Cassandra had seen the suit of armor that stood opposite her before and had to swallow the words, "Jean-Paul?" before they could slip out. Jean-Paul, in at least a basic sense, had been her friend in his last years. This man, whoever he was, could not be him, she'd already decided and was already sizing him up.

"Oi, we didn't kill Arlington and we didn't take Day." By the way he took his stance, Constantine probably knew his words would fall on deaf ears. "Take it up with those wankers in black."

"The Order of Cantonna have served as our allies for centuries." Azrael glared briefly in Constantine's direction before his eyes settled on the Suit of Sorrow. He extended one arm and clenched his fist. A telescoping blade popped out of his wrist and he pointed it toward Cassandra. "As are the Order of Purity. If you think yourself innocent, then why does she wear their champion's mail?"

"Crawled onto me," Cassandra said. "Girl in black, Nijah, she and the others killed him."

"A likely story. But if it were so—" Azrael raised his other hand, clenched his fist, and extended the second blade toward Constantine. "You'd ask me to believe Arlington sought the help of this… this heathen. We know full and well what you are, occultist."

"I'm no cultist, I just do what they do." Constantine knew nothing he was going to say would even slow down their attacker, but he never passed up the chance to act defiant. "Just like you don't worship gaudy clothing designers."

Azrael took another imposing step toward the magician and Cassandra, back in her Angel of the Bat mentality, stepped into his path. The warrior hesitated for a moment and thought back on his training. His own armor was mere decoration next to the might of the Suit of Sorrows. But even its power was determined largely by the one who wore it. And he was sure he could overpower that petty child.

With gauntlet blades extended, he ran to meet his fellow knight in the center of the living room. Angel took to defense immediately and weaved in, out, and around Azrael's slashes. The movements had been second nature for years, Angel's true concern was how easily she could strikes through the plate armor her opponent wore.

Over at the couch, still half undressed and gritting his teeth, Constantine searched his discarded pants pockets for anything that would have him aid. To his initial chagrin he found little besides a pack of cigarettes. Some of the frustration passed when he realized they could still prove useful, and then returned with a vengeance at the thought of a wasted Silk Cut.

As Angel dodged one swing after another from Azrael, Sadie and the Question both peeked out of their respective bedrooms. When he caught sight of them, the crusader stepped away from his slashes at Angel and shouted, "You two! Surrender yourselves or burn!" He pulled a pair of cartridges from his belt and threw each into one of the rooms. The Question seemed to recognize it immediately, ran out, and slammed her door shut. Sadie looked back in confusion a few beats more and only returned to her senses when the container began to crack and fizzle. By the time she put a door between herself and the gas that leaked out, a terrible, vinegar-like smell was in her nostrils. When she coughed, the Question ran over to her.

"You inhale any of that?"

Sadie gagged. "I think just a little."

"Tear gas," the Question said. "We should get you out of here."

Sadie tried to say "Thanks," but was cut off by another bad round of wheezes. Though she obviously had Angel's attention before, the oppressive hacks made her girlfriend seethe.

Azrael took another step toward them. "I told you you're not—"

Angel cut Azrael off with a sucker punch to his face. She was tough, but she knew from her few interactions with Jean-Paul that the Azrael armor could take a real beating, she had most hoped to be a distraction. What she was not prepared for was a smash into Azrael's facemask hard enough to bend it inward and make the warrior stagger backwards in pain. Angel's flinch was nearly as pronounced as her opponent's. After a moment she remembered what Bruce had said about the suit granting increased power, but it had apparently made a distractionary attack enough to dent metal.

In her moment of confusion, Azrael rushed forward and took a slash across her stomach with one of his blades. The steel slashed straight through Angel's surcoat and layer of lower black mail, the cut strong enough to even draw a thin line of blood. Angel snapped back into focus as Azrael took another swing. In answer to an instinct she wasn't sure was her own, she raised one arm to block and the blade as it came at her. Again, Azrael managed a cut through the armor and into Angel's skin, but it was then her attention returned momentarily to the first cut. Or, it seemed, the lack thereof. Despite a little pain still in her stomach, Angel touched a hand to the last slash and felt no cut in her armor, as if it had already mended itself. Similarly, as Azrael pulled back one of his arm blades, the cut through the armor along her arm vanished and her suit was again complete. She observed this for only a moment, it was one more thing to get a better grasp on later.

