“Ass.” But Griffin passed back one of the PayDays.

I laughed and shook my head. Both of them scowled at me this time. “What’s so funny?” Zeke demanded as he clutched the candy bar possessively.

“Just something I saw on the Discovery Channel once.” I turned into Rhyolite. “Are you coming with us, Kit, or are you going to stay in the car and play with your shiny pebble?” I nodded at the PayDay.

They were both confused now, but I didn’t have time to explain it. I also had no future plans of explaining it. They’d have to stumble their way through this on their own. I wasn’t going to rob them of the thrill, the excitement of their entirely ridiculous and oblivious natures.

Rhyolite wasn’t much to see at night. There was a caretaker, but Goodman and his magic encyclopedia of fake IDs took care of him. With Eden House though, they may not have been fake. Everyone might be as genuine as my knife in a demon’s gut. We moved past the ruins of a foundation, some kind of miner ’s building, and stopped at the Bottle House. The train station and abandoned Cook Bank were farther down the gravelly dirt road.

The Bottle House was fenced in, sadly enough, with chain-link topped with barbed wire and the saddest paddock lock I’d seen in my life. A five-year-old could’ve strolled through in less than thirty seconds, although I imagined our guitarist had climbed the fence and vaulted the wire. A five-year-old probably could’ve done that as well, the security was that half-hearted.

On the front of the gate was a plaque telling us that it had been originally built by a Tom Kelly in 1906. All the bottles, set in concrete, were beer or medicine bottles. Tom Kelly must have spent most of the early 1900s in a happy haze. The house had fallen to ruin once and since been redone—just a tiny L-shaped structure with the walls of bottles of clear green and amber glass. All the round bottoms of the bottles faced outward. It wasn’t particularly attractive or interesting, not to me, but Jeb had liked it for some reason. Griffin popped the fence lock with the universal key—a pair of bolt cutters. The windows were boarded up and I tried the door. It was locked or relocked after the guitarist had broken in, and Goodman had sent away the caretaker with the key.

I sighed and dug in my pocket. Within seconds I was picking the lock, which was quite a chore considering the difference between locks now and then. I’d have been better off picking it with a fork than my tiny instruments. “Why not just kick it in?” Zeke asked, already losing his patience. No demons, no gunfire—what a waste of time in his opinion.

“Because, unlike some”—I tossed a narrow-eyed glance at Trinity, who stood to the side—“I respect other people’s property.” There were two things wrong with that statement. Granted, Trinity had one of his Eden Housers kick down my door, but I burned down Solomon’s nightclub anytime I couldn’t find anything good on late-night TV. That was the first thing. The second thing came in a matter of minutes, and it wasn’t my fault. I could do a lot of things, but predicting the future wasn’t one of them.

Once I was able to get the door open, Griffin, Zeke, Trinity, Goodman, Oriphiel, and I all went inside. It was a tight squeeze for just the six of us and the others were sent back to the cars. As Griffin turned on a small flashlight from his pocket and Zeke pumped a slug into his shotgun, Goodman moved in front of Trinity and raised a shotgun of his own.

“Stop with the testosterone. I’m trying to concentrate,” I said absently. I could feel it—a sliver of the Light. But where? Before it had been easy. Touch a shark’s brain, touch a drug addict’s melting mind, but this—this was different. The Light wasn’t in anything organic. It was here and everywhere, but I couldn’t pin it down. I knelt down and touched a hand to the wooden floor. No. Here, everywhere, but not there.

I stood and looked around as Griffin’s flashlight hit one of the thousands of bottles that made up the wall. It shone in the light like diamonds. In the Light. That was it. . . . That was where it was. The last sign. The last stepping-stone to the Light and vengeance. Awed, almost unbelieving after all this time, I stepped forward and placed a hand against the cool glass of the bottles.

That’s when the house blew up.

Technically, not true. The house blew outward, every bit of it. Had it simply blown up, I doubt too many would’ve been left, sliced to pieces, to tell the tale. It sounded as if the roof landed in two or three sections several hundred feet away, and the walls . . . those incredible walls of glass . . . how had I not seen how beautiful they were? The glass poured outward into the night like a sideways rainfall. And every fragment of them, every piece, every shard, glowed like a white-hot sun.

Trinity and Goodman had dived to the floor. The angel had disappeared. Griffin and Zeke flanked me as I stared at my hand that glowed as brightly as the flying glass. None of the three of us had a single cut. The shattered glass hung in the air for nearly a minute, shimmering brilliantly, before finally settling in the sand like the glitter of thousands of falling stars; the glow faded away slowly as it did in my hand. But I could still feel it. Warm, powerful, mine.

If anyone lurking around had seen that, we’d just created a new Roswell—Elvis-loving aliens welcome. Either that or they’d think something had made it out of Area 51. It was only about one hundred miles northeast—a short hop for escaping aliens.

Zeke looked around at the debris: the scattered glass, the pieces of roof—all the remains of a miracle of light and destruction. “Huh. Cool.” Then he shrugged, walked back over the now-flattened door, and headed for our car. And probably that PayDay. Mysteries of the universe, yeah, whatever, was his attitude. Job done. Let’s go. There were times I almost envied Zeke’s been-there, done-that, live-in-the-moment attitude. Not the consequences of it, but the escape it could be.

“Holy shit,” Griffin said, scanning the space where the walls had once been, then up to see sky where a roof once was, and finally back down at the floor still sturdy beneath our feet—and beneath Trinity’s and Goodman’s bellies. “You . . . Damn . . . Holy shit,” he repeated, and managed to slide it by without comment as Goodman, normally our “Thou shall not blaspheme” enthusiast, was still covering his head and praying fer vently under his breath. Although I didn’t think “holy shit” counted as a true blasphemy.

“Not me,” I denied. “The Light.” If such a minute bit of the Light could do that, what kind of power would the entire thing hold? I knew if I was wondering that, Trinity was as well. Savoring it. Picturing the moment he held it in his hands, although I didn’t think the now-absent Oriphiel was picturing the same thing. Let a mere human touch such a glory? I couldn’t see him allowing it.

But back to business. “Whatever card Goodman flashed the caretaker, I don’t think is going to cover this without a lot of talking. And it’s almost bedtime.” I stepped over Goodman on the floor, saw the chilly bite of Trinity’s eyes, and kept walking. Griffin followed me, still shaking his head in awe as glass crunched under his shoes. “Just be thankful Zeke didn’t ask me to do it again,” I said as I gave him a light shove to the shoulder.

I climbed back into the car, this time in the passenger seat, and Lenore hopped onto my shoulder. “Nevermore?” he cawed doubtfully.

“No, Lenny. No nevermore. Now. The time is now.” I propped my knees against the dashboard.

“Now,” he repeated, and squatted up against the warmth of my neck. He sounded as grimly contented as I felt. “Now.”

We made it ten miles, Griffin driving this time, before Eli materialized in the backseat next to Zeke. If it had been daylight, we could’ve cruised through Death Valley, past the Artists Palette, a chunk of mountain striped in pastel greens, yellows, blues, and pinks, or seen the Devil’s Golf Course, a salt flat that had cracked and bubbled with escaping air until it looked like the surface of an alien moon. But it was night and instead of nature-made tourist attractions, we were given Eli. I definitely did not consider it a fair trade.