the injuries appear as though from nowhere, the blood and the bruising covering him, while Tucker could barely stand.
But that was his body.
His spirit was strong here, and he kept holding, kept his arms locked, until Conklin’s struggles weakened.
“What’s it going to be?” Tucker asked, his voice muffled by the blood but still sound.
“My hatred will never die,” Conklin rasped.
Tucker stood, dropping Conklin’s body on the mat.
“Then the heat from your anger will forge this place more tightly together,” he said sadly. “You could have had peace. Warmth and sleeping in the sun. You’ll have the coldness of iron, the cruelty of silver, the absolute mercilessness of gold. Just remember—it was your choice this time. What happened in the stable, that was wrong, that was against your will. What happened later, with your father—that was worse. But this? You chose this. You chose to inflict that on Sophie. You chose your afterlife.”
Tucker met Angel’s eyes with his own and winked.
“What you can’t change, you need to live with, Conklin. Or die with, if it’s your time.”
Angel stepped back then and hovered, looking around him at the darkening sky. Rae and Josh were still there, staring anxiously at Tucker, and Angel was so grateful for other humans he could have cried.
“Tucker,” he called. “Tucker!”
Tucker’s body broke free from the circle, leaving Conklin’s fading soul in the center, lying on the ground. The broken boy had become a powerful man, but that power had been a lie. What was left was a shell, the twisting headless snake, the defeated wrestler who couldn’t get up.
If Conklin’s soul were to bother anybody ever again, it would be as a particularly lowly toxic worm, one that could be crushed underneath a sneaker or driven over by a car—or salted like a slug by a child’s laughter.
James Beaufort had been right. Conklin had lost to his abusers the moment he became one, and now he’d lost to his own malice, his pitiful spirit writhing in the dust.
Angel didn’t care about him anymore.
Tucker had been facing the dirt road when he stepped into the pentacle, and when he’d stumbled, he’d stumbled backward.
Straight into the crowd of waiting ghosts.
Even Angel recognized Damien, his face pulled back in a rictus of triumph as Tucker delivered himself to his worst nightmare.
“Oh no. No! Tucker!”
Tucker looked at Damien, and the self-possession he’d shown in the face of Conklin’s evil disintegrated. His mouth twisted and trembled, and the strength that had held him up through it all crumbled.
“Damie,” he cried and sank helplessly to his knees.
The Unsullied Souls of Men
“DAMIE!”
Oh, everything hurt. Tucker’s body was one big throbbing mortal pain. His nose was going to explode through his brain. But he’d do it all again, throw himself in a car and charge a brick wall, if he could escape the fury on Damien’s face.
“I’m sorry,” he sobbed, at a loss. Rae and Josh were fine. Conklin was vanquished. There was only Tucker and his ghosts, and Tucker had been alone for so long.
“Ouch!” There was something burning in his pocket. He recoiled from the fury of the ghosts surrounding him, closer and closer, and reached into his pocket to see what it was.
James Beaufort’s button was cool to his fingers, but he swore he’d have the print of that damned sailing ship tattooed forever on his thigh.
“Dammit,” he muttered. “I promised.”
“Who’d you promise?”
Tucker looked up, into the ghostly twisted face of the man he’d loved since boyhood.
And Damien Columbus looked back curiously.
Gone were the tatters of flesh remaining after the bullet destroyed his head.
Gone was the recrimination of the vengeful spirits.
In their place was just… Damien.
Happy-go-lucky Damien, whose life had always seemed charmed, and whose smile had gotten Tucker through his worst days.
“I promised someone I’d help him find his way home,” Tucker muttered, wiping his bandaged wrist under his eyes, carefully avoiding his nose.
“Well, if you promised them, you need to follow through,” Damien said seriously. “I mean, I used to get mad at you, right?”
“You did?” Tucker asked, lost and drifting.
“Yeah. You’d never promise you could meet me, never promise we could do something. You didn’t want to disappoint me if you couldn’t make it.”
“I wanted to make it, so bad,” he whispered.
Damien fell to his knees on the dirt in front of Tucker. “I know that now,” he said.
“Then why are you, and the others, so angry?” He let out a sigh and slumped into the earth a little more. “You’ve been scaring the hell out of me, Damie.”
Damien’s