Blood painted the gravel black in the night, and when North brought the light across in a hard slash, the gravel glittered and sparked. Silica, North thought distantly. Granules of silica catching the light like quartz. Then, with the light splashing down, he could see the traces of red in the dried, blackened gore. Scuff marks in the gravel revealed a struggle that had taken place here, and trampled grass at the edge of the path showed the direction the fight had taken. North caught Shaw by reflex, his hand flat on Shaw’s belly, and it was only years of self-control that kept him from drawing Shaw protectively to him.

Shaw angled his phone, and a band of light cut a rectangle out of the darkness. Honeysuckle grew thick at the base of the hill, the long, delicate white blossoms open, the faint perfume carrying on the night air. Then the air shifted, and North breathed in corruption and decay.

“You don’t have to see this,” North said. “I can go by myself.”

Shaw shook his head. Together, they tramped off the gravel and into the switchgrass, which hissed at their knees. North angled himself in front of Shaw, ignoring the thin man’s second snort, and when he reached the honeysuckle, he gathered a handful of the supple branches and pulled. The velvet of the blossoms tickled his palms.

And there was Mark Sevcik—or what remained of him. The damage to the face was significant, but not enough to erase the man he had once been. He had been shot four, maybe five times: the cheek, the jaw, the forehead, the eye. In the leg, too; Mark was wearing a pair of boot-cut jeans identical to the ones in his closet. The boots, this time, looked like ostrich leather.

Shaw was pale, all the color vanished out of his face except a greenish tinge riding his high cheekbones. He kept reaching back and checking the bun of hair. The hand with the phone was shaking, and the effect strobed light up, down, spilling across the gold stamen of the honeysuckle and then back across North’s chest.

“Come on,” North said, taking Shaw around the waist and urging him back toward the gravel.

“I’m ok.”

“I know. Come on.”

Halfway back to the gate, Shaw went rigid, and North clutched him, certain that Shaw was going to fall. But Shaw just pushed at him, stiff-armed, until he was free, and then he shook his head slowly. “You have to hate someone,” he said, and each word sounded like a stepping stone that Shaw thought might slip out from underneath him. “You have to hate someone to do that, really hate them.”

North tried to rub Shaw’s back, but Shaw gave another stiff-armed shove. He didn’t even seem to know he was doing it.

“Let’s get back to the car. I need to do something before we call the cops.”

“His face.”

“Try not to think about it.”

Shaw shook his head. He wore a look of total incredulity, and that was worse than anything else North had seen tonight because he knew that, in spite of all the horrible things Shaw had seen in their work, all the horrible things that had been done to Shaw—the attack that had maimed him and left Carl dead, that above all—something about Shaw made every new horror a fresh wound. He didn’t grow calluses. He didn’t harden. He just kept bleeding again and again, and North wanted to burn the universe down for letting that happen.