Melanie frowned and held her bread up to her face, where she gave it a delicate sniff. She looked puzzled. “I don’t smell it.”
“My kingdom for a stick of butter,” Devi said around a bite of fish. “I miss hot buttered bread more thananything.”
Mellie took a tentative bite, then set her bread on her plate and poked at her fish with her spork.
“She’s lost her appetite again?” Finn said from my left. “I thought she was feeling better.”
Melanie leaned forward to give him a rare smile. “I’m fine. The bread’s just kind of…tasteless.” She whispered the last word with an apologetic glance at Grayson, who was oblivious. “Don’t you think?”
“Mine was good.” He’d finished his hunk in three bites. “You don’t like the fish either?”
Melanie shrugged. “Reese is better at killing things than cooking things.”
“I heard that,” Reese said with a self-deprecating smile. “But I think the baby’s messing with your taste buds. Everyone else likes my fish.”
In fact, mine was already half gone. Reese’s experimental salt, pepper, and thyme dry rub was a culinary triumph, in my opinion.
Melanie’s problem probably had nothing to do with the food. She’d been quiet and withdrawn since Tobias had been exposed as a demon, but Eli’s mother had assured us that fatigue was to be expected during the third trimester of her pregnancy. Especially for someone so young, who’d been through so much trauma. So I’d tried to leave her alone, watching her from a distance while she studied everything going on around her with eyes that seemed to grow larger every day.
While I watched Mellie, I’d also been getting to know our gracious hosts. Particularly the elders, who had even more to offer than priceless decades of experience. I felt guilty when I asked Brother Isaiah’s gray-haired wife to show me how she sewed together scraps of leather to make a knife-carrying pack, but not too guilty to notice that her thin, fragile hands shook and she had to hold the materials mere inches from her face to see them.
The elderly man who taught me how to layer kindling and tinder for a proper campfire couldn’t stand straight because of the hunch in his spine, and the sweet old lady who showed me how to prepare rendered animal fat to be used in soap-making had a persistent wet cough.
They were all three in their late sixties, according to Eli, which made them a full decade older than the oldest person I’d ever met in New Temperance, thanks to mandatory soul donations. I didn’t wantanyof them to die. In fact, the more time I spent with the army’s senior citizens, the harder it became to imagine saying goodbye to them. But if one of themwasnearing the conclusion of a natural life span, I was determined to make sure that Melanie’s baby honored the end of one life with the beginning of another.
The only one who seemed to have noticed my sudden interest in the elderly was Finn, and I was afraid to ask if he knew what I was thinking, because then he might ask me what my backup plan was. I couldn’t lie to Finn. Iwouldn’tlie to him.
But even as I watched firelight flicker over our joined hands, I knew I wouldn’t let him talk me out of it either.
“Eli!” Grayson called when she spotted the sentinel walking toward his family’s campfire, one of several scattered around the clearing. “Come eat with us! I made bread!”
“Are you sure you have enough?” he asked, already headed our way.
Reese shook his head in the dark, but Grayson jumped up and grabbed Eli’s arm, then pulled him down next to her. “We’re short one plate,” Reese grumbled.
She shrugged. “He can share with me.”
“No, take mine.” Reese shoved the last full plate at Eli. “You’re our guest.”
Finn and I exchanged glances as we chewed in silence, but neither Grayson nor Eli seemed to notice Reese’s irritation. Or the fact that he had no food.
When Eli bowed his head to pray silently over his plate, everyone but Grayson stopped eating to watch.
Grayson bowed her head and closed her eyes.
It wasn’t that the rest of us objected to Eli’s faith. It was that most of us had little of our own after discovering that generations of our ancestors’ souls had been consumed by those claiming to be our spiritual leaders. Everything we’d ever been taught to believe in had been proven not just false, butfoul.
The only things weknewcould save us were vigilance and violence. The only people weknewwe could count on were those gathered around our campfire.
“What did you pray for?” Maddock asked when Eli looked up, and his thoughtful tone caught my attention. Reese would have asked the same question with sarcasm. Devi would have asked it out of skepticism. But Maddock…
As usual, Maddy was merely curious.
“I was giving thanks and asking the Lord to put more demons in my path so I can strike them down in His name.” Eli took the spork Grayson handed him and dug a flake of fish from his fillet.
Anabelle gaped at him. “You were asking formoredemons?”
Eli laughed at her horrified expression. “I wasn’t asking for a second demonic invasion. I just asked the Lord to keep pushing the ones that are already here into my path so I can fulfill my life’s purpose by killing them.”
