The Flame Never Dies

by Rachel Vincent

  First things first, Nina.

  Metal squealed when I opened my car door. I turned off the engine—and with it, the headlights—then got out of the car, leaving my stuff in the front passenger’s seat because they’d only confiscate it if I tried to bring it with me. I’d taken seven steps toward the gate when light flared with a fizzy-sounding pop, trained right at me.

  I was literally in the spotlight.

  “Who the hell are you?” a voice demanded, followed by a high-pitched squeal I associated with every PE teacher I’d ever had—someone was using an electric megaphone. “Identify yourself or you will be shot.”

  “That’d be an awful waste,” I shouted, shielding my eyes from the light with one hand at my forehead. “My name is Nina Kane, and I’m an exorcist. Tell Kastor I’ve come to talk.”

  “Where’d this one come from?” A pink-bra-clad woman in her late thirties reached for me as Felix pulled me down the dark, narrow hallway by my left arm, and the steady flow of adrenaline that had been keeping me both awake and alert spiked like electricity run straight through my chest. “She’s pretty. Tired, and kind of smelly, but very, very pretty.” Her fingers brushed my shoulder, and I shuddered in revulsion.

  I’d been in Pandemonia no more than an hour and had yet to leave the building built into the city gate, yet I’d already seen at least twenty people. All of them had wanted to touch me. Few of them had any impulse control whatsoever. And if I were to add up the clothing worn by all of them combined, I wouldn’t have had enough material to cover two high school students attending any Church school in the world.

  Pandemonia’s dress code appeared to be “clothing optional.”

  I hadn’t lived a covered-up, buttoned-down, bottled-up Church-run existence in months, but even close-quarter cohabiting with boys in the badlands hadn’t prepared me for the flagrant immodesty inside Pandemonia. The display of flesh was disorienting. Unnerving.

  No matter where I looked, I wanted to avert my gaze. And sanitize my hands. And scrub my eyeballs with a scouring agent.

  “Don’t touch.” Felix slapped the woman’s hand away from me, and when she lunged at him, hissing, her brightly painted nails flashing in the overhead light, I realized her bra wasn’t a bra at all. It had the structural integrity of armor—something like a corset from the pages of my history texts—intended to both to support and display the flesh it hardly covered. Based on the lacy straps and ribbon trim, I could only conclude that the garment was actually meant to be seen rather than covered up.

  That bra was her actual shirt.

  Felix pinned the woman in pink against the concrete wall by her neck, without letting go of my arm. I could easily have pulled free, but if free was what I wanted, I wouldn’t have surrendered in the first place.

  “That’s Nina Kane,” Felix growled, his nose inches from the choking woman’s forehead. “No one touches her, Dione. Kastor’s orders.”

  “Nina Kane the exorcist?” Her eyes brightened with interest.

  “Thus the order not to touch.” Felix let her go, and Dione circled us like a cat on the prowl, waiting for the chance to pounce again, heedless of the red mark around her throat from his fist.

  “She’s even prettier than the other one….”

  “The other…?” Horror washed over me like the first wave of heat from a bonfire. “Grayson? Is she here?” If so, where was the rest of Anathema?

  “The one with all the curls?” Dione said, and I nodded. “I heard her screaming. Would you like to know what Kastor has done with her?”

  “Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t sure that was the truth—knowing what had happened to Grayson yet lacking the ability to stop it was like torture.

  But when Dione only laughed instead of answering, I realized she knew that. And she—like the rest of demonkind—wanted to see me suffer.

  When I wiped all emotion from my face, determined to deny her any further pleasure at my expense, she pouted and turned back to Felix. “Who caught this Nina Kane?” Her movements were fluid and eerily graceful, and if she ever decided to attack me for real, I’d probably never see her coming. “My money’s on Aldric.”

  “Aldric’s gone.” I shrugged, my hands zip-tied at my back, and gave her my best taunting smile, hoping she couldn’t smell the fear behind it. “So’s Meshara. I burned them both out.”

