The Flame Never Dies. Rachel Vincent
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heard her mention Adam, the ill-fated father of her child, in weeks.
Reese pulled the SUV to a stop beside our truck, right in the middle of the road, and the other half of our group poured out of the vehicle. “What the hell?” Footsteps crunched in the dirt behind me, and then Reese and Grayson stopped at my side. She carried a plastic jug and he had a hose wrapped around his massive left arm.
“Looks like the parents are dead in the front seat,” I whispered. “Not sure what happened yet, but Finn hasn’t found any immediate threat.”
“Poor thing!” Grayson cried.
Devi rolled her eyes and scuffed her boot in the dirt on the side of the road. “What the hell are we supposed to do with him?”
“We can’t leave him here.” Maddock threaded his arm through hers, frowning as he watched the little boy. “It’s a miracle he’s still alive. He must not have been here long.”
“We’re not even going to think about taking him with us until we know what killed his parents.” Devi circled the car toward the driver’s side and used one hand to shield the sun from her face while she bent to peer through the window. When she stood a second later, she looked sick. “Nothin’ but blood.”
While the rest of us took a closer look at the car, Grayson, Ana, and Mellie lured Tobias toward the cargo truck with promises of water and chocolate from a box of sweets that had been intended for the general store in New Temperance.
As Devi and Finn had said, the front windows were too caked with blood to show anything at all, and through the rear windshield we could see little more than the outlines of two bodies sitting in the front seats. The trunk door stood open a couple of inches, and when I lifted it, I saw that the narrow center seat had been folded down, creating a small path into the trunk from the backseat of the car. A path just wide enough for a six-year-old.
My stomach twisted at the thought of what Tobias must have witnessed. How could any kid see that much carnage without being psychologically destroyed?
When the child was out of sight behind the cargo truck, Maddock opened the driver’s door while Finn aimed his rifle at the interior just in case. Nothing jumped out at us, but after one glance inside I gasped and stepped back. Finn’s jaw tightened, and even Devi covered her mouth in horror.
The man and woman, still buckled into the front seats of the car, were drenched in blood fresh enough to glisten in the afternoon sunlight. The dashboard, windows, windshield, and floorboard had all been heavily splattered with what could only have been an arterial spray.
Yet even through all the gore, two things were clear.
First, the man and woman in the blue car were not Tobias’s biological parents—their skin was as pale as mine, even accounting for the pallor of recent death. And second, based on the blood and bits of flesh caking their right hands, the couple’s wounds appeared to be self-inflicted.
The man and woman had simply pulled onto the side of the road, then ripped out their own throats.
“Who are they?” Grayson whispered, glancing at the gore-splattered car.
“They didn’t have any IDs.” Maddock ran one hand through his thick brown hair in a rare display of nerves. But then, the contents of that car had bothered us all. “They’re not his biological parents, but aside from that, who knows?”
Grayson sipped from a half-full bottle of water, then passed it left in our huddle, to Reese. “There’s not a drop of blood on Tobias.” She shrugged. “If he was far enough away to avoid the spray, I’m betting he didn’t see much of what happened.”
“I think he was in the trunk, but who knows when he crawled in there?” I’d fought demons, degenerates, and humans on a regular basis since finding out I was an exorcist, but I’d never seen anything like the carnage in that car.
“Why is no one asking the most obvious question?” Devi demanded, and Grayson shushed her with a sharp look. “Why the hell would a normal couple just pull onto the side of the road and rip their own throats out? I don’t even see how it’s physically possible!”
Finn accepted the water bottle from Reese but hardly sipped from it before passing it to me. “They hadn’t been normal for a long time. And they probably weren’t a couple.”
“But they were possessed.” Maddock’s voice was so soft that at first I didn’t even register the words. “They’d already started to degenerate.”
Devi frowned. “I didn’t notice anything weird about them. Other than their mutilated throats.”
“Their fingers were too long.” Finn exhaled slowly and propped his rifle over his left shoulder. “And their chins were too pointy.” He glanced at Maddock, who nodded to confirm some unspoken concern; Maddy and Finn had known each other for so long that sometimes they each seemed to know what the other was thinking. Which left the rest of us in the dark. “The mutations were subtle. They’d be hard to detect, especially under all that blood.”
“How did you two notice?” I asked, passing the water bottle to Devi.
“They’ve had a lot of practice.” Grayson turned to Maddy and Finn, and her eyes held a profound sadness that seemed to stretch even beyond the scope of the carnage we’d just discovered. I started to ask what she meant and how she knew that, but—
“Okay, but how do you know they weren’t a couple?” Devi demanded, frustration sharpening the ends of her words.
Maddy shrugged. “Demons don’t make commitments unless they need to blend in.” Like Grayson’s parents, whose simulation of a human marriage had allowed them to breed her and her older brother as future hosts to be possessed at maturity. “And there’s no one to blend in with in the badlands.”
Devi rolled her eyes. “That doesn’t mean any—”
“We should get going, unless you all want to sleep in the open tonight.” Finn swung his rifle down and aimed it at the ground, then headed for the cargo truck, where Mellie and Tobias sat snacking on the bench seat while Anabelle leaned on the open passenger’s-side door.
“What’s got his gun sling in a twist?” Devi grumbled while we watched Finn walk off.
Maddy accepted the bottle from her and drained the last inch of water. “He’s being cautious. The blood’s still wet, which means that whatever bodies the demons are wearing now, they’re probably still close.” Maddock gestured toward our vehicles, urging us all forward, and I jogged ahead of the group to catch up with Finn.
“Hey. You okay?”
“Yeah,” Finn said, too quickly to have given the answer any thought. “I just haven’t seen anything that gruesome in a really long time.”
“Wait.” I reached for his arm and pulled him to a stop facing me. “How long is a really long time?” When had he ever seen something that gruesome? “What are you and Maddock not telling us?”
Finn shot an anxious glance at the others over my shoulder, then lowered his voice. “If it were my secret, I’d tell you, but there are things Maddy’s not ready to talk about.” His conflicted gaze begged me to understand. “But it has nothing to do with whatever happened in that car. That dead couple just . . . they remind him of something.”
“Something you saw too,” I guessed. Because Maddy and Finn were never apart.
“Yeah, but . . .” His shrug made him look vulnerable, in spite of his soldier’s powerful build and the rifle slung over one shoulder, and I wanted to pull him into a hug.
“Just because you didn’t have a body at the time doesn’t