Fundamentally, Angel knew her opponents weren't real. Sadie already described the way Nijah could appear in dreams, and Nijah herself confirmed this was just a way to settle what had escalated into their feud. But knowledge of that didn't matter—Angel still felt the pain of each fist that caught her upside the face and each slash that frayed her costume. Her bones still threatened to snap when she caught the giant's sword swings head on with her own blade. And their voices—more than anything else, she knew the voices of all these sinister illusions.

Angel sidestepped a pair of strikes from the tallest, most muscular enemy and the tiny, slim, horn headed demon at his side. But when she did, she fell right in range for the lithe, feminine shadow to rush forward with a thrust of her sword. Angel caught the slash with her katana, her heart raced as she met the attacker eye to eye.

"I never even wanted you," Lady Shiva said. "You cling so desperately to that faith of yours because you can't face the reality. No one great and benevolent made you, Cassandra. I made you, and I didn't shed a tear for what I knew your father would do to you."

"Shut up." Angel threw Shiva off with a yank of her sword and took a slash. The phantom dissipated into smoke, and for a passing moment she felt sick to her stomach. Had she just killed her? No, this was just a dream, it wasn't—she couldn't—

The giant she'd slipped from for a moment whirled around and smashed Angel in the neck with a lariat. She uttered a pained shout as she fell backwards and hit the ground. With a pair of wings extending out of his back and a sword wrapped in black fire, the Seraphim planted a boot on her chest and knelt down.

"You're no different than me." He spoke with a sneer. "Your convictions are only real when it's convenient." The Seraphim leaned in closer and raised his sword for a stab. "You expected so little of yourself, and you gave into whoredom anyway!"

The Seraphim drove the sword forward. Angel clapped her hands and caught the blade. Instantly her palms started to burn, but with a grit in her teeth she turned first to one side, then rolled to the other, knocking the giant off balance as she pushed back to her feet.

"Not real," she said. "Real Daniel Leibowitz is in a hospital. He's getting help. He's doing better."

"Is that the little lie that helps you sleep at night?" he asked. "Someday I will convince them to free me, and I'll rip you apart, just like this."

The Seraphim took a run toward her. With a hard, pained swallow, Angel leapt over his strike, raised her sword high, and cleaved him down the middle, head to gut. Unlike Shiva, he did not go quietly, a thunderous, distorted scream escaped his lips as the shadow dissipated to dark mist. The sound and sight made Angel's stomach churn, but she forced herself to whip around in search of one of the other phantoms before she could linger on it.

"What about me, little Angel?" The voice was tinged with a Russian accent. "Am I getting any better? How about him"

She turned her head just in time to catch a short sword through the side of her armor. A torrent of blood rushed upward and flowed out of Angel's mouth with a wheeze. She faced the horned demon and the snake-like man the with the shining scars on one cheek and the shimmer of a wide smile.

The demon—the Odmience—just glared at her with a pair of haunted, milk-white eyes.

"Rafal," she said. "Saved you. Taking care of you. Giving you a better life." Angel shoved the boy's sword arm aside and a lance of pain shot down her body as the bloody blade came free. Teeth clenched, she said, "You're not him."

"He's still just an animal, all he'll ever be. You can't give him a soul." Victor Lipov practically glided off the ground as he rushed and grabbed Angel by the throat with both hands. "And what about me? What do you have to say about me?"

"You—you had your chance—"

"And does that make you feel better? To think, 'He lived a wasted life, then he died. Thank God he's burning in Hell.'"

Angel clawed at his hands to try freeing herself from his grip. It wasn't right, she'd seen him in real life, he was a sniveling weakling who needed others to do his bidding. Yet pain ran up and down her neck as he threatened to cave in her windpipe. With some struggle she forced out, "Don't—believe in—Hell."

"Ah, such a relief—hear that, Zsasz? We get to go to heaven, like the good people we know we are!"

Lipov shifted his grip to a headlock and jerked Angel around to face the next phantom. All the silvery tally marks across his flesh meant he was as much light as he was shadow. Zsasz took slow, deliberate steps toward her as he absentmindedly fingered the knife in his hand. Angel kicked and struggled, desperate to slip from Lipov's grip as the next man approached, but it felt like the crazed assassin became implacable as stone.

