As they neared school, however, Ben's curiosity finally got the best of him. "So, how long do I have to wait to hear the rest of it, Joby?" When Joby didn't answer, Ben shrugged and let it go again, but then he saw a weird little smile on Joby's face, and really had to know. "Come on, dude. What drove you to drink?"

"This may seem a little sudden," Joby said, "but I was wondering if you'd consider being best man at my wedding."

Ben took his eyes off the road to glance at Joby. "What?"

"I'm gonna ask Laura to marry me," Joby said, straight-faced. "Today, I think."

Ben's mouth fell open. "Is that a joke?"

"Hey! It's red!" said Joby, pointing through the windshield.

Ben slammed on his brakes, and, when the light had changed, turned the corner and parked the truck.

"It's not a joke," Joby said, then smiled like Ben had not seen him smile since they'd been boys. That's when Ben knew he was for real.

To Ben's surprise, his own first reaction was a sudden stab of loss. He'd never realized until that moment, or acknowledged anyway, how much he'd hoped that somehow, maybe, someday, he and Laura . . . But then he took a second look at his friend's radiant face and realized that Joby was, finally, in love! A frantic burst of excitement and delight instantly eclipsed any other feelings.

"You son of a bitch!" Ben shouted gleefully, reaching across to grab Joby up in a bear hug. "Whoever thought you'd beat me to the altar!" He let go of Joby, and leaned back so they could beam at each other until Joby laughed out loud. Then they both were laughing themselves sick. "When you gonna ask her?" Ben said.

"Well, I've got some patching up to do first, I think," said Joby. "We had a little . . . thing . . . after prom, but that's what made me see how much I love her, Ben. I just hope she'll have me now."

"Ha!" Ben laughed. "She's been trollin' Joby bait for six years, and you think she'll say no?"

To Ben's consternation, Joby's easy exuberance vanished as quickly as it had appeared. "It was a pretty serious thing," he said. "I blew it real bad, but I'm gonna get her out of homeroom this morning, and try to work it out." He smiled a bit more wanly. "The valedictorian can pull some strings and get her a pass, I guess."

"Finally! He gets it!" Ben exclaimed. "Let's go get her, Joby."

He pulled back into traffic, and minutes later they were walking toward the school's main entrance. Crossing the lawn, Ben's attention was drawn to a group of girls clustered mournfully around one of their number who was crying. Ben was curious, but felt too buoyant to linger on it. As he pulled one of the school's big glass doors open for Joby, however, they saw another group of grieving kids at the end of the hall, and recognized Johnny Mayhew standing sullenly at the group's fringe.

"Lotta girls must've got dumped after prom," Ben said, oddly afraid to dignify his own joke with a smile.

"Hey, Johnny," Joby called quietly. "What's wrong?"

Mayhew turned and stared at him, then turned angrily and walked away.

"What's his problem?" Ben griped.

Joby looked around, and spotted Pete Blackwell. "Hey, Pete, what's with all the crying around here?"

Pete looked glumly past them at the group down the hall. "Nothing like dying to get friends you never had popping up all over, is there?" he mumbled.

"Who died?" Ben asked with a chill of alarm.

"Jamie Lindwald," Pete said. "Crashed and burned his truck last night, outside of town. They say there were empty beer cans all over."

Ben turned to find Joby's face painted in stark horror.

Pete looked abashed. "Sorry, Joby. I guess you were friends, huh? I should have-"

Before he could finish, Joby whirled, and slammed back through the big glass doors, half-running toward the lawn. Ben dropped his books and ran after him.

"Joby!" Ben yelled. "Wait, damn it!"

Joby ran even faster, right toward the street.

Ben poured on all the speed he had, and managed to throw him to the grass just before he reached the sidewalk. Joby writhed beneath him, but Ben kept him pinned to the lawn. As students gathered at a distance to point and gawk, Joby began to sob.

"It's got nothing to do with you!" Ben exclaimed. "You told him not to drive! You told me so last night. It was his choice! His, damn it!"

