Tears blurred the world in front of me, smearing wheat fields and the occasional rusted hulk of abandoned irrigation equipment. I sucked in breath after breath, trying to control the hitching sobs that shook my entire body and speared my head with fresh, sharp pain.
Shecouldn’tbe right. If the world we lived in could support demonic possession and flames spouting from the palms of mortal beings and a rift between the fabrics oftwo entirely different realities,surely there was some way to reverse what this monster had done and bring my sister back.
If Eli’s God truly existed, how could he deny me one tiny little miracle?
“Eli…” The name snuck out on a sob before I even realized what I was thinking about.
Melanie’s corpse gave a careless shrug. “He was still breathing when we left. He might make it.”
And if he did, he’d tell the others what had happened. That Mellie and I hadn’t just run off and left them. He’d tell them, and they’d come after me.
Except that they couldn’t, because they had to find…
I blinked to clear tears from my eyes, and then I twisted in my seat, trying to see into the back of the SUV. “Where’s Grayson? You’re working with whoever took her, aren’t you?”
“Smart girl. Grayson is on an alternate route—part of a two-pronged attack to divide and conquer Anathema. Either your group will split up, weakening itself to go after both of its members separately, or they will all head to where they know they can find you both in the same place.”
“Pandemonia,” I said, and she nodded. “Who are you?” I squirmed, trying to take pressure off my numb hands. “How long ago did you kill my sister?”
How long had I been sleeping next to a monster?
“Give it some thought.” She steered around a century-old wreck on the right side of the crumbling road. “You’ll figure it out eventually.”
My mouth was dry and my head throbbed fiercely, but I made myself think through the pain. We hadn’t come into direct contact with any of the Unclean since…
Tobias.Maddock had called the demon Aldric.
Except Aldric couldn’t be possessing Mellie, because I’d fried him right out of our world. But the demon Eli had bashed with his crowbar…
“You’re Meshara,” I said, and the demon laughed with Melanie’s throat. With Melanie’s voice. But not with her eyes. “You’ve been with us since that day in the courthouse. Almost a week ago.” Pain gripped my chest like a giant fist, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tears rolled down my face, but I couldn’t use my hands to wipe them. My fingers dug into the seat behind me as I silently pleaded with reality to banish the cruel lie sitting next to me and return my sister. But when I opened my eyes, the demon was still there. Still wearing Melanie’s body, as surely as it wore her sneakers.
My baby sister—the only true family I had left—had died alone in her sleep almost a week before, andI hadn’t noticed.Her soul was being slowly devoured by an evil parasite, andI couldn’t tell.
My mom had been possessed since before I was conceived, so there was never any change in her for me to notice, but I was closer to Melanie than I’d ever been to anyone in my life. Including Finn. I knew her better than I knewanyone,but she’d died, and I’d had no clue.
I hadutterlyfailed her.
Grief was a weight tied to my feet, dragging me beneath the current of denial. I was drowning, and I had no will to fight the tide.
“IamMeshara, but now I’m also Melanie, who came with this convenient little built-in insurance policy.” The demon laid one hand on my sister’s bulging belly. “We both know you’re not going to try anything that might hurt your sister’s squirming progeny. Nor would you let someone else put the little monster in danger. Which means that even though I took you prisoner, you’re my guardian angel, in case any of your friends catch up with us before we get to Pandemonia. Don’t tell me you don’t appreciate the irony.”
In fact, the irony made me want to vomit up my own lungs. But Meshara was right. Mellie’s baby was the only piece of her I had left.
“There was no early labor?” My thoughts felt sluggish, but my concussion was the least of my worries.
“Nope. This little parasite seems quite content where he is for now,” the demon wearing Mellie’s face confirmed as we bumped over a crack in the highway. “Thank goodness. Playing sweet, knocked-up baby sister was hard enough, but faking uterine contractions is a bit beyond my ken. And there was nothing I could do about the whole cervical issue.”
“But you’re sure the baby’s okay?” The question was ultimately pointless because there was nothing to keep her from lying, but I had to ask.
“As sure as I can be without an ultrasound machine or a prenatal psychic connection. I can’t read the little bastard’s mind. Hell, I can hardly feel him kicking anymore. Your sister’s stomach’s gone kind of numb.”
“Numb? Is that normal?”
Meshara closed her eyes for a second, evidently searching through my sister’s memories, then looked at the road again. “According to one of those stupid pregnancy books, it’s from the stretching of the skin. Came on kind of sudden, though. And the book didn’t mention the loss of sensation spreading into my limbs.” She took one hand off the steering wheel and pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her index finger, then shrugged as if she couldn’t feel the touch. “Or that food would lose its flavor. Being pregnant sucks. That’s why we usually let humanity bear the next generation for us. Except for a few sickos I know who get off on the whole ‘human experience’ thing.”
Could pregnancy really dull a woman’s taste buds and numb her fingers? Suddenly I wished I’d read more of Melanie’s books.
