Page 123

After the Primaxin antibiotic injection, she had perked right up. The infected cut on her arm had already tamed, and she was even managing to keep warm in a normal T-shirt. Thank God for modern medicine.

For the next two weeks, she would be on a course of oral antibiotics, and I intended her to follow through. I wasn’t going to risk Lana relapsing.

I gave up on the radio and straightened, bumping my head again. “So you share blood with other demons...literally?” I asked. “Like, their blood is your blood, and your blood is their blood, right?So how does that work when you have sepsis?”

“Sepsis?” she repeated quizzically.

“An infection in your blood,” I explained. “What you just had. Doesn’t that bacteria get spread around to other demons?”

Lana pursed her lips, considering it. “Well, it feels like decay lingers in my blood when I’m sick, and if I healed others while I felt that way, the bad spirits would slip from my veins to theirs. So I don’t try healing them. I guess that if I did, I could get other Infernari sick, too.”

“So you can turn it off? The blood connection?”

“Yeah, it’s like a gate. I have to open it to pass my magic onto others.”

“Huh.” I chewed my lip, my heart rate picking up at this news.

I didn’t like where my brain took it.

Lana had a blood connection to other demons. Toallother demons. She could access this connection at will, and when she did, her blood would literally be flowing in their veins... along with whatever else was put in her blood.

And here, I’d thought she was only valuable as a hostage.

If what she said was true, then Lana could very well be the Infernari’s Achilles’ heel.

God knew they already had a weakness to disease...

No.

To do such a thing would be unthinkable, too cruel to imagine. I couldn’t do that to Lana.

I couldn’t betray her like that. If ever there was an Infernarus deserving of redemption, it would be her.

I sighed and rubbed the back of my neck, wondering when I had grown a conscience... and when I had stopped hating the demon in Lana and started liking it instead.

She was turning me, just like she’d said.

But it didn’t matter; I would still follow through on my original plan. I wasn’t doing this out of hate, I was doing it out of duty. And the plan was still the same: destroy demons’ portals, cut them off from Earth, make them fend for themselves on their dying planet rather than leech off ours.

That was the only justice.

Lana could stay.

Suddenly, she gasped, unbuckled her seatbelt, and leapt out of her seat, pressing her face and palms to her window.

“Seatbelt, Lana.” Jesus.

“Can we stop here?” she asked.

The last few hours, we’d been chugging up the rim of a volcanic caldera, and we’d just reached the top. I followed her gaze out across the hellish landscape at the bottom of the crater. Stretching as far as the eye could see, miles and miles of blackened, charred rock were pockmarked with steaming, bubbling pools of milky acid, the edges crusted with yellow rings of sulfur. The smell of rotten eggs invaded the car.

“Augh—” I dragged my tank top over my nose. “You want to stophere?”

Lana nodded, gazing wistfully out at the crater.

“Oh-kay.” The road took us down into the crater, and I pulled over near a particularly nasty pool of bubbling goop. “Just don’t, like, swim in it.”

“It’s just like Abyssos,” she marveled.