Dancing on the Head of a Pin (20 page)

Intimidated by the oppressive power radiating from the fearsome beings, Madach and Byleth cowered in their presence, practically driven to their knees.

“I’m not giving them to anyone,” Byleth hissed. “They belong to me.” The Satan moved toward the back of the van, and Remy reached out, grabbing hold of his arm.

“Not the smartest thing to do right now,” he said.

Byleth fought him for a moment, and then stopped. There were sounds behind them in the alley, low rumbling purrs like the idling of a monster truck. The Hellions had found their way out through the fire- and smoke-filled garage.

“If only there was the time to make you understand,” Suroth said, flowing a little closer, as did the Nomads at his back. There were many more of them now.

“How about you try,” Remy suggested. “Why should we hand over something so potentially dangerous to you? There has to be some good reason.”

The Nomad leader’s smile grew from within the shadows of his hood.

“You of all of them should know, brother,” he said. “For it was this world, nearly brought to its end, that opened our eyes.”

Remy glanced into the side mirror of the van to see one of the Hellions coming closer. He guessed that another was probably coming up on the other side.

Call him dense, but it actually took him a second to figure out what the Nomad leader was talking about. The business with the Angel of Death. He knew that narrowly avoiding the Apocalypse had changed things a bit, but he wasn’t quite sure what the Nomad was getting at.

“Answers, Remiel,” Suroth stated. “The questions we had carried since the close of the war were suddenly answered.”

Another glance in the sideview showed that the Hellion was practically on top of them. It was squatting down now, tensing, ready to pounce.

Remy spun around, facing the creature as it leapt.

“Get down,” he screamed, pushing both Madach and Byleth out of the beast’s path.

The creature soared over their heads to land gracefully in front of the Nomad leader. The other two beasts slunk out from the other side of the van to join their brother.

The Nomad didn’t even flinch.

Suroth extended his hand, and Remy watched in awe as the Hellions cowered. Practically on their bellies, the ferocious beasts crawled toward the Nomad leader.

Something told Remy that things were about to become even more interesting.

“You brought them here?” Remy asked, shock and horror evident in his tone.

“Remarkable beasts,” Suroth said, lowering his hand to allow one of the Hellions to sniff at his fingertips. A bruise-colored tongue extended from its skull-like mouth to lick the offered appendage. “And exactly what was necessary to find the weapons of change. It took far less time than you would imagine training them, deceptively intelligent and so very eager to please.”

Remy didn’t know what to say.

“Sounds like another creation of the Almighty, doesn’t it, brother?” Suroth chided.

“You trained them,” Remy said, the gears turning and grinding inside his fevered brain. “You trained them to find the weapons.”

“We trained them to find the tools of change,” Suroth added. “And with them in our possession, the next phase of our plans can begin.”

“Why do I have a sick feeling that I don’t even want to know what that means?” he asked the Nomad.

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

It was as if all sound had been bleached from the air.

Remy’s thoughts raced at the speed of light, all the pieces of the puzzle trying desperately to come together. What did the Nomad leader mean exactly—
the true victor will reign supreme in Heaven
? He didn’t like the sound of that in the least.

The Hellions jumped to their feet with a grumble, the Nomads advancing toward them.

“Give them to us,” Suroth demanded.

The idea was certainly tempting. To be free of the weapons—of the crushing responsibility. For a moment it actually sounded like a pretty good plan.

Until he regained his sanity.

The Pitiless were weapons imbued with the power of Heaven’s greatest angel, crafted especially for the Morningstar in his bid to challenge the power of God, weapons that never had been used in the Great War, weapons that fell to Earth in the form of divine inspiration, spurring craftsmen to create these ultimate weapons—these precision instruments of killing.

These Pitiless daggers.

Yep, it certainly would be easy to hand them over to the Nomads, to make them somebody else’s problem, but much to his chagrin, Remy just didn’t work that way.

“No,” he said flatly.

Suroth recoiled.

“Something isn’t right here, and I’m not about to hand these bad boys over to you until I feel one hundred percent safe in doing so.”

The Nomads said nothing, their heavy robes billowing in a nonexistent wind, shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow, and some that were not.

“What are we going to do now?” Madach asked in a nervous whisper, his eyes still riveted to those blocking their path.

“We drive around them,” Remy said, starting to move to the back of the van. “I need to know more, lots more, before . . .”

He was interrupted by Denizens running down the alleyway, stragglers from the slaughter that had occurred inside Byleth’s garage.

Remy noticed the guns that they were carrying and the smile on Byleth’s face, just before it all went to hell.

It was like something out of the Wild West, the fallen angels coming to the defense of their boss . . . of their Satan. Bullets fired from pistols and sprayed from semiautomatic machine guns tore into the Nomads and their Hellish pets.

From their reaction, Remy knew that the ammunition was something special, something likely brought over from the plains of Hell. Man-made bullets would never have had this kind of effect on beings from Heaven.

The Nomads stumbled back, the bullets hitting their wonderful robes in small explosions of darkness. The Hellions squatted at their side, flinching from every bullet hit, waiting obediently for their master’s commands.

And then Remy sensed it, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end as the air became suddenly charged with an unearthly power. He reached out and grabbed Madach by the shirt, dragging him up the alleyway, toward a green metal Dumpster. That would have to do.

Bolts of crackling-white-hot energy seemingly pulled down from the Heavens erupted from the Nomads’ outstretched hands, forming a single bolt of jagged energy that skewered the front of the van with the most destructive of results.

The van flew into pieces, the vehicle torn asunder by the energy that now coursed through it. Singeing slivers of metal, plastic, and glass whizzed through the air, projectiles of death. Remy listend to the sounds of the shrapnel striking the Dumpster, and the screams of Byleth’s Denizens as they were cut to shreds by the razor-sharp debris.

The gunfire was silenced, and Remy peeked out from behind his cover.

“It could have been so easy,” Suroth droned, strolling through the smoldering pieces of twisted metal that now littered the alley floor. “But to be expected. Change is often so difficult.”

“They’re dead, aren’t they?” Madach said to Remy, gasping for breath.

The fallen was right; the bodies of Byleth’s soldiers lay bloody and torn.

But Byleth was still standing. Chunks of glass and pieces of the van stuck out of his body, making it look as though he was wearing some bizarre suit of armor. He had found the axe again, drawing strength from the powerful weapon to remain standing.

“Come at me, then,” he growled, blood dripping down from his mouth in a slimy trail. He spun the axe in his hands, swaying from side to side. “I’ve killed your kind before and am not afraid to do so again.”

Remy and Madach watched as some of the Nomads drifted about the wreckage of the van, retrieving the yellow transport cases. He felt Madach tense beside him and reached out to grab hold of his arm.

“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.

R
emy 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.”