Letting go of Lucius' hand, I slipped off the edge and landed in the empty pit, scrabbling away from him until I reached the other side and wedging myself into the corner as tightly as I could. It wasn't Lucius I was afraid of. No, it wasn't like those early days when I was petrified and repulsed by the strange little boy who could throw me into my nightmares just by the touch of his hand.

I was afraid of myself.

I was afraid of what I might do if I stayed by his side. I knew that this time I would be the one to seek out those nightmares, desperate to go back and find Caelan, to reclaim her as mine – just like I had promised I would do. I stared hungrily at his hands, those small pale child's hands that held so much power and as if sensing my thoughts, Lucius withdrew the gloves Garrick had given him from his hoodie pocket and quickly put them both on.

A feather-light touch on my shoulder made me flinch violently and I turned expecting to see rainbow eyes staring out from Punch's wicked face. Instead I found myself staring into those startling emerald eyes of Harper, his dark brows furrowed deeply, as he crouched low by the side of the baptismal pool.

"What is it? What's wrong? Why are you crying?"

"I am?" My fingers found the tears that were trickling down my face and I wiped them away, staring at the moisture on my fingertips as if it was the first time I had ever felt or seen tears.

"Yeah," Harper replied. "One minute you were sitting there, just staring into nothing, then you were crying. You didn't make a sound, your expression didn't change, but you were crying. Megan, what the Hell happened?"

"Oh God, Harper...." I said, the words drifting up into the air and fading to nothing as I saw Josiah standing in the centre of the aisle, his feet almost touching his sister's blood that still stained the floor. As soon as my eyes locked with his, I crumpled, clapping my hand over my mouth and wishing that the pool was full of water and I could just slip under the surface and stay there so I didn't have to see his face.

The seer turned away, staring up at the ceiling and raising his arms to cradle his head. The muscles across his back and shoulders tensed and he clenched his fists tight almost as if he was going to beat at his own skull, or maybe he was just thinking about beating me. Harper must have sensed the imminent explosion too. Grabbing hold of my arm, he half-dragged me out of the pit and shoved me behind him, acting as a barrier between me and Josiah.

The seconds ticked by like minutes but when the time came, there was no explosion, no Vesuvius-like eruption that would split the world down to its core. Instead Josiah turned back to face me and gave a slow nod of his head. His eyes displayed a surprising, but weary acceptance of what we had not yet discussed and yet he instinctively knew to be true. Staggering to one side, he found a seat on one of the discarded pews and slumped onto it, the wood creaking beneath his bulk.

Stepping out from behind the wall Harper had created, I studied the fallen seer with trepidation. Harper caught my hand as I passed by his side, shaking his head in warning, but I squeezed his hand in return and pressed on regardless, treading cautiously over the scene of my crime as I approached Josiah, with Harper following close behind.

"Josiah..." I began and then stopped. How do you even go about apologising for allowing someone to be claimed by the Devil's army? How do you apologise for standing by as someone is dragged into an eternity of torture? How do you admit that you've failed, that you're nothing but a failure and not fit to even say the name of the being that created you?

As it turned out, I didn't need to say anything at all as the seer looked up and nodded again. "It's okay, Megan," he said hoarsely, although I knew it wasn't okay. It was far from bloody okay although why he didn't say it, I had no idea. I stared at him, feeling cheated by his reaction. I wasn't sure whether I preferred him to be so accepting or whether I wanted him to put his hands around my neck and squeeze until I didn't have to deal with any of this anymore.

"How do you know? Did you see it?"

He gave a pained smile. "The look on your face was all I needed to see."

"I'm sorry Josiah....I-I don't know what to say...."

"You don't need to say anything. It was nothing but a fool's dream, I should have known that from the start and....maybe I did know it, maybe deep down I always knew it, but I never wanted to believe it. I always hoped..." he said, his voice cracking. "I hoped I was wrong about her, you know? Stupid, naïve Josiah, eh?" He laughed, which broke down into a deep hacking cough that took a moment from which to recover. "She always said I was stupid. And maybe I was, but I never lost hope. Hope for a better life. Hope for peace, for her. For me. Hope by name, hope by nature. Stupid and hopeful."

"What did you hope you were wrong about?"

"I hoped that she wasn't truly evil. I hoped to blame the madness for everything. I wanted to believe she'd be forgiven – for all the things she'd done. Not guilty on the grounds of insanity! I mean, what sane person hears voices telling them to do these things?"

