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.”