“I’ll come for you—”

Sissy’s face was slick with tears as she reached out for him. “Don’t leave me here!”

In an instant, she morphed into the condition she’d been in when he’d seen her over that tub, that sheath disappearing and leaving her naked, her body desecrated, her blond hair tangled and matted with blood.

Abruptly, her eyes shot to the far corner and her stained lips trembled. “No!”

She put her hands up as if to ward off blows, bowing away—

Just like that, she was gone. And Devina, beautiful, evil Devina, walked into the candlelight.

Jim fucking lost it.

Snapped in half.

Broke like a motherfucker.

As he screamed bloody murder, it was all about the girl. The innocent girl who had been taken from her family by a demon, and pulled into a shithole, and imprisoned here . . . and forced to see the aftermath of a grown man defiled.

Rage was a nuclear blast that went off inside him—

White light poured forth from his eye sockets, exploding in the room, illuminating the glossy black walls that ran upward into infinity. The release consumed his physical form, freeing him from Devina’s constraints, carrying him around the space in a rush-gust of loose molecules that blew out the candles and knocked over their stands.

Coalescing, he whirled around . . . and went gunning for Devina.

Now she was the one bracing for impact, her brunette hair stripped back from her scalp under the hurricane blast of him, the skin on her face flapping against the bone structure underneath as she lost her balance and went over onto the stone floor.

Just as he reached her, Jim pulled his new form together into a spearing lance and hurled himself right for her chest.

He entered her body and blew that bitch away, all of her parts going flying, pieces of her skin and tangles of slippery innards and pounds of dark red meat spackling the walls of her dungeon.

What was left was a black hole of equal mass and energy as that which made up him—and he was ready to go at it with her.

Except, evidently, she wasn’t up for a head-to-head fight: Her warping shadow shot out of the room and down a hall, making an escape.

Fuck. That.

Jim rushed forward after her—

And slammed into the metaphysical equivalent of a brick house.

The shocking impact of the nonvisual barrier sent him backward and he became corporeal once again as he skidded over the stone floor on his raw ass.

He had one brief moment of what-the-hell, before his body’s Game Over sign flashed and he fell flat on his back in utter exhaustion.