“You—” Her eyes widened.
“I’m an exorcist. The Church said I killed my mom because they can’t afford for anyone to find out the truth, but I’m innocent, and Adam was innocent, and Melanie is damn well innocent.” I glanced at Finn over her shoulder. “Speaking of which, where do we stand on the jailbreak?”
“I can’t find the right key,” he said, frustration echoing in his deep, borrowed voice.
“Let me.” Officer Flores pushed past me, already flipping through the keys on his own ring as he marched down the aisle. Finn stepped aside to give him access to the cell door, and that was when I saw my sister. Melanie was lying facedown on the floor of her cell, her legs still pinned to the floor by steel bands bolted to the concrete just below her knees.
She wasn’t moving.
“Melanie!” I raced down the aisle and gripped the bars of her cell with both hands while Flores unlocked the door. As soon as it swung open, I fell to my knees at her side and brushed limp, pale hair from her face. “Unlock her legs,” I demanded, but Flores was already squatting next to me, searching for another key. “Mellie,” I whispered into her ear. “Wake up. It’s Nina. I came to rescue you, and that’ll be a lot easier if you can walk.”
Her eyes rolled behind their lids; then those lids fluttered open, and I exhaled.
“Nina?” My sister’s voice was dry and hoarse, but she was awake and she recognized me.
“Yes. I’m here.” I blinked away fresh tears. “Hold still for just a minute while we get you unlocked.”
“Finn.” I twisted to whisper into his ear while I smoothed Melanie’s hair back. “Bennett was disembodied a few minutes ago.”
His eyes widened and he glanced at my sister, then back at me. “You want me to make sure Mellie’s…still in there?”
“Will you have to let go of Jennings to do that?”
“No, I should be able to sort of…push her, mentally. If there’s give she’s fine. If not, she’s possessed,” he whispered.
“Do it.”
While Flores unlocked, then flipped back, the steel bands that had bound my sister into the posture of penitence until she’d lost consciousness, Finn closed his eyes. A second later, he opened them, and I saw his relief even before I heard it in his voice. “It’s her. She’s fine.”
Tension eased within me—my unconscious sister would have been an easy and convenient target for the newly disembodied deacon. “Thanks,” I said to Finn. Then I turned back to my sister. “Let’s get you up slowly. Can you stand?”
“I think so,” Mellie said. I helped her carefully to her feet and kept one arm around her while she stepped over the restraints bolted to the concrete floor. “Yeah. I’m tired, but I can walk.”
Anabelle slid her arm around Melanie’s other side and Mellie looked surprised to see her. “It was all a lie, Ana. Mom was the demon, not Nina, and—”
“I know.” Anabelle smiled. “I’m not sure I understand it all yet, but I know,” she said as we helped my sister out of the cell.
“You need to get going,” Flores said. “Take a left into the hall, then two rights and another left. That’ll put you in the parking lot. But you’re on your own from there.”
“Thank you, Officer Flores.” I glanced back at him over my shoulder on our way down the aisle. “Be careful.”
He nodded, and we left him in that room full of empty cells, clearly trying to decide how best to proceed, armed with knowledge that could get him killed.
We took a left turn and two rights and were halfway to that last hallway when a soft thwup from a room ahead and to my right drew me to a silent stop in the middle of the hall. Something growled—a thick, guttural sound—and then I heard the distinct, grisly tearing of flesh.
Chills shot up my spine.
“Shit,” Finn whispered with Officer Jennings’s voice as my heart began to pound deep within my chest.
I’d just recognized the room ahead as the police station lobby—where I’d exorcised a demon a quarter hour earlier—when a man in an unembroidered navy cassock stepped into the doorway, one hand pressed to a wound in his chest. Blood seeped between his fingers, and his face was already pale. His focus found me without even veering toward Finn, Melanie, or Anabelle.
“You killed them,” the man said, and before I could object or ask who I’d killed, he spoke again, a thin line of blood leaking from one corner of his mouth. “You killed them all with that little demonstration. You killed them the moment you opened your mouth.”
And finally I understood. “Deacon Bennett?”