The Question led the still-wheezing Sadie toward the hallway door, but Azrael again took advantage of Angel's momentary distraction. With the flick of a button on his suit, he fired one of his blades at the exit and the metal weapon dug deep into the door and its frame. The sword's position was such it would take the arduous task of digging it out to even pull the door open. Almost seamlessly, the Question wheeled around with Sadie and made for the door onto the balcony.

With a clearer idea of what the Suit of Sorrows was capable of, Angel shifted into offense and struck out against Azrael. She swung a few punches into the crusader's upper pectorals, each of which produced a loud, hollow sound like a kick against a garbage can. Azrael shouted in pain and keeled downward, which allowed Angel another crack at his face. The force was enough to knock off his lower facemask, and Azrael leaned downward and spat up a mouthful of blood.

In pain and fury, Azrael swung his remaining sword about wildly. Despite the power in her armor, Angel took a few steps backwards as her opponent gasped for breath and settled a glare at her.

Outside on the balcony, the Question leaned over the rail at the edge of the balcony and looked down twelve floors to the ground. Sadie joined her and her eyes widened. "We're not going to have to escape down there, are we?"

"Depends on how your girlfriend does in there," the Question said.

Had it only been up to Angel, the situation would have been under control quickly. Unfortunately for all of them, Constantine was waiting for a good chance to offer some support and chose the wrong moment. Neither Angel nor Azrael were giving him any attention until he rose off the couch with his hands clutched together and shouted, "Oi, ya great bastard, choke on it!"

Hands opened, Constantine blew a breath of desecrated tobacco toward the crusader. With both his eyes and mouth uncovered, Azrael let out an agonized series of coughs and gags as he fought for a clean breath. Sure a follow up attack was coming from Angel, Azrael pressed on another trigger in his bladeless gauntlet. A small pipe rose out from his suit's wrist, and with a squeeze a breath of fire spat out into the room. Angel, who was halfway into another attack, stopped dead in her tracks and leapt backwards. As Azrael's flaring set fire to the couch and carpet, she just gave Constantine an exacerbated glare.

"All right, all right, I won't bother trying to help next time. Happy?"

As soon as the Question and Sadie got a good look at the sudden burst of flames, the Question reached into her coat and produced a grapple gun. "Looks like we're going to have to slide down," she said.

Sadie gawked. "You gotta be kidding me—can that thing even hold a person's weight?"

"How do you think Batman gets around, you of little faith?"

"Pretty sure Cassie's supposed to have enough faith for both of us."

The Question fired at another apartment on the other side of the street and got one of the hooks onto a porch railing. The Question turned to Sadie and said, "I'm going to jump down. You'll have to get ahold of the rope and follow afterwards."

The younger woman swallowed and looked back into the apartment as Azrael struggled to get ahold of his flamethrower. "Guess we don't have a lot of choice, do we?"

As sweat dripped from her forehead and wrinkled the skin in the suit, Angel commanded Constantine, "Go. Will finish with him."

"Well, I don't need told twice." Constantine turned toward the balcony.

"Keep Sadie safe." Angel turned back toward Azrael as he seemed to recover his vision and control of his weapon. "She's still new to this."

"All right, all right." Constantine ran for the porch just as the Question climbed up on the railing and made her jump downward into the alley below.

As smoke alarms began to screech throughout the building, the two in the Azrael suits stared one another down.

"Didn't kill him," Angel said. "Want to stop the people who did."

Red eyed and breathing heavy breaths, Azrael said, "Convenient, that. Especially for someone working alongside a known warlock and God only knows who else."

Angel clenched her fists. "Don't know him well, but saw him protect another. And fight with a demon…. Jesus said something about that. That devils don't drive out other devils."

For just the length of a sigh, as the acrid stink of burnt carpet filled his nostrils, Azrael admired her knowledge of scripture. Then he ran at her with his arm blade again, sure this time would finally be the successful one.

The instincts of the Suit of Sorrows and Cassandra's own melded together as she reached toward the back of one of her shoulders. Even she didn't know why or what feeling she was following. Out from the armor she pulled the handle of a sword and a blade of flame erupted from it.

Azrael stopped just short of her and his eyes went wide. "Wait— please, no—"

Angel thrust the blazing Sword of Sin into the crusader's chest. The weapon passed through his body easier than a knife through butter, as if it was made of thin air. For a moment, he sat in stunned silence.

