Small Favor

"Yep," I said.

"We’ve gone up against the supernatural three times," she said quietly. "It’s ended badly twice."

We meaning the cops, of course. I nodded. One of those occasions had killed her partner, Ron Carmichael. He hadn’t been an angel or anything, but he had been a good man and a solid cop.

"All right," she said quietly. "I’m willing to hold off for now. On one condition."

"Name it."

"I’m in from here on out. You obviously need someone to protect you from the big, bad billy goats."

I snorted. "Yeah, obviously."

She held up the last of her beer. I held up mine.

We clinked them, finished them, and went back out into the winter cold together.

Chapter Eighteen

"A ll right," I said. "I hearby call this war council to order."

We were all sitting around my tiny living room, eating Burger King. Thomas and Molly had voted for McDonald’s, but since I was paying, I sternly informed them that this was not a democracy, and Burger King it was.

Hail to the King, baby.

Murphy rolled her eyes over the whole thing.

"War council?" Molly asked, wide-eyed. "Are we going to start another war?"

"I sort of meant it as a metaphor," I said, as I made sure the ketchup-mustard ratio on my burger was within acceptable parameters. "I need to decide on my next step, and I’ve been hit in the head a few times lately. Figured my brain could use a little help."

"Just now worked that out, did you?" Thomas murmured.

"Quiet, you," I growled. "The idea is to generate useful thoughts here."

"Not funny ones," Molly said, suppressing a laugh.

I eyed her. She ate a french fry.

Murphy sipped at her Diet Coke. "Well," she said, "I don’t know how much advice I can give you until I know what you’re up against."

"I told you in the car," I said. "The Knights of the Blackened Denarius."

"Fallen angels, old tarnished coins, psychotic killers, got it," Murphy said. "But that doesn’t tell me what their capabilities are."

"She’s got a point," Thomas said quietly. "You haven’t said much about these guys."

I blew out a breath and took a big bite of hamburger to give me a moment to think while I chewed. "There’s a lot that these things can do," I said afterward. "Mostly, the coins seem to allow their users to alter their physical form into something better suited for a fight than a regular human body."

"Battle shapeshifting," Molly said. "Cool."

"It isn’t cool," I told her. Then I paused and admitted, "Okay, maybe a little. It makes them harder to hurt. It makes them faster. It arms them with various forms of weaponry. Claws, fangs, that kind of thing. Cassius looked like he might have had a poisonous bite, for example. Ursiel’s wielder could shift into this huge bear thing with claws and fangs and horns. Another one turned her hair into about a million strips of living titanium blade, and they were whipping all over the place and shooting through walls. Stretched out like twenty or thirty feet."

"I have some customers like that," Thomas quipped.

Murphy blinked and glanced at him.

I cleared my throat and gave Thomas another glare. "Another one of them, Nicodemus, didn’t seem to do any shapeshifting, but his freaking shadow could leap off the wall and strangle you. Creepy as hell."

"They don’t all have, like, a uniform or something?" Molly asked.

"Not even close," I replied. "Each of the Fallen seems to have its own particular preferences. And I suspect that those preferences adapt themselves differently to different holders of the coins. Quintus Cassius’s Fallen had this whole serpent motif going, and Cassius’s magic was pretty snake-intensive, too. But he was totally different from Ursiel, who was totally different from Mantis Girl from this morning, who was different from the other Denarians I’ve seen."

Murphy nodded. "Anything else?"

"Goons," I said. "More like a cult, really. Nicodemus had a number of followers whose tongues had been removed. They were fanatics, heavily armed, and crazy enough to commit suicide rather than be captured by his enemies."

She winced. "The airport?"

"Yeah."

"That it?"

"No," I said. "Nicodemus also had these…call them guard dogs, I guess. Except that they weren’t dogs. I don’t know what they were, but they were ugly and ran fast and had big teeth. But all of that isn’t what makes them dangerous."

"No?" Thomas said. "Then what is?"

"The Fallen," I replied.

The room fell silent.

"They’re beings older than time who have spent two thousand years learning the ins and outs of the mortal world and the mortal mind," I said quietly. "They understand things we literally could not begin to grasp. They’ve seen every trick, learned every move, and they’re riding shotgun for each coin holder-if they aren’t in the driver’s seat already. Every one of them has a perfect memory, a library of information at his immediate disposal, and a schemer that makes Cardinal Richelieu look like Mother Teresa hanging around in his brain as an adviser."

Thomas stared at me very hard for a moment, frowning. I tried to ignore him.

Murphy shook her head. "Let’s sum up: an unknown number of enemies with unknown capabilities, supported by a gang of madmen, packs of attack animals, and superhumanly intelligent pocket change." She gave me a look. "It’s sort of tough to plan for that, given how much we don’t know."

"Well, then that’s what we do next, isn’t it?" Molly asked tentatively. "Find out more about them?"

Thomas flicked a glance at Molly and nodded once.

"To do that we’d have to find them," I said.

"A tracking spell?" Molly suggested.

"I don’t have any samples to work with," I replied. "And even if I did, somebody on their team was able to obscure Mab’s divining spells. I’m nowhere close to Mab’s league. My spells wouldn’t have a prayer."

"If they’ve got that much of an entourage, they’re going to stick out anywhere even vaguely public," Murphy mused. "A gang of toughs with no tongues? If the Denarians are in town, that should make them relatively easy to locate."

"Last time they were holed up in Undertown," I said. "Believe me, there’s plenty of room for badness down there."

"What about the spirit world?" Thomas asked quietly. "Surely there’s an entity or two who could tell us something."