Dancing on the Head of a Pin

  “But we can’t . . .”

  “That’s right,” Remy agreed, turning his attention back to Byleth’s fate.

  “It saddens me that you could not be made to listen to reason,” Suroth said to Byleth.

  The Hellions stalked toward the Satan, stopping as he swung the axe at them.

  “I’ve lost everything that’s ever mattered to me,” he grunted, stumbling toward the Hell beasts, swinging the axe in a wide arc that almost caused him to lose his balance. “And I’ll be twice damned if I lose this as well.”

  The Nomads dropped the battered yellow cases at their master’s feet. One of them knelt down, opening a case and rummaging around inside. He carefully removed a pistol and handed it to his master. Even in the faint light of the darkened alleyway, it glistened like the most valuable thing in all the world.

  Suroth admired the weapon, hefting the weight of it in his hand.

  “The humans certainly do have their talents,” the angel said, pointing the weapon at a startled-looking Byleth.

  “At least your suffering will be at an end,” the Nomad leader said as he pulled the trigger, firing a single shot like a clap of thunder into Byleth’s forehead. The Satan flipped backward to the ground, hands still clutching the body of the battle-axe.

  The Nomads quickly moved to retrieve the weapon from his corpse as the Hellions darted forward and began to feed upon the bodies that littered the alley.

  “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.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  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 Karnig
han’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.”

  Madach nodded in understanding. “In Tartarus they’re called the Cowards.”

  “Didn’t seem too cowardly to me tonight,” Remy responded. “Because of their stance during the war, they call no place their home. They’re able to walk between the worlds, just as comfortable in the wastelands of Hell as they are here on Earth, or in Heaven.”

  “And now they have the Pitiless,” Madach said.

  Suroth’s words echoed inside Remy’s mind, madness at the time, but now taking on new meaning.

  And with them in our possession, the next phase of our plans can begin.

  Know that it is all for the best, and that this time, the true victor will reign supreme in Heaven.

  “I think we need to go see Francis,” Remy said, putting the car in motion, driving across the uneven dirt surface of the makeshift parking lot.

  “What do you think is going on?” Madach asked him. “Why would the Cowards—the Nomads—have any desire to possess weapons with that kind of power?”

  Remy left the lot, banging a sharp left onto Massachusetts Avenue, heading toward Newbury Street and Francis’ brownstone. He didn’t answer the fallen angel, not wanting to curse the situation—to give it strength—wanting so desperately to be wrong.

  They rode the few blocks in silence, the tension inside the car becoming nearly palpable as the traffic closer to Newbury Street became thicker, cars stopped in the middle of the street, seemingly refusing to move.

  “Is it a breakdown?” Madach asked, craning his neck to see through the windshield.

  “I don’t think so,” Remy said, rolling down the window just as the sensation hit him.

  His hands started to shake, his body breaking out in a chilling sweat. He looked across the seat to see that Madach was staring straight ahead, his body trembling as if the temperature in the car had dropped to subzero levels.

  “I’m not even going to ask if you’re feeling that,” Remy said.

  The strange sensation, an aura of undiluted menace, pulsated in the air, creating an invisible barrier that caused the people walking the streets, or driving in the vicinity, to have no desire to go any farther, making everything come to a complete stop.

  He had an idea as to the cause but hoped he was wrong.

  Turning around in his seat to check the rear window, Remy put the car in reverse. He beeped his horn to get the traffic piling up behind him to move so that he could back the Toyota toward Commonwealth Avenue, where he took a left, heading away from the chaos.

  “Thank you,” Madach said though chattering teeth.

  “Don’t,” Remy stated flatly, his eyes scanning the street for the first sign of an open space. He found one that would require an amazing feat of parallel parking, but he wasn’t deterred.

  “What are you doing?” the fallen angel asked, panic growing in his voice.

  “What does it look like?”