"I should have stopped him!" Joby wailed. "He was out there 'cause of me!"

"Goddamn it, Joby! You were out there 'cause of him! What the hell were you s'posed to do? Stand in front of the fuckin' truck?"

Joby stopped struggling and lay facedown, crying into the grass. Ben loosened his hold, but didn't let him up. After a moment, Joby's crying tapered off, and he mumbled something Ben didn't catch.

"What?" Ben asked.

Joby rolled over and stared up at him like a man already hanged. "The wages of sin is death," he said without inflection.

Ben could make no sense of it at first. Then he understood, and his anger flared white hot. "That's fuckin' bullshit!" he yelled. "Fuck Father Richter, Joby! I wish I'd never mentioned church to you! I wish I'd never gone myself!"

"No!" Joby moaned. "He was right, and I ignored him! He told me what would happen if I-"

"I've been drunk lots of times!" Ben shouted him down. "I got drunk in junior high sometimes! Nobody died! Everybody does it, Joby, and nobody dies!" He grabbed Joby's arms again, as if he might somehow force him to listen.

"Someone did die," Joby whispered. His eyes glazed even further. "It's different for you, Ben. . . . It always has been."

Ben was relieved to see Mr. Thompson, one of the school counselors, hurrying across the lawn, but when he got there, Joby wouldn't speak, so Ben explained as best he could.

"Joby," Mr. Thompson said calmly, "Ben is right. This wasn't your fault. In fact, your good sense in refusing to ride with him has saved us all from twice the grief. I can't tell you how grateful I am-how grateful we all are."

Joby remained silent, looking at the sky as if none of them were there. Ben felt his own eyes burning, wondering whether it would be good or bad for Joby to see him cry.

"Joby, let's go somewhere and talk, okay?" Mr. Thompson said.

Joby looked at him for the first time, then nodded slightly, as if movement itself were painful for him.

"Ben, thank you," Mr. Thompson said. "You can let him up now."

Ben got up, and reached down to give Joby a hand.

But as Joby reached his feet, he tore from Ben's grasp and bolted down the sidewalk away from school. Ben and Mr. Thompson were after him instantly, but Joby's speed seemed almost supernatural. Thompson soon fell away and ran back toward school. After three blocks, Ben started losing ground. Half a block later he gave up and turned back toward school himself. He'd get Laura, and they'd go find Joby together. He had a few ideas where Joby might go, and Joby wouldn't run from Laura . . . he hoped.

"Absolutely not," Lucifer barked. "I don't care how you do it, just get him down from there. I win nothing if he dies now."

Lucifer had canceled all appointments to stand over the viewing bowl and direct his team via the office obelisk. The moment Joby had stopped to loiter on the overpass, he'd gone to the obsidian pillar and contacted Malcephalon.

"No! Suicide will not begin to satisfy the wager's terms. . . .

"Yes, that's fine. . . .

"No. Eventually, he's got to be working for us, and he might be of no use whatsoever mad. I want him down, and sane, and I want it now! Must I be clearer? . . .

"Good. Now take care of it."

Joby didn't know how long he'd watched the freeway traffic rush below him. For some time, only one thought had occupied his mind: The wages of sin is death.

But why Lindwald's? he thought at last. Joby was the sinner. Fornication, drunkenness, murder, all in one weekend. Why should Jamie have been the one to pay?

He remembered Lindwald flinching from his touch after Lucy Beeker's birthday mission . . . recalled the scars exposed on Lindwald's back after he and Ben had beaten him for being a "demon." Lindwald had paid over and over for Joby's mistakes. "Let's go celebrate life," he heard Jamie laugh again. "Your life!"

"My life," Joby whispered dolefully. Just a quick climb over the railing, a single mindless jump. . . . People might grieve, but they'd get over it and go on with their lives.

Only . . . even now, in the middle of this desolation, he knew they wouldn't.