“Nina…” Terror and confusion rang in Melanie’s voice.
“Deacon Bennett was a demon,” I explained, without taking my eyes from the monster. “She lost her host, but now she’s found a new one.” And she’d slaughtered everyone I’d left alive in the lobby. Because I’d told them the truth.
Anabelle’s breathing quickened and Finn tensed at my side. “Nina,” he said. Time was running out. We needed to make a move. He was looking to me for a signal.
“Bennett is gone,” the possessed cop said, still clutching his chest wound. “Half a human-lifetime spent elevating myself in her skin, campaigning for deacon, and some snot-nosed assassin child ends the whole thing in five minutes.” He gasped, and when more blood dribbled down his chin, I realized Bennett’s new body was dying. Soon the demon would be free to search for another host. And again, I would lose the opportunity to purge the monster from our world and send it back to hell.
My left hand began to tingle, and I slid it behind my thigh, letting the heat build, hidden by my body. I was about to lunge for Bennett’s new host when the demon spoke again, and I froze, caught on his words like a fly in a web.
“I hope Kastor gets his hands on you.”
I blinked, and my eyes narrowed at him in surprise. If Kastor was an enemy of the Church—a thief of hosts—why would she hope he got his hands on me?
“Kastor?” Finn said, and I thought I heard something strange in the question, but maybe I just wasn’t used to his new voice yet.
“Who’s Kastor?” Anabelle said, and the name trembled on her tongue.
The demon gave us a bloody smile, eyes glinting with an inhuman shine. “Kastor is the boogeyman. You think humanity has reason to fear the Church?” he demanded, his voice filled with pain, yet somehow still menacing.
We had every reason to fear the Church—the room full of bodies to Bennett’s right was proof enough of that.
The demon read my reply in my expression, then snorted in derision. “Your fear is wasted on us, child. If Kastor rises, the Church will fall, and humanity will not be long for this world.”
“You believe your own propaganda now? The Church isn’t saving us—it’s leading us to the slaughter.”
Bennett’s new pain-glazed, contemptuous stare focused on me. “A farmer slaughters his cattle because he must eat to survive, but he also protects the herd from thieves and predators. If you leave the pen, the wolves will find you, child.”
“So Kastor is a wolf now? I thought he was the boogeyman.” Was this a distraction? Was her plan to keep us talking until reinforcements arrived?
“Kastor is destruction beyond what you can imagine. He and his libertines will devour the human race whole, and our kind will be stuck in hell once again, crawling over one another in the dark for untold millennia, until the next species creeps from the primordial ooze and evolves into something we can work with.” The demon’s body seemed to deflate as blood continued to leak from it. “Have you any idea how many eons we’ve wasted in previous cycles, thanks to gluttons like Kastor?”
Eons? Cycles?
“Yes, Kastor is the wolf,” he continued. “And you are the sheep, and by the time he’s done playing with his food, you’ll wish you’d died alongside Adam Yung, devoured by merciful flames.”
The jump in my pulse was part fury, part terror. I held up my glowing left hand and stepped forward. The demon pulled a gun from behind his back and aim
ed at Anabelle.
Before I could even process the threat or its purpose, Finn tackled Anabelle and Melanie, temporarily taking my sister and my friend out of the line of fire. “Get him!” Finn shouted.
I lunged for the former deacon, my left hand ablaze, but the demon was faster, even in the new, dying body. He pressed the barrel against his temple.
“No!” I shouted.
Bennett pulled the trigger. Blood and liquefied brains exploded into the lobby from the hallway, and I caught a brief glimpse of the carnage already laid out inside.
“Damn it!” I backed away from the body, turning to put the massacre in the lobby at my back, clutching my own stomach in horror as more tears filled my eyes.
Bennett was beyond my reach, no doubt already searching for a fresh body. I might never know whether she found one or got sucked back into hell for want of a host.
But there was no time to mourn the lost opportunity.
“Nina, we have to go,” Finn said, and I turned to find him pulling my shocked sister to her feet. Anabelle sat blinking and stunned on the floor, leaning against the wall. “With any luck, the cops are headed back here from the gate.”
