“Some bargains are just too good to pass up.”

An unsatisfied growl rumbled out of Reyes’s chest. Giving up for now, he said, “You need to fix this.”

Michael admired the surroundings once again. “Clean up your own mess.”

“For old time’s sake,” Reyes said.

In an instant the world was back where it belonged. The windows stood fully intact. The coffee cups rested on their respective tables. People sat talking and laughing as though their cook hadn’t just sealed a blood pact with an archangel to cast gods out of their world.

I glanced around for Reyes, then looked through the pass-out window. He was behind the grill, cooking, as if nothing had happened. My mouth formed a perfect O. Had I just hallucinated everything?

When Reyes glanced at me from underneath his lashes before reaching up to the spice rack, I knew that it had all been real. A huge gash ran the length of his arm. I hadn’t imagined anything. I inched backwards to the front doors as what I’d done came rushing back.

I’d gotten angry and risked the lives of my best friends? I was some sort of time bomb that would eventually collapse the universe? God – the God – wanted me dead? What kind of monster was I? Reyes stopped what he was doing. Gauged my emotions. Saw the fear in my eyes. Just as he started after me, I burst out the door and took off.

I thought of nothing but running. Nothing but getting away from people before I hurt someone. The otherworld raged around me as I ran. Its wind blistered my skin and scorched my lungs. I shook out of it and fought to stay in the tangible world, where it had just started to snow.

I kept running, my legs pushing forward as though they had an unlimited source of energy. The last time I tried to run, I got half a block and almost keeled over.

This was not me. This was the being Michael wanted dead. The one God wanted off His planet.

Slowing to a stop, I fell to my knees and panted. My breaths made puffs of white fog in the air, and my jeans were wet from the snow.

Then the wind scorched me again. I looked down at my arms. At my hands. Blisters started to bubble on my skin. The wind began to peel it off my muscle. I let out a quick scream and scrambled back. I forced myself to snap out of it, to find the snow again, the snow and the freezing wind that I’d complained about for weeks. But something dive-bombed me, and I couldn’t tell from which world it came. It happened again, and I huddled on the ground. Was it a bird? A spiritual being?

I squinted and focused on the sparrow trying to protect its nest. I seemed to be teetering on the razor’s edge between two worlds, unable to get a foothold in either.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and flinched.

“Janey,” a male voice said. “What’s going on? Did you take something?”

Ian. It was Ian.

“I need to go home,” I said, near panic.

He stood and looked around. “How did you get up here?”

“Where?” When I took in my surroundings, I realized we were on top of a mountain peak, looking down at the city. “I need to get back to town. I need to get home.” When he didn’t say anything, I asked, “Can you take me?”

He helped me to his patrol car. “Are you working?” I asked him. He was in uniform.

“Just got off. Hold on.”

He went to his trunk, rummaged around, and came back with a bottle of water.

“You’re dehydrated.”

We started down the steep and curving roads, over the Hudson and toward Sleepy Hollow.

“What were you doing up there?” he asked me for the tenth time.

I was getting a better grip on the worlds around me, more able to keep one on one side and the other on the other. I just needed sleep. The edges of my vision blurred, and by the time we hit the highway, I was out.

I awoke to cabinet doors banging and a cup breaking in my kitchen, but I was in my empty bathtub with all my clothes on and no memory of how I got there.

“You don’t have a drop of alcohol,” Ian said as he stormed into the minuscule room. “What the hell?”

“Ian, what are you doing?” I put my hands on either side of my head to try to stop the room from spinning. Or at least I tried to. They flopped past my face and fell to my lap. I had zero muscle control.

I tried to look at Ian but couldn’t lift my head.

“What were you doing up there?”

“I went for a run. Ended up at the top of that mountain. Why? Do you own it?”

My words were slurred, but he seemed to understand me okay.

“I have… friends up there.”

“You don’t have any friends.” I giggled, an embellishment he did not appreciate.

“You’re just like all the other fucking bitches.”

I might not have known a lot about my previous life, but I was pretty sure I didn’t like being called a bitch.

“You’re all just teases and whores until you get what you want, then you’re on to the next sucker that you can stand to fuck long enough to get what you want.”

“We never had sex,” I reminded him. He didn’t appreciate that either.

He knelt beside me. “If I could knock the shit out of you, I would, and trust me when I say I’d enjoy it.”

“I’m having trust issues today.”

“This is where I made my mistake with Tamala. Nobody gets it right the first time, you know. They hesitate.” He made tiny marks on my skin, some shallow and a couple much deeper. “They chicken out. Then…” He sank the knife into my wrist.

The pain cut through to my marrow. Blood dripped down the side of the tub and onto my pants. My head lolled back, and I hit the spigot.

He grabbed a handful of my hair. “Be careful,” he said with a hiss. “Any other mark will cast doubt on a suicide ruling.”

“Sorry,” I said. Whatever he’d given me made this entire situation seem a little funny. This would make the third time today someone, or something, had tried to kill me.

I snorted as he worked on my other wrist. He made fewer marks on that one because he said once they make the first cut, their adrenaline is going and they’re better with the second one. So that was good to know for future reference.

“My first one is up there,” he told me. “On the mountain. I go up there to talk to her sometimes.”

“That’s so nice.”

He finished slicing into my wrists and sank on the floor beside me. “Her name was Janet. I didn’t try to make hers look like suicide or anything, so I had to bury her. The constant weight of that, of someone finding her body and some stupid little mistake I made leading the investigators back to me… It puts a lot of stress on me.”

When my head lolled back again, he pulled it forward. “Careful, damn it. I told you, any other mark will cast suspicion.”

“Any mark?”

“Any mark.”

“Like this?” I asked and lifted my arm.

The look of utter disbelief on his face when I showed him what I’d scratched into my skin made me burst out laughing. His mouth did a fish thing when he read, Ian was here, and I doubled over.

Seriously, this day just got better and better.

He grabbed a handful of my hair, twisted his fingers into it, then – in an act I felt was a bit much – slammed my face against the rim of the tub. My head bounced back, and a blindingly sharp pain shot through me. He did the face-slam thing a few more times. Eventually it stopped hurting, so there was that.