"I don't think she really believes it," Zsasz said. "If there's no Hell there are no consequences. There is no justice." He took a step forward. Just seeing his face again made Angel's stomach roil, let alone hearing that quavering, unstable voice. Why weren't her struggles amounting to anything? Surely, she should be able to fight Lipov off. As Zsasz closed the distance, Angel cringed as he raised the knife and ran its dull edge along her cheek. "And there'd be no need for commandments like, 'Thou shall not kill.'"

With a forcing down of the bile that rose in her throat, Angel said, "It was wrong. I shouldn't have killed you."

Lipov let out a bark of laughter. "David—did you hear that, David? She's saying she's sorry for this one!"

Just before them, with his arms crossed, head downturned, and face little more than the white scar tissue of third-degree burns, David Cain stood. He said nothing, just watched her with eyes that bulged from tightened sockets and a mouth of rotting, exposed teeth.

"Did she tell her first kill she was sorry too?" Lipov asked. "What'd you pick out for her, David? Was he getting too close to the League's secrets? Was he a drug dealer no one would miss? Or was he a beloved father whose children never saw him again?"

With her eyes shut tight and a scream running through her head, Angel thrashed in Lipov's grip, but the madman's hold didn't loosen in the least.

"It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive." Shiva's voice suddenly returned. "Maybe he was serving the underworld to get out of debt to give his children a better life. But no one will ever remember that second detail."

"A shame." It was the Seraphim again. "There are some who try to do God's will by refusing to use violence at all. And some who kill to try destroying evil." His deep, resonant voice came closer with each sentence. "You're trapped here, serving two masters. What was it the Lord said about serving God and Mammon? A bit like the deep end of denial she digs herself into regarding that woman she fools around with."

Angel hadn't stopped struggling, but still Lipov's grip didn't slip. She started to shout her protests. "Not denial, not trying to justify! Did wrong, never stopped trying to do better. I—I—"

With his free hand, Lipov reached down and forced her eyelids open. "No slipping away now, little girl. Not when everyone's so happy to see you."

The desert from Nijah's memories they'd been fighting in was gone, in its place was a lavish, high-rise apartment. Whatever the charm of all the expensive trinkets on the wall and fine furniture was supposed to be was offset by the overturned table and papers strewn about. A struggle had taken place here. And, with her heart racing, Cassandra knew what.

"Stop!" All at once, her already ineffective kicks felt frail and tiny. "No—please—"

"Come on, girl. Be proud of your work." Lipov released the headlock only to thrust her forward into the room. All of her other waiting adversaries stood in a semicircle and looked down at a sight in front of the couch.

Cassandra turned to run, but one of them grabbed her by a pigtail she hadn't even realized was in her hair and yanked. She let out a cry far higher than any she'd uttered in years as she was pulled back. When she squinted with her eyes open and her head downturned, her blood ran cold when she recognized the pink dress she wore, and the splash of blood that ran down its center.

Zsasz, the one holding her hair, pushed her forward until she stood with her eyes down on the corpse in front of the couch. The body was older, bald, dressed in a white suit similarly turned crimson, like Cassandra's dress, like Cassandra's hands. At the sight, her tiny, eight-year-old legs buckled and she fell to her knees.

Shiva spoke first, "So much fuss. It wasn't even a clean kill."

"Odmience's first kill was far better than this, wasn't it, boy?" Lipov said.

The Seraphim spoke up. "She ran me all through with stained glass—brutal as it was blasphemous! If I could die, imagine what a corpse I would have left."

"She'd have dragged it out for me," Zsasz said. "It can take at least five minutes for strangulation to kill. Thank God her friend arrived and her rage flared—it sped up the—" he paused when a hideous bone crack interrupted him, "break in my neck."

Cassandra shut her eyes tight, slapped her hands over her ears, and grit her teeth. Whatever strength she'd had as Angel felt lost to her as she knelt in the middle of this horror again. She wanted to run, but her legs remained in place locked and worthless. Even with her ears covered, their words continued to cut like knives.

"I wonder if his loved ones ever knew she wasn't trying."

