“Does it have to do that?” Cormac says as he saws off the last strip of skin holding an ear to an Angel’s skull. Blood streaks up his wrists. “Christ.”

I whisper, quietly enough that nobody else can hear, that it’s okay, that they don’t have to worry. Some of the mouths settle, but others continue to call mournfully, and there’s not much I can do about that. Cormac grumbles and keeps moving.

Nick counts the dead. Aisha runs outside to throw up. Salvador sits in a pew, knees tucked up to xyr chest. Faith stands near the back wall with her hands clasped in front of her mouth. And I’m on the shallow stairs leading up to the altar, by the nonbeliever’s bare feet, between little snakes of meat trailing down to touch the pews and Reverend Brother Morrison’s body. I stare at the balcony, trying to keep my heart from tearing out of my ribs.

He left New Nazareth for me.

He still loves me.

“Fuck,” Salvador says.

There are two children among the dead. One barely looks old enough to be without his parents, the other just about to age out of the choir. Cormac takes their ears too. I don’t want to look at them but I do, trying to place them, to put names to the bodies I know. Eventually I stop seeing faces and start seeing a jumble of eyes, mouths, and noses that my brain won’t let me put together into a person. Small mercies.

Silently, I pray for the dead. I don’t know if it works, I don’t know if it means anything, but it stops the sick feeling in my chest, so it must count for something.

Nick sits beside me on the steps. His right index finger and thumb tap together over and over and over, a heartbeat in anxious double time.

His left hand offers the pistol.

My face burns. Between the vision and Theo, I hadn’t noticed I’d lost it.

“I found this under the balcony,” Nick says. No accusation of carelessness. Just a simple statement of fact.

“Sorry,” I say. “I must have dropped it. It won’t happen again.”

I don’t take the pistol. He doesn’t move it away.

I say, “I don’t want it.”

“All right.” He puts it in his jacket.

“How many Angels…?”

“Fourteen.”

Fourteen. Double what we took to the Vanguard. There’s no way they can screw us out of supplies this time.

We gather ourselves the best we can. I shake Salvador out of xyr silence while Nick coaxes Faith out of her catatonic state. We try to bring Aisha inside so we can talk about getting back to the ALC, but she bursts into tears as soon as she turns to face the pews, so we meet in the churchyard instead.