Some days she even thought she hated them. They were always there, always clamoring for her attention. The dead were with her when she went to sleep and when she woke. To be able to turn it off, just for a day. To have some peace, when they weren't watching her, when they didn't need her.

But it wasn't for her to decide. Spirits wanted what spirits wanted. She could feel the call now and it was too powerful to ignore.

She realized something that she had forgotten, long ago, when she'd seen her son dying beneath a car's wheels, his body shattered, his face in agony, and known such terrible guilt that she'd wanted to die.

Too much of a coward to do it, though. She couldn't face being one of the lost dead herself. There were things left unsaid, things left undone. She'd had a good life, maybe, to that point. But with such a weight of guilt she knew there'd be no solace for her beyond the grave. Just an eternity spent trying to pay it back.

She was afraid to die. It should have been a comfort, to know that there was a world after death. But not for her. It would be denied her, like so many of the spirits she saw. She'd walk the earth in chains until the end of time. Until the rapture, maybe, when the spirits of the earth were free.

But how long would that be and how much longer could she deny it? Tonight, she would meet her death. He was coming for her. The Devil himself.

There was no denying that. And she was afraid because death meant an eternity after her body was torn beyond repair.

There was one chance. They were screaming at her to come back to her calling. To stop serving herself and serve a greater purpose.

She didn't want to. She wanted to run and run and keep on running until she had no breath left and her lungs burned. She'd give it all right now to be someone else.

But she wouldn't run. She couldn't.

Gregory Sawyer had been found and now he was dead, but she was sure it wasn't the end the spirits wanted.

They were calling for her death.

Maybe by serving she could wipe some of the guilt away. Atone.

Maybe she would just die, and the spirits would take revenge for the evil she had done.

Did it matter when she had no choice?

When every choice ended with her death, what did it matter? Nothing. She could not avoid it. Once, she might have welcomed it, but now it held only terror.

And yet spirits had a hand in this. They had an interest in this that she didn't understand.

The only way she would find out was if she let them in, one more time. Let them show her what they wanted. Give her the future. Give her the strength to face the Devil and see the true face of the killer.

No choice at all.

She lowered her left foot into the freezing water, gasped at the sudden, stunning cold on her bare foot.

No choice.

She laid back on the bed and invited them in.

Chapter Fifty-Six.

Beth drifted in a state that was neither asleep nor awake. Some place other than her body, high above, in the air or in that space between the solid world and the world of mist where spirits wait, beyond the reach of time and space, no gravity, no barriers. A place where you could go as you will.

Beth didn't know where she wanted to go, or where she needed to go. She had a thousand questions but nowhere to start.

But the spirits offered a guiding hand.

She was led in some sense she didn't understand. One moment, or maybe hours, days, years, she was lost in the mist and then it cleared away as a morning fog will do when the sun hits it.

She was in a basement somewhere, filled with unnatural light. Heads adorned the walls, and the part of her that was still tethered to her body felt the horror of the place. Spirits insulated her from the worst of it, so she could bear witness.

The center of the room became clear, pulled her focus down.

A man checked some bags of clear liquid hanging from a metal pole with hooks branching out from the top.

It was clearly the killer. She knew his face. She knew those hands, so nimble and clever.

He lay down on crisp white sheets surround by the heads of those he'd murdered.

The killer radiated power. His body was strong and well muscled. He was naked, and some part of her appreciated him for what he was. He was perfection, at the height of his strength, in the prime of life.

But there was a darkness surrounding him, something unknowable, a core of him that spirits' vision could not penetrate.

His secret self. Something more than a man.

Surrounded by the dead, watched by them, he lay down and inserted the tubes carefully into a cannula in the back of his hand. His preparations were meticulous. No mistakes, because this was the culmination of his purpose.

He turned a small tap, a spigot, and the fluid was released. She saw his eyes close, his breathing slow.

Time shifted and she saw his body wither and the dark core of him grow, becoming stronger. Spirits could not bear the darkness. It would pull them into its vortex.

It was pure evil.

Suddenly, jarring her senses, she was further in the past. She saw him sitting at a table in a grand dining room above the death room, at a thick mahogany table. Silverware laid precisely at a table set for one.

There was no accomplice. She understood that now. Everything that had been done had been done by him.

He was young, but he was old, too. His strength and power came from something else. A ritual meal, laid before him.

He wasn't mortal, even in this form. He couldn't be. On a plate before him a heart rested. He picked up a fork and speared it, then cut off a chunk with a sharp knife. He had to saw at it, as the heart was tough. It wasn't an animal heart, and it was raw.

Revulsion floated away as the mist enveloped her once again.

Warmth filled her as the mist next drifted from her eyes and she saw Peter. Her emotions where stunted in this world of mist, but she could still feel something tugging at her.

She saw through Miles' eyes and could understand Miles' love of his father perfectly, even though it was a kind of understanding born of pure intellect rather than emotion.

Miles was saying goodbye in the only way he could. He put a hand on his father's hand and squeezed. Peter couldn't see his son, but Beth knew from the tears in her ex-husband's eyes that he had felt the touch, knew who it was, even if he didn't know what it meant.

