to earn an exorcist as a host? I mean, who’ll be wearing Nina Kane next season?”
“What?” She squinted at the road as if I were nothing more than a fly bu
zzing near her ear. “Mumbling is a sign of low self-confidence. Speak up.”
“What’s going to happen to me when we get to Pandemonia?” I repeated, each syllable exaggerated and loud. Pregnancy shouldn’t have affected her hearing. Surely she was just trying to scare me.
“Oh. He’ll either auction you off or give you away as a political favor,” she said as if the details didn’t truly matter, and my stomach began to churn. “But—” Meshara frowned and glanced down at her stomach, where her left hand still rested. “This thing’s kicking hard enough to bump my fingers, but I can’t feel the movements from inside. Is that normal?”
“I don’t think so.” I frowned and sat straighter, anxiously trying to assess the problem without access to my hands or any medical knowledge whatsoever. “Melanie could definitely feel the baby kicking.”
Meshara shrugged and returned both hands to the wheel, her pale brows drawn low.
“If I actually gave a damn, I might postulate that your sister felt what she wanted to feel—you know, because she cared—and I don’t feel what I don’t want to feel. Because I don’t really give a shit about your little niece or nephew, beyond its value to me as a human shield.”
The truth of that statement made me shake with fear and burn with rage. I could not let her get back to Pandemonia, because when she abandoned Mellie for a new form, my sister’s body would die and the baby would die along with it.
As best I could tell, Meshara was driving west on what was once Interstate 70, and if her speedometer and my estimates were anywhere near accurate, she’d covered more distance in a single day of driving than we’d managed in the past five days of traveling with the Lord’s Army, mostly because—as Reese had pointed out—cars could go faster than horses and they didn’t have to stop to eat or rest.
We were already too close to Pandemonia for comfort.
“But I thought the whole reason you guys possess human bodies is to experience things a demon can’t in its natural form.”
The demon tilted her head—a decidedly human gesture—and seemed to be giving the question serious thought. “Well, yes, in the sense that we can’t experience anything in our natural form. We have no sight and very little sound, and absolutely no taste whatsoever. Our sense of touch is limited to pressure, which means we can tell when we bump into something or someone, but that’s it. There’s no pleasure. No pain. We literally spend eternity crawling around, experiencing nothing.”
Which was why our world drew demons like bugs to a porch light. The human form was like a sensory buffet laid out before a child who’d never eaten.
An evil child with no self-control.
Meshara squinted as she guided the SUV off the road to avoid a fallen tree, rotting across all four lanes of cracked pavement. “But we have individual tastes, just like your people,” she continued. “Some like to eat—you should see some of the gluttons waddling around Pandemonia—and some like music. Some live to dance, some stare at bright colors all day long, and we have an entire faction dedicated to wearing interesting and stimulating fabrics.”
She glanced at me as she pulled the car back onto the road, bumping over an unseen chunk of concrete in the process. “And, of course, we have several distinct groups of masochists, who like pain because it’s the strongest sensation they can elicit. And then there are those sick bastards who actually like being pregnant.” She shuddered at the thought. “The aching joints, indigestion, and feet kicking my ribs from the inside were bad enough, but numbness and dead taste buds are worse than pain. I thought women liked pregnancy for the excuse to eat whatever they want. What’s the point if you can’t taste anything?” She glanced at me with a wry shrug. “You may think possession is distasteful, but I swear there’s nothing stranger than growing a human being inside one’s stomach.”
“The baby’s not in your stomach, it’s in your uterus.” Which she should know, considering that she had access to everything Melanie had ever seen, read, or felt. “But it’s not even your uterus…” My anatomy lesson faded away when what she’d actually been saying finally sank in. Worry tightened my chest. “Wait, you could feel the baby moving before, but now you can’t?”
Meshara shrugged. “That part’s a relief, really.” She squinted and bumped over another rift in the road. “I can still see the little parasite moving. I just can’t feel it.”
“That’s not normal.”
“All I care about is that it’s preferable.” The demon suddenly sat up straight and slammed her foot down on the brake. I flew forward, and my seat belt bruised me from hip to shoulder, driving all the air from my lungs. If not for the belt, I might have gone through the windshield.
Before I could suck in enough air to shout, Meshara had released her own seat belt and shoved open the driver’s- side door. “What’s not normal is how badly I have to pee!”
“Just now?” I’d had to go for hours, even with nothing to drink, and she’d had two bottles of water during the drive without so much as a complaint from her bladder, as far as I could tell.
