With his anger spent, there was nothing left in him, and a fatal fatigue bled out from his wonky-beating heart and spread through him sure as a weed taking root and thriving. No longer able to hold his head up, he let the thing rest on the stone and just breathed, dimly noting that the air was saturated with both the copper scent of fresh kill and the acrid pinch of still-smoking candlewicks.

“Sissy,” he said into the darkness. “I’m right here. . . .”

He had no clue whether she could hear him and there was no response. Just an eerie, molten sound . . . no doubt the souls trying to get free of their prison.

He hated the idea that his girl was trapped in there.

Hated that she had seen what he’d looked like.

At that thought, pain bored into him as surely as if he’d been stabbed with a crowbar. Oh, God . . . that poor child . . .

A sudden surge of emotion fell upon him in a tidal wave: Naked and broken and filthy, Jim curled onto his side and wept in great heaving gags, his tears hot and salty on the broken skin of his face.

He had never cared about any damage to himself. Ever. But his failings . . . his failings were unsupportable. And now there were two women he had not been able to save, his beloved mother and Sissy. . . . Both times, he had walked into a room too late; both times the damage had been done before he’d arrived.

With horrid acuity, he saw his mother on their kitchen floor at the farmhouse, all but slaughtered . . . and Sissy over the tub.

Sissy just now as well, trying to ward off the demon.

It was too much to bear, the weight of his failures too great for him to withstand, much less go on fighting—

The sound of his name opened his eyes and slowed the raw sobs.

With vast effort, he turned his head and looked up.

Far, far, far above, a galaxy away from where he lay, a pinpoint of light gathered and grew stronger, starting first as the tiny flicker of a blinker on a Christmas tree . . . and then growing to a twenty-five-watt, then a sixty-watt, then a hundred-watt bulb.

The illumination drifted down to him with all the speed and efficiency of a feather falling through still air . . . of dandelion puffs blown from a child’s mouth . . . of milk-weed caught on a gentle breeze. . . .

The disconnect between his epic despair and the delicate path of the light was a span too great for his mind to straddle. Closing his eyes, he stopped watching and gave himself over to the random shudders of his beaten body.

“Jim.”

A male voice. Above him.

He cracked his lids to see that the light had become a dark-haired man with magnificent golden wings.

Colin.

The archangel. Nigel’s number two.