Beth wished she didn't know. She didn't want to see their goodbye or understand the meaning of it.

Even insulated here in the world between worlds, that hurt, right to her core. She almost tumbled back to her body. She'd seen enough. She knew enough.

But the spirits weren't done with her.

Some things could never be understood, like the nature of the man that was coming to kill her. The spirits' purpose in showing her these things, with no answers, was as much a mystery to her as the man himself.

Faith, they sighed as they showed her the last thing that she needed to do.

She rebelled and pulled away with all her will.

Sat up in her body and cried.

Sometimes there were no answers. Not even the dead had the answers. Sometimes you had to guess and trust.

Faith was the hardest thing. Faith that when you died you would go to a better place than this. A world without guilt and pain and the terrible losses, those things taken away that could never be given.

Faith asked for sacrifice, but it was too much. Faith asked too much of her. No less than everything she had left. They wanted it all.

But she owed them. When the Devil came for her, it would be what she deserved.

She owed the spirits, and the Devil's price would be what she paid.

Chapter Fifty-Seven.

Mooney left Coleridge at the door. A cigarette dangled from his bottom lip, waiting for a light.

"I've seen him already," he said. "Once is enough. I'm going back to the station."

Coleridge checked his watch. His partner's watch. 1:45. He was cutting it fine. But he needed to see this.

It might make a difference and it might not. But he had to see. Needed to understand what kind of man could kill all those people and then kill himself, surrounded by such nightmares.

He pushed the clinically cold door open, and for the second time in less than a week Coleridge looked down at a body on a cold metal table.

Freeman looked up at him. His usually stern expression was gone. In its place was a look that Coleridge didn't like on the pathologist's face.

Confusion.

He looked at the body and wondered if he wore the same expression as Freeman.

"Weird, isn't it?"

"I don't understand."

"Me either. I'm stumped. I'm not often stumped. I know my job, but I've never seen anything like this. I don't know where to begin."

Gregory Sawyer's body was a withered mess. Sores covered his body, his ribs showed stark through his chest. His bone's structure gave a hint of what he must have been, like he was once a strong man. But all he'd left behind was a husk, bones held together by skin and sinew and nothing else. All muscle, all fat, was wasted away.

His eyes seemed massive in his shrunken face, and Coleridge got chills, imagining that somehow Sawyer's corpse watched him. He could imagine him sitting up, right now, and pointing a finger. Telling Coleridge he was going to cut his feet off, cut his head off, use it to...

He didn't need to go there.

Sawyer's mouth gapped open. Coleridge peered inside. His teeth were corroded, down to yellowed stubs. Like an old man's, worn thin by long years of living.

Sawyer's nails were long and yellowed and thick, too.

There was more. His hair, receded, was almost white. His body hair had turned white. His face was old, the skin sagging so much Coleridge couldn't discern wrinkles, but he knew they were there. There were liver spots, and the joints poking through the skin were twisted, somehow, like someone with bad arthritis. His knuckles were twisted in, his knee joints swollen.

Coleridge couldn't help but notice the dead man's penis. It was massive and thick, but even in death the killer's scrotum was sagging. He remembered one of the old wits on the force when he'd joined, saying you knew you were getting old when your balls hung in the toilet bowl instead of your cock.

Wished his mind would just shut down, right now.

Everything about Sawyer said he was an old man. Very old. And yet they had checked and double checked. He was thirty-four years old. There was no doubt.

"How can this be?"

"I don't know. The skin is sagging like that because he's been starved. The muscles have wasted and left excess skin. But the rest couldn't happen. The body would eat itself, if starved for long enough. But it wouldn't age. I haven't cut him open yet, but the body appears to be in advanced old age. I'd say in the eighties. Maybe the nineties. This is the body of an old man. There can only be some mistake with the identification. It's the only explanation."

"Would his organs give some kind of clue? Could he have something like, I don't know, an aging disease?"

"There's a disease that causes premature ageing, but that presents itself early, and he wouldn't have developed fully. You can see from the bone structure, the width of the shoulders, the pelvis, the thickness of the wristsa"he was once a powerful man. To have cut off people's heads must have taken great strength. In one blow. There's no doubt about it. A young man might have the strength to do that, but not a man this old."

"I don't get it. I thought I'd get some answers. But all I've got are more questions."

Freeman shrugged.

"Sorry, Coleridge, but join the club. I've got no answers. Just a body on my table that doesn't make sense. You want to hang around while I cut him open?"

Coleridge checked his watch again. 2:00 PM.

To stay would be cutting it too close. Dark wouldn't be far away, and he had a drive ahead of him.

"I've got to go," he said, shaking his head. He couldn't take his eyes off Sawyer's corpse.

"Please yourself."

"If you find anything in the meantime, give me a call. Anything that makes sense."

"I will. But I don't think this is going to make sense. I'd almost want to write it up for a journal, but I fear I'd just be laughed at."

"Sit on the results for a while."