“Push!” Eli shouted, and I echoed the command inches from Meshara’s largely useless right ear. Having decided that I didn’t need to actually see the miracle of birth, I’d taken up a position of support at her back, against the passenger’s-side door. I sat sideways on the bench with one leg folded on the seat, and between contractions Meshara leaned back against me.

Her hair still smelled like Mellie. She looked like Mellie. And she was about to deliver Mellie’s baby. Those subversive facts worked against me emotionally, even though I knew I was holding a demon. Cheering on a monster.

“Okay, stop!” Eli yelled, and I repeated the command into her ear. She still felt no pain, but she’d started to sweat, a clear indication of the effort her body was expending.

“When he was in Tobias’s body, Aldric said the same kinds of things,” Anabelle said, continuing our discussion of Meshara’s mysterious illness between contractions. A discussion that kept me from dwelling on the purpose of the knife in my pocket. “He only took one bite of the chocolate Reese gave him the day you exorcised him. He said it didn’t taste right.”

“I remember. He couldn’t feel his bumps and bruises either. Or that burn from the campfire. It’s safe to assume he was infected with whatever Meshara has.”

Eli’s gaze was still trained on Melanie’s stomach. He’d been amazing through the whole thing, though surely nothing in his life with the Lord’s Army had prepared him to deliver a demon’s baby, from a body that couldn’t actually feel the birthing process. “But he never went deaf or blind, did he?”

“I’m guessing he would have if he’d spent much more time in Tobias’s body,” I said. “The incubation period seems to be about two days. Meshara’s been in Melanie’s body for six or seven days now—”

Eli looked up sharply. “That long?”

“Yes, and she appears to be near the end phase—total loss of all sensory input.”

“You think this is actually fatal?” Anabelle asked. “I mean, she seems fine, other than the obvious.” Being completely cut off from the world through the loss of every sense she should have had.

“At the very least, it will lead to demons starving themselves, either because food is no longer appetizing or because they can’t feed themselves when they can’t see, smell, or feel their food.”

Eli glanced at Meshara again as if to confirm that she couldn’t hear us. “This disease, or virus, or whatever it is…it seems to be taking away everything demons want from the human experience. I’m guessing that’s more than coincidence.”

“I think it was engineered. By the Church.” I looked up at Anabelle. “Is that possible? Do you know if the Church has the kinds of facilities that would require? The kinds of doctors? Or scientists?” We’d all been led to believe that kind of technology—anything not required for a general medical practice—had been either abandoned or destroyed after the war.

Ana nodded slowly. “They’ve been actively—if quietly—recruiting science graduates from the universities since long before I was ordained. Rumor has it they kept parts of the Centers for Disease Control up and running after the war, to be sure they could protect what’s left of humanity from illness, which is honestly the last thing we need, after everyone we’ve lost to the demon horde.”

Though the truth was that we’d been losing humans and their souls to demons for centuries before the war began. We just hadn’t known it.

“It’s down south in Miseracordia,” she added. “Which used to be called Atlanta.”

“So it’s possible, then?” Eli said. “They could have made a disease that would…what? Take all the fun out of possession?”

“I think we’re well beyond just ‘not fun.’ ” I gestured to Meshara for emphasis. Her head was propped on my shoulder, her eyes closed. Her breathing was normal and unlabored. She was literally experiencing nothing between contractions during the most intense moments of childbirth. “The Church figured out how to isolate demons in our world just like they’re naturally isolated in their own world. Total sensory deprivation.” Thinking about that, I suddenly understood why some demons—and presumably some humans—might rather feel pain than feel nothing at all.

Anabelle frowned. “But the Church is run by demons. Why would they develop an illness that would target their own population?”

“Here we go again.” Eli glanced at Meshara’s stomach, and I looked down to see it convulsing. I leaned toward her ear—the right was still functioning a little better than the left—and shouted for her to push.

“I think Kastor’s population was their target,” I told Anabelle as the demon bore down against a pressure she could no longer feel. I couldn’t believe the change in Meshara. In the span of a few hours she’d gone from fiercely fast and deadly to disconnected and virtually helpless. “I’ve never heard of anyone—Church members or civilians—suffering from anything like this, in New Temperance or anywhere else. Not that they would have reported that on the news.” That would have made the Church look powerless in the face of a scary new illness.

