Jim was in front of him, except he couldn’t see the man, both his eyes blinded as his lids fluttered up and down.

“Oh…God…” he heard himself moan as he listed to the side.

Hell…he had been in Hell, tortured and claimed, sucked down into the eternal prison after he’d been shot by…

“Isaac Rothe,” he blurted. “He killed me, didn’t he. He shot me because—”

Alistair Childe. The one Jim had told him about, the man whose son had been taken and whose daughter was in danger…Matthias had gone after the daughter, but she’d had a protector, a trained, highly effective protector, who, in the end, had prevailed by shooting Matthias in the chest.

He had died on the floor of the elder Childe’s house—

More memories came to him, the impacts like physical blows, the agony dragging screams from his joints and limbs.

“Matthias, buddy—”

Abruptly, the vision of a blond girl, a young blond girl with runes on her stomach and a tattered, bloody sheath around her, cut through everything…and stayed with him.

“She was down there with me.” Abruptly, his voice became strong and clear, untempered by the maelstrom in his skull. “The girl…was trapped with me.”

There was a pause. Or maybe his hearing had gone, too?

“Who,” Jim said in a frozen voice.

“The girl with the blond hair…”

Twin grips locked on his forearms, and he knew Jim had grabbed him. “Tell me her name.”

“The girl with the blond—”

“What was her name?” Jim’s voice cracked at that point. “Tell me—”

“I don’t know….” Matthias felt himself get shaken hard, as if Heron were trying to rattle loose the answer. “I don’t— I just know she was an innocent…who didn’t belong….”

Cursing, low and vile, got his attention.

“Who is she?” Matthias heard himself ask.

“Was she okay?” Jim demanded.

“There is no shelter in Hell,” he replied. “We were all in there together, and they were merciless.”

“Who were?”

“The demons…”

34

“Well, I wouldn’t be married if it weren’t for Tony.”

As Mels laughed a little, she couldn’t help noticing that the man walking casually beside her was looking over his shoulder. “Tony’s a good guy.”

“The best.”

After the news conference, she’d met Jason Conneaut as arranged at this open-air mall a couple of blocks from the station house. It was clearly a case of the lost-in-a-crowd theory at work, and she had a feeling they were going to be fine on the anonymous front: They were just two more people in a flood of shoppers going in and out of stores like Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works and Barnes & Noble.

No big deal.

“So here’s the casing,” she said, surreptitiously passing him an envelope that had a bulge in it. “I wrapped it in Kleenex so I didn’t lose the damn thing.”

“Can you tell me where you got it?”

“No, I can’t. But I can tell you what I’m looking for.” Now she was the one glancing around. “I want to know if it was discharged from the same gun that was used in the shooting at the Marriott the other night.”

Tony’s friend locked a pair of pale eyes onto hers. “If it is from the same gun, I am going to be required to disclose who gave it to me.”

“I’ll do you one better than that. I’ll tell you who it’s from and where to find them.”

Oh, man…please let it not come to that.

Tony’s buddy visibly relaxed. “Good, because I don’t want trouble.”

Mels stopped and put out her palm. “You have my word.”

As they shook on it, he said, “This could take me a day or so.”

“No problem. Call me when you’re ready—I won’t bug you.”

After they parted, Mels took a little stroll by the shop windows, pausing from time to time. The city had closed off this five-block stretch of street to form a pedestrian way quite a while ago, but this was the first time she’d done a crawl—and it felt good to blend in with everybody else, to pretend that her life was boring/normal and she wasn’t hooking up with a relative stranger who was armed and had friends like that Heron guy.

She was standing in front of yet another store when she frowned and took out her cell. It wasn’t to answer a call or a text, though.

She was checking the date….

Well. What do you know.

It was the day her father had died.

At first, she didn’t know what had made her think about it, but then she saw that she’d stopped in front of a shoe store that had a Winter Clearance Sale sign hanging over a lineup of snow boots—that still might be useful in the spring in Upstate New York: late April could bring all kinds of different weather from cheery sun to miserable gray rain to snowstorms…or even sleet and freezing rain…that turned the roads superslick and dangerous, and made stopping impossible…and increased the likelihood of vehicular death. Especially during high-speed police chases.

She closed her eyes briefly. Then made a phone call that never would have happened before.

“Hello?”

At the sound of her mother’s voice, Mels felt tears prick her eyes. “You didn’t say anything about it this morning—and I forgot.”

There was a pause. “I know. I didn’t want to remind you if there was a chance it wasn’t on your mind.”

Funny, it was the first time she’d reached out. Then again, three years later, the missing and the mourning were too deep to handle with any kind of composure.

“How’re you holding up?’ she asked.

The surprise in her mom’s voice made her want to kick herself in the ass: “I…well, now that you’ve called, I’m better.”

“You must miss him like I do.”

“Oh, yes. Every day.” There was another pause. “Are you okay, Mels?”

This was said in the tone of who-are-you-and-what-have-you-done-with-my-previously-unreachable-daughter?

“Do you have plans, Mom?”

“The girls from bridge are taking me to dinner.”

“Good. I…may be home late again.”

