It seemed Dream Angel out there hadn’t made much of an impression on Wilbur. He hadn’t made much of one on me either. I sat up, stood still until I stopped swaying, and then reached up and ripped the poster from the ceiling. Laying it on the table, I pointed to the blue river and said gently, “Then join the river, John. You’re a Buddhist.” I took his hand and placed it flat on water that almost seemed real. “Rebirth. You flow on. They’ll never find you. There are many ways in this world. There’s no reason you can’t do it your way.”

“My way.”

As he contemplated the water with the sweep of his thumb, I kissed his bristly cheek. “You and I, John. We are of a kind. Until the day we die and beyond, we’ll do it our way.”

Five minutes later I was being chased out of a trailer, buckshot singing over my head. Wilbur was yelling and swearing, firing again, and slamming the door shut. It was wild and crazy and I needed Solomon and the angel to buy it for just a second. I passed the first as he was pounding with both fists at air that sparked gold under the impact but didn’t give way.

Then the swearing stopped, the buckshot ceased, and there was a long moment of quiet before the sound of one single shot ripped through the night. It sounded like small caliber. Didn’t matter really. It just meant it would bounce around the inside of his skull, turning to pudding everything in its path. Wilbur was a mountain man. If he wanted something shot dead, it was shot dead. The glowing circle around the trailer instantly faded, the flakes of crystal crumbling to gray ash.

“Gone,” the angel said flatly.

“Gone,” Solomon said with a little more dark emotion.

Both were right. Wilbur was gone by now. Riding the river along to his next life. No Heaven, no Hell . . . only the constant stream. His choice. I only hoped he did better next time. That he wasn’t so bad. Didn’t need so much to atone for. Was a little taller maybe, if that made him happy.

Poor bastard.

I kept running—toward the car. Leo was right behind me. The angel looked up, eyes no longer violet dusk but as bright as tropical water under a high sun . . . waiting. Like a good little GI Joe, Boy Scout, soldier of God . . . or so he thought. Lower management all the way. A GI can’t take a piss without the paperwork, and an angel of this caliber wouldn’t take a single step without orders from the higher-ups. That meant middle management, angels with free will and what they thought was a license to use it, would be here any second. Lucifer was apparently a little more lax in that entire employee protocol/rules and regulations area because Solomon was already heading in our direction, showing the boss that he had some serious initiative. Running. Not flying. He had never shown me his demon side and I thought he probably never would unless he had to kill me. So no swooping—he ran. That’s not to say he couldn’t run fast. Damn fast.

I dived behind the wheel and had the car moving before Leo was quite in it. “Damn it.” He wanted to say I could’ve waited half a second, but he didn’t because he was male, and a guy wouldn’t say that if you were taking off in the shuttle while he ran alongside.

“I had faith,” I said to his unvoiced bitching.

“Yeah, and it warms my heart,” he grunted as he got the shotgun up and nailed Solomon—barely. The demon probably would’ve disappeared, but Leo had reached out and grabbed his arm before discharging the shotgun. That was the thing about demons and probably angels. They could disappear, back to Heaven or Hell I guess, as long as they weren’t anchored to this world. The best thing for anchoring them here was a tight hand and a cranky attitude. Iron or steel seemed to work too, but it was one slow-ass demon that would let even me wriggle him into some cuffs . . . at least without whipping out the leather, teddy, braided whip, and holding back the bile. As for an angel . . . I wanted one of those in chains even less than a demon, although for different reasons. Demons occasionally came alone. Angels almost always had backup.

As Solomon writhed around the end of the shotgun, black blood flew around his neck as the car slid in a circle. Leo let go of him, ready to take a shot at his head, but I grabbed his arm to give Solomon that split second he needed to disappear. I ignored Leo’s frown. Solomon would be back—to join his brothers. Sure, demons occasionally came alone, but not this time. What I thought was bumpy terrain beneath was shown to be dozens of brown demons springing from the earth.

And as that happened, the night sky turned to van Gogh’s Starry Night. There were swirls of scarlet and green and blue and amethyst, but most of all . . . silver and gold. The nearly invisible curves became wings of glass. Red and gold. Green and silver and all variations. The angels floated in the air in their true form . . . their oddly alien faces were narrow with eyes large, almond shaped, and as full of light as the outer edges of their wings. You could see the stars through the glass of those wings, although they rippled because every “feather” was a sharply transparent dagger edged in gemstone color. Their skin was filled with light as well, only slightly cooler than the eyes. It was definitely a different look than surfer angel had been sporting not too long ago. Nothing like their human costumes at all.

I blinked against it all, not sure whether I was seeing angels or an impressionist masterpiece come to life, roiling the night sky—even the stars and moon seemed part of it all.

It was beautiful and it was terrible, all in one.

“You won’t have them,” Solomon said to the angels, having returned from wherever he’d gone, his face twisted as the car rocketed by.

“Neither will you.”

I expected that angelic retort to be the music of battle, the symphony of a storm. What I got was a familiar voice through a bullhorn. Griffin. There was the also the rapid chop of rotor blades behind his voice. Lots of rotor blades. The demons kept coming. Angels and Eden House weren’t enough to have them giving up—not when they thought they might have a link to the Light so close. They weren’t believing Wilbur’s act of running me off as thoroughly as I’d hoped.

Two managed to grab on to the back of the car as I drove over them. They climbed up, hissing like an entire nest of rattlesnakes—pissed and hungry. I could see the mottled, moist inner flesh of their mouths in the rearview mirror. Leo unloaded the other barrel of the shotgun into the face of the one on the right, dropped the empty gun, then pulled a sword from under the blanket covering the back floorboards and turned the second demon into a less than politically correct alligator bag. The head bounced into the front passenger seat, glass teeth still gnashing. Separating the brain from the body worked as well as liquefying the organ.

“A sword?” I swerved the car, smacked a few demons with the side, and shot one in the head as it climbed over the front windshield. Blood and scales sprayed in a fine mist over us. I was going to have to rethink the whole convertible situation. “You and a sword. I am boggled.”

“Sometimes you really do have to embrace your roots, just like your lemonade man said.” Luckily there were no tourists around to explain that to as Leo gave an unaccustomed grin and swung again as a demon launched itself into the backseat. Another head bounced up front. Now I had two heads with teeth still slowly chomping away. Would they just hurry up and die already? The last thing I wanted was them stripping flesh from my ankle and calf all the way down to the bone like piranha in an old Tar zan movie .

“It’s getting crowded up here. Swing the other way, Babe Ruth,” I called as I turned the car into another high-speed spin with one hand and used the other to toss the heads out, getting one nice slice across the back of my hand out of it. Bastard. The dead should be dead . . . immediately. No hanging around snapping like ill-tempered, satanic Chihuahuas. I fired again, this time upward as a demon dropped from the sky. My Smith & Wesson 500 was no shotgun, but it knocked him off course. He missed the car. The car did not, however, miss him. There was a very satisfying ka-thump as I careened over the top of him. It wouldn’t kill him, but it’d slow him down for a few minutes and make him respect a good American-made car. Or Japanese. Or maybe it was German. I kept forgetting which. I liked pretty things, but I also liked moving on to the next pretty thing fairly quickly. It made it hard to keep track.