Thank you also to Ann, Lu, and Opal—the most incredible line tamers I’ve ever seen! And Ken—I’m trainable, see? I really am—you can send back the Gorilla Glue. Also to Cheryle, who I take orders from because I’m no fool.

With big hugs to all the mods on the boards—I’m so grateful for everything you do out of the kindness of your hearts.

Tremendous thanks to my C.P., Jessica Andersen, who has been endlessly supportive and smart and lovely and brilliantly funny for all these years. I still wish I were in your top five. *sigh*

And, of course, with thanks to Mother Sue (Grafton).

As always with love to my mother and my husband and my family and the better half of WriterDog.

Prologue

The desert, far from Caldwell, NY, or Boston, MA, or . . . sanity.

Some two years after the fact, when Jim Heron was no longer in special ops, he would reflect that Isaac Rothe, Matthias the Fucker, and he, himself, had all changed their lives the night that bomb went off in the sand.

Of course, at the time, none of them knew what it all meant, or where it was all going. But that was life: Nobody got a guided tour to their own theme park. You had to hop on the rides as they presented themselves, never knowing whether you would like the one you were in line for . . . or if the bastard was going to make you throw up your corn dog and your cotton candy all over the place.

Maybe that was a good thing, though. As if back then he would have believed he’d end up duking it out with a demon, trying to save the world from damnation?

Come on.

But that night, in the dry cold that washed in the second the sun went down over the dunes, he and his boss had walked into a minefield . . . and only one had walked out.

The other? Not so much . . .

“This is it,” Matthias said as they came up to an abandoned village that was the color of the caramel on a Friendly’s sundae.

They were fifteen miles northwest from where they were staying in a barracks full of army boys. Being that he and his boss were XOps, they were outside the stream of defined corps, which worked to their benefit: Soldiers like them carried IDs from all branches of the service and used them whenever it suited.

The “village” was more like four crumbling stone structures and a bunch of wood-and-tarp huts. As they approached, Jim’s balls went tight when his green night-vision goggles picked up movement all over the place. He hated those fucking tarps—they flapped in the wind, their shadows darting around like fast-footed people who had guns. And grenades. And all kinds of sharp and shiny.

Or in this case, grungy and gritty.