“But surely those of us in the Church would have heard about it,” Anabelle said. “And I don’t understand how they could be sure Kastor’s people would be infected but the Church’s wouldn’t.”

“They couldn’t be sure,” Eli said. “Unless their members were never exposed but Kastor’s people were. Targeted exposure. Like biological warfare in wars of the past.” He looked up and nodded at me.

“Okay, you can stop for now!” I shouted into Meshara’s ear.

“How much longer?” she said, each word soft and slushy.

“Getting close!” I shouted, without bothering to verify that with Eli.

“How would they target a specific population?” Anabelle asked.

“They’d need a delivery system.” Eli leaned against the back of his seat so he could see all three of us. “Someone to carry a vial of the virus—or something exposed to it—into Pandemonia.”

I glanced at him in surprise, and Eli shrugged. “It’s been done like that in the past. Our textbooks are more than a century old and unedited by the Church.” Which meant he’d had history lessons my teachers would never have let me hear.

Anabelle frowned. “If that’s their plan, how did Meshara get it? How did Aldric?”

“Double agents?” Eli shrugged. “Maybe one of them was supposed to carry the vial but it broke and they got infected?”

I shook my head. “Meshara said she’s never even been in a Church city.” Which could have been a lie, but I was unconscious for hours, and…“If she’s loyal enough to Kastor to resist possessing me on his order, why would she bring a vial of some deadly poison right into the heart of his community?”

“It’s not actually deadly, though, right?” Eli said. “Wouldn’t anyone infected in Pandemonia just ditch the diseased host for a fresh one?”

“Yes, as long as there were fresh ones available.” The fact that we were all conscious was the only thing keeping Meshara in Melanie’s compromised body. I closed my eyes, trying to follow Eli’s thread of logic back to the Church’s intentions. “But then those fresh bodies would just get infected. Eventually there wouldn’t be any healthy hosts left in Pandemonia. And based on how fast this thing has reduced Meshara to a senseless bag of bones, ‘eventually’ is starting to sound more like a week or two, tops. After that, where would they go?” I opened my eyes to frown at Eli. “Is Verity the only city near Pandemonia? How close is it?”

“It’s about a day’s drive. So they could theoretically get there in time to find fresh hosts.” He sat up on his knees again when he noticed Meshara having another contraction. “Tell her to push. We’re almost there now.”

I coaxed my sister’s killer through another round of pushing, and Eli announced that he could see the baby’s head. Goose bumps popped up all over my arms, and my heart got stuck in my throat.

Melanie’s baby is almost here.

My eyes filled with tears, and suddenly her death seemed terribly, unbearably real, because she would never get to hold her child. She would never even get to see the baby she’d carried for all those months. Her last connection to Adam, who’d died just because he’d loved a girl whose last name was Kane.

The baby would have to make do with an aunt who was too much of a wimp to watch the business end of its birth. An aunt who would have less than an hour to spend with the precious new miracle…

I wiped tears from my eyes before Eli could see them, and I refocused my attention.

“Even if Kastor’s people could get to Verity before they went blind, there’s no guarantee they could get inside the city,” I said. “If the Church is really behind this, officials in Verity would see that coming. They’d be fortified, and willing to do anything to keep the virus from spreading.” My eyes widened as the potential fallout sank in. “When they’re out of fresh bodies to hop into, demons would have to leave our world on their own, or live in useless bodies until they starve and then get sucked out of our world en masse.” Which was surely exactly what the Church had intended. “They’ve come up with a plague that will cause a voluntary evacuation of demons from our world, and they cannot afford for it to backfire on them.”

“Okay, I understand that,” Anabelle said, when that round of pushing had ended. “But I’m still not sure how Meshara got the disease if the rest of Kastor’s people haven’t. She’d know if they were sick in Pandemonia, right?”

