My hands tightened around the edges of the blanket as I realized how differently the whole thing might have played out if he’d come in just a little earlier. “Did you know about…? Did you know I could…?” I took a deep breath and started over. “Did you know I was an exorcist?”
“This morning? Not for sure. I just knew that degenerate was stalking you, so you could be the one we came for.”
My heart thumped too hard. What the hell did that mean?
Finn stirred his stew aimlessly. “But then you disappeared, and I spent half the day watching your school, waiting for you to come out so I could find out if you were the one.” He leaned as far forward as he could without sliding off his cushion. The lantern lit his face from below, lending a threatening cast to his eager expression. “The degenerate from this morning was only the first. More will find you, and you can’t take them all on by yourself. You need us, Nina. You need us every bit as much as we need you.”
My fist clenched around the edge of the blanket. “Why are degenerates hunting me, Finn?”
“They have your scent. How old are you?”
“Seventeen, next week.” Fear dropped adrenaline into my bloodstream.
“Degenerates can sense an exorcist nearing maturity, and when we saw them converging on this area from all over the badlands, we knew you’d be here. We didn’t know who you’d be, or whether you’d be in New Temperance or Solace, so we split up to widen our search. We’re here to keep the degenerates from killing you and the Church from taking you.”
“And now we’re camping out in an abandoned warehouse, hiding from the police? And the fake exorcists?”
He nodded and took a bite from his bowl. “And from the Church in general. And the degenerates.”
And the degenerates…
I wasn’t leaving town without my sister. “So, are your friends in New Temperance?” I reached for my stew, and suddenly my arms felt heavier than the full bowl.
“They are now. We have another…place. It’s nicer than this one¸” he added, and I could hear the apology in his voice. “But it’s not safe for you to be on the move yet.”
My hand shook as I tucked the blanket tighter around my legs. The heater was only two feet away. Why was I trembling? “Because the police are still looking for us?”
“Yeah, but our real problem is that you just exorcised your first demon, and—”
“Whoa…” The warehouse tilted around me, and I almost dropped my bowl. “Something’s wrong.”
Finn set his bowl down and glanced at the watch on his left wrist. “Yeah, that’s about right. How’s your head? Any pain?”
“What’s happening?” Vertigo washed over me, and I threw one leg out to keep from falling sideways.
“Okay, hang on. Let me help.” He stood and grabbed the extra pillow next to his.
I blinked, trying to draw the room back into focus, then set my paper bowl on the ground and pushed it back with a shaking hand. My pulse raced, and that only made me dizzier. “What’s in the stew, Finn?”
“This has nothing to do with the food, I swear.” He squatted next to me and set the extra pillow beside mine. “Here. Lie down.”
But I scooted away from him clumsily. The warehouse spun, and suddenly my clothes felt like chain mail instead of cotton.
Panic danced in my chest and I tried to stand, but the signal Flee! got lost somewhere between my brain and my muscles. My other leg shot out and my foot flipped my bowl. My arm collapsed behind me and my shoulder slammed into the bare concrete. “What’s wrong with me?” I demanded, and my words were slurred.
“You’re gonna be fine. Try to hold still, Nina. Don’t fight it or you’ll hurt yourself.”
Terror made my pulse trip when he reached for me. “Fight what? What’s wrong with me?” My words were a mishmash of soft syllables, like verbal baby food. The warehouse was going dark from the edges of my vision inward, as if the night was spiraling in on me.
“Just close your eyes and try to relax….”
The rest of his instructions got lost as the world went dark, and the last thing I saw was Finn’s green eyes staring down into mine while he lifted my head and slid a pillow beneath it.
***
My ears regained function first, and I heard Finn talking but couldn’t tell what he was saying. I heard sound, but that sound had no focus.
The first words that made sense were spoken by a girl I didn’t know. “Where the hell are you?” Her voice was peppered with static.
I blinked, and the ceiling of the warehouse appeared above me, a distant, dark blur. Why can’t I move? Fresh panic fluttered in my chest.
Finn sighed, and I heard footsteps as he paced to my right. “I found an empty warehouse on Morgan Street. On the north side of town, near the old train depot.”
“Morgan…” Paper crinkled over the connection, and I realized she was looking at a map. Whoever she was.
“We’re fine, Devi.” Finn sounded exhausted. Frustrated.
I tried to move my right arm, and my fingers twitched.
“We’re fine? How do you know he’s fine? Have you asked him?”
Him? Had Finn told her I was a guy? Was she his girlfriend? Kids our age rarely defined illicit relationships with titles or commitment, but there were exceptions, like Mellie and Adam. Did Finn think his girlfriend wouldn’t notice my complete—if not entirely functional—set of girl parts?
“Thirty-eight hours!” Devi shouted. “I’ve been looking for you for nearly two days. Don’t you ever disappear on me like that again!”
Yup. Definitely a girlfriend.
Finn paced closer to me that time, which brought him into my field of vision, behind the camp stove. He was almost in focus. “I found her.”
Her? Me, her? Then who was “him”?
“That’s no excuse!” Her shrill shout made my ears ring. “Grayson says there’s a small horde somewhere in your area, and you’re all alone with a rookie. What happens if they find you?”