  Dione laughed, and light from the dusty fixture at the end of the hall shone dully on her spiky hair, the tips of which were dyed a contrasting shade of pink. “That’s what you think you’re going to do to me? Burn me out?”

  I shrugged, careful to exhale in her direction in case the demon virus was somehow airborne. “I don’t think I’ll have to,” I said, and her smile faltered but the hunger in her eyes swelled. “And no one caught me. I came to see Kastor.”

  “Wait.” Dione stepped in front of us and held her hand out like a stop sign. “You came here on purpose?” She turned to Felix without waiting for my reply. “What is it with Kastor? I swear, back in the Stone Age, fish used to jump out of the water and impale themselves on his spear.”

  “Kastor was here during the Stone Age? Or was that hyperbole?”

  Dione laughed. “Yes to both,” she said, and for the first time it occurred to me that some members of his species had actually lived in our world hundreds of times longer than any human ever could. They’d seen the rise and fall of governments and technologies I’d only read about.

  How much of our world had they shaped, unbeknownst to us?

  Felix pulled me around Dione, but she only growled and followed us. Even before he opened the door at the end of the hall, I could hear raucous yelling, as if the members of an angry mob were trying to out-shout one another.

  We entered a large courtyard, bordered on three sides by two-story prewar buildings. A crowd was gathered at the center of the open space, around a raised stone square much like the one in the center of New Temperance. But my hometown had never seen a gathering like this. The audience—it really was a mob—was half-dressed and roisterous. The din was deafening, and I couldn’t see whoever stood on the stone platform for the thick press of the crowd.

  “You got here just in time,” Dione taunted from my right, while Felix tugged me by my left arm. “They brought in a fresh haul of hosts this morning. Biggest lot we’ve seen in years. Half were from a raid on some nomads, half from a captured Church caravan.”

  Dismay sank through my chest as Felix led me past the back of the raised square—the only side not surrounded by men and women shouting out numbers. On the platform, facing away from me and toward the crowd, stood a line of people wearing more steel than actual clothing. Their hands were zip-tied at their backs, like mine, but they were all connected by a chain threaded through steel shackles around their ankles. Their heads were bowed, as if refusing to see the spectacle playing out in front of them might somehow save them from it, and I understood the psychological need for denial.

  In retrospect, I could see that I’d lived it for the first seventeen years of my life.

  “Up next, we have a human female, approximately nineteen years of age, in perfect physical condition.” Onstage, a man wearing only a ridiculously tall black hat and matching black satin boxer shorts pulled a girl about my height forward two steps. The young men chained on either side of her were jerked forward with her, and though I couldn’t see any of their faces, I could tell from her trembling arms and from the violent hitch each time she sucked in a breath that she was crying. “She has no noticeable scars or deformities, and as you can see, her face boasts an aesthetic symmetry certain to make her occupant the envy of his or her peers.”

  I realized with a jolt of horror that the people onstage were being auctioned off as hosts to a crowd of demons gathered to bid.

  As Dione had said, about half of the hosts up for sale wore the remnants of unembroidered Church cassocks of various colors, cut away in strategic places to show off lean torsos and strong limbs. They, I realized, were human Church members wh
o’d been kidnapped from a caravan taking them to their consecration ceremony.

  What they didn’t realize was that if Kastor’s people hadn’t stolen them, the Church would have put them through a similar ordeal. The private “consecration” ceremony was really a mass possession, where Church elders deemed worthy were given fresh bodies, as well as the new identities that came with them.

  The other half of the hosts up for sale wore handmade leather accessories, similar in style to what Eli’s division of the Lord’s Army had been teaching us to make. My chest ached even more fiercely when I realized these were the people who’d been taken away from their children that morning at the burned-out campsite.

  “Let’s start the bidding at three hundred,” the man in the tall hat said, and bidders began shouting numbers again. I stared at them as Felix pulled me past, and I was surprised and horrified to realize that none of the bidders looked old or in any way used up, as my mother had begun to look during her last few months in the human world, when the demon inside her had used up the soul it had stolen. Her arms and legs had grown long and bony, and her joints had begun to crack with every movement. Though I hadn’t realized it at the time, those were the first physical signs of demonic degeneration—the result of a demon remaining in its human host for too long.

