Grim had just let go of my mind, but he returned like a boomerang thrown by an angry vamp.

Lady Luck, whatever she might have been or not, was not a physical being, as such. My mundane sense, sharp as they were, hadn't noticed her. But even when I tried my aura sight, it was just as bad-even worse, it was like staring into a floodlight. I couldn't perceive any true color, either, which had never happened before. Her aura, if it could even be called that, was a blinding, all-pervading white, nothing like a vampire's white soul. No, this was more like an angel's true form, but orders of magnitude greater.

Well, I suppose it made sense. If she wasn't really the embodiment of luck, she was doing a damn good job at looking it.

"Fancy meeting you here!" Dead Boy said, stepping towards her, smiling broadly, hand outstretched, like he met abstract beings everyday. And who knew? Maybe he did, in the Nightside. "Are you here to sell lucky charms? I had some rabbit's feet recently, but I think I ate them."

Lady Luck smiled hesitatingly at Dead Boy, glancing at us from the corner of her eye. I shrugged, and Jason chuffed softly. "Sadly, I don't have any on my...person. But, how would you feel if your wound miraculously healed themselves?"

And just as she said that, Dead Boy's body, covered in stitches and patches and duct tape, flowed like water. In a few moments, he looked as good as new, like he'd just died.

It says something about my life that I'm used to sentences like that.

Dead Boy looked down at himself, as if he couldn't believe it. When he looked back at Lilith, his smile was decidedly less friendly. "That was nice. Very nice. Now, may I ask why you did it? As far as I know, we've just met, and I haven't done you any favor."

Lady Luck smiled back, and it looked faker than his. "Is it so hard to believe I would want to thank a man who has just defended the Nightside's way of life?"

Dead Boy laughed hollowly. "Good one, Lady. Now, pull the other one. It plays show tunes." Dead Boy's smile disappeared, and his dark eyes turned steely. "I didn't do shit to defend anything. I got tied up with a couple of bully boys, then did exactly jack while that ink-blot impaled the Nightguard's Captain in front of my damn eyes. And if you knew anything about me," Dead Boy continued in a dangerous tone. "You'd know I didn't come back from the dead so I couldn't do things."

By now, Lady Luck's smile had faded, as had the friendly look in her eyes. Her body became less and less substantial, like she was sliding out of reality, until she disappeared.

"What's your problem?" Jason asked, walking to Dead Boy and putting a hand on his shoulder. "I won't have you beating yourself up because you couldn't help me-it was my own damn fault for getting blindsided. There was no need to get up in her face for-"

"Damn it, couldn't you feel it?" Dead Boy asked hotly, shrugging Jason's hand off. "I've been around Transient Beings before, alright? And, as pants-shittingly terrifying each of them was, none of them felt actively threatening. She...she felt like poison in honey, like a knife in velvet."

"What do you mean?" I asked, moving closer to the two of them.

Dead Boy shook his head. "I'm dead. I can see far more than the living can, for my sins. I don't know if it's instinct, insight, or something else, but she-"

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Dead Boy's next words were drowned out by a tide of shrieking darkness. It came out of nowhere, spinning me head over heels, tearing and burning at my skin like steel covered in acid. I couldn't see anything, couldn't hear anything but the darkness. Grim snarled in my mind, trying stop our body from being ragdolled, to get a snapshot of our surroundings. It didn't work.

Snarling, I covered myself in aura, and it was like slipping into a pocket of air underwater. Oh, I still couldn't sense anything, but at least I didn't feel like I was being peeled alive while getting tossed around like a brick in a washing machine.

I Pushed myself downwards, until I felt my aura-edged feet tearing into the floor, and Posted myself there. The tide of darkness shrieked and roared for a few more seconds, then pulled back.

It drew away from me, gathering into a sphere of roiling darkness and floating above me. Blood and Bone's office was almost gone: no more walls, and the floor was covered in tears and holes, but it still somehow held together. Guess it was built to last.

Through the holes in it, I could see the first floor, where my friends' bodies had fallen. Jason looked like he'd been put through a woodchipper, patches of blue fur torn away to reveal shredded muscle...which healed itself even as I watched.

Dead Boy, on the other hand, hadn't been nearly as lucky. His miraculously-healed body had been ripped to shreds, and I had a feeling he wouldn't be stitching himself together anytime soon. Even his head had been split in half.

One half of his head, with a crushed forehead and swollen eye, somehow moved itself to look up at me.

"Chris," it mouthed. "Look above you."

I did, and promptly wished I was hallucinating. The night sky, filled with thousands of stars and an immense moon, was barely-visible due to the countless dark angels flying across it. Each looked the match of the one we'd sent packing back to Hell, and there were so many of them...

But none came at me. Instead, they descended to the streets on dark wings, ripping buildings to pieces or blowing them apart through sheer force of will. Some of them fell upon the people in the streets, slaughtering them, or carrying them up in the sky, to do unspeakable things to them.

The Nightguard surged forth to meet them. Thousands and thousands of people, in the armored uniforms devised by Jason, took aim at the sky with rifles, energy guns and other, stranger things. Some of them-combat magicians, by the tattoos on their faces-raised their hands and began throwing curses, or weaving spells that made the angels crash from the sky like their wings had been severed.

Some of them weren't humans. I saw vampires, werewolves and less identifiable beings stepping up to meet the soldiers of Hell with equal ferocity. Frankenstein creatures, stitched bodies bulging with muscle, hefted giant crucifixes, the ends sharpened like spears, and impaled the angels that came close to them, or threw them into the air like javelins, smashing their targets into buildings or knocking them out of the sky.

And yet, they were losing,

I saw Nightguards torn apart by the dark angels' incredible strength, burned to ash by their blades or blown into dust by black thunderbolts.

I didn't know why the dark angels were here, or why they were attacking the Nightside, but I could not let the Nightguard fight alone.

I covered myself with aura, and leapt into the fray.