“Shit!” Finn rubbed his forehead in frustration, and I flexed my right hand, forcing all four fingers to move at once. They brushed soft material, and I realized he’d covered me with a blanket. “She’s been triggered. If they’re that close, they’ve already scented her. We have to move.”
“Did your brain leak out your ears this morning? Stay there. We’ll come get you. Hopefully, we can take out a few of them along the way to even the odds.”
I lifted my left arm from the blanket, and when Finn turned toward the motion, he found me looking at him.
“Gotta go. She’s waking up.”
Both of my arms were working, as were my fingers. My toes twitched in my sneakers when I tried to move them. My body was slowly surrendering to my control, but that did little to alleviate my anger and fear, when I didn’t know how I’d lost control of it in the first place.
“Do not get him hurt, Finn,” the girl on the radio said, static breaking her order into several bursts of sound I had to concentrate to make sense of.
Finn clipped the radio to the waistband of his jeans, then stepped over the portable heater and knelt next to me. “Hey.”
“ ‘Hey’? Seriously?” I spared a moment to be grateful that my voice worked when the rest of me seemed to be malfunctioning. “I pass out under your care, then wake up half paralyzed to hear that some kind of ‘horde’ is in our area, and that’s your opener? ‘Hey’?”
Finn shrugged while I glared up at him. “I almost went with ‘Get up and help me pack before we’re overrun by a horde of degenerates,’ but I was afraid that might lead to more panic than the situation actually warrants.”
“There’s a limit to how much panic that situation warrants?” Because I was pretty sure the only thing worse than fighting one mutated demon was fighting a whole horde of them.
“Degenerates aren’t exactly a rarity in our line of work, so if you panic every time you get the opportunity to do what you were born to do…well, let’s just say that the number of
exorcists who panic is inversely proportionate to the number of exorcists who survive.”
“Good to know.”
“Still, you should get up before we’re overrun by that horde of degenerates.”
I pushed myself into a sitting position, and the blanket fell into my lap. My head spun. When I started to tip over, Finn put one hand on my shoulder and one on my lower back to steady me. His hands were warm through my shirt when the rest of the warehouse was cold, and they felt good. I wanted to enjoy the feeling, but I didn’t know him. I didn’t know why I’d passed out or what he’d had to do with that.
The number of girls who let strange boys touch them in abandoned warehouses after waking up from unexplained blackouts was probably inversely proportionate to the number of girls who survived.
I cleared my throat and sat up straighter, and he let me go. “What the hell happened? What did you do to me?”
“Nothing, I swear.”
I started to argue, but he spoke over me as I struggled to make my legs obey commands from my brain. “Nina, there are some things you don’t know yet. Things I was going to explain when you woke up, but you were out for longer than I expected, and now we’re kind of…out of time.”
“Because of the horde of degenerates?”
“Yeah. Although the Church’s ‘exorcists’ and the police are also looking for us. So we need to pack everything we can carry before my friends get here.”
Running for our lives. Again. Was this how he lived? “Fine. I’m a little busy relearning how to walk, but I assume you can talk and pack at the same time?”
He smiled, and I tried not to notice how green his eyes were in the light from the lantern. “I’m a proficient multitasker, yes.”
“Good. How long was I out?”
“Almost seven hours.”
“Seven hours!” I glanced up at the windows near the ceiling, searching for any sign of daylight while I did the math. “So it’s, what, three in the morning?”
“Just after.”
“Why am I so weak?”
“You’ll be fine in a few minutes.” Finn backed away from me, and when I didn’t fall over, he grabbed a duffel I hadn’t noticed before, then sank to his knees in front of the box of utensils. “Your body did most of the hard work while you were passed out.” He dropped a small box of plastic utensils into his bag, then followed those with the can opener and a large box of matches. “Most exorcists start coming into their abilities around the time they turn seventeen. I’m not sure why that is, but Reese thinks, evolutionarily speaking, the exorcists whose abilities matured before their bodies did were hunted and killed by degenerates.”
Reese! That was the other name mentioned on the news. Reese and Devi. Reese was the big guy, and Devi was…I wasn’t sure what Devi was.
“He thinks those who matured later were better able to defend themselves, so they lived to pass on their genes. Either way, seventeen seems to be the magic number, give or take a few months.”
“And because I’ll be seventeen next week my abilities have matured, so the degenerates can, what? Smell me?”
Weird.
“Or sense you. Or something like that.” Finn disconnected a small propane tank from the camping stove, then folded in the sides and closed the lid, so that the stove looked like a small metal suitcase. The dented outside said it was well used, but the shiny inside and lack of burnt-on crud said it was also well cared for. “But they can only sense you during that transitional period, between the time your abilities start to manifest and the time you gain full control over them all. Which can’t happen until you’re ‘triggered.’ ”
“Wait, abilities? Plural? I can do something other than fry demons with my bare hands?” Because, honestly, that one was both awesome and scary enough on its own.
He slid the camp stove into the bottom of his duffel, then tightened the seal on the propane tank and slid that in after it. “That’s the big one, but yes, you’ll develop a few other advantages that help you hunt both degenerates and demons in their prime.”