"Dead is dead, it doesn't matter what she tried to do."

"Heaven or Hell for this one, what do you think?"

"All she felt was darkness when she snuffed him out, surely that's all there is."

"Too stupid to have known any better, too weak to put it to any proper use. It's a shame I even brought her into this world."

The cacophony of voices only faded when a hand was laid on and started to rub Cassandra's shoulder. Tears in her eyes, unable to use her hands to shove it away, she turned and looked upward. David Cain, his face still mutilated with burn scars, looked down at her, solemn. "Don't listen to all their talk," he said. "You did good. And I'm so proud of you."

In a sudden burst, the feeling returned to Cassandra's lower body. Eyes shut tight again, she shoved Cain aside and ran. She couldn't see where she was going, surely she'd hit one of the apartment walls, but she didn't care, she just needed to be away from those monsters and their words. On and on she ran and knew she should have been stopped by something. Only when she forced her eyes into a wet squint did she feel and hear the shattering of glass and collapse to the ground.

"So many phantoms. So much real trauma. Your girlfriend wasn't nearly so impressive, you know."

Cassandra clenched her hands, which were half-buried in sand all of a sudden, and stood. Opposite her, with arms crossed and a scrutinizing glare, was Nijah again. With a look down at her hands, she realized her arms had grown and she wore her black gloves again, it seemed her body returned to its proper age during her escape.

Angel pushed back to her feet and looked around. She and Nijah stood on a beach with the sun caught at twilight. All around them, suspended in midair, were stained glass windows, as if the sand were the middle of a cathedral. Some of them were moments of her life; in one she sobbed as Barbara held her close, in another she caught Bruce in a tight embrace. Others were just people. Stephanie shimmered in one window, the vague reliefs of her Spoiler, Robin, and Batgirl costumes each stood like shadows behind her. Beside that glass stood Tim surrounded by swirls of red, green, and black. Sadie occupied another window, a paintbrush in hand, a smirk on her face, and an aurora of colors all shining above her. Nijah stood before the glass that bore Angel's personal sigil; the golden bat with the white cross down its center hung high and glowed bright over a city on a dark night.

"It looks like we've reached the core of your being." Nijah paused to admire a stained-glass window of Bruce casting a shadow in the shape of Batman. "It's a bit like a sanctuary. Those phantoms will have a much harder time troubling you in this place."

"But you're here," Angel said. "You still want to fight me."

"I couldn't reach your sanctuary without you opening the door. When you ran away, you let me in." Nijah flashed a satisfied smirk. "I've been in a few of these places done up like office buildings or mazes. There's no infrastructure in here at all. You really aren't a terribly complex creature, are you?"

"Really not." Angel opened her right palm and, again, her katana materialized. "Just a sinner trying to do better."

"Aren't we all." Nijah extended her hand, her own flaming sword emerged as if it was an extension of her being. "Some of us are just more willing to do the work that requires."

Angel wasn't even sure what pragmatic tricks she could try using to get the edge on a metaphysical plane. A few memories of marathoning some of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies with Stephanie came to mind, but it seemed like nobody ever really got the better of the killer in those. Nijah said they were inside her mind; she just had to fight and hope for a home-ground advantage.

Nijah ran toward her; when she came within striking distance, Angel took a slash, Nijah vanished as she did. Angel felt some of the hot breeze push past her ear. With a whip around, Angel raised her blade, cut off an overhead attack, and Nijah went invisible and intangible again a moment later. Angel's heartrate was already speeding—she'd never come up with a way to beat Nijah's teleportation. She needed to strategize—

Wind crossed her right cheek, Angel turned and parried another strike from Nijah, who disappeared as fast as she'd come again. Angel's mind raced for any proactive edge she could get her hands on. As the wind whipped past her right side again, a memory returned to her. Instead of facing the incoming attack, she turned on her heels and rushed for the edge of the water.

"Running now, are we?" Nijah's voice had gone wispy and ethereal. "Silly girl, this is a dream! Your own mind. You can't escape."

A gust pushed up from behind Angel, she leapt to her right, out of the way of Nijah's slash. Her next move—to dip her sword into the tide below, felt ridiculous. Years of training and understanding her surroundings told her this wouldn't work in reality.