Every time he'd set his hand to the railing, his mind had filled with vivid, awful images of what his death would do to everyone he had cared for: Laura, Ben, his mom and dad. Though he'd lost any fear of hurting himself, he could find no way to live or die without hurting all those others so terribly . . . so permanently. There seemed no way to make anything better, but it seemed he would be forced to live anyway, just to keep from making things worse.

Drained of feeling altogether, he wandered off the overpass at last, and, like a wounded animal driven by instinct toward its den, finally found himself at home. Relieved to find his mother's car gone, he unlocked the door and went inside, fearing he had little time before she'd return.

In his room, he pulled some clothes into a bag, then, hardly able to think, scrabbled through his shelves and desk drawers for anything else he might need until, buried in the very back of his bottom drawer, he came across a thin book bound in royal blue, its cover decorated with a golden sunburst in a field of stars. Beneath that was his Treasury of Arthurian Tales, stored there, out of sight and out of mind, since childhood. He sat numbly on his bed, and began to flip vacantly backward through the small blue book.

It was filled with large, childish writing, smudged in pencil. "Taubolt." "Taubolt." "Taubolt." The name appeared again and again across the last few pages. Then, "A knight must practice." He felt blood rush to his face, and flipped quickly to the front of the book. "Drink a lot of beauty, Sir Joby. Feed your-" He flipped that page so hard, it tore, wanting to close it altogether, but he couldn't seem to stop flipping through its pages, as if the answer to all this might still be hidden somewhere between all the things he was trying not to read . . . until his eyes caught a single heading, and his fingers froze.

Ideas for beating Lindwald.

He was on his feet, running from the house, madly down the street without a plan, oblivious of the books still clutched in his straining hands. He ran and ran, trying to outdistance the torrent of memory: childhood dreams of Arthur; candles in the darkness; reconciliation of enemies, comfort to the suffering, help for the weak; candles burning by the hundreds, off into the night. . . . The knight. . . . The knight of God! "Ha!" he shouted, hardly able to bear his own scorn. What an ass! If he ran forever, he might not make it all any worse! . . . That was the brightest dream left him.

He ended up in a field, doubled over in the grass, vomiting a single plea, over and over, until his raw sobs mocked the raven's voice: "Forgive me! Forgive me!"

There was no answer in the silence, and, in time, he ceased to speak at all, but merely sat and stared as sunset came and he realized, with dull surprise, where he was.

The tournament field.

He got up, still clutching his two small talismans of childhood, went slowly to the clearing's edge, swung his arm back, and threw them as hard as he could into the trees.

Across the field, concealed in knee-high grass and weeds, a glossy tortoise-shell cat stood stock-still, watching, with strange dark eyes, as Joby shuffled miserably away. When the boy was gone, the cat turned to mew mournfully at a cricket perched atop a long tendril of vetch beside him.

"He begs for forgiveness he does not need," the cat mewed in frustration. "Why does he not think to beg for help, My Lord?"

"Lucifer's creature spoke truly before he was destroyed," the Cricket chirruped softly. "Joby has been well trained to think only of his debt to others. And in any case, he can hardly have guessed that you were here to beg help directly from, Gabe."

"But he has many years of religious instruction now, Master. Why should it not occur to him to call upon one of us?"

"Oh, he'll call upon Me," the Creator sighed. "But Lucifer's terms forbid Me from answering. As for you and all My other servants, Gabe, I sadly suspect that for Joby you are precisely that, and nothing more: 'religious instruction.' He may have been taught all your names, but it will not occur to him that any of you are actually there watching, except, perhaps, to judge and condemn."

"Then how can he ask any of us for help at all?" Gabe asked, greatly distressed. "He cannot. It is not fair!"

"Nonetheless, it is the deal I agreed to," the Creator chirruped gravely.

"He will want those books back someday," Gabriel mewed in agitation. "They contain a portion of his heart. . . . Surely it would not violate the wager's terms if I retrieved them so that they can be returned, should he think to ask it someday?"

