“You want to study him?” I really should have seen that coming. Why else would he try so hard to orchestrate a reunion with a son he couldn’t even see?
But Kastor shook his head on his way across the room toward a large, neat desk. “I don’t just want to study him. I want toreplicatehim.” He plucked a notebook from the desk and held it up so that I could see a handwritten list of names, most of which had been crossed off. “I’ve been collecting the Church’s scientists as hosts, to give us access to what they know. One day one of them will help us understand Finn’s unusual state and figure out how to bestow it upon the rest of us.”
He’d kidnapped Church scientists and turned them into demons, and now he was grinning at me from across the room like a child eager for his parents’ praise. Could he actually think I wouldapproveof what he was doing?
Although I didn’thatethe idea of the Church having fewer scientists to use against what was left of the human population….
Wait. Church scientists…
Did any of them know about the virus? Did Kastor know? Surely if hedidknow about the plan to drive Pandemonia’s demons from our world, he couldn’t know it had already been implemented….
“But we can’t study him until he comes home,” Kastor continued, oblivious to the turn my thoughts had taken. “That’s why I need Maddock, as well as anyone else Finn has grown to care about during his sojourn.”
Which was why he’d abducted Grayson and me. “How do you plan to study Finn if his natural state is incorporeal?”
He shrugged, but the gesture looked stiff and forced. “That is for the scientists to figure out. I won’t pretend to understand the specifics, because I’ve never possessed a scientist. Hell, I didn’t know about Finn’s incorporeal potential until he died.”
“He…died?” It took a second for the horror of that thought to truly sink in. I’d never met anyone asaliveas Finn. Even stuck in a body with only average physical abilities, he conspicuously enjoyed every warm breeze, every cold dip in a river, and every single time we’d ever touched. When others had only complaints about our living conditions, Finn was quick to point out that cold, hard, and dusty just made warm, soft, and clean feel even better by comparison.
Maybe that was because he’d never felt any of those things on a regular basis before. At least, not that he could remember.
“Did you think he’d beenbornwithout a body?” Kastor picked up his glass and crossed the room toward me again. “How would that even work?”
“I don’t…” I shook my head, mentally wiping the disturbing question from my mind. “What happened? How did he die?”
“Abigail killed him.”
“His own…?” I couldn’t finish the thought. My mother’d tried to kill me too.
“Insane.” Kastor shook his head and clucked his tongue, like one of the elderly teachers from my elementary school. “It’s a shame, really. She was catatonic when I got her back into your world, and I was fine with that. I mean,you’rea decent conversationalist.” He tossed a magnanimous gesture my way. “But all Abigail ever really did was scream, so I much preferred her silence. When the boys were a couple of years old, she woke up.” Kastor snapped his fingers. “Just like that. She saw the twins, but she didn’t love them.” He frowned. “I thought that was a human mother’s entire raison d’être? Loving her kids? But Abigail took one look at her boys—a matched pair of them, identical down to the double crowns on the backs of their heads—and started shouting that they were Unclean.”
I shuddered at the thought. Poor boys. Even if they didn’t remember any of it.
“We didn’t know she was half-right at the time. We thought they were human. We were only keeping them around in case they grew up to be exorcists like their mother. But Abigail just yelled that they were demons, and then she lunged for the boys. She got to Finn first. Only we didn’t call him Finn yet then.”
“You couldn’t stop her?” I demanded, tears standing in my eyes while my hand clenched around my glass. “You’re ademon.You’re faster than humans.”
“She was anexorcist.And I was in the next room.” He pointed to a closed door on the other side of the room, seemingly insulted that I would doubt his strength and speed. “I heard the shouting, but when I got to the doorway, she’d already crushed Max’s throat. The boy was dead before I could get to him.” Kastor shrugged. “I thought it was a shame at the time—the loss of a potential exorcist host. But in retrospect, if he hadn’t died, we’d never have known his true potential.”
“Max? Finn’s name was Max?” That wasn’t the most important of the questions flying around in my head, but it was the only one I couldn’t seem to set aside. Finn wasn’t even really Finn?
“Maxden. Maddock renamed him later, and by then he seemed to have no memory of ever having a brother.”
My hands felt cold, and that had nothing to do with the cuffs around my wrists. “What happened to Abigail?”
“I ripped her throat out.” He sipped from his glass. “It was a messy solution, but swift and efficient.”
“A messy…?” I stared at him with utter incomprehension. “You pulled Maddock’s mother’s throat out in front of him when he was two years old? After he’d just seen her kill his brother? No wonder he doesn’t remember Maxden! He probably blocked the memory to escape psychological trauma! How could you do that to your ownson?”
Kastor stood, and he seemed to swell with the motion, as if the threat he embodied was suddenly even greater. “My native language does not have words for the concept of parenthood.” His voice sounded deeper. Harder. “Just as we cannot die, we were never born. We aretrulyeternal. None of us has ever conceived a child before—much less two—so you see, I am apioneeramong my people. I’ve done something no one else has ever managed to do, and unless it someday becomes clear that someone elsecan,both my existence in this world and my authority in this city are secure. But don’t mistake my genetic donation to a set of half-breed human twins as any kind of emotional attachment.
“I tried to stop Abigail from killing Maxden because he wasmine.But I did not mourn his death. I did not miss his presence. I have been more disappointed over misplacing my favorite shirt than I was by the death of my son.” He leaned so close to me that I scooted back until I hit the end of the sofa, and then I had nowhere else to go. “So do not lecture me on how I should have anticipated Maddock’s trauma or empathized with it. His screams did not bother me. I simply had him removed from earshot so I would not have to hear them.”
Furious on the boys’ behalf, I didn’t realize that nervous sweat had compromised my grip on my half-full glass until it slipped from my hand. It shattered on the floor, spraying water and sharp shards everywhere. “Damn it. Sorry.” I slid from the couch onto the floor to pick up the largest pieces, which was more difficult than I’d expected with my hands still cuffed, and suddenly I realized an opportunity was staring me in the face. I gripped the next piece of glass too hard, and it sliced into the pad of my thumb. “Shit!”
Kastor set his own glass on the coffee table and headed into the bathroom. When I heard him rummaging beneath the counter for a towel, I spit into his glass as quietly as I could, then let a single drop of my blood fall into it, to be sure he got a good dose of whatever virus I was carrying.
The blood hung there for a moment, suspended in amber whiskey, so I stuck my finger in and stirred until the color disappeared.