But, as Nijah pointed out, they weren't in reality anymore.

Angel swung her sword in an arc around her body. Nijah had already vanished again, but reappeared and cried out in pain when a splash hit her body, the salt and water burning away at her transformed state. With a self-congratulatory mental Got you, Angel closed the distance between them and swung. Nijah tried to push back to her feet, but Angel's strike knocked her back down again with another shout. Desperate to hold onto her advantage, Angel threw attack after attack, anything to hold Nijah down would have to do. Nijah gripped her blade tight as Angel brought her sword up for another strike, and swung toward Angel's hand as she brought the weapon down.

Nijah's attack caused the sword to slip from Angel's grip. For a moment, Angel couldn't tell why, just that her hand suddenly felt numb.

Then came a furious explosion of pain as Angel's fingers split from the hand. The breath was stolen from her throat as she fell to her knees and, after another instant for the feeling to set in, screamed. Her moment of shocked agony was interrupted when Nijah rose, grabbed her by the neck, and threw her away from the water.

"Not a bad attempt to turn things around," Nijah said. "But you're not getting another chance like that."

Angel barely heard what was said, the trauma of her mutilated hand left her crumpling in the sand, her breaths clipped and her body convulsing. When she found strength enough for words, she looked up at Nijah and, after great struggle, asked, "Why?"

"Why? Why?" Nijah pulled back her foot. Angel braced for impact but still felt the sting of a hard-booted kick to her gut. "Because—you—cheated—me!" With her last shout, Nijah reared back and threw a kick into Angel's face. The beaten woman's nose burst and blood spilled out onto the sand. "I believed you would be good enough to see the light, I believed you were already so close, but you resisted me at every damned turn." Nijah dropped to one knee and another, smaller blade materialized in her hand. "We're on the cusp of a new world, one heralded by the bloodless anguish of the old one's sinners. And if I can't bring you to appreciate that now, then I can at least play my small part in ushering you into that pain." She swung the knife.

For an instant, Angel's vision ran red, then it disappeared into black. Another long, ragged, tortured shriek bubbled up from her throat.

When Nijah spoke next, she needed to raise her voice to be heard over the cries. "Trained to be the world's greatest assassin, left to wander until pity was taken upon you. And mistaking the care God confers on us for approval of all that wickedness that lies within you. Do I have all of that right?"

Angel still couldn't see anything, still felt only pain, and still felt trapped in place, quivering in the sand. It sounded like Nijah was preparing to attack again, she tried with all her might to roll away, but no part of her body would cooperate. All she could do was struggle and await her torment.

She still didn't believe in Hell. But if she were to imagine it, this seemed like the kind of twisted agony that went on there.

"Stripped of everything else, can you see yourself for what you truly are?

And, in spite of whatever it seemed Nijah was about to do, one tiny thought slipped through Cassandra's mind. It was a last grasp at keeping her fracturing mind in one piece, and a last struggle to deny the power this woman seemed to hold over her.

Both in her head and in her broken, raspy voice, Cassandra said, "Loved."

Nijah neither understood nor cared what was said. Even without her vision, Cassandra somehow sensed as she raised her sword for another slash.

In that same moment, a few drops of water hit Cassandra's face and let off tiny hisses from Nijah. When she saw the sky a few seconds before, there were no clouds to be seen, yet it felt and sounded like rain. And as it fell, her body seemed to have some tiny amount of mobility again. She felt the air displaced by the fall of Nijah's sword as she rolled out of the way and got a face full of mud in the process.

As she pulled her head up, the grime dissipated. Suddenly, Angel recovered her vision just enough to see as Nijah raised her sword for another slash.

Then she saw as a batarang struck her hand. Nijah yelped, released the sword, searched about, and demanded, "What the—"

A few feet behind Nijah, the image of Bruce on one of the stained glass windows had a hand extended that wasn't before. With his form still shaped from the shimmering material, her father stepped off the glass. A moment after, the silhouette of Batman draped itself over him until they became one.

