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SAINT JOHN CAME SLOWLY OUT OF THE FOREST AND STOOD AT THE EDGE of the plateau. The crashed steel angel lay where it had died two years ago. The gray wanderers who had been the crew of the plane still hung from their posts.
Everything was as it should be.
He bent and studied the ground, but there was no easy story to read. The top shelf of the plateau was mostly flat rock, baked hard by the sun and unable to take a footprint. The tracks of the two teenagers had petered out a quarter mile back, and now Saint John was unsure if he had come the right way.
He looked up at the open hatch. Had they gone up into the thing?
He smiled and shook his head, dismissing that level of heresy in children so young. They would not remember airplanes anyway—they’d grown up in a world without such machines. Or . . . mostly without them.
He walked to the base of the plastic sheeting and gave it an experimental tug.
It was solid enough, and he debated climbing up, but he dismissed the idea. There was nowhere to go in there, no reason to try. If the children had been real flesh and bone, then they would surely die up there. If they were, as Saint John suspected, merely spiritual beings pretending to be human teenagers, then they would have no need to enter the shrine.
What would be the upshot if he were to go up and look for himself?
Apart from the direct insult to Mother Rose, whose shrine this was, it would surely be viewed as a lack of faith on his part.
These children had tried to tempt him into an act of transgression. A sin. He smiled.
It was a clever trap, but his faith was stronger than his curiosity. His faith was his armor and his sword.
A sound distracted him—the roar as a quad motor started—and he walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down to see which of his reapers was down there.
Saint John froze, his breath catching in his throat.
What he saw was not any of his people.
Instead he saw a big man buckling a girl—another teenager—onto the back of an idling quad. The girl was a complete stranger.
The man, however, was not.
Nor was the monstrous mastiff who stood wide-legged beside the machine, its body clad in chain mail and spikes.
Oh, he certainly knew this man.
This sinner.
This kind of heretic.
He mouthed the man’s name. “Joe.”
Saint John’s hand strayed to the handle of his favorite knife, hidden as it was beneath the folds of his shirt.
And then he understood.
The two teenagers he had followed had manifested on earth only partly to test his faith, and he had passed that test here at the Shrine of the Fallen. But they had a higher purpose, and one that was of great importance to the reapers and their cause.
Saint John now knew where Joe was.
Joe, however, did not know that Saint John of the Knife, the man he had tried to kill so many times, crouched on the edge of a cliff not a hundred feet above where he stood.
Joe knew the secrets of Sanctuary. If those secrets could be wrested from him, then they could be used to destroy Sanctuary. And oh how it needed to be destroyed. Not just for the evil that it represented, but also because of the temptation it offered to the corrupt.
Like Mother Rose.
Saint John knew full well that if his dear Mother Rose were to reach Sanctuary first—reach it and take it—then she would become a great and terrible threat. To him, to the will of God. She would become the dark queen of this world, and if Saint John could not prevent that, then God would turn his back on him and close the pathway to darkness forever.
The key to all of it was the ranger named Joe.
