“I don’t know. Maybe this is what happens when a demon goes into labor.” Had this happened to my mother? To Grayson’s? How could it—they’d both survived to have a second in the same body.
Meshara shook her head, and the car swerved again. “It’s not. I’ve hardly tasted anything in days.”
I gave up sawing at the nylon cord and pulled my arms apart with as much force as I could summon. The cord creaked and several individual strands popped, but the binding didn’t give. “Days?” Details spun through my head, and one of them triggered a vague memory. Someoneelsehad complained about taste….“How long, exactly?”
“Since a couple of days after I took Melanie’s body.”
And suddenly I remembered. Tobias/Aldric had started complaining about the way his food tasted a couple of days after we’d found him. Could he have been sick too? If I hadn’t exorcised him, would he have lost his sight and hearing?
Two demons getting sick didn’t bother me in the least—surely sick was one step closer to dead—but could Meshara’s illness affect the baby?
And why hadn’t any of the rest of us caught it?
“What the hell is happening to me?” Meshara demanded, panic trailing from her words as she squinted at the windshield. “It started out as dull taste buds and some tingling, and suddenly everything I like about being human is just”—she threw her hands into the air, and the car swerved again—“draining away.”
I gave my arms another pull, and more strands of nylon popped. “Stop the car!”
“What?” She squinted even harder as the SUV barreled between an off-kilter concrete barricade and the rusted hulk of an abandoned bus.
“Stop the car before you get us both killed!”
Instead, Meshara stomped on the gas, and the SUV lurched forward again while she alternately squinted and blinked furiously at the road, mumbling about making it to Pandemonia before my sister’s rotting hull of a body gave out.
“Look out!” I shouted as she swerved around the burned-out frame of what might once have been a police car, and we careened toward a three-foot-high buckle in the concrete. Meshara screamed and took her foot off the gas, but she couldn’t hit the brake before the SUV slammed into the jagged fold of pavement.
I flew forward, and my seat belt felt like an iron bar swung straight at my chest. For several seconds I couldn’t breathe. I blinked, but all I could see was the crumpled hood of the SUV, which had popped open to block the whole windshield.
I twisted in my seat to find my sister slumped over, the steering wheel pressing a dent into the rounded top of her belly. “Melanie!” I cried, in the instant before I remembered that Mellie was dead and her body was possessed. And that her baby’s odds weren’t much better.
“Meshara!” Her eyes fluttered open. She moaned, and her eyes closed again without ever focusing. “Hey!” Terrified and furious, I jerked my arms apart as hard as I could, and finally the cord popped, releasing my hands. “Meshara.” I flexed my fingers until the feeling came back, ignoring the blood caked on my wrists, and then I gently pushed my sister’s shoulders back until she sat upright in her seat. The demon opened her eyes again. She squinted, trying to focus. “Are you okay? Can you feel the baby?”
“Can’t feel anything.” Her speech was thick and labored, as if she’d finally lost all feeling in her tongue. “Whass happening to me? I can hardly see you.”
Fighting pins and needles of my own from the bindings, I lifted her shirt to expose the baby bump and found the top of her belly already beginning to bruise from the collision with the wheel. And as I watched, her stomach began to contract again, her muscles defining a tighter shape beneath her flesh.
“You’re having another contraction.” How long had it been since the previous one? “Don’t move!” I shouted, to be sure she could hear me.
I pulled my feet up onto my seat so I could free them, but the nylon knots were too tight and my fingers were still tingling.
“I gotta get outta this body.” Her words were still labored, as if she were speaking around a mouthful of marbles.
“You’d just get sucked back into hell.”
“Thass where you’ll send me anyway.” She stared slightly to the left of my head, and I realized she couldn’t see the difference between my face and the headrest. “At leass I won’t see the fire coming.”
Nor could she feel the baby kicking or her own bladder filling. She couldn’t taste cayenne and hadn’t been able to smell Grayson’s bread either.
As the pieces began to come together in my head, I twisted onto my knees and leaned between the front seats to pull Eli’s backpack closer. “Meshara,” I said, rummaging in the zipper compartment. Surely he had some kind of small blade.
But if he had a pocketknife, he obviously kept it in his actual pocket. There was nothing sharp in his backpack at all.
I dropped back into the passenger’s seat, scanning the car for anything sharp enough to cut through nylon, and had almost decided to contort my body in order to use the broken armrest on my ankles too, when my gaze fell on the keys in the ignition.
I snatched the ring and identified the key with the sharpest-looking teeth, then began sawing on the bindings around my ankles. “Okay, so you were fine for the first couple of days in Mellie’s body, and Tobias was fine for the first couple of days we had him…”
“Tobias?”
“Aldric,” I reminded her. “But after that, you both started to lose your sense of taste and the sensation in your skin.” I stopped sawing long enough to inspect the damaged nylon and was pleased with my progress.
