An older man stood on the curb. At first glance, he looked normal. Dressed in dark trousers and a white button-down shirt, he could’ve been any number of the businessmen that stood around him, waiting to cross the street. Except he held no umbrella and the rain seemed to not touch him as he stood there, staring at me through the window. Half of his head looked...caved in, a bloody mess of bone and flesh as he stared back at me, a look of utter horror etched into the side of his face that wasn’t ruined.

I recognized him.

It was Josh Fisher—the senator who’d been aiding Gabriel and Bael by buying Heights on the Hill under the guise that the school would be renovated into a facility that would service chronically ill children. In reality, the land that school sat on was basically a Hellmouth straight out of Buffy, situated smack-dab in the middle of a hub of spiritual power where several powerful ley lines crossed. Gabriel had needed access to the school, to get at what rested in the ground below it. There, he’d already created the portal that would eventually become the doorway into Heaven.

And Gabriel and Bael had found the perfect person to help them. Senator Fisher had signed right up, all out of a desperate attempt to be reunited with his deceased wife. A man I hadn’t wanted to feel pity for, but now more than ever, I did. I understood how that kind of loss and grief would drive someone to do the unthinkable.

But he was dead now. Either by jumping out the window of his penthouse or by being thrown out of it.

“Shit,” I whispered.

“What?” Dez pulled away from the curb. “What are you looking at?”

I cranked my neck, about to tell him to stop the vehicle, but in a blink of an eye, Senator Fisher was gone. Dammit. I sat back against the seat. He’d spilled the beans on the Harbinger and Bael after a few minutes of “talking” with Zayne, but he could’ve been holding back on information—information he might be more likely to share now that he was super-duper-dead.

“It was Senator Fisher,” I told him.

Only a few Wardens knew what I was—Dez and Nicolai were two of them. Gideon, another Warden, only knew I could see ghosts, but since everything had gone down with Zayne, I was sure the Trueborn was out of the bag with the entire clan.

“Isn’t he dead—wait.” He glanced at me as we came to a stoplight. “You mean you saw his ghost?”

“Yeah, he...didn’t look so great.” Wondering if the senator had been looking for me, I kept my gaze glued to the windows for any sign of a possibly demented fallen angel. Not like I’d be able to see him coming until it was too late, but whatever.