“Nina, it’s time,” Eli said, but I hardly heard him. “This is it.”
I propped Meshara up out of habit, still mentally mired in the Church’s deception. “Time to push!” I shouted into her ear. I couldn’t tell whether she had any awareness of her own position—if she couldn’t feel her limbs, could she tell how they were situated?—and I only knew for sure that she’d heard me when she gave a great grunt of effort and curled around her own bulging stomach.
“Good!” Eli called. “Here comes the head!”
Anabelle peeked over his shoulder and her eyes widened. Then her gaze snapped up to my face, and I practically saw her mental gears shift as she tried to distract herself from what she’d seen. “Wait, Nina, you think we’re actually carrying the disease?” She frowned. “But we’ve been through all our stuff over and over, consolidating. Repairing. Replacing. Restocking. Even if they were smart enough to send it in one of the supply trucks, knowing we’d raid it, surely we would have found…Wait, how does one store a virus?”
“It could have been in anything,” I said. “Probably in something they knew we’d keep. Like painkillers. Or Mellie’s prenatal vitamins. They probably didn’t stash it in something obvious, like vials or syringes.”
“But if it was in something we’d use, wouldn’t we just be infecting ourselves?”
“Not if humans can’t get the virus.” Which seemed to be the case, since only the possessed among us had gotten sick.
“Okay.” Anabelle nodded slowly. “But then wouldn’t they just be wasting their virus on us, instead of using it on Pandemonia? And even if they weren’t, how did they expect Kastor’s people to actually get infected? Accidentally prick themselves on a suspicious syringe in our luggage after we were captured?”
Good question. And there were no syringes. Anabelle was right. We would have noticed….
Syringes.Needles.
My hand fell from Meshara’s shoulder as something she’d said earlier finally sank in. She’d said the Church had tied Melanie to the prenatal exam table and poked her with needles.
What if they hadn’t been just running tests? What if they hadn’t been just taking blood out of her, but putting somethingintoher bloodstream?
“Wearecarrying the virus,” I said, my voice hollow with shock. “But you’re right—it’s not in a vial or a syringe. It’s inMelanie.They injected her with it, thenletus escape, knowing Kastor would come after us.
“My sister is the Church’s Trojan horse, and Kastor is still trying like hell to bring her into his city.”
“Are you serious?” The beam from Anabelle’s flashlight wavered as she gaped at me over Eli’s shoulder. “You think they infected your sister?”
“Nothing else makes sense. They had unlimited access to Melanie for several days, and they had two reasonable excuses to ‘examine’ her—pregnancy and suspicion of possession. We assumed they were threatening Melanie to get me to turn myself in.” Which I’d done. “But what if they were really trying to get me to break her out?” Which I’d also done. “When we rescued her, there were almost no consecrated Church members in the courthouse. We assumed we’d successfully lured them out, but what if they were running on a skeleton crew already because any of the possessed were at risk of contracting and spreading the virus once Melanie had been infected?”
“Nina, you’re about to become an aunt!” Eli called. “The rest can wait.”
He had no idea how wrong he was about that, and I couldn’t tell him.
“Here comes the head! Push!”
Astonished, I repeated his order into Meshara’s ear. Then I watched, shielded from the most graphic moments by my sister’s stomach, while her baby came into the world as helpless and precious as I’d expected.
Though quite a bit messier.
“It’s a boy!” Eli held the tiny infant up, one hand beneath the baby’s head and back, the other holding his rump and feet, and my heart nearly exploded with…joy.
There was nothing else in that moment. No worry over what lay in wait in the badlands, or—worse—in the cities. No fury at Meshara for killing my sister and using her child as a human shield. No fear for myself. Not even grief for Melanie. In the moment her son was born, there was room inside me for nothing but celebration of the life she and Adam had created. The life she’d carried and protected. The very last member of the Kane family had arrived, in spite of countless odds stacked against him.
And he wasbeautiful.He was so amazingly, breathtakingly beautiful that it almost hurt to look at him. But it hurt even more not to be holding him.
When the baby didn’t immediately begin to cry, Eli laid him on the clean cloth draping his lap, then folded it over the child and began to massage his limbs. The baby made a mewling sound so soft and weak that fear speared my chest like a bolt of lightning straight to my heart.
“Is something wrong?”
“Nothing that I can see.” Eli continued to rub him gently with the cloth, and the baby let out a loud, warbling cry. A strong,healthycry. “He’s small, but those lungs sound great. Ten fingers, ten toes. Nothing missing, nothing extra. No club foot. No cleft in his lip or palate. Come meet your nephew!” I helped Meshara sit up long enough for me to slide off the bench seat, then close the door for her to lean against. Anabelle carried the baby to the back of the SUV, where I met her in front of the open cargo area, which we’d already emptied and staged as a receiving area for the baby.
I had to bite my tongue to keep from yelling at her to hurry. I was desperate to hold him, but if I waited too long to free my own soul, my sacrifice would be for nothing.
“What do you think she’d want to call him?” Anabelle laid my nephew on another clean cloth—this one a towel folded in half—while Eli tended to Meshara in the middle row.
I didn’t have to think about that for long. Melanie had volleyed names for a girl back and forth, but she’d had a boy name picked out almost from the beginning.