And with that reversal in the concentration of security, we might just make it out of town alive.
“Come on!” I hauled Anabelle up with one hand, digging Flores’s keys from my pocket with the other. “Are you okay?”
“I will be,” Anabelle said, one hand on the wall for balance, while she avoided looking at all the blood. “I just can’t believe she was a demon, hidden right in front of us.”
“She’s not the only one. Anyone wearing embroidered sleeves is possessed, Ana.”
Anabelle blinked at me, visibly struggling to process that new information—and the fact that she’d been days from consecration herself. But we were out of time. She’d have to process on the run.
“What about you?” I asked, turning to Melanie. “You okay?”
“I think so,” she said, staring at the body on the floor. “Still tired and thirsty, though.” And obviously in shock over everything she’d seen and heard in the past ten minutes.
“You can hydrate in the car. Let’s go.” We raced down the hall with Mellie half supported by Anabelle and Finn, and took the last corner so hard and fast I almost slammed into the wall. The parking lot was ahead, past a single glass door, and through the tall pane I saw red and blue lights flashing in the distance. In the direction of the south gate.
I pressed the bar on the door, and we burst out of the building, every breath puffing in front of our faces as we ran past the sparsely populated first and second rows, headed straight for the only car in the third. I shoved the key into its slot and twisted, and the car gave a soft thump as all four doors unlocked. We piled in, sirens growing louder in the distance as the colored lights flashed faster and brighter, and my heartbeat raced to match the pace.
Finn sat up front with me and I started the engine as Anabelle slammed her rear door. I shifted into reverse and backed out of the parking spot, thankful that it was too early in the season for snow and ice. Finn twisted to stare out the rear windshield as I pulled out of the lot and onto a back street, determined to take the longer but less visible path to the town gate.
“What’s the plan?” Anabelle whispered, and in the rearview mirror, I saw her wrap one arm around Melanie.
“Some friends—fellow exorcists—are waiting for us between here and Solace.” Assuming they’d shaken the fake exorcists pursuing them.
“You’re an exorcist?” Mellie’s eyes looked huge in the mirror. “You exorcised Mom?” she asked, obviously putting the pieces together, and I nodded. “Is Officer Jennings an exorcist too?”
“No.” He twisted to look at her. “My real name is Finn, and I don’t always look like this,” he said, and when she started to ask another question, he shook his head. “It’s complicated, but I promise I’ll explain everything once we’re out of town. For now, we need to be quiet.”
We rolled down darkened streets with the headlights off, pulling into alleys and onto dark shoulders whenever another vehicle approached. I turned left a block from the wall so we could approach the gate head-on, and for several moments I let the car roll slowly forward, still unnoticed, while we evaluated the situation.
“I only see two guards,” Finn said. “They must still think you’re in custody at the courthouse.”
“There will be more patrolling the perimeter,” Anabelle said.
“We have to go now, before the patrol brings them close to the gate.” I slowed to a quiet stop in the middle of the dark street. “But Finn will have to drive, with Anabelle up front. They’ll recognize me and Mellie.”
After a moment of hesitation, Anabelle nodded. I put the car in park, then crawled into the backseat with Melanie while Finn slid into position behind the wheel and Anabelle buckled herself in next to him. He pushed back the sleeves of his police cassock, then shifted into drive and took his foot off the break. Mellie and I huddled on the rear floorboard, our heads pressed together, trying to see through the windshield between the front seats.
My heart thumped so hard my rib cage felt bruised as our stolen car slowly approached the wall I’d been trapped behind nearly every day of my life. The wheels rolled over the first speed bump, and Anabelle flinched. Her teeth chattered, a nervous habit certain to catch the guard’s attention.
“Stop!” someone shouted, and I ducked even lower, fear crawling like tiny bugs beneath my skin. “Gate’s closed,” that same voice yelled. “Town’s on lockdown. Don’t you watch the news?”
