Anabelle angled her watch into the moonlight. “Just less than an hour. He’s about eighty-five minutes old.”
Still so new. So fragile. So…precious. “And we’re sure…?”
“I’ve never seen one die after a full hour,” Eli assured me, rubbing the red mark across his jaw. “Hell of a punch,” he added as an afterthought.
“Exorcist, remember?” I decided not to tell him how badly my hand hurt. “How long has she been like that?” I nodded at Meshara, whose labored breathing had gotten loud.
“Since not long after you went down. We wanted to put her out of her misery—for Mellie’s sake—but couldn’t until you woke up.” Because if they’d released the demon while I was unconscious, Meshara would have gone right into my undefended body. She would have done that on her own, if she’d had any idea my body was undefended.
“She looks so miserable.” Her eyes were unfocused and she didn’t react to our voices or Adam’s cries. She wasn’t blinking anymore because she couldn’t feel how dry her eyes had become. When I put my hand on her shoulder, she didn’t jerk in surprise, or even look up. I gently pressed my thumbnail into her skin, leaving an indentation but not breaking the surface, and got no reaction at all.
My sister’s body had become a prison for the monster inside it, cut off from all sensory input, and though her breathing sounded horrible, it showed no sign of stopping. Meshara would live until her stolen form literally starved to death. Or choked on its own spittle. Or was torn apart by degenerates.
She was a startling, horrifying vision of what the Church had in mind for Kastor’s people, and it was no less than they deserved. But it was too hard to watch while it wore my sister’s face.
“I’m ready to let her go,” I said finally, and Ana took the baby without being asked. Eli carried Mellie’s body to the wrecked SUV, and her still form blurred beneath mytears as he laid her across the middle bench seat. He left me alone with her, and for several minutes I could only crouch on the floor, resting my head on her stomach. Listening to each labored inhalation.
“I’m so sorry, Mellie,” I said as tears rolled down my face to soak into her shirt. “I’m so sorry I let this happen to you. I hope there wasn’t any pain. I hope you didn’t even know….” I sat up and wiped snot from my face before it could fall on her. “I wish I could undo it all….”
But the only thing I could still do for her was set her free.
My entire body hitched with sobs as I placed my left hand over her chest. Twice I tried to call forth the flame that would fry the parasite from her ruined body, and twice I failed, because when I looked at her, I saw not the demon, but my sister.
Finally, I took a deep breath and spoke to Meshara. “From whence you came, bitch.” Fire burst from my palm and shot through her chest. Meshara’s eyes opened wide. She jerked once, twice, then a third time, but never made a sound.
“For Melanie,” I whispered as I removed my hand from the smoking hole in her chest. Then I pulled a blanket from the backseat and draped it over her.
I cried all the way back to the car.
While Anabelle and Eli cut an extra shirt into strips of cloth with which to pad the baby’s diaper area, I changed Adam’s soiled wrapping by moonlight on the backseat, suddenly wishing I’d paid more attention to what would happenafterthe baby came. At the current rate of consumption, we would run out of wipes in a few days, and I had no idea what to do with the messy clothes until we had a chance to clean them.
Adam sucked on his palm while I rolled him onto his side to make sure his back was clean, and the mark on his spine caught my eye again. “Hey Eli, have you ever seen anything like this, other than on Grayson’s back?”And onmine…?
He turned to look at Adam from between the front seats. “I’ve seen some interesting birthmarks, but—”
“It’s not a birthmark. Mellie, Grayson, and I didn’t have it until…” I frowned. “Actually, I don’t know when Grayson and I developed the discoloration, but Melanie’s showed up a couple of weeks after we escaped from New Temperance. It was just a small spot at first. Like a bruise.” But Adam had been born with the full version.
Eli folded his stack of cotton strips laid across one knee. “Maybe it’s an allergic reaction to something you came across in the badlands.”
“But Grayson lived out here with the rest of Anathema for months before they found me and Mellie.” My thoughts flew so fast my head spun. “We all three got the mark after we left New Temperance, but none of the guys did.” Reese, Finn, and Maddock regularly sparred with their shirts off, and while the scandalous display of flesh had shocked me at first, after a month or so it had seemed routine. And…nice.
“But it can’t be gender specific, because Adam has the mark but Devi and I don’t.” Anabelle added her strips of cotton to Eli’s pile. “And it can’t be something that affects just exorcists, because Melanie wasn’t an exorcist but Devi is.”
“We had an outbreak once, when I was a kid,” Eli said while I carefully reswaddled the baby the way he had shown me. “Two of our members died, buteveryonewho got sick developed a rash.”
Anabelle stuffed the soiled blanket into the bag of clothes Adam had already gone through. “What kind of sickness?”
“Sore throat. Fever. Brother Isaiah said it was some kind of virus—lots of them cause rashes.”
My goose bumps doubled in size. “You think the demon virus could have caused the stripe on Mellie’s back?”
Eli shrugged. “It’s all conjecture, but for Melanie to transmit the virus, she’d have to be infected with it, even if she’s just a carrier. Orwasjust a carrier, until Meshara possessed her. If that’s true, then humans actuallycanget the virus—they just don’t exhibit the full range of symptoms until and unless they’re possessed.”
“Then how come the rest of Anathema isn’t infected?” If thatwaswhat the mark indicated.
Eli shrugged. “We won’t know that until we know how it’s transmitted.”
“Well, obviously Mellie transmitted the virus to the baby in utero. So we know it’s blood-borne.” Anabelle tied the stack of cotton strips into a bundle with a piece of twine from Eli’s backpack. “If the virus were airborne, the Church wouldn’t need a carrier, and using one would be too dangerous—any demon she breathed on would be infected. But she passed it to you, Nina, which suggests that itcanbe transmitted through direct contact.” Anabelle shrugged. “You’re the one she had the most direct contact with.”
