Cherub, broken, let me lead him. I dragged him across the blood-wet asphalt and lined us up in front of the policemen and their guns. They could not see us. They were back in the real world and had the luxury of blindness to the horrors that lay in the dark.

They pressed their rifles against their shoulders and leveled the barrels at our chests. They peered down the sights. They pulled the triggers.

We died, and we came home.

The police were, understandably, surprised. From what they had seen, we had appeared out of the night. If they had fired again, they could have killed us, but they had other things on their mind. Behind us, where the battle had been, where a thousand had vanished, there was a wall of darkness. Inside that darkness lay living death. I knew it, and Thorne, curiously, knew it too.

“The light!” he cried, and two of his men put torches to a pile of gasoline-soaked firewood on the back of one of their wagons. Flames exploded, and the shadows were beaten back. We shoved through the line of cops. If they’d cared, they could have stopped us, but there was liquor on their breath and blood in the air. They had done enough for the night.

We walked home through simple, ordinary darkness, far more inviting than the horror that lay behind. The smell of death faded, to be covered up by the hot, sweet, Westside night.

“Why don’t these shadows jump?” he said. “Why don’t they swallow us? Why don’t they take us . . . there?”

“I think . . . I think the hungry shadows are drawn by blood.”

“Like sharks.”

“Kill one man, and you attract a few of those ghouls. Kill a hundred . . .”

“And you get an army. How did you get us out?”

“It’s like a dream—die in it, and you wake up.”

“Is there any way to get . . . if someone was left behind there . . .”

“How should I know? This was my father’s sort of mystery. Not mine.”

It was a nasty thing to say, and I tried to mean it, but as the words hung in the air, all I could see was the look on Roach’s face when I left him to die. He hadn’t looked angry. He’d looked surprised—unable to understand how badly Miss Carr and the chief had let him down.

After that, Cherub was silent. From Eighth Avenue to Bleecker to Charles Street. Across Seventh, right at Waverly, past Sixth Avenue, and then just a block back to Washington Square. By the time we got back to the park, the night was melting into gray. His jaw was clenched, and tears had worn tracks in the matted soot and blood that stained his face.

“What will you do?” I said.

“I’m going to kill Edward Thorne.”

“It won’t fix anything.”

“I don’t care.”