Chest burning so deep it felt like my soul was unraveling, I climbed the stairs out of the crypt, emerging into the St. Louis Cathedral. The place looked like a goddamn palace meant for a sultan or a sheik. Hard for me to imagine a God who sat in the luxuries of Heaven would care about the platitudes of Earth. A semi-domed ceiling soared above me, painted in what looked like a depiction of the ascension of Christ.

  Behind the altar, the words Te deum laudamus te dominum confitemur were written.

  “We praise thee, God. We confess thee, Lord.”

  Well, I’ve got a confession. I’m sick to death of the shit. A good woman died because of my hunt for the wicked, and I found it difficult to reconcile the idea of an Almighty God with less than almighty power.

  Moonlight filtered through the narrow windows out front. Otherwise, it was all candles set for prayers at the dedicated side altars. Some half-burned, others full, others down to the wick, like a field of low-hanging stars.

  Other than me, it was empty. Just row after row of barren pews.

  Empty. Just the way I liked it.

  I stopped by the main altar, where a shaft of light from the windows around its arch illuminated the Virgin Mary holding a cross and chalice. I couldn’t help but notice the motes of dust dancing in it. Even here, in this holy place, the scene reminded me of the old saying: From dust, we came, and to dust, we return.

  The burn intensified, sending me to my knees. Finally, I pulled my shaving mirror out and set it on the altar.

  “Have you lost yourself, Crowley?” Shar hissed, her form seeming to drown out the candles with its own whitish aura. “Have you completely lost sight of your purpose?”

  “Have you?” I groaned, the burning vanishing the instant I answered her, leaving me hollow and, for whatever reason… missing it. “You’ve got me chasing ghosts in a city full of them. Tourmaline said it. This Betrayer of yours ain’t here.”

  “He is.”

  “He ain’t!” I slammed a fist down, knocking a communion bowl off the altar.

  “You are too distracted.”

  “No, Shar. I’m seeing clearly.”

  “The things you revealed to that Child. You have doomed her.”

  “She deserved the truth!” I shouted so loud, it repeated back to me three times in the immense chamber.

  “What makes her so special?”

  “What makes you such an asshole that you think only special people deserve honesty?”

  The windows all around me shattered into a million pieces, spraying inward like they’d been hit by explosives.

  However, Shar’s following words were explosive in their own right. “You have forgotten your place.”

  We stared at each other, me watching what amounted to steam floating around in the mirror’s reflection. I waited for her to say more, but she remained silent.

  “Shargrafein, Rosa’s no demon,” I said. “She’s not a witch. She’ll do nothing to harm the White Throne. She’s good.”

  “Ah, so now you are the judge of good and evil, Crowley. Is that it? You know what will happen—what always happens. She will dig deeper into the unknown. Get lost in mysticism until the darkness takes hold. She’ll never be content with a routine life. Damnation will weave its way into her soul.”

  “I’m choosing to have faith.” The words were soft, strained, and buried under a two-ton pile of doubt.

  “No, you chose selfishness. To unburden your grief to her detriment. Did it lighten the load, Crowley? Do you now feel capable of performing your duties?”

  My hands squeezed into fists. I glared at the shattered glass all around me and then at the colossal cross hanging above the altar. “You want me to kill vampires, fine. Tourmaline went and made it personal anyhow, but—”

  “You were not sent after her.”

  “What’s the damn difference!” I roared. “She’s a killer. Confessed to murdering a senator, for Christ’s sake. How is she unworthy of your judgment?”

  “Because she cannot reveal the location of her maker if she is vanquished.”

  “I’ll make her tell me first.”

  “In that, you have already failed.”

  “I never fail twice,” I said, standing tall. “That’s why you keep me around, right? For what I just did with Rosa, you oughta smite me. But you won’t.”

  “Your overconfidence amuses me, Child,” she said.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Your value is proximity,” she continued like I hadn’t spoken. “The Betrayer never stays in one place for long. If it is not you, then it is no one this time. And if you fail—”

  “If he’s here, I’ll find him.”

  The mist in my shaving mirror went dark. Shar’s voice, usually resonant like a church organ, went utterly silent. Considering our eternal battle to get the last word over each other, I found that odd. Then, cold started creeping in, tracking muddy boot prints on the carpet of comfort I’d built, thinking that here, in this place, I was free of Hell’s gaze.

  My hand dropped to the pearl grip of my pistol.

  “Who’s there?” I called out. No answer. “I ain’t gonna ask twice!”