  “You can’t,” Madach stated. “You can feel it in the air as much as I can, and you know what it is.” He hugged himself as his body became wracked with painful-looking spasms. “It isn’t right,” Madach yelled through clenched teeth. “You’re not supposed to be able to feel it here.”

  Remy shut the engine off, pulling the keys from the ignition. As he opened the door, preparing to get out of the car, Madach’s hand shot out, grabbing hold of Remy’s shoulder.

  “We’re not supposed to feel Hell here.”

  “You’re right,” Remy said, shrugging the hand away and climbing out of the car. “We’re not.

  “And that’s what makes me so goddamn nervous.”

  As much as it frightened him to admit it, the essence of Hell had indeed come to Newbury Street.

  Steeling himself against the feelings of utter despair, fear, and hopelessness wafting down the street at him like a bad stink riding on a gentle summer wind, Remy forced himself forward, fighting his way toward Francis’ brownstone.

  The sidewalks and street were filled with people, lying where they had fallen—first affected by the waves of misery leaking out from the nether regions, some trembling and crying, others so sickened, so traumatized by what they were experiencing, that they had fallen into a kind of coma, puddles of vomit pooling at their heads.

  The closer Remy got to the brownstone, the harder it became for even him to continue. His mind became crowded with thoughts of failure—of the crimes he’d committed against his own kind in the name of God. He saw the death of his enemies—his brothers—his sword cutting them down. With each strike of his sword—each death—the journey down Newbury Street became more difficult.

  Remy stopped, pummeled by the memories, the guilt, of his ancient past. Violently shaking his head, trying to force away the overpowering thoughts, he glanced at Madach there beside him.

  The fallen angel hugged himself, tears streaming down his face as he gazed fearfully ahead.

  “I can’t go back there,” he said shaking his head. “I’ve done my penance and I won’t go back—I can’t go back.”

  The miasma of anguish that enveloped them was nearly suffocating; Remy felt his legs begin to grow limp, and he was tempted—oh, so tempted—to lie down on the street, curling up into the tightest ball that he could imagine, to escape the sensations he was experiencing.

  Anything of importance had left his mind; all he could think about, all that he could dwell upon, was the failure to his own, to his Lord God Almighty.

  To Madeline.

  It was as if he’d a received a shot of pure adrenaline directly to his heart, the image of his wife’s smiling face, like the rays of the sun, burning away an oppressive fog. Thoughts of her loss, and of how he had failed her on so many levels, niggled at the edges of his memory, but they had not the strength to dampen the joy and love he felt for her still.

  Remy straightened, focusing on his surroundings. They were less than two blocks away.

  Madach had dropped to the street. He sat there rocking back and forth, head buried in his hands.

  “Get up,” Remy said, reaching down to haul the fallen angel up by the arm.

  “I can’t . . . ,” he complained.

  “You can and you will,” Remy stated firmly, using this moment of clarity to propel himself and his companion forward. “If it wasn’t for you, this wouldn’t be happening. You’re coming with me just in case I need a hand.”

  He pulled the struggling Madach along, maneuvering him through the body-strewn street until they finally reached the steps of the brownstone.

  Wave after wave of sensations, the likes of which Remy had never felt before, washed over him. Hell had indeed come to Earth and it was leaking from the brownstone.

  Madach was a quivering wreck, trying to sit down on the building steps, to hide from the d
estitute feelings that threatened to cripple him.

  “I . . . I just can’t,” the fallen said, his voice a pathetic squeak. But Remy would not allow him to sit down, holding on to his arm and dragging him up the stairs toward the door.

  The fallen angel’s complaints fell on deaf ears, Remy’s only concerns being that he get inside before he himself was reduced to a quivering pile of jelly. He had to know what was going on. He had to know the fate of his friend.

  Remy opened the heavy wooden door and pushed Madach in ahead of him. The inside foyer door was open and Remy dragged Madach through the lobby to the door to the basement and Francis’ apartment.