style="font-size:15px;"> Useful.
I was born for this.
Behind me, the grunts and thumps were winding down, and when the body beneath my hand fell limp, I turned to see that we had won the fight.
It wasn’t even close, really. I counted six men in white-embroidered navy police cassocks, each now sporting a scorched and smoldering hole in his chest. The two survivors were the human deliverymen who’d been driving the cargo. Both now stood with their backs against the first of the two green supply trucks with their hands in the air, while Finn aimed his rifle at them.
“What’s the plan for these two?” he asked, his aim unwavering.
Maddock considered the question for a moment. “Cuff ’em and leave ’em in the escort vehicle.”
“I’m on it.” Devi squatted next to one of the dead cops, then stood with his handcuffs. While she and Finn restrained the civilians, Maddock searched the bodies until he found the keys to the cargo compartments. He unlocked the rear of the first truck and rolled the door up to reveal the shipment.
Relief eased the most immediate of my fears. Our famine was over, at least for a while.
Reese rounded the back of the vehicle. “Holy hellfire.” The truck was stacked full of boxes, floor to ceiling, front to back. Even if the second vehicle was empty—and it wouldn’t be—we’d found way more than we could carry.
Each box was clearly labeled, and at a glance I noticed crates of canned and dry goods, boxes of clothing bound for department stores, cleaning supplies, textbooks, and more toiletries than I’d ever seen in my life.
“They put all their eggs in one basket,” Maddock said, his voice hollow with surprise. “They must have thought we wouldn’t attack an armed caravan.”
“Or they were hoping we would,” I guessed. “They came armed with stun guns, prepared to capture, not kill.”
“Well, too bad for them.” Devi stepped in front of me and pulled a clipboard from a hook on the wall of the cargo area. The inventory was several pages long.
“It’ll be easier to drive this back than to try to unload it,” Reese said, and no one argued. We took turns siphoning the gasoline from the truck we wouldn’t be taking, and then Maddock and Devi drove off in the other cargo truck. Reese followed them in our SUV, which left Finn and me to drive the shot-out car we’d “stolen” from a sympathetic cop back in New Temperance. As we passed the police vehicle on the way to our car, one of the cargo truck drivers stuck his head out of the backseat window.
“Carter?” he called, leaning at an odd angle because his hands were bound behind his back. The other civilian sat in the front seat, his left wrist handcuffed to the steering wheel. Neither man could get out of the car, but they would be able to drive it to the nearest city. “You used to be Heath Carter, right?” the man in the backseat repeated, staring at Finn. “I knew I recognized you.”
We’d ditched Carter’s ID along with his unembroidered church cassock months ago, because even when Finn eventually released his body, returning to New Temperance would be a death sentence for the real Carter—he would know things the Church wouldn’t want him to share.
“He’s not possessed,” I said. “He just switched sides once he learned the truth.” Telling my little lie was much easier than trying to explain that Carter actually was possessed, but not by a demon. Beyond that, we didn’t want the Church to know about Finn and his ability to inhabit any human body not already occupied by a demon. He was as close to a secret weapon as we had.
“What truth? What the hell happened out there?” the man cuffed to the steering wheel demanded, and I followed his gaze to where we’d lined up the scorched corpses on the grass. “What did you bastards do to them?”
The drivers didn’t recognize us as exorcists because their only exposure to the practice had come from the Church’s army of fake exorcists, who marched around in dramatic black robes, wearing crosses and chanting nonsense in Latin for show.
“Those cops were possessed,” I said. “We exorcised them.”
“Nina,” Finn whispered, warning me to shush, because just like with Carter, the more these civilians knew, the more danger they’d be in from the Church. But they’d already seen enough to get themselves killed, so my explanation might actually save their lives.
“You expect us to believe you’re exorcists and the cops were demons?” the man in the backseat spat. “Bullshit.” He leaned forward, appealing to his coworker in the front. “Demons are pathological liars. You can’t believe a word she says.”
“If we’re possessed, why would we let you live?”
Backseat Man lifted his eyebrows at me in challenge. “If they were possessed”—he nodded at the bodies lined up on the ground—“why were they going to let you live?”
“So they could deliver us to the Church.” I shrugged. That should have been obvious.
“Deliver you . . . ?” Front Seat Man stared up at me, surprised. “Where exactly were they going to put you?”
I frowned, considering the question. The backs of both cargo trucks were full of goods, and most of the available seats had been filled by the cops and drivers. They wouldn’t have had room to bring more than two of us back.
So why had they come armed with nonlethal weapons?
Before I could come up with any reasonable theories, Backseat Man made a show of glancing around what he could see of the ghost town. “Where’s your sister? She lose that baby yet?”
Finn held me back when I took an instinctive, aggressive step toward him. Melanie and her unlicensed, underage pregnancy, which constituted multiple prosecutable sins, had risen to infamy when the Church publicly questioned her humanity and broadcast her boyfriend’s immolation—death by fire—to the entire country.
For once, Finn’s hand on my shoulder failed to calm me. “She’s not going to lose the baby,” I growled through clenched teeth. Making sure of that had become my mission in life since escaping New Temperance. Mellie’s unborn child was the only family she and I had left in the world—thanks to routine sterilization by the Church, I could never have one of my own.
“Oh, we both know that’s not true,” Backseat Man taunted. “Even if it’s born breathing, how long will it live? The well is empty, and you have no donor. Without a soul, that baby will die out here in the dirt, and there’ll be nothing you or your sister or your gang of flame-wielding assassins can do about it.”
Assassins? My heart thumped harder. Only demons called exorcists assassins.
I squinted against the sunlight for a better look at Backseat Man, and that time when I stepped toward him, Finn didn’t try to stop me. He’d heard it too. The Church had sent one of its demons in disguise as a deliveryman—no official cassock, no telltale embroidery.
“Melanie’s baby will live.” I held my left hand out so he could see the flame cradled in my palm. His eyes widened, and he tried to retreat across the bench seat but was trapped by the seat belt. “I will find a soul for it.” I shoved my fiery hand through the open window, and the demon screeched, an inhuman sound of agony, as the flame met his flesh. “And
