Outside, the world sank into the deepest part of the night. Starlight painted everything—the forest, the other buildings, the beach, the moored boats, and the rolling waves. It also traced the outlines of dozens of black birds huddled in the branches of the trees. Hundreds of them, and of at least eight species. Church had noticed them beginning to gather shortly after Christmas. Some were migratory birds that should long ago have flown south. It was Church’s habit most mornings to go outside with a bag of bread and toss it around so the birds could eat. But that would be hours from now. The night birds were in their trees, pretending to sleep but not selling the lie. He could feel them watching.

As he worked, Church wondered where Joe Ledger was at that moment. He had a general sense of location, but no specifics. Those details would be scraped off the ground in Ledger’s wake.

He wondered what was going on in Ledger’s broken heart and in his furnace of a head.

He wondered how much damage all this was doing to an already dangerously compromised individual.

He wondered what the price tag would be when it was all over. And how big an amount he’d be adding to the deep debt already stacked against his own immortal soul.

CHAPTER 35

VAN DER VYVER BIOMEDICAL ASSOCIATES

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

The man staggered away from the burning building.

He tripped and fell twice. Again. And finally stopped trying and sank slowly to his knees. Everything in front of him was darkness.

Everything behind him was hell itself. Long fingers of bright orange flame clawed at the sky, tearing apart the midnight clouds.

The man knelt there, panting, gasping for clean air in a soiled world. A big white dog stood nearby, his coat speckled with blood, eyes bright, muscles trembling. All around them both, in every tree, the night birds watched with black and unreadable eyes.

The man looked down at his hands and for a twisted moment thought he was wearing red gloves. But then the truth punched him in the face, in the heart.

The blood-spattered dog came over slowly, cautiously, and stopped beside the man. Then pushed at him with its muzzle as if urging him to get up. To run.

The man shook his head and began furiously scrubbing at his hands, but one bloody hand could not clean the other. He caved slowly forward until his forehead touched the dirt.

“God,” he begged, “help me…”

But it was not a divine hand that pulled him up, forced him to stand, made him run when the banshee sirens filled the air. It was no clean hand at all that saved him.

It was the colder hand of darkness. Sure, and steady, and inexorable.

The man and the dog vanished into that endless black of night.

PART 3

WHERE NIGHT BIRDS FLY

Before you embark on a journey of revenge,

Dig two graves.