The rock bounced off the demon’s leathery chest. It grinned with both mouths and seized Lucie around the torso, sending her seraph blade flying. She was lifted off her feet as the demon’s black gaze raked her up and down. Its eyes narrowed. “I know you,” it snarled. It sounded almost surprised. “You are the second one.”

Lucie kicked out, her feet connecting hard with the demon’s torso. It grunted and she shrieked in pain as its grip tightened. Its lower mouth opened; she saw the glint of fangs, and then a flood of black as ichor poured forth. Staggering, it released Lucie; she fell to the ground and rolled aside as the demon’s body arched backward. The blade of a sword emerged from its chest, smeared with green-black ichor. It looked down incredulously at the steel protruding from its torso, snarled, and vanished.

Standing just behind where the demon had been was Jesse.

He held the sword that had hung on the wall in the tiny coffin-room. Though there was ichor on the blade and spattered on the ground at his feet, there were no stains on his clothes, or on his bare hands. The sky was black above: his green eyes glittered as he slowly lowered the sword.

“Jesse,” Lucie breathed. “I—”

She broke off as Grace took a staggering step forward. Her gaze darted from Lucie to Jesse and back again, her expression incredulous. “But I don’t understand,” she said, gripping one hand with the other. “How can you see Jesse?”

James had thought Matthew and Cordelia still might try to prevent him, but after he explained—the words echoing in his own ears as he told them how he had put the pieces of it all together—he knew that they would not. Both stared at him with drained, pale faces, but neither made a move to stand between him and the gateway.

Matthew—disheveled, dirty, still with his incongruous spats on—drew himself up, his chin high. “Then, if you must go, I will go with you,” he said.

James’s heart broke. How could he do this to Matthew? How could he contemplate dying in a place Matthew could never follow him to?

And yet.

“It won’t work,” he said softly. “No one can follow me into the shadows, Math. Not even you.”

Matthew walked swiftly toward the archway, even as James called out to him in sharp alarm. He reached out to touch the empty space below the arch, where the green ground of the cemetery turned to ash and grayness.

His hand bounced back as if he had slammed it into glass. He turned back to face his companions, and Cordelia saw that he was shaking.

“Cordelia, do you have rope?” he said.