"Oh, what's this supposed to be?" Nijah scoffed. "Trying to manifest allies, are you? That's not how this—"

Another batarang flew down toward her. Nijah sidestepped that one so it landed in the sand. She opened her mouth for a retort, but shouted when it exploded and a burst of green goo and stuck her foot to the ground. Stephanie, with her costume colors cycling every few seconds through purples, reds, greens, and blacks, descended from her stained-glass window with a smirk on her face.

Nijah vanished from the spot where she stood, the goo released from her boot as she did, and reappeared over Angel with her sword raised for another attack. Angel rolled out of the way of the strike, Nijah balked at her apparently regained sight, and a two-footed kick smashed into her face as Robin swung by and extended his legs for a hit. The jinn faded again and was forced to put some distance between herself and Angel. All the while, to her continued frustration and fury, more of the stained glass windows descended from the sky. Out from one leapt Dick Grayson before his Nightwing costume folded over him like a second skin. Barbara Gordon rolled out from hers, her wheelchair levitated just a few inches off the ground and she had a pair of escrima sticks gripped in her hands. Damian Wayne, garbed in the black and gold of his Talon uniform, rushed her down and the two crossed swords for a moment. Nijah leapt out of the way of a trio of arrows fired by Connor Hawke, and shouted when Connor Kent flew through the air and tackled her.

"This is pitiful!" Nijah thrust her sword into Superboy's back and he shattered like the glass he was formed from. A scream built in Angel's throat for a moment before the broken pieces reformed themselves a few feet away. Still, Nijah kept at her raging. "All these people in your core? You need all of them to validate your pathetic existence? Where's your self-respect? Are you anything but what others say you are?!"

"Never taught to love myself." As Angel pushed up from the mud, she realized, at some point, her lost fingers had reattached themselves. "Needed to learn it from them." She squinted at a pair of stained glass windows that remained inanimate behind Nijah: one of Monsignor Ryan saying a blessing with one hand and holding Snowball with the other. On the next window over, with his arms wide open, was Jesus Christ. "They showed me everything."

Nijah uttered a low roar as she tried to force herself past the barrage closing in on her, but was cut off by a dual-daggered attack by Marque, Angel's wayward but reconciled elder sister.

As she tried to finish her rise from the mud, Angel sensed another presence at her side. Unlike the rest, this one spoke. "You need a hand?"

She turned. There, radiant as she always appeared in her imagination, and yet somehow the same as she ever was, stood Sadie. Angel accepted the hand as she was pulled up straight.

"Should stand back," Angel said. "Don't want you in the middle of this."

"Eh. This is all just in your head." Sadie shrugged. "You already know anything I'm going to tell you, right? Like that I'm going to be at that meetup, and I'm going to help rescue you however I can."

Angel gave her head a frustrated shake. "Shouldn't. You said yourself, bigger than us now—"

"I know what I said. Or you know what I said." Sadie gave her a nod. "I've also said 'I love you,' dozens, maybe hundreds of times. And, 'this world needs more people like you in it,' a couple too." She reached out and squeezed one of Angel's hands. "I'm just your thoughts put in a body, so you know it as well as I do—you'd do the same for me. So, I'm gonna do the same for you."

The moment stretched between Angel and Sadie briefly as the rest of the manifestations threw themselves at Nijah. Even when one of Nijah's strikes shattered one of her allies, two more took their place while the broken one recovered. Angel's precious ones were too numerous and too powerful, any ground Nijah gained in attempts to rush her down kept being interrupted.

Finally, Angel stepped forward and shouted, "Stop!" Her army of phantasmic friends froze in place an instant after Barbara knocked Nijah into the sand with a baton strike upside the face. With the fire of her being blazing hotter than ever, Nijah struggled to push upward and turned a furious gaze toward Angel. The heroine asked, "Ready to talk?"

Without a word in response, Nijah disappeared again. Angel felt the rush of wind come at her and remained perfectly still. She caught the sound of Nijah reappearing behind her, but she didn't move. She didn't have to. Talon parried her sword strike with one of his own, and before Nijah could mount a counterattack Batgirl came in with a suckerpunch that knocked her off balance. As quick as she'd come and gone, Nijah appeared across the sand from Angel again. The way her eyes were wide and her body trembled, whatever bravado she'd come into this fight with laid completely broken. With quakes running through her, she looked like she was desperately grasping for a new strategy.

