disappearing and leaving her naked, her body desecrated, her blond hair tangled and matted with blood.
Abruptly, her eyes shot to the far corner and her stained lips trembled. “No!”
She put her hands up as if to ward off blows, bowing away—
Just like that, she was gone. And Devina, beautiful, evil Devina, walked into the candlelight.
Jim fucking lost it.
Snapped in half.
Broke like a motherfucker.
As he screamed bloody murder, it was all about the girl. The innocent girl who had been taken from her family by a demon, and pulled into a shithole, and imprisoned here . . . and forced to see the aftermath of a grown man defiled.
Rage was a nuclear blast that went off inside him—
White light poured forth from his eye sockets, exploding in the room, illuminating the glossy black walls that ran upward into infinity. The release consumed his physical form, freeing him from Devina’s constraints, carrying him around the space in a rush-gust of loose molecules that blew out the candles and knocked over their stands.
Coalescing, he whirled around . . . and went gunning for Devina.
Now she was the one bracing for impact, her brunette hair stripped back from her scalp under the hurricane blast of him, the skin on her face flapping against the bone structure underneath as she lost her balance and went over onto the stone floor.
Just as he reached her, Jim pulled his new form together into a spearing lance and hurled himself right for her chest.
He entered her body and blew that bitch away, all of her parts going flying, pieces of her skin and tangles of slippery innards and pounds of dark red meat spackling the walls of her dungeon.
What was left was a black hole of equal mass and energy as that which made up him—and he was ready to go at it with her.
Except, evidently, she wasn’t up for a head-to-head fight: Her warping shadow shot out of the room and down a hall, making an escape.
Fuck. That.
Jim rushed forward after her—
And slammed into the metaphysical equivalent of a brick house.
The shocking impact of the nonvisual barrier sent him backward and he became corporeal once again as he skidded over the stone floor on his raw ass.
He had one brief moment of what-the-hell, before his body’s Game Over sign flashed and he fell flat on his back in utter exhaustion.
With his anger spent, there was nothing left in him, and a fatal fatigue bled out from his wonky-beating heart and spread through him sure as a weed taking root and thriving. No longer able to hold his head up, he let the thing rest on the stone and just breathed, dimly noting that the air was saturated with both the copper scent of fresh kill and the acrid pinch of still-smoking candlewicks.
“Sissy,” he said into the darkness. “I’m right here. . . .”
He had no clue whether she could hear him and there was no response. Just an eerie, molten sound . . . no doubt the souls trying to get free of their prison.
He hated the idea that his girl was trapped in there.
Hated that she had seen what he’d looked like.
At that thought, pain bored into him as surely as if he’d been stabbed with a crowbar. Oh, God . . . that poor child . . .
A sudden surge of emotion fell upon him in a tidal wave: Naked and broken and filthy, Jim curled onto his side and wept in great heaving gags, his tears hot and salty on the broken skin of his face.
He had never cared about any damage to himself. Ever. But his failings . . . his failings were unsupportable. And now there were two women he had not been able to save, his beloved mother and Sissy. . . . Both times, he had walked into a room too late; both times the damage had been done before he’d arrived.
With horrid acuity, he saw his mother on their kitchen floor at the farmhouse, all but slaughtered . . . and Sissy over the tub.
Sissy just now as well, trying to ward off the demon.
It was too much to bear, the weight of his failures too great for him to withstand, much less go on fighting —
The sound of his name opened his eyes and slowed the raw sobs.
With vast effort, he turned his head and looked up.
Far, far, far above, a galaxy away from where he lay, a pinpoint of light gathered and grew stronger, starting first as the tiny flicker of a blinker on a Christmas tree . . . and then growing to a twenty-five-watt, then a sixty- watt, then a hundred-watt bulb.
The illumination drifted down to him with all the speed and efficiency of a feather falling through still air . . . of dandelion puffs blown from a child’s mouth . . . of milk-weed caught on a gentle breeze. . . .
The disconnect between his epic despair and the delicate path of the light was a span too great for his mind to straddle. Closing his eyes, he stopped watching and gave himself over to the random shudders of his beaten body.
“Jim.”
A male voice. Above him.
He cracked his lids to see that the light had become a dark-haired man with magnificent golden wings.
Colin.
The archangel. Nigel’s number two.
“Hey, mate,” the guy said as he knelt down. “I’ve come to get you out of here.”
From somewhere, God only knew where, Jim called up enough energy to speak. “Take her instead. Leave me . . . take her instead. Sissy. The girl . . .”
“That I can’t do. I shouldn’t be here even now.” The angel leaned forward and gathered Jim’s broken form into his arms. “But you’re going to need some recovery time before you can so much as sit up, much less drag ass out of here. And the war is proceeding without you.”
No argument there on his energy level, but God, he’d rather have Sissy a million miles away from here.
“Leave me,” he moaned.
“Not on your life. You want Sissy free? You beat Devina. That’s how you unlock this nightmare for your girl.”
As they began to levitate, Jim’s head lolled to the side and he watched as up, up, up they went, past yards and yards—hell, miles—of the black walls. Along the way, Colin’s glowing form illuminated the shifting, churning surface, and faces pushed against the opaque, liquid barrier, as if those trapped were trying to see them, get to them, join them in the escape. From every direction, hands reached out, contouring into grotesque shapes as the tensile strength of the prison proved too hard to get through.
Where was his girl? His beautiful, innocent girl who . . .
Jim’s brain ran out of gas, the weave of his thoughts unraveling, consciousness giving up the ghost and going in for a deep lie-down in the hard-walled crib of his skull.
As he passed out, his last mental missive was a prayer—that Sissy would remember Dog in this hellish place and hold on until Jim could get to her.
CHAPTER 33
Down in the wine cellar, with Jim Heron’s picture staring up out of a dossier, Isaac was pretty damn sure both Childes had lost their minds.
“He’s not dead.” Isaac glanced between father and daughter. “I’m not sure what you saw or what you heard—”