“Like what?”
“Like…speed. And strength. They can run fast, so you have to be able to run fast. They’re strong, so you have to be strong. But like I said, those additional abilities have to be triggered.” He glanced up at me with a shrug. “That’s what we call it, anyway.”
And he’d told Devi that had already happened. “How?” When I realized my head was no longer spinning, I shook out the blue blanket—the best I could, still seated—and folded it in my lap.
“By exorcising your first demon.” He grabbed a flashlight standing on end near the rows of cans and dropped it into the duffel bag. “In your case, that was your mother.”
“Superpowers as a reward for matricide. This just keeps getting weirder.”
Finn glanced at me in surprise, and I remembered that he hadn’t read Mr. Yung’s old picture novels, and he probably had no idea what I meant by “superpowers.” But then he smiled.
“They’re not superpowers, and you’ll only be able to use them to their full extent when there’s a demon near, but yeah. I guess it’s kind of weird if you’re not used to it.”
“So why did I pass out?”
“Because it takes a lot of energy for your body to implement those changes. That happens to everyone, and obviously you’re most vulnerable when you’re unconscious. Which is why we’re here.” He made a sweeping gesture to take in the entire warehouse. “I wasn’t sure how soon you would shut down, and I didn’t want to be running when that happened. But now we have to go. Can you stand yet?”
I planted both palms on the ground, then carefully got to my knees on the pillow beneath me. “Did it ever occur to you to tell me I was about to lose control of my own body?”
“I was getting to it when you passed out.” He grabbed the blanket I’d folded, and refolded it into a longer, narrower shape, then stuffed it into the duffel on one side, as padding for the other supplies. “How do you feel?”
I stood slowly, my arms out for balance, and when the warehouse didn’t pitch around me, I let out a sigh. “Fine. I feel pretty good.”
“Great.” He tossed me my school satchel, and I caught it easily. “Take all the cans you can carry.”
I stepped over the lantern and two pillows, then knelt in front of the double row of canned goods. “Who’s Devi?”
Finn made an annoyed sound deep in his throat, and some small bit of dread inside me eased. She was definitely not his girlfriend.
“Devi’s a friend. Well, more like the irritating girlfriend of a friend. She only speaks in commands and seems to think she’s the boss of the whole world, but she comes with the territory, and she carries her weight, so what can you do?”
I unzipped my bag and picked up two cans, but Finn rolled his eyes and snatched the satchel from me. “You’re not going back to school, so this is all worthless.” He turned my backpack upside down and dumped all my textbooks and notebooks onto the grimy floor.
A surprising bolt of disappointment shot through me at the realization that he was right.
I dropped the first two cans into my empty bag, trying to find points of commonality between my life before I’d killed my mother and this new existence on the run with dangerous abilities I didn’t yet understand and a beautiful green-eyed boy I didn’t really know. But I couldn’t find any. The before and after halves of my life seemed to have nothing in common except me.
And Melanie. She was still my sister, even if my mother wasn’t really my mother and my school was no longer my school and my future was now a huge question mark scribbled over the path I’d always assumed my life would take.
I couldn’t leave her.
“Where are we going?” I dropped two more cans into my bag, then picked up another two without glancing at the labels.
“Today? To our current home base. It’s much more comfortable, and it has running water and a functioning bathroom.”
Good. I’d been trying to ignore the pressur
e in my bladder ever since I woke up. “And after that?”
Finn shrugged. “We don’t have an agenda, but we’ll stay in the area long enough to hunt down most of the degenerates scenting you, unless the Church gets too close to finding us.”
I wouldn’t leave Melanie, even if that happened.
I zipped my full bag and stood, mentally preparing myself for how heavy it’d be, and was surprised when I lifted it with very little effort. Did the increase in my strength mean the degenerates were getting closer?
When I turned to Finn, I found his little campsite virtually gone. He’d managed to fit most of his equipment into that one huge duffel.
“Where did you get all that, anyway?” I waved one hand at the pillows and cans remaining.
“I…um…I’m pretty good with acquisitions. I’ll show you later.” He threw the bulging bag over his shoulder with as little effort as I’d needed to lift my satchel. “Ready? Devi and Reese should be here any minute, and hopefully they’ve thinned out the horde a little on the way.”
“How big a horde are we talking about?” I clutched the strap of my satchel. A strange itch had developed in my legs, way too deep to scratch. My muscles ached with it, as if I’d been in one position for too long and now my body wanted to stretch. To move.
“Grayson said it was small, so ten or twelve, I’d guess, unless Devi and the others have made a decent dent.”
That itch in my legs swelled, extending through my arms and down into my feet—a physical sense of urgency, as if my muscles knew we should have been running but my brain didn’t yet know why. I dropped into a squat and bounced on the balls of my feet, then set my satchel down and bent to touch my toes, hoping stretches would alleviate some of that itch to move. To run.
“What’s wrong?” Finn set his duffel on the floor and ducked to catch my gaze. “You feel something?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure what, though. I just…I feel like we should be moving. Fast. Now.” I could sense something strong and dark racing toward us and felt compelled to run in the opposite direction.