The suit, shirt, and tie were parting gifts from MHI. He didn’t know who’d left them in the Body Shack, but they had been neatly hung up and waiting for him. Even having lost some body mass from the fight and replacement parts, the suit almost fit correctly. There had been a note that said it had belonged to one of the Hunters they had lost in Vegas. That was good. Franks had not wanted to go into the fight of his life wearing Owen Pitt’s borrowed sweat pants.

He held out his open palm with the St. Hubert’s Key he had taken from MHI in it. It grated on his new skin as it turned, pointing toward the north. The pull was very strong. A human would only be able to tell that there was a gathering of angry demons in one place, but the Fallen had a very long time to get to know each other, and one spirit in particular stood out from the others. That one had to be Kurst.

Franks should have listened to the imp informant he’d shaken down off the coast of California. He’d done a cursory sweep after returning to duty back then, but had not picked up anything of note. Perhaps it was because the greater demon’s body hadn’t been fully formed yet, or maybe whatever process Stricken had used to grow the bodies had shielded them from Franks’ search. Perhaps, since he had been using a holy relic, the Creator had a sense for the dramatic and simply preferred their final showdown to happen this way. Franks didn’t know, and he didn’t really care. All that mattered was ending this once and for all.

When he returned to the road, a motorcycle had stopped behind his stolen car. Gutterres was waiting for him. He saw what Franks had in his hand. “A St. Hubert’s Key? Is that what you went to Alabama for? I could have saved you a whole lot of time, not to mention a whole lot of getting your arms ripped off by a werewolf, if I’d known that beforehand . . . I guess the Lord really does work in mysterious ways.”

He had no patience for people he liked, not that there were many of those, and even less for people he didn’t give a shit about. He felt like slugging the Hunter in the mouth, but Franks needed all the help he could get. “Kurst is that way.”

“I’ve given those rally point coordinates to my people. They’ll be there in a few hours. What about yours?”

Franks shrugged. For all he knew Jefferson was on his way to a country without extradition.