“It’s okay—and thank you for letting me know. Thank you—” A choked sound cut that sweet voice off. “Thank you for calling.”

Mels focused on the heavy treads of the snow boots that the store was practically giving away. “I love you, Mom.”

Long silence at that point. Reaaaaaaally long. “Mom?”

“I’m here,” came the rough reply. Which was followed by a sniffle. “I’m right here.”

“I’m glad you are.” Mels turned away from the shoes, from the mall, from the people. “I’ll let you know if I’m staying the night at his place, okay?”

“Please. And I love you, too.”

After she hung up, Mels walked back to the station house in a daze, entered through the front door, and headed straight out the back to the parking lot where she’d left her mother’s car.

She didn’t go to the CCJ offices.

Heading out of the city, she properly stopped at the lights and hit her directional signal appropriately and didn’t tailgate…but had no idea where she was going.

Until the gates of the Pine Grove Cemetery loomed.

Part of her groaned. She didn’t want this. Not with everything else that was going on in her life at the moment. Then again, under the Drama Loves Company rule, maybe the timing was ideal.

She had no trouble finding her father’s grave site, and as she eased over to the shoulder of the lane, she was not surprised to see that his plot had been planted with all kinds of spring flowers, like daffodils, tulips, little crocuses.

Her mother being thoughtful, of course. And she no doubt came for visits not just on special days but on a regular basis.

Getting out, Mels crossed over the pale green lawn, the young grass springing back into place and covering her tracks.

Other headstones had debris on them, little bits and pieces of trees or patches of lichen or moss dotting the tops or the bases. Not her father’s. His was clean to a polish, no evidence of the passing of three sets of seasons.

When Mels finally knelt down, it was to trace the cross that had been inscribed deeply into the gray granite.

Matthias’s deep voice came back to her as he had talked about Hell with the kind of conviction she might have used to discuss working at the paper, or living in Caldwell, or losing a father.

Personal experience had marked his words.

Mels went over the crucifix again with her fingertips. Funny, she’d never paid much attention to the religious stuff people put on grave markers, whether it was the angels with their wings upraised, or the Virgin Mary with her head tilted down, or the Stars of David—whatever the religion, she’d seen them as decoration, not serving any kind of divine purpose.

That didn’t feel true at the moment.

She was glad her father’s patch of earth was marked with the symbol of faith, and she was glad he’d always gone to church on Sundays—even though, growing up, she’d hated that she missed a day of sleeping in.

Abruptly, she prayed with a kind of burning fear that made no sense that he was in Heaven.

To have a loved one in Hell would be…unthinkable.

Jim was losing his godforsaken, ever-loving mind.

As Matthias’s lax body slumped into the sofa, his mouth moved like he was trying to speak…but nothing came out. Like there was a traffic jam on his cognitive byway.

“Talk to me,” Jim barked, trying to get through to the guy. “Did you know her? Did you see her? Is she okay?”

That mouth worked up and down, especially when Jim shook the guy again. “Matthias—”

“The girl—she’s in there.” Matthias pawed the sunglasses off his face and stared straight into Jim’s eyes—yet seemed not to focus on what was actually in front of him. “In Hell. The blond girl is there—I was with her.”

“Is she okay—” Dumb-ass question. Of course Sissy wasn’t. “What…”

“I was really there,” the man said as he tried to push himself up, like maybe some vertical would help clear his head. “And I was brought back to…why was I brought back? What am I supposed to do?”

Even though a big part of his mind was stuck on Sissy, Jim forced himself to get back in the game: this was the moment he’d been waiting for. This was his opening, the way in.

But shit…Sissy…

Jim cleared his throat. Twice. “Ah, you’re back because we need you to make the right choice this time.”

“Choice?”

“At the crossroads.” Jim prayed he was going to make some sense. “You’re, ah, you’re going to come to a moment where you need to choose, and if you don’t want to go back where you were, you have to pick the righteous path, not…what you’re used to.”

“So it’s true? About Heaven and Hell?”

“And you’ve got a second chance.”

“Why?”

“The devil cheats.”

Matthias suddenly focused on him. “You were there. Down below…oh my God, you were there—and that woman, thing—whatever—shit, the nurse!”

“I’m sorry?”

“The nurse who took care of me at the hospital after I was hit—who ran into me at the hotel!”

For a moment, Jim wanted to punch his own head. “Let me guess. A brunette?”

“It was her down below. And you were with her…she had you strapped down on—” The guy stopped abruptly. “Um, yeah…you were there.”

Great. Fucking wonderful.

Matthias had seen the fun and games?

And then it dawned on him. If Matthias had, Sissy must have as well— Christ, and he’d thought her catching him in the aftermath had been bad enough?

The urge to kill curled his hands into fists.

“Just how are you involved in all this?” Matthias demanded, eyes narrowing—

A dull thwack cut off whatever Jim might have replied, the sound something he was way too familiar with to misconstrue. And yet he couldn’t have heard it right, could he?

No, he thought as he reached for his forty, that had been a bullet going into wood: The confirmation was Adrian’s sudden appearance in the apartment. The angel was outing his gun, and looking like he was frustrated as shit.

“We’ve got company,” he barked.