"Voices?" My chest tightened.

"Did you never notice? The way she used to tilt her head and listen?" He tilted his own head, mirroring an action I had seen Caelan do and I shivered at how uncannily like his sister he looked at that moment. "She said they spoke to her, these voices of hers, encouraging her to commit the most unspeakable acts, always whispering in her ear. But maybe it was all a lie. Just a way for her to justify the evil she did."

Save me. Save me. Save me.

Caelan's pleas filled my head as if she were standing right by my shoulder, whispering in my ear, begging for me to listen. Flashes of her petrified face blinked across my vision. The look in her eyes. The way she had reached for me as they took her.

What could I say to Josiah? I could have told him that I didn't think Caelan was evil. Okay, she'd done terrible things, of course she had, but something told me her madness was the work of something more sinister than her brother could possibly imagine. I'd witnessed her fear and it had been true and genuine and awful to behold. I could have told Josiah that the demons that had tormented her for so long had been real and not just the imaginings of an insane mind. I could have said that she'd been marked, maybe since the day of her birth, that she'd always belonged to them and had been nothing but another soul to twist, pervert and claim as one of their own. That had been the deal. This was just business, as Lucifer had so plainly stated and I think I was starting to understand just what the business of gathering souls was really all about.

What hope could I give him by revealing the truth? How would it help him to know that his sister, his poor mad sister, had been tormented her whole life for one reason only – so that she could belong to them when she died? Especially when it had been Josiah himself who had orchestrated her death.

And so I said nothing. I stood in front of him and said not a word but I felt the guilt of knowing the truth burning as if it was etched upon my skin like a tattoo.

"So what now, seer?" said Harper. "What of your contract with Megan?"

Josiah looked at Harper, narrowing his white eyes, a small dangerous glint appearing across the surface.

"I would like to keep her," he admitted with a shrug of his broad shoulders. "I like having her around and I can't say it wouldn't bring me a small sliver of satisfaction to piss you off, Cain." He sighed and slumped further down onto the pew, his gaze grazing over me. "But she did what I wanted of her and much more besides, in all honesty. The terms of the contract are fulfilled and Megan is free to go."

The sound of someone hammering on the front door to the chapel resounded through the building. Three loud knocks, silence, and then three more.

"Well, how about that...." said Harper, with a smug grin. "Perfect fucking timing."

"Who...?" I said, my eyes widening in panic as he shot past me.

"Looks like the cavalry's here," remarked Josiah dryly, shaking his head when he saw my look of utter confusion. "Oh come on, Megan. You don't actually think the Varúlfur would bother knocking do you?"

I started towards the chapel entrance, hearing the sound of voices and feeling the cool touch of the night air sweeping in from the street outside but before I could reach the double doors, they were swept open and I was greeted by the sight of Fenton and Edward. Behind them I recognised Maggie, Charlie and Clayton, plus a few other faces of Fenton's people.

Unable to stifle my joy at seeing Edward, Benjamin's old compadre, I ran towards him and threw my arms around him, burying my face into his black bushy beard and hugging him fiercely. He retuned my crushing embrace with one of his own before pulling away, his cheeks flushing slightly.

"Eh, lass, it's good to see you, so it is," he said gruffly, his dark eyes twinkling under his heavy-set brows. "We've been scouring the city since Oxleas. Had almost given up hope completely when the lad here contacted us." He gestured to Harper, who stood in the doorway, his arms folded across his chest.

"You contacted them?" I said with surprise.

He shrugged, as if it was no big deal. "Yeah...can you believe London still has pay phones? Working ones too. If you search hard enough under the graffiti and piss, they're still out there. And you can reverse charge call to cell phones. Technology these days, huh?"

Fenton raised an eyebrow at Harper. "Don't go getting used to doing that by the way. I'm not paying for all your calls." He turned back to me, his eyes wary as he kept a staid distance. "It's good to see you, Megan. We feared the worst after Oxleas...."

"What happened to you out there? Where the Hell did you go?" The words shot out before I could stop them. Maybe I didn't want to stop them. He'd left us, after all and what's more, he'd left Lucius. All I remembered is that one minute he'd been there, chasing after me, calling my name as I'd charged to where Garrick had faced Vanagandr, and then he had gone. They'd all gone.

"Megan..." Harper warned, walking over to where I stood and grasped my hand in his, attempting to dampen the flame before it could ignite further.