“Yes. Sit tight!” she shouted as she lunged from the car and fast-waddled toward the grass. I lost sight of her when she ducked behind an abandoned car with a sapling growing through the engine compartment, but after a couple of minutes, which I spent sawing the nylon cord against the broken armrest at my back, she returned, still pulling the stretchy fabric of Melanie’s maternity pants over her bulging belly. Only, something about her baby bulge looked…strange.
“Meshara!” I twisted for a better look, tugging as hard as I could against the frayed cord around my wrists. Being near a demon made me stronger than I’d have been on my own, but not as strong as I’d have been in the presence of several other exorcists. And nylon was very strong, for its weight. “Something’s wrong.”
“What?” she snapped as she dropped into the driver’s seat. “You’re mumbling again.”
“Your belly. I’m telling you something’s wrong.”
Frowning, she pulled up the hem of her shirt, and her eyes widened even before she could push down the top of her pants. The fabric seemed to be…bunching. As if the flesh beneath were contorting. She pulled the elastic material down to the base of her bulge and we both gasped. “What the hell is that?” she demanded, while we watched her stomach roil as if her guts were waging war beneath her flesh.
“I think that’s a contraction.” My heart pounded and my thoughts raced. It was too early. And how had she not noticed? “The baby’s coming. For real this time.”
“The baby can’t be coming,” Meshara insisted calmly, staring at her contorting stomach. “It’s too early.”
“That’s not up to you.” Fear plucked at my nerve endings like the strings of a guitar. What was I supposed to do with a demon in labor? Even if she safely delivered her “human shield,” enabling me to exorcise her from my sister’s body, what could possibly come next? My soul would do the poor child no good if there was no one there to take care of it once I was gone.
Minutes after the birth, I would be sitting alone in the middle of the badlands with the bodies of my sister and her baby.
Of all the ways I’d pictured the birth going horribly wrong, this wasn’t one of them.
Panic sharpened my thoughts like the lens of a camera, blurring everything on the periphery so I could focus on the most important part. One thing at a time, Nina. The baby comes first. Even if it would only live for a few minutes.
I twisted in my seat, angling my bound wrists toward the demon. “Cut me loose so I can help you.”
Meshara ignored my order, still ogling her belly in detached fascination. “Is he trying to rip his way out the hard way?” She reached for the lever on the side of the driver’s seat, then pushed the whole chair back to put more space between herself and the steering wheel.
“It’s not like there’s an easy way.” I tore my gaze away from her belly to study her face. “Can’t you feel that?”
She shook her head, and Melanie’s pale hair fell o
ver her right shoulder. “It’s like I’m watching the whole thing from the outside. How long has this been going on?”
“How am I supposed to know?” I sank back into the passenger’s seat, trapping my hands against the upholstery as anger swelled to rival the fear already storming inside me. I wanted Meshara to deliver my niece or nephew screaming in agony the whole time. Then I wanted to fry her from my sister’s body with my left hand while I cradled the baby in my right.
Was that too much to ask?
“You’re supposed to be in a lot of pain right now!”
“No, I’m supposed to be in a brand-new body with no appreciable stomach, perfect vision, and me as the only parasite!” Her eyes were wide and she kept blinking, as if to clear her sight, but I still saw no sign of pain. “With any luck, we’ll be in Pandemonia long before the damn thing pops out.” She slid the seat forward again and slammed her stomach into the wheel to punctuate her dissatisfaction.
Anger bubbled up from deep inside me. “Be careful!”
“Let’s be clear!” Meshara grabbed my chin and squeezed it mercilessly, glaring at me with eyes that held all of the color and expression of Melanie’s yet none of the warmth. “I don’t give a shit about this little uterine leech.” To demonstrate, she punched her stomach with her free hand. I flinched, tears welling in my eyes, but she didn’t even seem to feel the blow. “We’re going to Pandemonia, come hell, high water, or motherfucking childbirth, and when we get there, I’ll get a pretty new body and you’ll get…whatever Kastor decides to do to you before he gives that tight little flesh-and-blood fortress away.” She looked me up and down appreciatively, and my skin crawled even as I noticed her stomach contorting again. “That man does like his toys. And this thing…” She punched her belly again, and hot tears spilled down my cheeks toward the ironclad grip she had on my chin. “With any luck, they’ll cut it out of your sister’s corpse and show it to you before they throw it out with the rest of the garbage.”
The Flame Never Dies Page 13
