"Well, it wasn't only that," Marcus admits as he takes a mouthful of eggs. "I had a long history of doing whatever the hell I wanted, orders from the Church be damned. They were concerned about my mental state, between the threat, my tendency to disappear and- well, I'd lost someone not long before. A young boy. The first one I'd ever lost and I wasn't taking it well."

St. Aquinas, the home for broken priests. That's where they'd sent him and where he'd stayed for months on end, drawing and dwelling and sinking into a blacker and blacker hole inside his heart.

He tries not to think about the sound Dan makes when he begins to eat and instead asks, "She's powerful? A girl like that..." He imagines she might be in danger. "How old is she?"