"Asking again," Angel said. "Ready to talk?"

"Talk? Talk?" Nijah spat out the words in disgust. "I have nothing to say to you."

Angel looked toward the manifestation of Sadie for a moment, Sadie gave her a supportive smile and a nod. "Took me looking at myself again to realize," Angel said. "To understand you."

"Understand me? What are you—"

"You're not a zealot, Nijah," Angel said. "Never were."

This made her opponent balk. "Eh? Of course I'm not, but you think I am. You obviously think all of us are—"

Angel shook her head. "No. Maybe you believe in this plan, maybe all of you do, but only a little. It's him you believe in."

"Of course, I believe in the lord's plan—"

"Kedar." Angel drew out the name. "Never about God, not really."

With her fists clenched hard, Nijah demanded, "You dare question my convictions?"

"You showed them to me yourself," Angel said. "And I understand—"

It was Nijah's turn to interrupt. With a shout she rushed at Angel again. As if she'd internalized that her teleporting was useless, she just ran with a trail of flames blazing behind her.

Angel looked around at all her frozen companions for just a moment, took in a deep breath, and ran to meet Nijah in battle. As the distance was closed, both swung their swords and took aim for the decisive blow.

After a quick switch to her left hand, Angel parried Nijah's overhead slash. With her opponent within reach, she pulled back her right hand, formed her fist into a palm, and threw a strike square into the center of Nijah's sternum.

For an instant, the two stood in that place, frozen. Then Nijah uttered a long, agonized scream and fell forward into nothingness.

Seconds later, she appeared again a few feet in front of Angel, curled on the ground and gripping her heart.

"When my mother does it, it kills," Angel said. "It's dangerous, I hate using it. But the pain isn't real here."

Nijah opened her mouth to respond, but instead she keeled forward and a mouthful of blood burst from her lips. Angel shuddered—this wasn't a normal reaction to the heart strike technique, but she assumed Nijah was responding the way her mind concluded her body should.

"Enough, enough!" Nijah spat out gobs of the red suddenly staining her teeth. "My uncle was right, this is needless. Everything will be finished soon anyway." She pushed back to her feet, turned, and ran.

Angel considered the retreat for just a moment before Sadie reemerged next to her side, set a hand on her shoulder, and said, "Go get her."

"Really think I should?"

"She's cornered, that's why she's running," Sadie said. "Like when you got through to Rafal, right? Violent outburst, then redemption?"

"You knew about that?"

"No, dummy, you know about it." She gently rapped on Angel's forehead with her knuckle. "And don't call yourself dummy, especially not through me."

Angel nodded and looked back toward the retreating Nijah.

"Hold up, one more thing."

She turned back toward Sadie, who slipped her mask off. The rest of the uniform dissipated as she did and left a simple t-shirt and running shorts in their place.

"Don't go to her looking like an enemy. Make yourself approachable."

Cassandra nodded and pulled her in for a quick embrace. "See you soon."

"The real me, anyway. Now hurry up, she's getting away."

With a whirl of her heels, Cassandra ran. Though Nijah had a head start, she tripped and struggled on the same sand Cassandra ran effortlessly upon, closing the distance only took a few seconds.

Nijah puffed with shortened breaths as she shouted, "Keep away from me!"

"You're clinging." Cassandra's breathing came steady and easy. "Don't blame you for that."

"Don't talk as if you understand me."

"You always said we're alike. I finally see how, and I agree."

"Shut up!" Nijah clapped her hands over her ears. The flames that covered her body started to dance erratically, as if they were being doused with water. Her next scream was raw and shrill. "Shut your stupid, whoring, dyke mouth!"

"I know what it's like—"

"You had nothing and were given the world. But I was born with my whole world, and it was ripped from my hands!"

As Nijah shouted, the two ran straight through an unseen barrier and the beach slipped from existence. Cassandra slowed herself to a stuttering stop, Nijah rushed straight into a low table with her shin, tripped, and toppled to the floor. Confused, Cassandra looked around for what had just happened. It was as if they'd broken through the walls of a small sitting room, not so different from the one from Anne's home.

