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cemetery!”
    “Dear Lord, oh, it’s the end of days—a ring of fire!”
    “Someone call 911! Call the shittin’ bomb squad!”
    A hand gripped Gillespie’s shoulder. Lowering his arms, he looked up into Monica Rutgers’s ashen face. Her dark curls were disheveled, her expression grim and making her look every one of her fifty-plus years.
    “Jesus Christ,” she muttered. “Are you all right?”
    Good question. Gillespie pushed against the pavement and eased himself into a sitting position. Pain rang his skull like a noontime bell. Nausea twisted through his guts. He felt a cold sweat pop up on his forehead.
    “I’ll live,” he said. Then he chuckled as he realized he’d swallowed his gum.
    Rutgers shook her head. Her lips stretched into a thin line. Her expression told him that he looked as bad as he felt. He grasped the hand she offered and allowed her to help him up to his feet.
    He stared at the wreckage surrounding him, pulse racing, mouth dry. Shattered glass was everywhere—in the street, on the sidewalk, strewn like sharp and glittering confetti on cars, grass, in bushes. Water from a broken hydrant geysered into the night, a pale starward stream. His Nissan rested on its side on the sidewalk beside a now tattered-looking rose bush.
    Then he looked across the cemetery. Its walls and gate had been smashed into blue-flickering ruin.
    “Jesus,” he breathed. “What the hell happened?”
    “Damned if I know,” Rutgers replied. “But I intend to find out.”
    She hurried back to the sidewalk and Gillespie followed, fumbling in his jacket pocket for his glasses. He realized the binoculars no longer dangled from around his neck. His fingers skimmed across his glasses and he was surprised, but happy, to find them in one piece. Pulling them free, he slid them on.
    Gillespie stepped up onto the cracked sidewalk and felt ice flow through his veins. Throughout the cemetery, tombs, crypts, and statues had been cut in half, their contents spilling onto the ruptured stone paths; the sliced-off tops of cypresses and oaks had tumbled onto chunks of broken stone and masonry, their leaves aglow with blue flames.
    Uneasiness snaked through Gillespie as he recalled his last sight of Prejean.
    Blue fire swallows the bloodsucker’s hands. Prejean draws back his left fist. Then punches it into the crypt.
    Blue flames. Just like those devouring the leaves and sparking along the ruptured tombs.
    Dear God. Had Prejean caused the explosion? Gillespie’s thoughts flipped back to what he’d seen on the security cam disk he’d stolen in Damascus.
    The energy surrounding Prejean shafts into Johanna Moore’s body from dozens of different points. Explodes from her eyes. From her nostrils. Her screaming mouth. She separates into strands, wet and glistening. Prejean’s energy unthreads Moore. Pulls apart every single element of her flesh.
    Johanna Moore spills to the tiled floor, her scream ending in a gurgle.
    If Prejean could unmake a woman, then he could also make a cave like the one that had mysteriously appeared in Damascus. Could surround its raw edge with a Stonehenge of white stone angels—smooth-winged angels that he’d bet anything had once been flesh—while something deep within the cave’s dark and glistening guts sang holy, holy, holy .
    Jesus Christ. Listen to yourself. You’ve finally pickled your brain. No way Prejean’s responsible for all that. Not possible. Can’t be possible.
    That final conversation with Wallace replayed through his aching mind, intensifying the dread knotting up his belly.
    They’re lying to you. Ask about Bad Seed.
    I know about Bad Seed. I know what Dante Prejean is.
    I doubt that.
    Three simple words containing depths beyond Gillespie’s imagining.
    Pain pulsed through Gillespie’s head, throbbed at the back of his skull. He looked around for his rifle and found it, tarp-free, in the gutter. He scooped it up, then started running along the cracked concrete path, heading for the