“Eli, please put the crowbar down.” I forced my voice to remain low-pitched and calm. “This is Finn. He’s with me. He’s not going to hurt you.” I turned to Finn. “This is Eli Woods. He killed the demon who snuck up on me, and I think we should all be friends.”
Finn glanced at the corpse on the floor but looked unconvinced.
“Finn, put the gun down,” I said.
“Him first.” His aim at the center of Eli’s worn-thin button-up shirt was a steady threat.
“Okay, boys, someone has to go first.” I turned back to the self-professed sentinel. “Since you obviously don’t recognize my face or my name, I’m guessing you haven’t seen or heard the news recently?”
He shook his head. “We don’t have television or radio.”
“We who? The Lord’s Army?” I said, and Finn gave me a confused look. “What is this army?”
“We are the last of the true believers.” Eli’s words had the formal cadence of an official pledge or creed. It sounded a little too much like the Church for comfort, but Eli—and presumably his nomadic army—were no more fans of the Unified Church than I was. “We are a beacon of light and truth, shining in a world of darkness and corruption.”
“Humble too,” Finn muttered.
I ignored him and focused on Eli. “It’s nice to meet you. And your army.” I cleared my throat and tossed a warning glance at Finn. “Are you familiar with the saying ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’? Because that’s kind of what we’re looking at here. The Church has been hunting you guys for decades, and now they’re hunting us too because of what we know and what we can do. Since we’re on the same side, maybe you could reconsider lowering your weapon?”
Eli took one hand from his crowbar long enough to reseat his black cowboy hat, briefly revealing short, tight curls. Then he reclaimed his expert grip. “You’re exorcists.” It wasn’t a question. He was repeating the part he obviously found hard to believe.
“We’re true exorcists. We hunt demons, just like you.” I gestured to the body at my feet. “But instead of puncturing skulls, we incinerate the bond between parasite and host and fry the demonic bastards back to hell.”
His eyes widened. “You’re serious.”
I nodded. “It’s kinda badass.”
“Though most of us don’t object to blunt force trauma when the occasion calls for it.” Finn shrugged and gestured with the rifle he was still aiming. “Or bullets.”
I glared at Finn, then turned back to Eli. “I need both of you to put down your weapons so we can focus on our mutual enemy.” I shrugged, aiming for casual confidence. “You know. Evil.”
Both of them glanced at me. Then they glared at each other. Neither boy lowered his weapon.
My temper spiked. “We’re in the middle of the badlands with a corpse on the floor and the Church on our tails. We are not each other’s biggest problem. So, Finn, put the damn gun down!”
Finn’s bright green eyes narrowed and his jaw tensed. “Not until you back out of his reach.”
“Striking a human would be a blight on my honor, and she’s obviously not possessed,” Eli said as I moved closer to Finn. “The jury’s still out on you.”
Finn’s glare grew colder, but he flicked the safety switch on his rifle, then lowered it. But he didn’t sling it over his back.
I turned back to Eli. “Your turn.”
When the sentinel took a deep breath, I realized that trusting Finn and me was as much of a risk for him as the reverse was for us. Maybe more. He lowered his bloody crowbar but didn’t put it down, and I decided that was the best we were going to get.
“Now I have to go find—” Something moved in the shadowy doorway behind Finn, and I exhaled in relief as Tobias stepped into the marble foyer from the back hall.
But he wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t gloating over having escaped my custody, nor did he look chagrined. He didn’t even seem surprised to see the body on the floor, or Eli, with his gore-covered crowbar.
Eli’s gaze tracked down from Finn to the boy now at Finn’s side. His eyes narrowed and his arms tensed as he raised the crowbar like a bat again. “Step away from the Unclean.”
I tried to move in front of Eli, to shield Finn, but he pushed me aside.
Finn lifted his gun again. “Do not touch her!”
“I’m fine,” I insisted, my pulse racing as the tension between the two of them resurged. “Finn’s not possessed. He would never hurt—”
“Not him,” Eli growled through clenched teeth. “The little one.”
Chills rose the length of my spine as I turned to follow his intently focused gaze. He was staring right at Tobias.
“No.” Panic tightened my throat as the sentinel focused his destructive zeal on the child I’d committed all of Anathema to helping. The child I’d begun to think of as an older version of my unborn niece or nephew—an innocent, dependent upon us for survival. “No. He’s just a kid.”
“Tobias was my nephew,” Eli said, and shock surged like fire through my veins. I hadn’t told him the boy’s name. “Then an Unclean raiding party ambushed our division four days ago and took him. You’ve been traveling in the company of a demon, Nina Kane.”
I glanced at Tobias, expecting the child to deny the accusation. But then, he probably didn’t even understand what he was being accused of. “We found him on the side of the road. He’d been abandoned. Left to die.”
“He wasn’t left. He was bait,” Eli insisted.
“No.” I stepped toward Tobias, intending to shield him with my body, but Eli pulled me back again, and this time Finn didn’t object. I jerked free of the sentinel’s grip and reached for Tobias.
“Nina.” Finn suddenly turned and aimed his rifle at the child, backing slowly toward me and away from Tobias. “Eli’s right. The kid’s possessed.”
I froze. If anyone would know for sure, it’d be Finn. All he had to do was give a little psychic push in Tobias’s direction—as if to take over the child’s body—and he would only meet resistance if something else was already occupying that space.
A demon.
“But . . .” My pulse raced even as I tried to deny what I was hearing. A demon traveling in the company of exorcists, and not one of us had realized? How was that even possible? We hadn’t suspected him because . . . “Demons don’t take over children’s bodies,” I mumbled, still trying to come to terms with what I was hearing. “Everyone knows that.” The limitations were too great. The hosts failed to mature properly. Degeneration came much faster.
Tobias smiled slowly, eerily, and chills crawled across my skin. There was nothing left of the little boy we’d spent the past two days with. “Which is exactly why you’d never suspect a child.” His gaze—his very awareness—appeared to age right in front of me, and suddenly his chubby cheeks seemed an absurd and disturbing disguise.
“He’s your nephew?” I asked Eli, without taking my gaze from the pint-sized demon. No wonder the nomads were following us. We were traveling with the human husk of one of their children.