In the distance he heard a scream that rose louder than the roar of the quads on which his reapers went about their sacred work. Was it male or female? It was hard to say, because there is a level of pain so pure that it strips away gender and identity, and that was what he heard now.

Saint John nodded his appreciation. Most of the reapers were ordinary folk—believers, true, but in no other way exceptional. They were blunt.

Whoever sculpted that scream was one of the special ones. One of his angels—of which only nine were left on this side of the darkness—or one of the recruits who had fully embraced the way of the blade and the glory of the red mouth.

He smiled and nodded to himself.

He began to walk through the woods, following the footprints of the girl who called herself Nyx and the boy who served as her knight. He did not hurry. The world’s clock had run down, and haste was irrelevant.

In all it had been a good week’s work. Twenty-five hundred of the heretics had gone into the darkness at Treetops. Only six hundred of them escaped the burning of their town. Of those, four hundred reached the mountains of southern Nevada. Barely two hundred made it to this patch of wild forestland in the arid Mojave.

Saint John doubted that a hundred heretics still remained on this side of the darkness.

Soon red doors would open for each of them. The reapers were doing everything he and Mother Rose had trained them to do, and they did it with the unquenchable diligence of true faith.

A quad motor growled behind him, and Saint John turned to wait as one of his reapers hurried to find him. When the machine came into view and Saint John saw who was riding it, he smiled.

Brother Peter.

Peter had been the first of the twenty-seven angels to embrace the way of the blade, and it had taken no urging at all. Peter was a natural, a prodigy. The number of heretics he had ushered into the darkness was legion, second only to Saint John himself.

The quad pulled up and Brother Peter turned off the engine, allowing a soothing quiet to settle over the woods. He placed a hand over the angel wings on his chest and gave a slight bow of the head.

“Honored One,” he said softly.

Peter was in his early twenties and had grown up tall and powerful, but his face was unmarked because he had never, in all the years Saint John had known him, smiled. Not once. His scalp was tattooed with a tangle of thornbushes through which centipedes crawled.

“How goes the crusade?” asked Saint John.