"No," I hissed angrily. "He needs to say it, he needs to explain why the fuck he wasn't there!"

"What's done is done," Harper insisted and I stared at him, incredulous that he was just going to let this go. He'd never liked Fenton, never trusted him and yet he here was, prepared to forget the fact that the one person who could have saved us –saved Garrick – had walked away and left us when we needed him most. I felt the rage simmering under the surface, the heat raging through me until it was ready to reach boiling point, weeks of grief and frustration ready to explode.

"Wait, Harper," Fenton said. "Megan's right. We owe you an explanation. I owe you an explanation." He sighed and scratched at the shaved side of his head where the rose tattoo decorated his scalp. "When the Great Wolf attacked, Megan, you were gone so quickly. I tried to reach you but by then you were already there and we were cut off from where you were. We were overrun. In truth, we underestimated them. We – I mean, I believed that possessing firearms would give us the upper hand and it did for a while, but they were too strong, too powerful up close. Garrick always said as much. He always said we'd never win through guns alone and that we'd have to fight them in hand to hand combat and being the arrogant whelp I am, I never believed him. I thought we'd sweep in there and take them all out. But we couldn't and Vanagandr.....well, I don't think anyone anticipated his power."

A shiver scratched up my spine when I thought of Brandon that night, of how terrifying he had become, of how I had looked upon him and realised that he wasn't just the Great Wolf. He was the God-slayer.

"We looked for you after. I went back..." Fenton went on.

"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "You went back? You went back to Oxleas?"

"Yes," Fenton replied. "I went back as close to dawn as I dared. I knew the Varúlfur would have cleared their dead as quickly as they could after the battle and they wouldn't have expected any of us to hang around so near to sunrise. I thought maybe you could be injured or holed up somewhere so I went back to search for you."

I swallowed hard, feeling the ache burn from my throat down to my chest. "Did you see him?" I croaked. "Did you find Garrick?"

How I'd hated leaving him there. Hated the thought of him lying there in the mud, left as carrion for the birds or as a sacrifice to the sun, whichever was lucky enough to discover him first. Or worse still – I hated the thought that the beasts might have found him and mutilated his body in some sick way, celebrating their triumph over their enemy, the great Bartholomew Garrick.

"Yes," he confirmed, biting on his lip. "Yes I found him. We took him back with us. I couldn't stand the thought of him burning there, all on his own."

My eyes found his and my anger dissolved, dissipating rapidly through my pores when I saw how his anguish seemed to mirror my own, his usually stoic, blank expression, replaced by one consumed with a pain he could not hide. It was my pain. Our pain. A pain we shared for somebody that we both loved deeply.

I sagged back against Harper, grateful for the way he wrapped his arms tightly around my waist, holding me against him.

"We looked after him, lass," said Edward, patting my arm awkwardly. "Cleaned him up, washed away all that shit from the battle. Handsome bloody devil he was, eh? Even said a few words, I did. Only right seeing as I'd known the boy since our Benjamin brought him into the family, like. We made sure he was alright, don't you worry about that."

I nodded then, unable to speak for fear I might break down and I didn't want to do that. Not here. Not now.

"Right," said Harper, taking a deep breath, clearly keen to curb the emotion sweeping through the chapel. "Now that the reunion is done, why don't we get the Hell out of here?"

 *****

"You could come with us."

I'd hung back as everyone prepared to leave, scarcely daring to believe that this was even happening, that we were actually going to leave the chapel. All these weeks, effectively imprisoned here with Josiah and I'd been so desperate to be free of this place, to be free of him and now I didn't know how to feel. I wanted to go, yet all of a sudden I wasn't so sure I wanted to face the outside world again. Everything seemed so uncertain, so terrifying. It was as if I'd been held in some kind of time warp and I was scared to leave and discover that the whole world had changed and had left me behind. I would have to face it like a new-born, weak and uninformed about how different life would now be. But maybe that was the whole point. Maybe it could never be like it was before and the only way to survive would be to go out there and adapt to whatever the Hell awaited us.

The weird thing was that after spending so much of my time hating Josiah, I now felt a strange sense of loss at the thought of leaving him behind and so, as I'd stood back, watching the others, with the seer at my side, the words had tumbled out. I wasn't sure which one of us was more shocked to hear me say it.

