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Remy poked the jagged furrows in the wood floor with the toe of his shoe.
“We should think about getting out of here,” Mulvehill said from the doorway. “I’m sure they want to get Dougie here over to the morgue before…”
It was as if Remy had stepped on a live wire, his entire body going rigid as violent images flooded into his head. Scene after scene of brutal acts, two delicate knife blades slicing through the air to cut short the lives of multiple victims. It was almost more than he could stand. Remy was blind to the world, seeing only one murder flowing into another.
From somewhere in the distance he heard his friend’s voice, filled with concern.
Sound became muffled, distant, and he found himself falling, dropping to his knees upon the floor. The images grew stronger, faster, more pronounced and more savage. Men, women, and children; the blades; whoever wielded them undiscerning in who was felled by their razor-sharp bite.
A cascade of savagery almost suffocating in its relentless onslaught continued, and multiple voices could now be heard, voices that did not wish to speak to him, but to his other side.
Voices that spoke to the Seraphim, urging it to come forward.
Here, they hissed inside his head as he watched the image of a woman’s throat being cut so deeply that it practically severed her head.
The visions halted momentarily, and Remy found himself staring at a section of flooring. It wasn’t obvious, but on closer examination he saw where the floor had been cut to create a hiding place beneath.
Compelled by the voices inside his head, Remy clawed at the floor, his fingernails digging into the edges of the boards.
He saw the dead man—Dougie—wrapping something in a towel, hiding something away. The next images were like a head-on collision: multiple flashes filled with muffled screams, frozen moments of death and destruction.
“What the fuck is going on?” he heard Mulvehill ask from what seemed like miles away, but he couldn’t tell him. He couldn’t speak.
Something had come through the wall, something large and bestial. It had first attacked Dougie before turning its attention to the room.
Searching.
The board came loose from the floor, and Remy tossed it over his shoulder before plunging his hands inside the darkness of the hidey-hole.
The memory of a woman’s scream exploded in Remy’s mind; the scream had driven whatever it was—the beast—away. It hadn’t found what it was looking for.
But Remy had.
His hands emerged from beneath the floor holding something wrapped in an old, black-checked dish towel, the same something that he’d seen Dougie holding in the flash of the past. Remy dropped the wrapped object to the floor, pulling apart the cheap cloth to reveal what was hidden within.
Brother and sister daggers.
Two of the Pitiless.
Holding the daggers was even worse.
The images became more clear, more focused and precise, accompanied by the sounds of the death and misery that the brother and sister had caused.
The knives were stuck to his hands, and although repelled, he never wanted to let them go. The Seraphim was aroused, enticed by the song of the blades. Remy could feel his flesh grow warm, the masquerade of humanity that he wore ready to be sloughed off and cast aside.
“No!”
He used all the strength that he had remaining to open both hands, causing the daggers to drop to the floor.
Perfectly balanced, they spun around, their razor-sharp tips digging into the hardwood. They protruded there, vibrating with malice, urging the angel to again take them up.
“What the fuck is going on?” Mulvehill asked again as Remy stumbled backward, away from the weapons’ siren call. He leaned on his friend for support.
“There’s something very wrong about those knives,” he gasped, forcing the angelic essence back down.
“Did I just see your skin start to smoke?” Mulvehill asked, a hint of panic in the man’s voice. Again the unseen world that scared him so was peeking around the corner, waving to him.
“Yeah, but I’m all right now,” Remy said, eyes searching the room. In the corner there was a stack of cheap sweatshirts with various Boston colleges’ insignias decorating the fronts. He darted over to the stack, snatching up one of the heavy pullovers. Using the sweatshirt as a buffer, he carefully pulled the two blades from the floor, wrapping them tightly in the heavy fabric.
“I need to take these,” he said, doing all he could to ignore the whispering from the blades that he could still hear inside his head. Even through the layers of cloth, he could hear them—feel them.
Mulvehill just stared.
“You can have the others,” Remy stated. “But I need to take these. This is much bigger than a case of stolen property.”
“Detective?” a voice called from the apartment’s doorway. It was one of the drivers from the medical examiner’s office. “Is everything all right?”
Mulvehill looked briefly from the doorway of the room back to his friend. “Take them,” he said. “Something tells me they’re not something we should have lying around in Evidence anyway.”
Remy bit the inside of his cheek, fighting the images of murder and death that tried to fill his mind.
“You’re right,” the angel said, resisting the urge to throw the daggers away.
Mulvehill stepped into the doorway so that he could be seen by the man at the entrance to the apartment. “I’m just wrapping things up,” he said. “I’ll be right out.”
The detective gave a casual wave and returned to Remy.
“Thank you,” Remy said.
“Are you going to be all right with those?” the detective asked. “You look a little green around the gills.”
“I’ll be fine,” Remy said, “but the sooner I get rid of them, the happier I’ll be.”
He followed the homicide detective through the building, out the front entrance, and down onto the street. The crowds had diminished slightly, many of the gawkers probably tired of waiting for something horrible to see, satisfied to go home and watch it on the evening news instead.
“I’ll let you know what I find out,” Remy whispered in his friend’s ear as he headed in the direction of his car.
Mulvehill was lighting up a cigarette. “Watch your ass,” he muttered, cigarette clamped between his lips. Some of the remaining crowd gave the man talking to himself a sideways glance before turning their attention back to the apartment building.
The die hards will be getting their payoff soon, Remy thought, cutting across to the side street where he’d parked his vehicle. Dougie’s bagged body will soon be coming out on a stretcher, a prize for their endurance.
The Pitiless daggers beneath his arm screamed to be noticed, but he managed to close his mind to the disturbing imagery they tried to force upon him.
Remy got to his car and tossed the wrapped blades down onto the passenger seat. His thoughts raced with what he would need to do next.
He slipped the key in the ignition, deciding that he would continue on to Karnighan’s. The old man had to know more than he was letting on. The engine turned over, and he thought that it might be wise to give Ashley a call to go over and feed and walk Marlowe. Who knew how long the business in Lexington would take, and he didn’t want his four-legged friend back home to suffer.
He was thinking that Francis might need a call as well when the black SUV seemed to appear out of nowhere, cutting him off as he pulled out of the parking space, blocking his exit.
He been around long enough to know that nothing good was about to happen.
The truck’s doors opened and four familiar faces emerged.
This shit never gets any easier, Remy thought, almost sure that he could hear his angelic nature chuckling to itself as the four Denizens who had attacked him at home surrounded his car.