Then the same man who was so ready to kill screamed in horror. The crusader fell backwards and clutched his body to himself as he screeched over and over again. It was only through these screams of terror Cassandra returned to lucidity from the battle trance she was in.

Angel's confident, unbreakable stance shattered as Cassandra looked down on the man shouting in agony. "Oh God." She couldn't contain a shake that ran through her. "What did I do? What have I done?"

As the screaming Azrael fell to the floor, Constantine shouted from the porch, "Come on then already, the room's going up in smoke!"

Though the words were intended for Cassandra, they had Sadie's heart about to beat out of her chest as well. The Question had looped the grapple gun's thin rope around the balcony's railing before she descended to the ground, so in theory she just had to get ahold and let herself drop. But with sweaty palms and blood that pumped so loud she could hear it in her ears, Sadie really didn't know how to take that first leap. She'd made it to the top of the railing with half of her feet already hanging in midair. All she had to do was let herself fall, but again and again her nerves got the better of her.

Constantine looked her way and demanded, "You waiting on something?"

For just a moment, Sadie's fear was overtaken by anger. "I'm too chicken to even bungie jump, back off!" And just as soon as she'd gotten it out, dread wrestled control back from her.

If Cassandra was in complete control of all of her faculties, she would have thrown the sword away without regret. But the subconscious force of the Suit of Sorrows forced her to just slip it back into its place on his back. As she heard screams of confusion from the apartment's hallway, the shouts from Azrael passed as he seemed to fall unconscious. At his size in his own suit of armor, Cassandra assumed he must weigh twice what she did. That wouldn't have stopped her from doing everything in her power to get him out of the blaze in the first place, but with the Suit of Sorrows, she didn't even have to wake him up. Despite their disproportionate sizes, Cassandra slipped her arms under Azrael's chest, lifted him off the ground and ran toward the balcony. She was already examining the building across the alley as the suit's subconscious fed her information when she stopped and saw Sadie frozen in place.

"You all right?"

Sadie breathed out a heavy sigh. "Uh, you know." She swallowed hard. "Not something I'm used to."

Constantine was about to get another word in edgewise before Cassandra beat him to a response. "All right. Always scary the first time. Everyone said so."

The magician shouted, "No, no, please, take your time! Just a burning building behind us!"

Two ignored him and Sadie got in another nervous breath. "You really mean that? You were scared the first time you repelled from something like this?"

"Took a lot of getting used to," Cassandra said. If not for the hand she needed to keep on Azrael, she may have gone first to show Sadie how it was done. "Question did it, knows how it's done. You can trust her. And trust me."

For just a moment, a tiny smile of hope crossed Sadie's tired, frightened face. Cassandra took that as approval enough to, with Azrael still in hand, leap over the railing and across the alley. The hope that was on Sadie's face vanished and the blood drained from her face as she screamed, "Cassie!"

Between the suit's powers and Cassandra's own years of experience, the leap was well planned. As she crossed the alley and fell, she got ahold of the railing of one of the opposing apartments, turned herself around, and jumped back toward the original building. Each jump lowered her by a floor, and she was on the ground in less than a minute.

In between a pair of sour remarks from Constantine, Sadie went from feeling horrorstricken, to awestruck, to inadequate, to determined. If her girlfriend had just pulled off a ridiculous descent like what she'd just seen with a medieval knight tucked under her arm, Sadie could handle an improved fire pole drop.

Eyes shut tight, teeth grit together, she kicked off the railing and down the side of the building. The winter air was oppressive and freezing, her hands burned with the slide of the thin rope, and she wanted to scream. But the soles of her feet hit the ground before she had a chance. She opened her eyes with hesitation and the rest of the world still seemed to move a little slowly. The Question pulled her away from the rope and directed her toward Cassandra as she set Azrael's unconscious body against the adjacent building. As soon as she'd finished, Cassandra turned toward her.

"How was it?"

"I uhh… think I might need to throw up." After a second of thought that still seemed much longer to her, Sadie added, "But maybe let out a good long laugh too."

"Sounds about right." Cassandra stepped forward and pulled her into a tight hug. "Safe again now."

And, in spite of everything that had just happened, Sadie actually felt like it. And to even her own relief, she shattered the tension with a pang of laughter.