The Flame Never Dies. Rachel Vincent

careful.” I pulled him close for an adrenaline-fueled kiss, and when we let the moment linger, Devi grabbed the tail of my shirt and hauled me backward.

      “Priorities,” she snapped as Finn grinned at me, then turned to jog across the street.

      “We’ll take out the escort vehicle first.” Reese towered over the rest of us, in a group too varied in height to form a true huddle. “Then Nina and I will take the first supply truck and you two take the second one.”

      Maddock and Devi nodded, then headed into an alley across the way while Reese and I hid behind an industrial trash bin half-eaten with rust on our side of the street.

      Seconds later we heard engines.

      Our haphazardly parked SUV was dusty and dented enough to pass for abandoned, and I knew for certain that the ploy had worked when the caravan’s escort vehicle, a police car, stopped ten feet away. The police car bore the stylized emblem of the Unified Church—four intertwined columns of flames—and the men who got out of it wore the long navy cassocks of police officers.

      Even from a distance I could see the white embroidery on their full, bell-shaped sleeves. They were both consecrated Church leaders.

      Which meant they were possessed.

      A jolt of excitement shot up my spine, anticipation laced with an edge of fear, and I felt Reese tense beside me. He was as eager to fight as I was.

      The cops were already headed toward our SUV, obviously intending to push it off the road, when a passenger got out of the second cargo truck and shouted, “What’s the holdup?” He wore civilian clothes—a green jacket bearing the logo of the shipping company that owned the truck.

      “Abandoned car,” the first cop shouted over his shoulder. “We’ll have it out of the way in a minute.”

      “We came through here last week and there was nothing in the road,” the civilian called, and both cops turned to eye our vehicle warily.

      A gunshot thundered from Finn’s hiding place as the civilian was climbing back into his truck. One of its tires exploded, and shouts erupted from both trucks.

      The cops dove for cover behind their open car doors, pulling pistols from their holsters while they scanned the storefront for the source of the gunfire. Finn took two more shots in rapid succession, and one of them hit a second tire, effectively disabling the second cargo truck and trapping the two vehicles in front of it.

      My pulse raced, my left fist clenching and unclenching in anticipation.

      Maddock and Devi burst from their hiding place and crossed the distance quickly and quietly.

      Reese and I came at the lead vehicle from the opposite direction, running crouched over, and the driver got out of the car when he saw us coming. Even if his robes hadn’t been embroidered, I’d have known he was possessed from the way he moved, inhumanly quick and impossibly nimble. Daylight hid the demonic shine in his eyes—visible only to exorcists and fellow demons—but I saw recognition in his expression when he skidded to a stop in front of me, already reaching for the gun at his waist. He knew me.

      But then, everyone knew Nina Kane. I was public enemy number one.

      I lunged forward and pressed my left hand to his chest before he could pull his weapon. Light burst between us, and the demon screamed as he was burned from his human host while the body dangled from the fire kindled in my palm, weightless beneath the power of exorcism.

      On my right, Maddock grunted. A form flew past me and crashed to the ground, unmoving. The light from my hand faded and the body suspended from it crumpled to the cracked pavement. I turned and found Maddy fighting a second possessed police officer, but before I could get to them, I was suddenly yanked from the ground and thrown backward through the air.

      I screamed and flailed in flight, then crashed onto a patch of grass ten feet from the road. Before I could stand, another navy-robed demon sprang at me with an odd, squarish gun in his hand. I rolled out of the way, and the demon shoved the weapon into the ground where I’d been an instant earlier.

      The weapon buzzed, and I realized it was a stun gun. They’d come armed not to kill, but to capture.

      The Church still wanted us alive.

      “Watch out! Stun guns!” I shouted as I rolled over and leapt to my feet.

      The demon was on me in an instant. I tried to kick the weapon from his grip but missed his hand entirely. He was too fast. Too strong. After fighting only mutated and relatively weak degenerates in the badlands, I was out of practice battling demons in their prime, and the number of pained grunts bursting from my fellow exorcists said I was not alone.

      Time to step up my game.

      The demon cop lunged again and I blocked his gun arm, then kicked him in the chest as hard as I could. Breath exploded from his mouth and the demon flew backward several feet. I was on him before he could stand, my palm already alight with the force that would scorch him from his stolen body and eject him from the human world. For just a second, as I pressed that living flame to his chest and listened to his flesh sizzle, I felt . . . peaceful.

      Useful.

      I was born for this.

      Behind me, the grunts and thumps were winding down, and when the body beneath my hand fell limp, I turned to see that we had won the fight.

      It wasn’t even close, really. I counted six men in white-embroidered navy police cassocks, each now sporting a scorched and smoldering hole in his chest. The two survivors were the human deliverymen who’d been driving the cargo. Both now stood with their backs against the first of the two green supply trucks with their hands in the air, while Finn aimed his rifle at them.

      “What’s the plan for these two?” he asked, his aim unwavering.

      Maddock considered the question for a moment. “Cuff ’em and leave ’em in the escort vehicle.”

      “I’m on it.” Devi squatted next to one of the dead cops, then stood with his handcuffs. While she and Finn restrained the civilians, Maddock searched the bodies until he found the keys to the cargo compartments. He unlocked the rear of the first truck and rolled the door up to reveal the shipment.

      Relief eased the most immediate of my fears. Our famine was over, at least for a while.

      Reese rounded the back of the vehicle. “Holy hellfire.” The truck was stacked full of boxes, floor to ceiling, front to back. Even if the second vehicle was empty—and it wouldn’t be—we’d found way more than we could carry.

      Each box was clearly labeled, and at a glance I noticed crates of canned and dry goods, boxes of clothing bound for department stores, cleaning supplies, textbooks, and more toiletries than I’d ever seen in my life.

      “They put all their eggs in one basket,” Maddock said, his voice hollow with surprise. “They must have thought we wouldn’t attack an armed caravan.”

      “Or they were hoping we would,” I guessed. “They came armed with stun guns, prepared to capture, not kill.”

      “Well, too bad for them.” Devi stepped in front of me and pulled a clipboard from a hook on the wall of the cargo area. The inventory was several pages long.

      “It’ll be easier to drive this back than to try to unload it,” Reese said, and no one argued. We took turns siphoning the gasoline from the truck we wouldn’t be taking, and then Maddock and Devi drove off in the other cargo truck. Reese followed them in our SUV, which left Finn and me to drive the shot-out car we’d “stolen” from a sympathetic cop back in New Temperance. As we passed the police vehicle on the way to our car, one of the cargo truck drivers stuck his head out of the backseat window.

      “Carter?” he called, leaning at an odd angle because his hands were bound behind his back. The other civilian sat in the front seat, his left wrist handcuffed to the steering wheel. Neither man could get out of the car, but they would be able to drive it to the nearest city.