The Flame Never Dies (20 page)

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.

And if that wasn't enough to set the two demonic civilizations apart, once I passed the abandoned suburbs and industrial districts and could see downtown, I realized that Pandemonia's walls were as representative of the anomalous population they contained as were any of the Church's city enclosures.

Rather than a tall, smooth steel wall, welded and virtually seamless, Pandemonia's defenses were a patchwork of metal—chair legs, chain-link fences, traffic barricades, car frames, shopping carts, garden gates, street grates, ladders, scaffolding, steel pipes—all apparently fused together by welders high on some sort of psychotropic drug. The effect was that of a metal briar patch surrounding the entire former downtown area, as far as I could tell, easily penetrable by light and sound but not by any creature larger than a cat.

The only gap in the bizarre fusion of steel was the city gate, facing almost due east.

I parked my borrowed car in the middle of the road a hundred feet from the gate, and for a moment I could only stare up at Pandemonia while I took deep breaths, trying to avert sheer panic. This was it. My chance to succeed where the Church had failed. To drive the worst of the demonic presence from earth and reclaim the badlands in the name of humanity.

If I survived, I swore to myself, I'd go after the Church. Starting in New Temperance.

First things first, Nina.

Metal squealed when I opened my car door. I turned off the engine—and with it, the headlights—then got out of the car, leaving my stuff in the front passenger's seat because they'd only confiscate it if I tried to bring it with me. I'd taken seven steps toward the gate when light flared with a fizzy-sounding pop, trained right at me.

I was literally in the spotlight.

“Who the hell are you?” a voice demanded, followed by a high-pitched squeal I associated with every PE teacher I'd ever had—someone was using an electric megaphone. “Identify yourself or you will be shot.”

“That'd be an awful waste,” I shouted, shielding my eyes from the light with one hand at my forehead. “My name is Nina Kane, and I'm an exorcist. Tell Kastor I've come to talk.”

“W
here'd this one come from?” A pink-bra-clad woman in her late thirties reached for me as Felix pulled me down the dark, narrow hallway by my left arm, and the steady flow of adrenaline that had been keeping me both awake and alert spiked like electricity run straight through my chest. “She's pretty. Tired, and kind of smelly, but very, very pretty.” Her fingers brushed my shoulder, and I shuddered in revulsion.

I'd been in Pandemonia no more than an hour and had yet to leave the building built into the city gate, yet I'd already seen at least twenty people. All of them had wanted to touch me. Few of them had any impulse control whatsoever. And if I were to add up the clothing worn by all of them combined, I wouldn't have had enough material to cover two high school students attending any Church school in the world.

Pandemonia's dress code appeared to be “clothing optional.”

I hadn't lived a covered-up, buttoned-down, bottled-up Church-run existence in months, but even close-quarter cohabiting with boys in the badlands hadn't prepared me for the flagrant immodesty inside Pandemonia. The display of flesh was disorienting. Unnerving.

No matter where I looked, I wanted to avert my gaze. And sanitize my hands. And scrub my eyeballs with a scouring agent.

“Don't touch.” Felix slapped the woman's hand away from me, and when she lunged at him, hissing, her brightly painted nails flashing in the overhead light, I realized her bra wasn't a bra at all. It had the structural integrity of armor—something like a corset from the pages of my history texts—intended to both to support and display the flesh it hardly covered. Based on the lacy straps and ribbon trim, I could only conclude that the garment was actually meant to be seen rather than covered up.

That bra was her actual
shirt.

Felix pinned the woman in pink against the concrete wall by her neck, without letting go of my arm. I could easily have pulled free, but if free was what I wanted, I wouldn't have surrendered in the first place.

“That's
Nina Kane,
” Felix growled, his nose inches from the choking woman's forehead. “No one touches her, Dione. Kastor's orders.”

“Nina Kane the exorcist?” Her eyes brightened with interest.

“Thus the order not to touch.” Felix let her go, and Dione circled us like a cat on the prowl, waiting for the chance to pounce again, heedless of the red mark around her throat from his fist.

“She's even prettier than the other one….”

“The other…?” Horror washed over me like the first wave of heat from a bonfire. “Grayson? Is she here?” If so, where was the rest of Anathema?

“The one with all the curls?” Dione said, and I nodded. “I heard her screaming. Would you like to know what Kastor has done with her?”

“Yes,” I said, though I wasn't sure that was the truth—knowing what had happened to Grayson yet lacking the ability to stop it was like torture.

But when Dione only laughed instead of answering, I realized she knew that. And she—like the rest of demonkind—wanted to see me suffer.

When I wiped all emotion from my face, determined to deny her any further pleasure at my expense, she pouted and turned back to Felix. “Who caught this Nina Kane?” Her movements were fluid and eerily graceful, and if she ever decided to attack me for real, I'd probably never see her coming. “My money's on Aldric.”

“Aldric's gone.” I shrugged, my hands zip-tied at my back, and gave her my best taunting smile, hoping she couldn't smell the fear behind it. “So's Meshara. I burned them both out.”

Dione laughed, and light from the dusty fixture at the end of the hall shone dully on her spiky hair, the tips of which were dyed a contrasting shade of pink. “That's what you think you're going to do to me? Burn me out?”

I shrugged, careful to exhale in her direction in case the demon virus
was
somehow airborne. “I don't think I'll have to,” I said, and her smile faltered but the hunger in her eyes swelled. “And no one caught me. I came to see Kastor.”

“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. “What
is
it 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 actually
needed
a new body.

The demons in Pandemonia weren't merely evil, they were
wasteful.
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 does
she
go 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.