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help him.
    “Touch my back,” Deacon said. “Don’t break contact until I’ve reaped him, and then we’ll go immediately.”
    Ruth placed her open palm against Deacon’s black scrub top. Deacon reached his glowing hands forward and made contact with her ghost father, whose shape shimmered and dissolved into a glittering gray stream. When Deacon inhaled, what was left of her father flowed forward into him through his sternum, vanishing like water down a drain. Her hand grew cold and painful against his back, but she didn’t let go. Deacon shuddered and consumed her father. When he turned to look at her, his blue-green eyes were icy gray.
    “Let’s go.”
    Deacon stepped off the grave and pulled Ruth into an embrace after surveying the road to make sure no one else was headed their way.
    “Hold on.”
    He reached out and placed his hand on top of the headstone.
    The headstones and the entire cemetery shimmered, and she lost the vertical hold on her vision as everything began to swirl into a vortex around her.
    I’m going to be sick.
    She closed her eyes and waited for it to pass as they spun and slid down, down, down.

Chapter Five
    Ruth opened her eyes to complete and utter chaos. There were creatures everywhere. She would have been hard-pressed to prove most of them were now or ever had been human. It was like the cantina scene in
Star Wars
without the fun band. Ruth’s mouth gaped open. It was dark, foggy and damp in the long underground chamber where they’d landed, like some kind of subterranean cave. She’d never seen anything like it.
    It was a depot of sorts, it seemed, and there were long tunnels crisscrossing every which way, disappearing into the stone walls. Her mouth still agape, Ruth followed Deacon into what appeared to be the main hall, where the floors and ceilings were also rough stone, and light from an unseen source flowed down through strategically positioned skylights along the ceiling. Reapers were everywhere: men and women but also a disturbing number of…well,
monsters
was the word that came to mind.
    There was so much to take in that it was overwhelming. Chiseled placards demarked the top of each tunnel in a language she didn’t understand. And at each end of the main channel, huge platforms rose above the fray. Sitting on stone thrones upon the platforms were two very similar-looking men who looked like angels, complete with flowing purple robes and wings.
    Deacon took her hand and dragged her along behind him. “Keep up.”
    “Don’t worry.”
    She did
not
want to be down here alone, wherever here was. They rushed through the throng of creatures, large and small, human and otherwise, toward the opposite end of the channel and the angel who was sitting there. They were almost there when someone called out behind them.
    “Walker? What the hell? I thought you would have cashed in by now,” the man said. Deacon spun around, pushing Ruth behind him.
    “Kylen,” Deacon said, grimacing and barely containing his obvious disgust. He clearly wasn’t happy to see the guy. “I’ve been…occupied.”
    “I can see that,” he said, leaning over to give Ruth a slimy once-over look. “Who is she?”
    “We’re bringing in a sleeper,” Deacon said, changing the subject.
    “A sleeper? Wonder how I missed that one?”
    “It doesn’t matter,” Deacon said, forging ahead.
    “Put up a good fight at least?” Kylen asked with inappropriate enthusiasm.
    “What are you doing down here? Have you grown tired of your ride?”
    “Oh, no. I just like to keep a finger on the pulse of things. Network. Mingle.” He winked, then directed a disturbing smile Ruth’s way.
    “Right.” Deacon pulled Ruth away from Kylen, leading her the last few paces to the platform.
    A line of mixed creatures wound in front of them. Ruth had no idea what some of them were. Of the ten or so in front of them, two looked passably human. The rest were all variety of sizes and degrees of grotesqueness. One great