After staring at me for a few seconds, the seer chuckled and I smiled to hear that deep rumble of laughter and to see the way his eyes crinkled at the corners.

"Oh darling," he said. "It's tempting I must admit, but nah...I've never really been one for the whole vampire community vibe, you know? I much prefer to keep myself to myself. It's easier that way." He glanced over at where Harper stood, with Lucius by his side. "And besides, I'm not too sure your boyfriend would approve. I could be wrong, but I don't think he likes me very much."

I grinned. "Hmmm, maybe not but I don't think he likes anyone very much to be honest."

"Except you, it seems."

"Maybe, but even that took a while," I replied. "Are you sure you won't reconsider?"

Josiah shook his head and reached out, tugging playfully on a lock of my hair.

"What can I say? I'm a stubborn old bastard." Taking my hand in his, he raised it to his lips and planted a small soft kiss on my knuckles. "It's been a pleasure doing business with you, Megan Garrick. Despite everything, it really has and I'll be sorry to see you go."

I held onto his hand for a moment, staring into those captivating white eyes. "What will you do now, Josiah?"

"Live," he said simply. "I will live."

Feeling a pang of regret and grief that I never thought I would feel for the seer, I walked away, over to where Harper stood waiting by the door. He looked at me, his brow furrowing in question.

"Ready, angel?" he asked.

I snaked a hand around the back of his head and pulled his head down to meet mine, pressing my mouth firmly against his and relishing the taste of him upon my lips. "Ready for anything, demon."

The door opened and I gasped almost in wonder as that first rush of air enveloped my skin. The night sky was clear with just a few stars sparkling high above, framing the moon that seemed so much bigger and brighter than I remembered that my breath caught in my throat to see it. The smells of the fast-food joints wafted over me, the noise and confusion of the busy street like music to my ears. I smiled as I grabbed Lucius' gloved hand and stepped outside, ready to get into one of Fenton's cars that purred at the kerb outside. Maybe the world had changed but right then I didn't care. I was just glad to be a part of it again.

I had almost reached the car when a voice called my name and I turned to find Josiah there and wondered whether maybe he had changed his mind after all.

"Megan," he said, as he drew in closer, shooting wary glances around the street. "You have no reason to listen to anything I have to say and I wouldn't blame you for not trusting my word after everything that's happened, but this mission of yours to find Michael....please, be careful, alright?"

"Trust me, Josiah, I know what I'm facing. I met Lucifer and his demons..."

He shook his head furiously and lowered his voice to little more than a whisper. "No, no, I'm not talking about Lucifer. I'm talking about Michael. The Archangels aren't what you think they are. If you're expecting halos and white robes, then think again. These beings, they're powerful and I mean we're talking real power here. Don't be fooled by any of them, okay? This is a war and all of them are capable of doing whatever it takes to win. Never forget that, Megan. Never."

I studied his troubled face for a moment before reaching up and touching his face, tracing a pattern under one of his eyes. "The story you told me about Sister Agnes....it was an angel that blinded you, wasn't it?"

Grabbing my hand, he squeezed it firmly. "Just be careful, yeah?"

And with that he turned and walked away, leaving me to stare at the great wooden door of the chapel as he closed it behind him. His words of warning gripped my soul in a sudden panic. With wide eyes, I scanned the street as he had done, seeing nothing unusual and yet feeling the touch of something icy upon my skin. My flesh tingled with an unnatural sensation that made my teeth chatter as if the cold winter air was seeping right through into my bones and freezing my body from the inside out.

A gloved hand tugged on mine and I looked down to see Lucius, his big blue eyes staring up at me and his face ghostly pale under the moonlight.

"We need to go now, Megan," he urged.

"Yes," I agreed, numb with cold and casting one more nervous look around. Everything looked as it had just moments before and yet everything was different, changed irrevocably just by a few words.

Getting into the back seat of Fenton's car, with Harper in the front passenger seat and Lucius by my side, I stared out the window, feeling the weight of Josiah's warning darkening my vision and forcing the world to pass by in a shadow-filled blur. I put my arm around the boy and hugged him against me. As the car sped on into the night, heading towards our new destination, the soft hum of the engine made my eyes droop heavily and I felt my body succumb to exhaustion. Unable to fight it any longer, I let myself get pulled deep under the surface, drifting far away from consciousness where dark figures with oil-slick wings waited to burn my eyes with the brightest of lights and where I could no longer tell who was the monster and who was not.