The beeping was oddly hypnotic and frightening at once. Focussing on it meant that Solomon had something to help calm him and yet reminded him just out of control he currently was. Injured, helpless, emotionally vulnerable. Surely there wasn't much more of this he could take.

"Saw him," he mumbled, and his voice kept catching in his throat. He wished he had a glass of water, but he wasn't sure he'd have had the strength to lift it even if he did. "Saw him before the medics came."

He was staring at the bear, he realised abruptly. Staring at the bear as if half-expecting to see the bear itself lit with a tiny halo of light. Even though that hadn't been anything like his experiences so far. Saint Gabriel had been blinding. That man ... the cowboy fisherman ... there were no words for what he'd been.

Solomon searched for them anyway, if only because talking meant not thinking. "Light all around him. Not like a halo. Like a sun. A spring. The lifestream ..."

At which point his voice died and he couldn't even begin to contain the fine tremble that set up in his body, or the little spikes of pain it elicited from his knee. The heart-monitor shrieked. Somewhere distant, an alarm went off.