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Somewhere, one of the faces from the beast’s wounds screams.

And then…

Jay rips the fucking beast’s head off with his bare hands.

Like a kid twisting off the head of his teddy bear. One motion clockwise, then one hand pulls the head one way while the other hand pulls the body the other and the garage fills with the sickening sound of flesh and bone and sinew being torn in half.

The head goes flying to the floor with a dog-like whimper, blood spraying across the both of us as it lands with a wet thump.

The body tries vainly to stand, then collapses, twitching once, twice.

It is dead.

Jay killed the beast.

I suck in my breath, trying to breathe, as that moment of stillness comes around me, the type that precedes me fainting.

I crumble to my knees, gasping for air, at the horror that I’ve just seen, at how close that just was, at how unfair this all is, at everything, everything, everything.

Jay is crouched beside me, his hands, his decapitating hands, grabbing me by the elbows to keep me from rolling back onto the concrete.

“Did they hurt you?” he asks gently, though there’s a tone of panic in his voice. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I tell him. Then I look up at his face and know that I’m not.

I burst into tears.

“Hey,” he says softly, sitting down beside me. He wraps his arms around my shoulders and tries to pull me into him.

I resist. Stubborn, even as I’m a hysterical, crying mess.

But then the strength drains out of me and I let him hold me, my face buried into his chest. The tears keep coming, my body wracked by my sobs, so much that they rattle him. But he just holds me and I feel his heart beating. It calms me like nothing else.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The next hour or so is a blur. I’m not even sure if time passes the way I think it has.

One moment I’m crying into Jay and he’s holding me (oh fuck, did it ever feel good to be held) and we are sitting on the second floor of that parking garage for what feels like forever. It could have even been forever—I seem to have a never-ending supply of tears—but the sound of a car entering below brought us to our feet.

The demon wouldn’t be visible to the average person, so it was okay to leave the dismembered body where it was. Shortly it would turn to flames and burn off anyway.

But there was the still the real fact that we were a long way from downtown Portland to my house and Jay obviously hadn’t driven to get me.

Jay took my hand, opened up a portal to the thinnest part of the Veil again (which I’ve now nicknamed the “Thinny”—yes, after The Dark Tower series) and while I don’t remember much of what happened next, whether due to the Veil or everything else that happened, I do know that the world became desaturated, like someone playing in Photoshop. My ears popped. Jay took me down the stairs and into the empty streets of Portland and then I was sitting cross-legged in my bedroom.

I still am, leaning back against the headboard and staring at Jay who sits on the edge of the bed, watching me.

“It’s a lot to handle,” he says and I stare at him blankly, trying to piece together the journey over here but coming up blank. He goes on. “I sifted you. It takes a lot of energy from me to do so. Usually I prefer to walk, drive, or run when I’m in the Veil. But there was no other way to get you here in a hurry.”

Now that he mentions it, he looks tired. Dark half-moons under his eyes, though this doesn’t diminish how beautiful he is. It almost enhances him, making him look more rugged and manly than before. Someone with experience, who has experienced more than anyone should. It makes him look more human.

I clear my throat. “At the risk of sounding terribly ungrateful, next time I’m about to encounter a demon or two, you might want to show up earlier.”

He frowns, looking momentarily pained. “I would have. I couldn’t . . . Ada, you put up walls, all the time, I’m sure without meaning to. But they’re there and it makes you nearly impossible to track. It’s only when you’re most frightened that they come down. I’m lucky it wasn’t too late.”

“Lucky,” I repeat. A bit of an understatement. A second later and I would have been dead and for all my faith, I don’t think I would have gone up. I would have been dragged down.

“Who was that demon?” I ask, as if it has a name. Still, I remember the way it looked at Jay when they fought, as if it were Caesar, before Brutus stabbed him in the back. Et tu, Brute? “And who was the nun?”