  But the oldest of the Pandemonia bidders appeared to be in their midthirties, and none of their faces looked hollow or jaundiced. Their limbs didn’t look disproportionately long, nor had their hair started to thin.

  No one in that crowd actually needed a new body.

  The demons in Pandemonia weren’t merely evil, they were wasteful. They were throwing away human hosts that still held half-consumed—yet irrecoverable—souls, like the more affluent girls at my school who’d bought new uniforms before their old ones were truly worn out, simply because they could afford to.

  But at least those girls had donated their used clothing to the less fortunate—like Mellie and me. Demons had no equivalent charity.

  “When does she go up on the block?” Dione asked as Felix dragged me around the corner of a building into a dark, narrow alley.

  “Don’t know that she will,” he said. “That’s up to Kastor.”

  “She’d bring a fortune.”

  Felix huffed. “You don’t have a fortune to spend on her, so why do you care?”

  “Where are we going, anyway?” I asked when Dione didn’t answer. “I’m here to see Kastor.”

  Felix’s reply was swallowed by a new clamor when we emerged from the alley into a marketplace teeming with customers, even well after sundown.

  The auction square was lit by torches mounted on the walls of the surrounding buildings, which painted the grim proceedings with an eerie flicker of shadows. The marketplace, however, was lit with electric streetlamps, which cast cold, clear pools of light at regular intervals in the ambient darkness. The rooflines and balconies of buildings on either side of the wide lane were lit with a thousand tiny lightbulbs strung together on plastic-coated wires, which I recognized from pictures I’d once seen of prewar winter holiday decorations.

  The extravagant, celebratory display of light gave the entire shopping district the look of a nocturnal wonderland, like something out of one of Melanie’s storybooks. I was fascinated by the spectacle, even knowing I was being led toward some fate no doubt much less…entertaining.

  As we passed through the middle of the market I stared at the stalls and carts on either side of the center aisle, alternately amused, horrified, and baffled by the wares for sale: Garments made of too little material to rightly be called clothing. A menagerie of animals on jeweled leashes—tiny pigs, strangely clothed monkeys, bright birds, exotically patterned lizards, and even several long, thick breeds of python. One booth sold a wide array of food on thin wooden sticks dripping with melted chocolate, caramel, or cheese. Another sold meats I couldn’t identify and bright, fragrant fruits I’d never even seen pictures of.

  Booths peddled jewelry, cosmetics, and prosthetics of a disturbing and personal nature. Carts sold hats, feathered or sequined sashes, and shoes with dangerously high platforms and spindly heels. Liquor and beer flowed from taps in refrigerated carts. Colorful, icy concoctions were served in clear glasses, garnished with olives, edible flowers, or berries speared on brightly dyed toothpicks.

  People danced and sang their way from one stall to the next, and more poured into the marketplace from stores and restaurants lining the wide lane, their doors open, spilling exotic aromas into the air.

  Pandemonia seemed devoted to stimulating the senses in every way imaginable. My eyes were so wide they actually ached, but I couldn’t seem to close them for more than an instant at a time. The whole thing made me dizzy. I’d never seen so strange or lavish a display of wealth and plenty, and the people who consumed it all were just as colorful and bizarre as the market itself.

  They came in every size, shape, and skin tone. Some were dimpled and plump, others bizarrely muscled. Some had more hair than they could contain on their heads, chests, and beneath their arms, and others were as hairless as a newborn, and everyone seemed proud of every bald patch of skin, be it pale, tanned, toned, soft, or painted to match their pets, their clothes, or their jewelry.

  Several, in fact, wore nothing but paint, and I felt myself flush each time my gaze landed on what I at first mistook for a snug top or lumpy pair of pants.

  They wore silk and satin and leather and sequins and feathers and ribbons. Their hair was dyed every color of the rainbow, and their shoes seemed designed to make walking impossible, which might explain why they stumbled from place to place instead.

