As all kinds of people started talking and the air filled with voices, he put the noise out of his head and sunk down on his haunches. From beside the now twice-dead body, he picked the phone up off the floor and went into the sent box for texts.

He recognized the last number that had been hit immediately.

Matthias had gotten the picture.

The cold clarity that came upon Jim brought with it a kind of terror: He’d been trying to save the target . . . when all along, he should have been focused on the shooter.

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 42

Reflex, not reflection.

That was where Isaac was as he stood in Grier’s hall with some kind of solution dripping off his nose and chin.

His brain could have spent a decade or two trying to figure out what the fuck he’d just seen, but that would have required time he didn’t have. As much as he didn’t understand—and that black hole was on a football-stadium scale—he was going to have to rely on what his eyes had shown him and leave it at that: He had witnessed a dead man get up; he had shot the bastard; and the only thing that had refloored the corpse had been some kind of glass or crystal knife. Then something had left the body and escaped out under the front door.

It was kind of like sKillerz, when you went into the paranormal-world part of the game. With a flick of the switch, the normal rules went into the shitter and you stepped into an alternate universe where people could disappear right in front of you and vampires lived in the shadows and pale men came after you instead of humans.

Of course, that was role play that you could turn off—and there was no pause button on this sitch. Which was why he wasn’t going to waste a lot of energy figuring it all out. Yeah, sure, maybe after this was over he’d ask Jim what the hell had just happened . . . but that was only if there was an “afterward.”

With the way things were going, some portion of the people standing in this hall might well be headed for an “afterlife.”

“Where did it go?” he asked Jim. “Not that black thing—the picture.”

As Jim looked up from the cell phone, the second in command’s words came back: Matthias is not in charge. So that meant some other mastermind was engineering a certain result by hitting the levers and pulleys of various puppets and scenes.

“Who?” he repeated.

“Matthias got it,” Heron said, getting to his feet.

“Is Matthias . . . one of those?” As Isaac pointed to the pop-up corpse, he thought it was just fucking great to be in a situation where there were no terms to describe anything.

“He wasn’t when I saw him last night.”