“Wait.” Dione stepped in front of us and held her hand out like a stop sign. “You came here on purpose?” She turned to Felix without waiting for my reply. “Whatisit with Kastor? I swear, back in the Stone Age, fish used to jump out of the water and impale themselves on his spear.”
“Kastor was here during the Stone Age? Or was that hyperbole?”
Dione laughed. “Yes to both,” she said, and for the first time it occurred to me that some members of his species had actually lived in our world hundreds of times longer than any human ever could. They’d seen the rise and fall of governments and technologies I’d only read about.
How much of our world had they shaped, unbeknownst to us?
Felix pulled me around Dione, but she only growled and followed us. Even before he opened the door at the end of the hall, I could hear raucous yelling, as if the members of an angry mob were trying to out-shout one another.
We entered a large courtyard, bordered on three sides by two-story prewar buildings. A crowd was gathered at the center of the open space, around a raised stone square much like the one in the center of New Temperance. But my hometown had never seen a gathering like this. The audience—it really was a mob—was half-dressed and roisterous. The din was deafening, and I couldn’t see whoever stood on the stone platform for the thick press of the crowd.
“You got here just in time,” Dione taunted from my right, while Felix tugged me by my left arm. “They brought in a fresh haul of hosts this morning. Biggest lot we’ve seen in years. Half were from a raid on some nomads, half from a captured Church caravan.”
Dismay sank through my chest as Felix led me past the back of the raised square—the only side not surrounded by men and women shouting out numbers. On the platform, facing away from me and toward the crowd, stood a line of people wearing more steel than actual clothing. Their hands were zip-tied at their backs, like mine, but they were all connected by a chain threaded through steel shackles around their ankles. Their heads were bowed, as if refusing to see the spectacle playing out in front of them might somehow save them from it, and I understood the psychological need for denial.
In retrospect, I could see that I’d lived it for the first seventeen years of my life.
“Up next, we have a human female, approximately nineteen years of age, in perfect physical condition.” Onstage, a man wearing only a ridiculously tall black hat and matching black satin boxer shorts pulled a girl about my height forward two steps. The young men chained on either side of her were jerked forward with her, and though I couldn’t see any of their faces, I could tell from her trembling arms and from the violent hitch each time she sucked in a breath that she was crying. “She has no noticeable scars or deformities, and as you can see, her face boasts an aesthetic symmetry certain to make her occupant the envy of his or her peers.”
I realized with a jolt of horror that the people onstage were being auctioned off as hosts to a crowd of demons gathered to bid.
As Dione had said, about half of the hosts up for sale wore the remnants of unembroidered Church cassocks of various colors, cut away in strategic places to show off lean torsos and strong limbs. They, I realized, were human Church members who’d been kidnapped from a caravan taking them to their consecration ceremony.
What they didn’t realize was that if Kastor’s people hadn’t stolen them, the Church would have put them through a similar ordeal. The private “consecration” ceremony was really a mass possession, where Church elders deemed worthy were given fresh bodies, as well as the new identities that came with them.
The other half of the hosts up for sale wore handmade leather accessories, similar in style to what Eli’s division of the Lord’s Army had been teaching us to make. My chest ached even more fiercely when I realized these were the people who’d been taken away from their children that morning at the burned-out campsite.
“Let’s start the bidding at three hundred,” the man in the tall hat said, and bidders began shouting numbers again. I stared at them as Felix pulled me past, and I was surprised and horrified to realize that none of the bidders looked old or in any way used up, as my mother had begun to look during her last few months in the human world, when the demon inside her had used up the soul it had stolen. Her arms and legs had grown long and bony, and her joints had begun to crack with every movement. Though I hadn’t realized it at the time, those were the first physical signs of demonic degeneration—the result of a demon remaining in its human host for too long.
But the oldest of the Pandemonia bidders appeared to be in their midthirties, and none of their faces looked hollow or jaundiced. Their limbs didn’t look disproportionately long, nor had their hair started to thin.
No one in that crowd actuallyneededa new body.
The demons in Pandemonia weren’t merely evil, they werewasteful.They were throwing away human hosts that still held half-consumed—yet irrecoverable—souls, like the more affluent girls at my school who’d bought new uniforms before their old ones were truly worn out, simply because they could afford to.
But at least those girls had donated their used clothing to the less fortunate—like Mellie and me. Demons had no equivalent charity.
“When doesshego up on the block?” Dione asked as Felix dragged me around the corner of a building into a dark, narrow alley.
“Don’t know that she will,” he said. “That’s up to Kastor.”
“She’d bring a fortune.”
Felix huffed. “You don’t have a fortune to spend on her, so why do you care?”
“Where are we going, anyway?” I asked when Dione didn’t answer. “I’m here to see Kastor.”
Felix’s reply was swallowed by a new clamor when we emerged from the alley into a marketplace teeming with customers, even well after sundown.
The auction square was lit by torches mounted on the walls of the surrounding buildings, which painted the grim proceedings with an eerie flicker of shadows. The marketplace, however, was lit with electric streetlamps, which cast cold, clear pools of light at regular intervals in the ambient darkness. The rooflines and balconies of buildings on either side of the wide lane were lit with a thousand tiny lightbulbs strung together on plastic-coated wires, which I recognized from pictures I’d once seen of prewar winter holiday decorations.
The extravagant, celebratory display of light gave the entire shopping district the look of a nocturnal wonderland, like something out of one of Melanie’s storybooks. I was fascinated by the spectacle, even knowing I was being led toward some fate no doubt much less…entertaining.
As we passed through the middle of the market I stared at the stalls and carts on either side of the center aisle, alternately amused, horrified, and baffled by the wares for sale: Garments made of too little material to rightly be called clothing. A menagerie of animals on jeweled leashes—tiny pigs, strangely clothed monkeys, bright birds, exotically patterned lizards, and even several long, thick breeds of python. One booth sold a wide array of food on thin wooden sticks dripping with melted chocolate, caramel, or cheese. Another sold meats I couldn’t identify and bright, fragrant fruits I’d never even seen pictures of.
Booths peddled jewelry, cosmetics, and prosthetics of a disturbing and personal nature. Carts sold hats, feathered or sequined sashes, and shoes with dangerously high platforms and spindly heels. Liquor and beer flowed from taps in refrigerated carts. Colorful, icy concoctions were served in clear glasses, garnished with olives, edible flowers, or berries speared on brightly dyed toothpicks.
People danced and sang their way from one stall to the next, and more poured into the marketplace from stores and restaurants lining the wide lane, their doors open, spilling exotic aromas into the air.
