The desert, far from Caldwell, NY, or Boston, MA, or... sanity. Some two years after the fact, when Jim Heron was no longer in special ops, he would reflect that Isaac Rothe, Matthias the Fucker, and he, himself, had all changed their lives the night that bomb went off in the sand. Of course, at the time, none of them knew what it all meant, or where it was all going. But that was life: Nobody got a guided tour to their own theme park. You had to hop on the rides as they presented themselves, never knowing whether you would like the one you were in line for... or if the bastard was going to make you throw up your corn dog and your cotton candy all over the place. Maybe that was a good thing, though. As if back then he would have believed he'd end up duking it out with a demon, trying to save the world from damnation? Come on. But that night, in the dry cold that washed in the second the sun went down over the dunes, he and his boss had walked into a minefield... and only one had walked out. The other? Not so much... Crave "This is it," Matthias said as they came up to an abandoned village that was the color of the caramel on a Friendly's sundae. They were fifteen miles northwest from where they were staying in a