Or so I thought, until metal squealed behind me.
I spun, my pulse pounding in my throat, to find a girl around Melanie’s age standing in front of the open door of an old, rusty sedan. She held a tire iron in both hands like a bat, clearly ready to swing. “Who are you?” she demanded in a shaky voice, and behind her, movement from the sedan drew my attention to several small heads peeking over the backseat.
“My name is Nina Kane.”
Her eyes widened, and she took an unsteady step backward into the embrace of the open car door.
“What happened here?” I asked when she seemed frozen with indecision. “Demons? Was it Kastor’s people?”
“It wasourpeople. Only they weren’t really. They woke us up before dawn. Four of them, wearing the skins of our friends and parents. One of them was my mother. Only she wasn’t. Not anymore.” The girl sniffled and wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. “They killed the ones who fought, and burned Brother Malachi in the camper.” Her eyes filled with tears again when she glanced at the burned-out vehicle over my shoulder. “They took everyone else and only left me to care for the little ones.”
Because they found child-rearing tedious but didn’t want to waste the potential future hosts.
“But this isyourfault,” the girl continued, and I frowned, confused. “They were looking foryou!”
“Me?” I stepped forward, hoping to hear her better, but she raised the tire iron and made a threatening noise deep in her throat. The children ducked out of sight in the sedan. They were all terrified, and I didn’t know how to convince them I was no threat.
“They wanted to know if any of us knew Nina. Or Maddock. Or Finn,” she said, and horror tightened my chest. Thiswasmy fault, at least in part. Anathema had been the target. “There were other names, but those were the ones they said the most. Were they talking about you? Are those your brothers?”
“Yes, that’s me.” I exhaled slowly, my mind racing. “The boys are my friends.” They were more than that, of course, but the fact that Kastor was out looking for us, leaving carnage in his path, underlined the urgency of my mission. “Eli Woods is my friend too. Do you know him? He’s a sentinel in another division of the Lord’s Army.”
“Eli is my cousin,” the girl said.
“Good.” I glanced past her into the car, where the children were peeking again, scared, their dark-eyed gazes trained on me. “Does that car run? Do you have gasoline?”
She nodded.
“Can you drive?” Church cities wouldn’t issue a driver’s license to a girl so young, but nomadic children seemed to learn everything early.
Her second nod confirmed my guess.
“Good. Pack up everything you can still use, then drive those children east on old Interstate 70 until you catch up with Eli’s division. Don’t stop for anything or anyone. They’re planning to spend a few days in what was once Salina, Kansas, before they move on. They’ll take you in. And with any luck, I’ll see you there on my way back through.”
When I backed away from the car full of children, headed for one of the other vehicles, near the perimeter of the ruined campsite, the girl finally lowered her weapon. “Where are you going?”
“Into the Lion’s Den.”
“That’s where they took our people,” she called as I turned toward the nearest intact car, crossing my fingers that it had gasoline and that someone had left the keys behind. “Why would you go there?”
“To kill the lions and set the lambs free.” I pulled open the driver’s-side door of a rusted, formerly slate-gray vehicle with large wheels, a high center of gravity, and a solid-looking roll cage. It was the kind of car Reese would have chosen. It would go fast if I had to run, and it wouldn’t get crushed if I flipped it over.
Not that I was planning to flip it over.
“They’ll kill you,” the girl warned, and I glanced back to see her holding a handmade leather back pouch, half-full of whatever supplies she’d been able to salvage.
“Probably. But hopefully, by then the damage will already have been done.”
The girl gave me a strange look while I searched the gray vehicle for the ignition key. “They’re usually over the visor,” she called. Then she straightened her shoulders, got into her sedan, and drove the car full of orphaned children east on I-70. I spared a moment to send up a prayer to Eli’s Lord that she and the children would make it unscathed.
Then I slid into the driver’s seat of the gray car and pulled down the sun visor. Shade fell over my face and a set of keys dropped into my lap. I started the engine, and the arrow in the gas gauge swung up to just beneath the three-quarters-of-a-tank line.
I took off toward the west as fast as I could drive.
The sun had just slipped beneath the horizon when Pandemonia came into sight, its buildings blazing in the distance like torches in the dark. Other than two periods of unconsciousness, I hadn’t slept in two days, and I had no expectation that that would change anytime soon.
I hadn’t come to Pandemonia to rest.
The glow from the demon city was an extravagant waste of energy and resources that Deacon Bennett would have condemned on sight. Where the Church subsisted on careful rationing of everything from city utilities to human hosts, I could see at a glance that Pandemonia was a bastion of excess.