Meshara’s shock and terror over her own predicament felt real, and I couldn’t help but believe she’d never seen anything like what was happening to her. “Meshara thinks she got it from us,” I said. “Both she and Aldric were fine until they came into contact with Anathema.”

“You escaped from New Temperance, right?” Eli said, and I nodded. “So maybe the Church sent something contagious into the badlands with you, hoping you’d infect the degenerate population.”

“I think Kastor was their goal,” I said, thinking back to the report I’d read and the hatred in Deacon Bennett’s voice when she’d mentioned him. Suddenly that memory triggered a chilling realization. “Holy shit. Kastor was their goal. Deacon Bennett actually said she hoped Kastor got his hands on us!”

“Yeah, but she didn’t mean it like that,” Anabelle said. “She was just kind of…cursing us. Like when I used to tell my little brother that I hoped the monsters under his bed got him in his sleep.”

“Except that Kastor is real, and the Church really hates him. They’re scared of him. What if she wasn’t just cursing us?” I blinked, and for a moment I saw not the interior of our wrecked SUV in the rapidly darkening badlands, but the inside of the New Temperance courthouse, from which Mellie, Finn, Anabelle, and I had made a miraculous escape.

“What if we didn’t truly escape? What if they had let us go? What if they had pretended to play into our hands so we could ‘escape,’ knowing Kastor would come after us? Relying on that very thing? Think about it.” I counted off the points on my fingers. “They knew Kastor had been raiding their caravans, specifically looking for exorcists to be used as hosts. They knew he had taken Carey James—Grayson’s brother—for that very reason. And they have to know that the citizens of Pandemonia have been watching their television broadcasts since…forever. Which means that announcing on the news that Anathema had escaped into the badlands was like ringing the dinner bell for Kastor. The Church didn’t have to send its virus to Pandemonia. They just had to plant it on us somewhere, then let us go. They knew Kastor would do the rest of the work for them. And they were right.”

“Nina, it’s time,” Eli said, but I hardly heard him. “This is it.”

I propped Meshara up out of habit, still mentally mired in the Church’s deception. “Time to push!” I shouted into her ear. I couldn’t tell whether she had any awareness of her own position—if she couldn’t feel her limbs, could she tell how they were situated?—and I only knew for sure that she’d heard me when she gave a great grunt of effort and curled around her own bulging stomach.

“Good!” Eli called. “Here comes the head!”

Anabelle peeked over his shoulder and her eyes widened. Then her gaze snapped up to my face, and I practically saw her mental gears shift as she tried to distract herself from what she’d seen. “Wait, Nina, you think we’re actually carrying the disease?” She frowned. “But we’ve been through all our stuff over and over, consolidating. Repairing. Replacing. Restocking. Even if they were smart enough to send it in one of the supply trucks, knowing we’d raid it, surely we would have found…Wait, how does one store a virus?”

“It could have been in anything,” I said. “Probably in something they knew we’d keep. Like painkillers. Or Mellie’s prenatal vitamins. They probably didn’t stash it in something obvious, like vials or syringes.”

“But if it was in something we’d use, wouldn’t we just be infecting ourselves?”

“Not if humans can’t get the virus.” Which seemed to be the case, since only the possessed among us had gotten sick.

“Okay.” Anabelle nodded slowly. “But then wouldn’t they just be wasting their virus on us, instead of using it on Pandemonia? And even if they weren’t, how did they expect Kastor’s people to actually get infected? Accidentally prick themselves on a suspicious syringe in our luggage after we were captured?”

Good question. And there were no syringes. Anabelle was right. We would have noticed….

Syringes. Needles.

My hand fell from Meshara’s shoulder as something she’d said earlier finally sank in. She’d said the Church had tied Melanie to the prenatal exam table and poked her with needles.

What if they hadn’t been just running tests? What if they hadn’t been just taking blood out of her, but putting something into her bloodstream?

“We are carrying the virus,” I said, my voice hollow with shock. “But you’re right—it’s not in a vial or a syringe. It’s in Melanie. They injected her with it, then let us escape, knowing Kastor would come after us.

“My sister is the Church’s Trojan horse, and Kastor is still trying like hell to bring her into his city.”