"That's for you to say, Gabe."

"Me!" the cat complained. "Since when is it my place to define Your will, Lord?"

"You know I am not allowed to speak on any matter touching the wager. You are the wager's official witness and arbiter, are you not? Who should know better?"

Gabe batted the grass with his tail in agitation. He had never had to guess his Master's will. A moment later, where the cat had been, a young man stood, with dark eyes and lovely copper features framed in curly locks as black as night. He walked resolutely toward the thicket of trees where Joby's books had vanished, but came back moments later empty-handed.

"They are gone!" Gabe said quietly to the cricket. "I searched quite carefully! Where can they have gone?"

"The world is full of mystery, Gabe," the cricket chirruped back. "Dryer lint, for instance."

"What?" Gabe asked.

"Does anyone ever see it on the clothes when they go in?" the cricket mused. "Do the clothes seem much smaller when you take them out? . . . Of course," the cricket chirruped pensively, "clothes do shrink sometimes, but that hardly seems to account for all the sheets of it left over in the end."

"My Lord, forgive me, but . . . I haven't the slightest idea what You're talking about. What happened to Joby's books?"

"There's another mystery, Gabe. Shall we head back? I've a sudden hankering for cards. Care to join Me in a game of poker?"

"Cards, My Lord? . . . Now?"

"If not now, when?" the cricket chirped.

Their fruitless search ended where it had begun: at the school parking lot. Ben stared wearily through the windshield, his hands still on the wheel, trying to think of someplace they might have missed, while Laura sat in like silence beside him. They had combed the grid of streets around campus first, then gone to the tournament field and half a dozen less and less likely places after that. They'd even gone out to St. Albee's, where Ben had derived some small, cold pleasure from the look on Richter's face as he learned of the disastrous fruit all his guilt-mongering had produced.

They'd found Mrs. Peterson a tearful wreck at Joby's home. After Mr. Thompson's call that morning, she'd spent a few panicked hours waiting there, then gone to church to pray for Joby's safety, only to come back and discover he'd been home while she was out. Ben and Laura had stayed with her until Joby's dad had arrived.

As Ben tried in vain to think of some stone unturned, Laura began to cry again.

"Hey," he crooned, sliding an arm across her shoulder. "Joby's okay. He's just gone somewhere to sort things out."

"I've made such a mess of everything," she moaned, swiping at her running nose. "I've driven him completely away just when he needs me most."

"No, you didn't," Ben insisted.

Laura just cried even harder, burying her face in his shoulder, soaking his sleeve with her tears.

While they'd been searching for Joby, she had told Ben all about seducing Joby after prom, and how horrified she'd been afterward at what she'd done. He'd been tempted several times to tell her of the marriage plans Joby had confided in him that morning, but he knew those were not his to tell, and certainly not under these circumstances. What unbelievably sucky timing.

"I wanted him to love me, Ben," she wept. "I wanted us to stay together. But I . . ." For a moment she simply shook with sobs. "I didn't want to trick him into anything!"

"Shhhh," Ben said, hugging her even tighter. "He loves you, Laura. He told me so. When we got to school this morning, he said he was going to . . . to go find you and talk." His hand came up to wipe Laura's tears away. He kissed her cheek where they had been, then kissed the top of her head. She looked up at him, so near, so hurt, so desperate for comfort . . . and somehow, it was her lips that his brushed next. She looked startled, but did not protest or pull away. Instead, she seemed to hold her breath, gazing at him uncertainly when he leaned back at last. Ben knew what he had done was wrong, but Joby had left Laura here with no one to turn to except . . . except . . . Laura leaned up and kissed him again, as if testing some confusing, utterly unexpected hypothesis.

"Well, screw me blind! Looky here!"

Laura jumped convulsively in Ben's arms as he whirled around, slamming his arm painfully on the steering wheel. Johnny Mayhew's face was practically pressed against the driver's window.