“At least,” Finn mumbled, and I noticed that he’d backed away from the monster to stand near Maddock, his rifle aimed at the ground.
They knew something.
“It doesn’t make sense for their bodies to be this deformed but their clothes to be this new. Or for them to have traveled this far in a pack,” Reese said.
However they’d escaped from wherever they had been kept, they shouldn’t have remained in a single group long enough to have been drawn to the same place. Degenerates were solitary creatures no longer sane enough to choose their company.
“They’re not prisoners,” Maddock said at last, and I looked up to find Finn frowning at him—a wordless warning to shut up. “They’re bloodhounds.Kastor’sbloodhounds.”
Finn closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.
“They’rewhat?” Devi turned to Maddy and Finn with tension in every line of her frame. “Okay, it’s past time to come clean. How do you know so much about Kastor? Why is he looking for you?”
“Why have you been lying?” I added softly, but my question was for Finn, not for Maddock.
“We haven’t been lying.” Finn’s intense eye contact begged me to believe him. “We’ve just been leaving things out. Private things.”
Things Maddock didn’t want to talk about.
Finn wasn’t withholding information on his own behalf, but on Maddy’s. He’d do anything to protect Maddock, just like he’d do anything to protect me. We were the only family he had.
“That is suchbullsh—” Devi swallowed the rest of the word in surprise when I put one hand on her arm.
“You were his prisoners, weren’t you?” I said, and everyone except Maddock turned to look at me. “But I’m guessing Finn only stayed because Maddock was there.”
How else would Maddy know so much about Pandemonia? Why else would Kastor be after him?
“We escaped two weeks before my seventeenth birthday.” Maddock spoke so softly I could hardly hear him. “Kastor knew I was starting to transition.”
“You were supposed to be his host, weren’t you?” Devi said, and there was no hint of anger left in her voice. She soundedhorrified.
Maddy nodded. “Finn got me out. Just in time.”
Devi stepped toward him and slid her arms around his neck. She laid her head on his shoulder and held him, comforting him the same way I’d seen him calm her down countless times. When he wrapped his arms around her in return, my vision blurred beneath tears.
I couldn’t even imagine what Maddock had been through at the hands of someone theChurchhad labeled a monster. Surely Finn’s lack of a body had been a blessing for once.
“How did he get you in the first place?” Reese asked.
“I’m guessing the Church got to him first, but then Kastor stole him.” And I was pretty sure I was right, considering what I already knew about Carey James. “Kastor probably raided a Church caravan.”
“The specifics don’t matter,” Finn said before anyone else could question my theory. “What matters is that we got out, but now Kastor knows we’re in the badlands, thanks to the Church’s news broadcasts, and he knows how to find us, thanks to Grayson’s transition.” Finn waved his bad hand at the corpses littering the ground. “That’s why he let out the bloodhounds.”
“That part I don’t understand,” I admitted. “I’m assuming he calls them bloodhounds because he uses them like bloodhounds—to hunt. But how is that possible?”
“Because he doesn’t just use them like dogs. Hetrainsthem like dogs.” Finn slung his rifle over one shoulder bythe strap, and when Maddy showed no desire to take over the explanation, he continued. “It’s a punishment and a scare tactic—one of the ways Kastor maintains control. People who piss him off get locked up until they start to degenerate. Once they’re too far gone to take another host, he throws them into the ‘pound’ with the other hounds and he starts training them.”
“You can’t train a degenerate,” Devi insisted. “They hunt humans by nature.”
“You can if you start when they’re only a little crazy,” Maddock whispered. “But the training deteriorates along with their minds.”
“It’s mostly teaching them not to attack the possessed,” Finn elaborated. “He’s had marginal success training a few of the fresher ones to corner potential hosts without attacking them, but that bit’s inconsistent.”
“So, he sent them after us expecting them to kill us?” Reese said. “I thought he wanted us alive.”
“He does,” Maddy said. “He sent them after us expectingusto killthem.The whole point of the exercise was to point him in the right direction. Like bloodhounds flushing out prey from the bush.”
“But if these are the hounds, that means…” Devi didn’t seem interested in finishing the thought, so I did.
