“Not good enough,” he told her, hating her, hating himself. “Say it, bitch. Say it.”

In a hoarse, hungry voice, she breathed, “I crave you. . . .”

Jim released the hold on himself, feeling filthy inside and out. But war was ugly, wasn’t it, even if you were on the good, moral side.

Means to an end, he thought. His body and her need were means to an end, and he would use them if he had to.

“Good,” he growled. “That’s good.”

With that, he willed his body to rise up from the floor, this time the twisting energy summoned up by him and no one else.

As he levitated higher and higher, Devina reached for him, her face contouring into a kind of painful desire that juiced him up.

And then he wasn’t looking at her anymore; he was scanning the walls of her dungeon, searching for the girl he hated leaving behind yet again . . . as well as the boss he had tried to save and failed.

He would be back for the former. But the latter . . . he feared that Matthias had been laid to rest for an eternity, his never-ending suffering having been well-earned.

Jim mourned the loss of the man, however.

He’d wanted to redeem the guy.

Jim came back to consciousness on Captain Alistair Childe’s lawn. And as he thought back to his first assignment, it seemed he excelled at coming and going on grass.

Adrian and Eddie were on either side of him, the two angels grave and serious.

“We lost,” Jim said. As if they didn’t already know.

Adrian put his hand out, and when Jim reached up, the guy helped pull him to his feet. “We lost,” Jim muttered again.

Looking over his shoulder, he thought briefly about going into the farmhouse and helping Isaac take care of Matthias’s remains, but he decided to stay put. The soldier was going to have a hard enough time making sense of all the things that couldn’t be explained—more contact with Jim was just going to give him another thing to get fucked in the head about.

“Caldwell,” Jim said to his boys. “We’re going back to Caldwell.”

“Fair enough,” Eddie murmured, like he wasn’t surprised in the slightest.

And Jim wasn’t going to worry who was next in the game. As he’d learned with this particular assignment, the souls were going to find him. So he might as well follow what the center of his chest was telling him: namely that it was about time for the Barten family to have their daughter’s body to bury properly.

Jim was just the angel to make that happen.

Unfurling his great, luminescent wings, he took one last stare through the kitchen windows. Isaac Rothe was working with grim purpose, handling things with the same kind of competence and strength as he always had.