“Um…exorcist.” I laid one hand over my chest, while both of them stared at me. “Incineration of stolen souls. Sending demons back to hell.” I turned to Eli as he knelt to pick up his crowbar. “We’ve been over this.”
Carter cradled his left hand, where an inflamed red streak spanned his palm. “Son of a bitch!” He tried to flex his fingers, then flinched again. “What happened to my hand? Where am I? Whoareyou people?”
Eli stared, his jaw slack. “What’s wrong with Finn?”
“Well…” I rubbed one hand over my face in frustration. “That’s not Finn anymore. That’s Heath Carter.”
The guard glanced around, and when he noticed his rifle, I slid it out of his reach with my foot, just in case. “What happened to that kid? What thehellis going on?” His brown eyes were wide and glazed with shock.
“Finn!” I called, hoping he could hear me. “You can come back anytime!”
“Who’s Finn?” Carter demanded.
“Nina…” Eli retrieved his crowbar, then backed away from the guard, and I could see that his confusion was making him dangerously nervous—he would start swinging again any second.
“Calm down,” I said. “Carter’s human. So is Finn. He just doesn’t have a body of his own, so he’s been borrowing Carter’s. For several months.”
“What?”Carter glanced at the rifle behind my heels, and Eli looked back and forth between us, one frayed nerve away from throwing his crowbar again—and I wasn’t sure I could catch it, even if I were willing to risk a broken hand.
“Finn!” I shouted, and Carter closed his eyes. When they opened, they were green. Finn was back.
“Sorry.” He blinked again, then stretched his arms as if testing the fit of a new shirt. “The pain woke him up and I got ejected.” He started to flex the guard’s injured left hand, then flinched and hissed in pain.
Eli gripped the crowbar until his knuckles paled with the strain. “What in theholy hellfireis going on with you people? What kind of demon are you consorting with?”
Finn snorted. “If I were a demon, Carter wouldn’t have been able to toss me out. He’s human.I’mhuman—but without a corporeal form of my own. Just like Nina said.”
Eli eyed Finn warily as Finn picked up the rifle with his right hand. “Only demons lack bodies.”
Finn bristled again, and I had to remind myself that I’d had a similar thought when I first found out about his…state. Then he braced the butt of the rifle against his chest with his left forearm and racked the slide to chamber a round.
Eli’s eyes widened.
“Look, there’s a lot of it that we don’t understand,” I said, before Finn’s temper could explode all over the sentinel. Not that he would have fired, even without a broken hand, but he wasn’t above scaring the immortal soul right out of anyone who implied he was one of the Unclean. “But what wedoknow is that Finn’s not a demon. He doesn’t eat souls. He has no access to his host’s memories. He doesn’t originate from hell. He’s just—”
“Missing one of the defining characteristics of humanity?” Devi said, and I looked up as she and Maddock marched through an archway on the other side of the foyer, dust clinging to their combat boots, bold loyalty shining in their eyes. “Yeah. It’s endearing. Who the hell are you?”
Maddock’s pistol was aimed at Eli’s head.
Reese and Grayson weren’t with them.
“I am a sentinel in the Lord’s Army,” Eli began. “We are the last of the true—”
“This is Eli Woods. He saved my life”—I gestured at the dead man on the floor—“with the crowbar that just tenderized Finn’s hand. Eli’s one of the nomads,” I added, in case they couldn’t tell from the cowboy boots and hat.
“Wha—?” Maddock started to ask a question, but then his gaze found Tobias and his aggressive stance crumpled beneath a devastating comprehension. “The kid was possessed?” His expression seemed caught in the battle between what experience had taught him—that demons don’t possess children—and the irrefutable singed hole in the boy’s chest.
Maddock lowered the pistol. “Why would a demon abandon an adult body to take achild?”
Eli lowered his crowbar, but his grip on it did not loosen. “The boy was bait.”
When Finn swung his rifle over his shoulder with his good hand, I exhaled slowly, relieved now that no weapons were being aimed. “It was Aldric,” he said. “He knew we wouldn’t suspect a kid. Kastor sent him.”
Maddock froze. “He was leading us to Pandemonia.”
Finn nodded.
“Who’s Kastor?” Devi asked, and I was oddly reassured to realize that Maddock had been keeping the same secrets from her that Finn had been keeping from me. That made the wound feel much less personal—it wasn’t that Finn didn’t trust me specifically; it was that neither of them truly trusted anyone but the other.
