Anabelle frowned. “But the Church isrunby demons. Why would they develop an illness that would target their own population?”
“Here we go again.” Eli glanced at Meshara’s stomach, and I looked down to see it convulsing. I leaned toward her ear—the right was still functioning a little better than the left—and shouted for her to push.
“I thinkKastor’spopulation was their target,” I told Anabelle as the demon bore down against a pressure she could no longer feel. I couldn’t believe the change in Meshara. In the span of a few hours she’d gone from fiercely fast and deadly to disconnected and virtually helpless. “I’ve never heard of anyone—Church members or civilians—suffering from anything like this, in New Temperance or anywhere else. Not that they would have reported that on the news.” That would have made the Church look powerless in the face of a scary new illness.
“But surely those of usinthe Church would have heard about it,” Anabelle said. “And I don’t understand how they could be sure Kastor’s people would be infected but the Church’s wouldn’t.”
“Theycouldn’tbe sure,” Eli said. “Unless their members were never exposed but Kastor’s people were. Targeted exposure. Like biological warfare in wars of the past.” He looked up and nodded at me.
“Okay, you can stop for now!” I shouted into Meshara’s ear.
“How much longer?” she said, each word soft and slushy.
“Getting close!” I shouted, without bothering to verify that with Eli.
“How would they target a specific population?” Anabelle asked.
“They’d need a delivery system.” Eli leaned against the back of his seat so he could see all three of us. “Someone to carry a vial of the virus—or something exposed to it—into Pandemonia.”
I glanced at him in surprise, and Eli shrugged. “It’s been done like that in the past. Our textbooks are more than a century old and unedited by the Church.” Which meant he’d had history lessons my teachers would never have let me hear.
Anabelle frowned. “If that’s their plan, how did Meshara get it? How did Aldric?”
“Double agents?” Eli shrugged. “Maybe one of them was supposed to carry the vial but it broke and they got infected?”
I shook my head. “Meshara said she’s never even been in a Church city.” Which could have been a lie, but I was unconscious for hours, and…“If she’s loyal enough to Kastor to resist possessing me on his order, why would she bring a vial of some deadly poison right into the heart of his community?”
“It’s not actually deadly, though, right?” Eli said. “Wouldn’t anyone infected in Pandemonia just ditch the diseased host for a fresh one?”
“Yes, as long as there were fresh ones available.” The fact that we were all conscious was the only thing keeping Meshara in Melanie’s compromised body. I closed my eyes, trying to follow Eli’s thread of logic back to the Church’s intentions. “But then those fresh bodies would just get infected. Eventually there wouldn’t be any healthy hosts left in Pandemonia. And based on how fast this thing has reduced Meshara to a senseless bag of bones, ‘eventually’ is starting to sound more like a week or two, tops. After that, where would they go?” I opened my eyes to frown at Eli. “Is Verity the only city near Pandemonia? How close is it?”
“It’s about a day’s drive. So they could theoretically get there in time to find fresh hosts.” He sat up on his knees again when he noticed Meshara having another contraction. “Tell her to push. We’re almost there now.”
I coaxed my sister’s killer through another round of pushing, and Eli announced that he could see the baby’s head. Goose bumps popped up all over my arms, and my heart got stuck in my throat.
Melanie’s baby is almost here.
My eyes filled with tears, and suddenly her death seemed terribly, unbearably real, because she would never get to hold her child. She would never even get toseethe baby she’d carried for all those months. Her last connection to Adam, who’d died just because he’d loved a girl whose last name was Kane.
The baby would have to make do with an aunt who was too much of a wimp to watch the business end of its birth. An aunt who would have less than an hour to spend with the precious new miracle…
I wiped tears from my eyes before Eli could see them, and I refocused my attention.
“Even if Kastor’s people could get to Verity before they went blind, there’s no guarantee they could get inside the city,” I said. “If the Church is really behind this, officials in Verity would see that coming. They’d be fortified, and willing to do anything to keep the virus from spreading.” My eyes widened as the potential fallout sank in. “When they’re out of fresh bodies to hop into, demons would have to leave our world on their own, or live in useless bodies until they starve and then get sucked out of our world en masse.” Which was surely exactly what the Church had intended. “They’ve come up with a plague that will cause avoluntaryevacuation of demons from our world, and theycannotafford for it to backfire on them.”
“Okay, I understand that,” Anabelle said, when that round of pushing had ended. “But I’m still not sure how Meshara got the disease if the rest of Kastor’s people haven’t. She’d know if they were sick in Pandemonia, right?”
Meshara’s shock and terror over her own predicament felt real, and I couldn’t help but believe she’d never seen anything like what was happening to her. “Meshara thinks she got it from us,” I said. “Both she and Aldric were fine until they came into contact with Anathema.”
“You escaped from New Temperance, right?” Eli said, and I nodded. “So maybe the Church sent something contagious into the badlands with you, hoping you’d infect the degenerate population.”
“I think Kastor was their goal,” I said, thinking back to the report I’d read and the hatred in Deacon Bennett’s voice when she’d mentioned him. Suddenly that memory triggered a chilling realization. “Holy shit. Kastorwastheir goal. Deacon Bennett actually said shehopedKastor got his hands on us!”
“Yeah, but she didn’t mean it like that,” Anabelle said. “She was just kind of…cursing us. Like when I used to tell my little brother that I hoped the monsters under his bed got him in his sleep.”
“Except that Kastor is real, and the Church really hates him. They’re scared of him. What if shewasn’tjust cursing us?” I blinked, and for a moment I saw not the interior of our wrecked SUV in the rapidly darkening badlands, but the inside of the New Temperance courthouse, from which Mellie, Finn, Anabelle, and I had made a miraculous escape.
“What if we didn’t truly escape? What if they hadletus go? What if they had pretended to play into our hands so we could ‘escape,’ knowing Kastor would come after us?Relyingon that very thing? Think about it.” I counted off the points on my fingers. “They knew Kastor had been raiding their caravans, specifically looking for exorcists to be used as hosts. They knew he had taken Carey James—Grayson’s brother—for that very reason. And theyhaveto know that the citizens of Pandemonia have been watching their television broadcasts since…forever. Which means that announcing on the news that Anathema had escaped into the badlands was like ringing the dinner bell for Kastor. The Church didn’t have to send its virus to Pandemonia. They just had to plant it on us somewhere, then let us go. TheyknewKastor would do the rest of the work for them. And they were right.”