  If the Church’s unspoken credo was “Cover yourself and behave,” Pandemonia’s seemed to be “Show yourself and have fun.” No one stood still. No one spoke quietly. No one seemed out of place, uncomfortable, or self-conscious. And if there were any rules, laws, or policies, I couldn’t tell.

  As Felix marched me through the madness, people turned to stare as if I were the oddity.

  Nina Kane, someone said, and soon the rumor had caught on like fire burning through the crowd around and ahead of us.

  “Who caught her?”

  “Is Maddock with her?”

  “Will they sell her?”

  “She looks pale. Is she sick?”

  “…smaller than she looked on television…”

  “…so young…”

  People reached for me, and I let them touch me, hoping that each invasive touch would spread the demon virus far and wide. Someone pulled a hair from my head, and when I flinched, they all laughed. Hands ran over my arms and up my legs. Noses dove into my hair and inhaled. Fingers explored my ears and the hollows above my collarbones.

  “Hands off!” Felix shouted, but he might as well have been whispering.

  “Back away!” Dione yelled, but they only pulled her aside, and after that they were pulling me.

  Hands crept beneath my shirt and over my stomach, and I clenched my teeth to keep from screaming. A tongue slid into my ear, hot and wet, and I shuddered all over.

  “…skin tastes amazing…”

  “…so young and healthy…”

  “She’d last for decades…”

  “…so tight and firm!”

  Another hand grabbed my right arm and tugged me so fast and hard that Felix lost his grip. The world spun around me, and then a strange mouth closed over mine and I nearly choked on the metal-pierced tongue shoved into my mouth.

  I tried to scream, but my attacker swallowed the sound. I tried to pull away but found resistance from at least a dozen hands wandering all over me while the whispers about my various gifts and advantages as a potential host continued.

  A familiar warmth burst from my bound left hand, and flames blazed to life at my back, nearly scorching my thigh. Screams ripped through the night behind me. The demon stuck to my face continued to abuse his position, but all the other hands were abruptly gone. The crowd shuffled backward, and suddenly I stood in a circle al
l my own, except for the kissing demon.

  A hand grabbed my left arm again, and Felix ripped me away from the man still trying to strangle me with his tongue. I gasped for breath, blinking up at the monster who’d assaulted my mouth, and found a man in his midthirties, his hair just beginning to gray, his eyes a deep, piercing greenish-hazel, practically glowing against smooth, light brown skin.

  “Fire!”

  “Do you see?”

  “Think of the power….”

  The whispers continued all around me. My heart pounded, and I couldn’t suck air into my lungs fast enough. Everyone was staring at me. Hands reached for me again, adorned with glittering rings and shimmering bracelets, some with artwork drawn straight onto their skin, and they were held back from contact only because my left palm still blazed behind me.

  “Don’t get too close.”

  “Stunning!”

  “I bet it’s a blissful pain.”

  “I warned you!” a single, youthful voice boomed over the crowd. I gasped and looked up to find a man not much older than I standing on the balcony above one of the restaurants, staring down at the chaotic marketplace. “Nina Kane is off-limits for your own safety!” The young man’s gaze met mine and his smile bloomed, slow and full of some secret promise.

  I wanted to look away, but not watching this man seemed as dangerous a prospect as letting him watch me.

  Kastor. His identity was obvious from the authority he clearly wielded and the confidence in every single aspect of his bearing.

  “Welcome to Pandemonia, Nina Kane,” he said, and though he’d lowered his voice from public-address to just-for-you, I still heard him with perfect, eerie clarity. In fact, I seemed to be hearing intent he hadn’t actually vocalized.

  Then, finally, he blinked and readdressed the crowd, dismissing me. “Someone take Nedes to the kennels.”

  “No!” someone shouted, and when I turned, I found the kissing demon backing away from me as several of his fellow citizens closed in on him, vicious satisfaction shining in their eyes, the potential for violence resonating in every tensed muscle as they reached for him. “I only wanted a taste!” Nedes insisted, his hands held palms out as if to show that he was unarmed. “I wasn’t going to possess her, I swear!”