Nijah pushed upward, her flames totally dissipated by that point, and searched about. With distress clearly painted on her face, she looked toward Cassandra. "You—you shouldn't be here. This place is belongs to me."

Cassandra glared at her. "Like you shouldn't have been in mine?"

"That's not the point." Nijah's words grew quicker and more frantic. "Go back, hurry—"

She turned to look back the way she'd come, but all she saw was solid brick. "Not like you," Cassandra said. "Don't know how."

"Oh God." Nijah gripped and lowered her head as she started to curl up on the floor. "No—this isn't—this can't be happening—please—no—"

Shouts in Arabic started to fill the small room. Cassandra searched about for an explanation as men formed from shadows started to pour out from the walls. Their bodies were so cloaked in darkness almost no features seemed clear, except for pairs of burning red eyes and, if examined closely enough, the texture of oily mustaches. Each of the fast-appearing shadows extended their hands to where Nijah laid tremoring on the floor.

Cassandra opened her hand to try summoning her katana, but it didn't rush to meet her in Nijah's dreamscape. Undeterred, she grabbed Nijah's discarded sword and uttered one warning of, "Keep back." None of the shadow men responded. With a last reminder to herself they weren't real, they weren't alive, and thus they could not die, Cassandra threw herself into the fray.

The shadows of Nijah's trauma didn't even acknowledge Cassandra as she cut through swathes of them one after another. Maybe in that space they couldn't comprehend the incongruity of her, or maybe they had no survival instinct. Whatever it was, they did not fight back except by continuing to creep out of the walls.

A different, deep-voiced shout in Arabic cut through the room. Cassandra didn't know the words, but she did recognize the sound. The words almost certainly meant something along the lines of, 'I will not bargain for my daughter's life!' An instant after they were spoken, a gunshot rang through the space. As Cassandra cut down more of the shadows, the scream of a little boy followed. And words she couldn't translate yet already knew from a woman's voice followed.

With no end of the encroaching shadows evident, Cassandra forced her movements into a circle around the center of the room. She slashed through extended hands, cut through necks, went with quick thrusts into the guts from one to the next. She felt no exhaustion as she kept fighting, but she didn't know if she could keep up with these nightmarish ghouls forever.

As she fought, one more voice reverberated with the rest. And though it spoke in Arabic at first, little slips of English cut in as well. A slow, droning recital of: "If they'd just left me…"

"Nijah!" Cassandra raised her voice, desperate to get over all the other noise in the air. "You didn't kill them; it wasn't your fault!"

She turned to look, the Nijah that laid curled on the floor remained there and said nothing. Still, her voice echoed through the space in response. "If it's not my fault, it's theirs! Sinners—twisted, evil sinners—heretics, all of them!"

"They needed to be stopped; I know that." It was only when Cassandra started to think she should feel exhausted that the tiredness started to seep into her body.

"All of them do. All this world needs to be—no more killers, no more rapists, no more heretics, make them suffer until they can't do their evil anymore."

For just a moment, it seemed the constant flow of shadows began to slow. Given the chance to catch her breath, Cassandra asked, "Heretics like your parents? Like Rafik?"

Nijah's broken voice boomed like a crack of thunder. "They'd have changed for me! Changed so we could still be a family—they'd have done anything for me!"

Although the outpouring of shadows held back, it was suddenly clear to Cassandra they weren't retreating. Their dark forms started to blur together until they overlapped, as if they united into one being. Disgust curled Cassandra's face—she'd fought the likes of Clayface, she'd seen abominations spring forth like this before. Still with some of her attention turned toward Nijah, she asked, "And you'd want that? Your loved ones tortured for how they believed?" After she asked, Cassandra rushed forward and tried to cut down the conjoining shadow shapes.

With her voice on the edge of sobbing, the unseen Nijah demanded, "Why are you mucking about in our religion if you don't want all of the world practicing it? Isn't that the point? Why would you practice if you don't think our will is best?"

Out from the centralized mass of the shadows emerged one gigantic, umbra-black demon. And, for the first time, it turned its bloody red eyes toward Cassandra.

