“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.”
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.