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of his personality adorned the room. Just white walls and a desk. Two soft armchairs. One lamp. Notebooks and pens, as well as some wrinkled papers covered in algebraic equations. A thick FedEx envelope, ripped open and bulging.
    And a framed picture of us, sprawled together on drift-wood while the ocean roared behind our backs and the clouds split silver with sun. No other photograph of me existed, not as an adult. I was happy with that one.
    I stood beside the office door, behind Father Cribari, and leaned against the wall, staring at the back of the priest’s head. Arms folded over my chest, subtly rubbing my arms as Zee and the others rumbled like little earthquakes erupting all over my body.
    “There’s been an incident,” said Father Cribari, without preamble. Still sounding calm, despite the twitch of his cheek and the sweat rolling down the back of his neck, just above the collar of his Windbreaker.
    Grant said nothing. Neither did I. No need. Silence could break a man more easily than questions. And Father Cribari had not come here to simply stand in a room and sweat.
    But it took him a while to say anything else. He was stone, pale as marble clothed in shadows, and the sweat could have been the aftermath of winter rain. Cold man. Standing near him, doing nothing, was difficult. I was used to action. Zombies. Demons. Exorcisms. I saw a problem, I fixed it. No waiting, unless it was for the right moment. And right moments were easy to find if you kept your options open. If you let yourself dwell in possibilities.
    Father Cribari said, “Murders.”
    Just like that. A declaration. Murders. No explanation. Grant’s jaw tightened. “Who were the victims?”
    “Three nuns. Taken in quick succession. Tortured before their throats were slit.”
    Grant showed nothing on his face. He leaned back, gaze flicking to the air above Cribari’s head. Studying the man’s aura.
    I could see auras, but only those that belonged to demons. I wished, though, that I could see what Grant did, though I doubted that was a responsibility I could have handled with even half his grace.
    Grant had a syndrome, a brain disorder that had afflicted him from birth: synesthesia. Which meant that every sound he heard, every sigh and creak and chirp, translated itself into color. Grant could see sound.
    He could see others things, too. Energy. Auras. Reflections of souls, bound in color, colors that had meanings, that formed a language only he could decipher. No person could hide from Grant. Masks meant nothing. To be seen by him meant being stripped down to the essence of some personal truth—no matter how damning, no matter how good. Not something most people would have been pleased to know about. Souls were supposed to be private. Souls—even the souls of demons—were supposed to be inviolate, unalterable by any human or creature.
    But no other human or creature was like Grant. No one I had ever met had the ability to alter the very nature of a living being—with nothing but a song.
    “You have investigators,” replied Grant.
    “Ah,” said the priest, with a smile, “but the killer was a friend of yours.”
    I was looking at Grant when he said that. I was staring straight into his eyes, and so I saw the flinch, even though his body stayed still as death.
    “I had a lot of friends in the Church,” Grant replied, but I knew him too well, and a fist of dread pushed into my stomach. Unfamiliar sensation. Ugly. I had felt dread while my mother lived. I had felt dread after she died. Dread, when it was just me and the boys, up against the world. Trivial, though. My mother had been indestructible, larger than life—and I was merely hard to kill. Even my close call with the bullet was nothing, in the long run.
    This was different. I suffered, in quick succession, anxiety and dismay—and it was not for me. It was for Grant. And that was worse. Worse than I could have imagined, all those years spent alone.
    “Father Ross,” said the