Balthazar looks over his shoulder at the still, passive figure of the boy, then back at Raphael. "I'm going to give him a piece of the Staff," he says evenly. "And watch what he does from there. Unless you're here to stop me."

This is strange. This isn't how it's supposed to happen. How it happened before. Still, he presses ahead doggedly, clinging to the sketchy logic of the dream-world. "But you're not, because you didn't before. His name is Aaron, and he's just lost his big brother."