We were completely shrouded in shadow, and I couldn’t stand not knowing, so I peeked between the seats, nerves skittering along my spine. We were about twenty feet from the actual gate, a large steel panel mounted on wheels in a sunken track. Two police officers manned the gate itself, and four we hadn’t seen—three men, one woman—were marching toward us in unembroidered navy cassocks, their cheeks red from the cold, their swaggers inflated by an uncommon measure of authority.
Yes, they’d just lost a confrontation with the rest of Anathema, but as far as they knew, the demon Nina Kane had been captured, and the guards obviously thought they were the only force standing between the good citizens of New Temperance and mass slaughter by degenerate hordes from the badlands.
I wanted to laugh at them. But I also pitied them. They were human, and they had no idea what was really going on. They looked simultaneously thrilled and terrified by the prospect of actually shooting a degenerate, and if they failed to stop me from leaving the town, they would likely pay with their lives.
Or at least with their bodies and souls.
There was a soft grinding sound as Finn cranked his window down, the car still rolling forward slowly, and then a frigid draft raised goose bumps all over me.
“Hey!” The guard’s voice was sharper and louder with the window open. “Didn’t you hear me? No one leaves tonight!” The shouter and his colleagues were almost to our car now, and if they shone a flashlight into the backseat, we were screwed. “Jennings, is that you?”
“Yeah.” He stuck his head out the window. “Police business.”
“Where’s your car?” the guard asked, with another glance at the hood of our stolen vehicle.
Finn turned to Anabelle and whispered, “When I get out, slide behind the wheel and lock your door.”
“What? Why?” she demanded in a fierce whisper, but he rolled up his window and got out of the car without answering. Anabelle slid into the driver’s seat and locked the door as Finn waved the guard closer, as if for a private conversation. Then, suddenly, he went stiff, and I realized Finn had just abandoned Officer Jennings’s body.
“Carter?” Jennings said, glancing around at the gate and the wall, and I could hear confusion in his voice, even through the glass.
“Oh shit, did you guys see that?” the guard to the right of the gate shouted, large automatic rifle aimed to his left along the wall. “Degenerates! T
hree of the bastards just jumped right over the barbed wire!”
My pulse raced.
Anabelle shifted into drive.
“Are you sure?” one of the other guards called. “I didn’t see anything.” No one was looking at us anymore. They were staring into the dark now, guns aimed at something they couldn’t see.
That was when I realized Finn had stepped into the body of the guard who’d reported the wall breach. He was creating a distraction. Giving us a chance.
“Of course I’m sure! Go!” Finn-the-guard shouted. “We’ll handle this,” he added, and I peeked again in time to see him wave one hand at our car. The four guards closest to us hesitated for just a second, then took off into the dark after the imaginary monsters.
“What the hell is going on?” Jennings demanded, but there was no one left to answer.
“Nina…?” Anabelle said, when he turned toward us with no sign of recognition.
“I’ll explain in a minute. Drive. Slowly.”
Finn waved us forward, and as our car rolled toward the gate, he ducked into the guard booth and pressed a button. Metal squealed, and the gate began rolling to the right.
The remaining guard glanced from Anabelle in the car to Finn in the guard booth. He lifted his gun—an unaimed precaution—and stepped into our path, still scowling at Finn. “What are you—”
“Get out of the way.” Finn’s borrowed voice was soft, but the command was strong.
“Turn off the engine and get out of the car!” The guard swung his huge gun toward our windshield. Jennings stared, still too confused to take action.
Anabelle stomped on the brakes hard enough to throw Melanie and me into the backs of the front seats, even at our low speed.
“Let her through!” Finn shouted as the gate rolled open slowly, like a huge metal snail in its track.
The guard’s eyes widened, and we were close enough by then that I saw comprehension the moment it surfaced behind his eyes. He’d just spotted me between the seats, and even if he couldn’t see my face, he knew we were hiding something.
The guard aimed. Anabelle ducked as light flashed and thunder exploded from the end of the rifle. A small hole appeared in the front windshield an instant before something thunked into the seat in front of me. Anabelle screamed. Melanie curled up on the floorboard, and I shielded as much of her as I could with my own body.