  I went to turn. A thwerp preceded a bolt attached to rope puncturing the wrist of my gun hand and pinning it against the altar. A perfect shot. From all the way at the cathedral’s entrance, two figures all in black approached wielding crossbows. Their hoods were up, casting shadows over masks with upside-down crosses painted in red.

  “Who in the Hell?”

  Before thinking twice, I yanked my arm forward, ripping free of the bolt. Another shot aimed to crucify me like Christ, just missed my other hand as I scrambled for a gun. A third zipped over my head. I vaulted over the altar, taking cover on the other side.

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  Upside-down cross masks? My first thought was Tourmaline’s Underdark and the symbols I’d seen there. Nothing else rang a bell. I hadn’t noticed anything like these men down there.

  “Put those down, and we can talk!” I shouted. Still no answer, just ragged breathing through the slits in masks as they neared. “Alright, fair warning.”

  I grabbed the service bowl I’d knocked down earlier and flung it out from cover. A bolt struck it in midair, eliciting a loud clang.

  Hoping their focus was elsewhere, I popped up and fired, catching one of the masked figures below the jawline. He rasped as blood sprinkled the pews like some kind of sacrificial lamb. The masked assailant collapsed to a knee, but there was no sizzling or silver steam, even though my gun was loaded with the like.

  Were they human?

  I prepared to charge, but all my body managed to do was fall forward. I looked back. Two more strung bolts crossed behind me, having punctured my ankles while I was kneeling. Their ropes were attached to the crossbows held by two more masked individuals crouched on either side high above inside the clerestory windows.

  With an irritated grunt, I reached back, grabbed the ropes in one fist, and pulled with all my might. One of the masked men held on, but the other fell, and their ropes crossed, causing both to plunge. They hit the floor hard. I drew my knife and slashed the ropes so I could pull my ankles free.

  The bolt in my left one was really jammed in there. Stuck on a bone, maybe. I couldn’t jostle it.

  The forward attacker appeared around the altar, leaving me no time. He fired another bolt, and I raised my hand to take it through the center of my palm. With my fingers intact, I gripped it and pulled him toward me.

  “Who are you!” I growled.

  With my leg still pinned, I dragged him down to my level and bashed him in the face with the butt of my pistol. The same sound the bowl had made echoed loudly. The masks were dull plate metal as if we were in the goddamn medieval times.

  He clicked something in his hand, and thick smoke poured out around us. I couldn’t see anything. Which, since I couldn’t feel, was like chopping the whiskers off a cat. My next punch cracked the marble flooring as my foe kicked free.

  The smoke didn’t stay thick long, and as I raised my gun to put an end to him, another bolt went clean through my arm. Then, from another direction, through my other arm. A third through my right leg, joining the one already stuck in my left. The three surviving masked figures gripped the ends of the ropes and pulled them taut like I was a kebab on a skewer.

  “What is this!” I growled. “Did Tourmaline send you?” I thrashed this way and that, but my limbs merely slid on the ropes.

  “I heard you were looking for me,” spoke a refined voice. It possessed an almost angelic quality. Smooth, resonant, and with the slightest hint of an accent I couldn’t quite place—somewhere in the far east.

  “Depends who you are,” I replied, still testing what it might take to pull free.

  Candles along the aisle went out one at a time, a shadow creeping closer as a presence neared. It stooped over the body of the masked man I’d shot. I could make out little but heard the sound of flesh tearing, then gurgling.

  The downed assassin coughed, and the presence whispered something to him in another language. The masked man rose, cracked his neck, then approached me as if nothing had happened. He took the end of the unmanned rope in my ankle and held it tight.

  “Nice trick,” I muttered.

  “Life is no trick,” the shadow said.

  What could I do but laugh exhaustedly? “You know, I’m getting really tired of things in this wasp nest of a city trying to kill me. So why don’t we skip the banter and get to it?”

  “Ah, but how many mistakes would have been solved if the culprits had merely decided to converse honestly and plainly? How many wars avoided?”

  “Bold to say while you have me here like a pincushion.”

  “My guardians had to ensure you would play nice,” he said. “My apologies. They can be… enthusiastic. But you will heal.”

  “Yeah, people usually just get right up after being crucified,” I said, tugging against the restraints. “Pretty sure that’s common as toast.”

  “But you are not so common,” the presence said.

  I eyed him as he casually approached, and asked, “So you know what I am?”

  “I know everything about you, James Enoch Crowley.”

  That answer caught me. I never used my middle name. Hated it. The name of my good-for-nothing pa.

  “Rougarou isn’t the only one with a network of eyes,” the shadow said. “Only mine is vast and sees so much more. A perk of eternity.”