With a swallow and the anticipation of a cruel fight, she spoke just one more time. "None of us are so pure we don't need saving. I've seen what happens when my faith and anger took over me." Cassandra let out an exhale as the devil before her released a roar. Without raising her voice she said, "When we convince ourselves we're not cruel, we're just serving God, we need someone to pull us back. Other people, other faiths? They save us from ourselves."

The demon reached a monstrous hand toward Cassandra. She slashed hard and fast at the creature's palm, but her strikes just passed through it like smoke. Despite that, the appendage shifted into invincible tangibility as it closed around her and forced out a fearful cry.

Before it could squeeze her to death, the demon let out a deep, threatening snarl. Cassandra looked back toward Nijah. The woman stood once more, the flames of her jinn state danced all about her body again, and from her arm extended a long, fiery sword that pierced the heart of the huge demon. Nijah passed her glare to Cassandra for just a moment before she yanked the sword in her opposite direction and cut the shadowy creature in two. It let out one last noisy rumble before it faded completely.

Freed, Cassandra looked toward Nijah, unsure of just what her recovery suggested, before a new trio of shadows rose up from the ground and consumed her. "No!" Cassandra ran toward the encompassing mass of darkness, swung her sword, and clipped the nearest shadow to her on its shoulder.

Another low, deep yelp sounded through the chamber as her victim turned toward her. When she realized this one's eyes were white rather than red, Cassandra lowered her weapon and stepped back. It wasn't just the color; she realized a moment later. She saw something sad in those eyes.

As their images came into focus, Cassandra made out the shapes of a man with a round belly, a lithe woman at his side, and a child that clung to Nijah's leg. All held the same gloomy look in their white eyes as they looked at her, then back toward Nijah. On another examination, these were her beloved family, and they weren't trapping her; they were holding her.

After a few moments content in their arms, Nijah looked between the three of them with her own troubled expression, then turned to Cassandra again. Her voice was cold but not threatening when she spoke next. "… If I admit you were right… if I find some way to stop all this…." As she spoke, another form, stout and muscled, materialized behind her. In the first moments his eyes were white, but the longer he stood there, the more they swirled like a barber's pole between white and red. "What will you do to him?"

Still uneasy and on her guard, Cassandra said, "Can't even kill him."

"You could if you have the spear," Nijah said. "And if you want any chance of stopping him and saving your…"

When she hesitated, Cassandra sighed and said, "Her name is Sadie. You can call her Sadie. Think you already know that."

"Mmm. All right, fine. If you want any chance in the short term of getting the icon out of… Sadie, you'll need the spear to do it. And if you have the spear, you can kill my uncle."

"Won't kill him," Cassandra said. "Not our way. Not me, not Batman, not any of us." After a moment to consider, she added, "He may need to be captured. Know he's done good, but he's done evil too."

Nijah shuddered before she said, "You'll be hard-pressed to defeat him and the rest of the Order when your allies arrive. Escape should be a much higher priority." After thinking it over for a moment, she went on, "You said our loved ones are who save us from ourselves. Well, you saw my memories. There's no one my uncle loves more than me. Just leave today, let me try to get through to him. If anyone can, it's going to be me."

Cassandra hesitated as she looked at the shadowy manifestation of Kedar. "What if you can't?"

"I don't know, maybe I won't convince him today," Nijah said. "But if I get you some ear coverings and the manacle keys, you should be able to slip free while Kedar and Father Gallagher present you for the trade and think you're delirious. You just have to steal the spear and escape. It won't be easy, but it's much better than trying to win, and then my uncle will be back to square one."

She still didn't like this plan or the thought of Kedar slipping away from justice for the moment. But, she reminded herself, the only justice she'd ever faced for two murders was years of self-hatred and a single Glory Be. So, however reluctantly, she started to nod.

"Time is running out," Nijah said. "I'm going to release this dream and see what I can bring you."

"Thank you." It seemed Nijah operated fast, because the walls and floor of the small house already began to dissipate. Unsure if another opportunity would come, Cassandra called, "Nijah? Was that it? Did I really change you?"

Still held in the arms of her parents and little brother, Nijah too started to fade when she proclaimed, "I can't believe in a Hell with my parents and Rafik in it. And, if not for that, just what is my uncle trying to save us from?"