The Flame Never Dies. Rachel Vincent

months ago, because even when Finn eventually released his body, returning to New Temperance would be a death sentence for the real Carter—he would know things the Church wouldn’t want him to share.

      “He’s not possessed,” I said. “He just switched sides once he learned the truth.” Telling my little lie was much easier than trying to explain that Carter actually was possessed, but not by a demon. Beyond that, we didn’t want the Church to know about Finn and his ability to inhabit any human body not already occupied by a demon. He was as close to a secret weapon as we had.

      “What truth? What the hell happened out there?” the man cuffed to the steering wheel demanded, and I followed his gaze to where we’d lined up the scorched corpses on the grass. “What did you bastards do to them?”

      The drivers didn’t recognize us as exorcists because their only exposure to the practice had come from the Church’s army of fake exorcists, who marched around in dramatic black robes, wearing crosses and chanting nonsense in Latin for show.

      “Those cops were possessed,” I said. “We exorcised them.”

      “Nina,” Finn whispered, warning me to shush, because just like with Carter, the more these civilians knew, the more danger they’d be in from the Church. But they’d already seen enough to get themselves killed, so my explanation might actually save their lives.

      “You expect us to believe you’re exorcists and the cops were demons?” the man in the backseat spat. “Bullshit.” He leaned forward, appealing to his coworker in the front. “Demons are pathological liars. You can’t believe a word she says.”

      “If we’re possessed, why would we let you live?”

      Backseat Man lifted his eyebrows at me in challenge. “If they were possessed”—he nodded at the bodies lined up on the ground—“why were they going to let you live?”

      “So they could deliver us to the Church.” I shrugged. That should have been obvious.

      “Deliver you . . . ?” Front Seat Man stared up at me, surprised. “Where exactly were they going to put you?”

      I frowned, considering the question. The backs of both cargo trucks were full of goods, and most of the available seats had been filled by the cops and drivers. They wouldn’t have had room to bring more than two of us back.

      So why had they come armed with nonlethal weapons?

      Before I could come up with any reasonable theories, Backseat Man made a show of glancing around what he could see of the ghost town. “Where’s your sister? She lose that baby yet?”

      Finn held me back when I took an instinctive, aggressive step toward him. Melanie and her unlicensed, underage pregnancy, which constituted multiple prosecutable sins, had risen to infamy when the Church publicly questioned her humanity and broadcast her boyfriend’s immolation—death by fire—to the entire country.

      For once, Finn’s hand on my shoulder failed to calm me. “She’s not going to lose the baby,” I growled through clenched teeth. Making sure of that had become my mission in life since escaping New Temperance. Mellie’s unborn child was the only family she and I had left in the world—thanks to routine sterilization by the Church, I could never have one of my own.

      “Oh, we both know that’s not true,” Backseat Man taunted. “Even if it’s born breathing, how long will it live? The well is empty, and you have no donor. Without a soul, that baby will die out here in the dirt, and there’ll be nothing you or your sister or your gang of flame-wielding assassins can do about it.”

      Assassins? My heart thumped harder. Only demons called exorcists assassins.

      I squinted against the sunlight for a better look at Backseat Man, and that time when I stepped toward him, Finn didn’t try to stop me. He’d heard it too. The Church had sent one of its demons in disguise as a deliveryman—no official cassock, no telltale embroidery.

      “Melanie’s baby will live.” I held my left hand out so he could see the flame cradled in my palm. His eyes widened, and he tried to retreat across the bench seat but was trapped by the seat belt. “I will find a soul for it.” I shoved my fiery hand through the open window, and the demon screeched, an inhuman sound of agony, as the flame met his flesh. “And if I can’t find a soul for my sister’s baby,” I whispered so softly that no one else could hear me above the crackle of crisping skin, “I will damn well give that kid my own.”

TWO

      We caught up with the other two vehicles on the way back to Ashland, and Finn must have known something was wrong, because he didn’t tease me about my lead foot. “Try not to let them get to you,” he said, plucking my right hand from the wheel so he could intertwine his fingers with mine. “They’re demons. They live to cause us pain.”

      But I wasn’t upset about what the backseat demon had said—I was upset because he was almost certainly right. The well of souls was empty. It had been quietly drained over the past millennia by demons secretly living among us. The soaring infant mortality rate at the end of the previous century had finally clued humanity in, leading to the war against the unclean, which had decimated two-thirds of the world’s population.

      Now pregnancies were licensed and regulated by the Church. People who were declared unfit to reproduce were sterilized at age fifteen, as I’d been because I was slightly nearsighted and prone to seasonal allergies. To make sure that every baby conceived would actually live, elderly citizens were expected to give up their souls in simultaneous birth/death events carefully orchestrated by city officials. What the rest of the world didn’t know was that the Church only wanted those babies to live so they could be possessed and fed from as adults.

      Escaping New Temperance had spared Melanie’s baby—and the rest of us—from that fate. Theoretically, at least. Unfortunately, our escape had also drastically lowered the chances of finding a soul for the baby. Without one, the youngest and most vulnerable of my two remaining family members would die within hours of his or her birth. We’d all known that from the beginning.

      What I hadn’t told the rest of Anathema was that I was fully prepared to make the necessary sacrifice myself if I couldn’t find a willing donor before the birth.

      “It’ll work out, Nina.” Finn squeezed my hand as I pressed on the brake to keep from rear-ending the cargo truck in front of us. “One way or another, it’ll all work out.”

      But I knew better. Nothing in my life had ever just worked out. Good things never happened unless I made them happen, and five months spent wandering through the badlands hadn’t changed that.

      Before we’d even pulled to a stop in front of the library, Grayson James burst through the cracked glass doors and raced down the crumbling steps without so much as a precautionary glance in either direction. I groaned as I shifted into park. One of these days her enthusiasm was going to get her killed. Or worse—possessed.

      Reese got out of the SUV and pulled her into his massive embrace, then lifted her for a long, deep kiss. For a moment I was caught off guard by their demonstrative affection—a transgression worthy of arrest had we still been in New Temperance, or any other city. If Finn and I had become comfortable with our relationship, free from the enforced modesty of the Church, Reese and Grayson had grown bold.

      Maddock and Devi’s connection had already been scandalous when I’d met them.

      “Grace, you can’t just keep throwing yourself into unknown situations.” Reese set her on her feet on the crumbling concrete, and her head barely reached his shoulder. “Until you transition, you’re vulnerable.”

      We’d seen an increase in degenerate activity over the past month as her seventeenth birthday approached, bringing with it the emergence of her exorcist abilities—a genetic inevitability because