“That’s our cue,” Remy whispered, nudging the fallen angel by his side into action. Clinging to the shadows, they exited the alley, and Remy saw that he recognized where they were.

On Massachusetts Avenue they stayed in the cover of shadows, desperate not to be noticed. They had to get as far away from their attackers as possible before they could stop and catch their breath, maybe figure out their next step without the threat of being killed.

It was good to have something to aspire to.

Remy couldn’t believe it; something actually seemed to be going his way.

“Would you look at that,” he muttered, leaving the sidewalk, much to Madach’s surprise.

“Where are you…?” the fallen started to ask, but then decided to simply follow.

After everything he’d gone through that night, Remy had never expected this. His car was parked in a vacant lot along with the black SUV that Byleth’s gang had been driving.

With all the sports cars, and the limousine, of course there wasn’t enough room in the underground garage for anybody else’s vehicles, he thought, moving toward the Toyota, hoping that whoever had driven it here had left the keys. The thick, acrid smell of fire was prominent in the air, and he was glad at the moment for Byleth’s automobile indulgences.

“This is yours?” Madach asked as Remy opened the door and got behind the wheel. He leaned over and unlocked the passenger-side door, allowing the fallen angel to get in, then crossed his fingers and pulled down the driver’s-side visor. His keys fell into his lap.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Remy turned the engine over, flinching at the sudden explosion of noise. Someone had taken some liberties with the radio, a country-western station blaring from the speakers. He reached out, quickly turning the volume down to nothing.

They sat there in silence, the only sound the gentle purring of the car’s engine. Remy glanced down at himself. He was a mess, his pants torn and stained, one of the sleeves of his jacket and shirt charred black and crumbling from the release of his inner power.

He looked over at Madach, who sat with his eyes closed, head leaning back on the headrest. “You all right?”

Madach nodded. “Fine. Should’ve figured it would turn out something like this,” he said. “I knew it would all turn to shit the minute I listened to them.”

There was a bit of a chill in the air, and Remy jabbed the button to turn on the heat.

“Listened to whom?”

Madach laughed before answering. “The weapons,” the fallen said, eyes opening. “I was working a job—house painting—a few weeks back, when I first heard them.”

The whirling bits of information in Remy’s mind suddenly began to click into place.

“You were working at the Karnighan house in Lexington.”

This made the fallen angel sit up a bit straighter in his seat.

“Yeah,” he said. “How could you know that?”

“Small world,” Remy answered. “I was hired to find the stuff that you ripped off.”

“That’s right; you’re a detective,” Madach said with a nod. “Mason had said something about a Seraphim that was also a private investigator looking for the Pitiless.”

“That would be me.” Remy nodded.

“I would have given them away to anybody who would’ve taken them off my fucking hands,” Madach added. “But Mason saw dollar signs when I approached him. He said we could make a fortune… that there were plenty of buyers for what we had.”

“When I saw you leaving the brownstone on Newbury Street,” Remy said, “did you have them with you then?”

At first Madach didn’t seem to know what Remy was talking about, but realization quickly dawned. “That was you,” he said, forcing a simple smile. “You had the black dog.” He started to pick at the skin around one of his fingernails, peeling away some paint that had stained his flesh. “Don’t really care for dogs,” he said before laughing nervously. “After the garage, you can probably figure out why.”

“Marlowe’s much nicer than that,” Remy said.

“That’s good to know. And yeah, I did have them with me.”

“So the weapons called out to you while painting Karnighan’s house and you decided to break in some night and steal them? Paint me a better picture.”

“They didn’t just call out to me… they called out to me.” He struggled with the explanation. “They seemed to know me… to want me to take them.” The fallen fidgeted in his seat as he remembered. “I tried to take them that very day, that very moment, but there was something that kept me from entering the room no matter how hard I tried… something special to keep somebody like me out.”

“Meaning a fallen angel?” Remy suggested.

Madach nodded. “I think so. The security lock was nothing. I figured out the code in a matter of minutes, but I couldn’t get past the doorframe.”

Angels and their puzzles, Remy thought, recalling Francis’ Sudoku books. Now why somebody like Karnighan would have security specific to angels in the first place was another question entirely.

Remy drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel.

Unless he knew more about the Pitiless than he was letting on.

“How did you finally end up getting them?”

“I brought help,” Madach said. “Human help. One of the guys that I worked with had a little history, and it didn’t take all that much to convince him to give me a hand.”

“The guy that helped you,” Remy asked. “He live on Huntington Avenue by any chance?”

“Yeah,” Madach answered with a nod.

“He’s dead, you know,” Remy offered.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Madach said. “He stole the daggers from the Pitiless stash, replaced them with some of the other antique knives that he’d taken from the house. I think he figured they were more valuable than the other shit just by watching how I acted around them.” He paused, working on the skin around the nail again even though the paint was gone. “How did he…?”

“The dogs… the Hellions got him.”

Madach seemed to physically react. “Nobody should go like that,” he said with a furious shake of his head. “After a few days I could sense that those things were around, stalking me, stalking the weapons. At first I thought I was cracking up, traumatic stress syndrome or something like that. I didn’t even think it was possible for them to leave Hell, never mind track me down. I think they could smell them… the Pitiless.”

“As soon as the weapons left Karnighan’s house, they became aware of them,” Remy said. Once again he was faced with the concept that there was more to Karnighan than met the eye.

“You say they,” Madach commented. “You’re not talking about the Hellions, are you?… You’re talking about the ones who are controlling them.”

Remy nodded slowly, examing nuggets of information still floating around inside his head.

He thought of his recent dealings with the Nomads, focusing on the incident involving the angel that he and Francis had freed from the Denizens. He remembered some of the dying Nomad’s cryptic words of warning.

The deceivers live on, the black secret of their purpose clutched to their breast.

I could bear the deceit no longer… my secret sin consumes me…

We should be punished… Oh, yes, we deserve so much more than this.

We’re no better… than those cast down into the inferno.

And how Remy had tried to explain it all away as insanity brought on by countless millennia of guilt, but now…

“They’re called the Nomads,” Remy started to explain to the fallen angel. “At the beginning of the war they decided not to choose sides, opposing the nightmarish struggle that they were certain was about to unfold.”