  The man I’d shot pulled his mask off to reveal his face. I recognized the port wine birthmark. I noticed it then, though I hadn’t realized it before. His cross necklace wasn’t just stuck hanging upside down. It had been designed that way.

  I don’t generally fall prey to fear. Without worrying I might die, nothing truly strikes me as worthy of such an emotion. However, at the moment, the shadow-man standing before me might as well have been the Devil himself—hell, maybe he was.

  A preternatural fog swept through the place in the man’s wake, moving like a swift-flowing river. I swallowed hard—another leftover from my old life.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, Hamsa,” the shadow said, using the same word Tourmaline had been calling me. “I believe you’ve met Mr. Chapelwaite.” The man I’d believed to be a mere marshal stepped forward, a new vigor in his step. He held his mask to the side. The shadow took it from him and held it up. “I don’t believe you’ll be needing this anymore.”

  He tossed the mask with the upside-down cross amongst the pews.

  “So, what’s this—some kind of Satanic cult? You its leader?” I asked.

  He stepped closer, and the mark on my chest was like a cattle brand searing hot against my flesh. His friends were human, but the shadow definitely wasn’t. “Even one such as you only sees that which you have been groomed to see.”

  “Who are you?” I strained against the ropes, but they’d struck true. The tips had pierced right between the bones in my wrists and ankles.

  “In time, Hamsa,” the shadow said. His eyes shifted to my Peacemaker on the ground where it had fallen. “Silver bullets? I can smell them from here. I hope you have enough.”

  He laughed, but it wasn’t the same kind of sinister sound one expects from an overly confident Nephilim. That said, I got the distinct feeling that although this one reeked of something evil, he wasn’t like anything I’d met before.

  “I asked a question,” I said. “I ain’t fond of wasting words.”

  The man squatted before me. No longer bathed in shadows, I could see him clearly for the first time. He wore dark robes, crimson, the color of blood. He pulled back his hood to reveal a gaunt face—sharp lines for cheekbones. He had a firm chin covered in a thin strap of beard that lined his face upward to long black hair.

  Absolutely no emotion in his features.

  Like his accent, he had the appearance of someone from the desert lands to the east, if I had to wager. He didn’t look particularly strong. Then again, neither do most snakes.

  “You seem like a man unused to giving answers,” I said. “I’ll ask once more. Who are you?”

  He flicked one of the ropes, and it twanged like a guitar. “I don’t think you’re in a place to make demands.”

  “All I have to do is ask, and an army of angels will be here before you can spit,” I lied.

  “And where have I heard claims such as these before?” His gaze wandered up to the crucifix, where the Man himself still hung in his underwear. “At least they sent someone with a measure of courage this time. And to you!” He clapped slowly. “Surviving so long on what little information they supply. Gets tiresome, though, doesn’t it? Go to this place, travel to that… left to deduce the desires of the White Throne, yet expected to share their moral predilections. How often have you strayed from their vaguely lit path? How frequently are you threatened with eternal destruction simply for failing to comprehend their often impotent leadings?”

  His words reverberated in my mind like they were my own. How did this man know so much about my dealings with Shar? Had he been listening before making his presence known?

  “Nice trick, reading minds,” I told him, unsure if it was true. “Or were you just eavesdropping?”

  “No trick,” he said. “One needs no deception when one has walked upon the same guide stones, Hand of God.”

  I took a beat. “So, what, you’re one of us?” Twenty so-odd years and I’d never run into another Hand of God or Black Badge or whatever. Was always told they kept us spread out so as to best battle the creeping darkness of Hell.

  “Not just one. The.”

  As he said it, more men wearing inverted cross masks entered the cathedral, closing in on me. I knew there was a strong chance I wouldn’t be leaving this place, but I also knew what I’d been told by Shar a million times before: If he wasn’t for us, he was against us.

  “In my time, we were called Hamsa,” he said as four sets of hands gripped me and pulled me to my feet.

  I struggled to break free, but it was futile.

  “You are only acting upon your training,” he said. “I will not hold it against you… For now.”

  “Who the hell are you people?” I demanded again.

  “We have much in common, James. I, too, turned upon the One who only wished to save me. And I, too, did it because I was lied to, manipulated. You asked me my name, though I’ve gone by many.” He leaned in, mouth open wide enough so I could see what were undoubtedly vampire fangs. Though his were short—evolved in a way. “You may have heard of me referred to as the Betrayer. Some have called me the descendant of Cain, the One who kissed, though you would know me best by my true name: Judas Iscariot.”