When Nero called to check in with Nico the next morning, she still had no word of any demon sightings. "But every one o' my contacts knows to call me th' instant they hear a peep about demons or that hunter chick," she assured him. "We'll catch up to her sooner or later."

"Let's hope it's sooner, if she's going around summoning demons."

Nico gave a thoughtful hum. "I mean, it does mean job security for us, if she's turnin' them things loose on the city. People'll pay more if there's a bigger threat. Wonder why I never thought o' this before…"

"Nico!" Nero growled. "Fortuna has enough problems without you setting up some kind of demon protection racket. That's just the kind of shit the Order pulled on them."

Lady, who was finishing breakfast at the kitchen table, nearly choked on her toast. "Protection racket?" she sputtered.

Nico completely ignored Nero's rebuke. "Hey, that sounded like Lady. Is she in town?"

"Yeah, she just got in yesterday."

"Put her on! I got some questions for her."

Nero handed the receiver over to Lady before ducking beneath the stretched cord to start washing the dishes. Lady's half of the conversation consisted mostly of affirmative or negative grunts around bites of food, but she concluded the conversation with, "All right. I'll come over in a little while, and we can check. Right. See you shortly."

Nero tried not to sound like he'd been eavesdropping. "You going somewhere?" he asked when she'd replaced the phone on the cradle.

"Nico wants my help narrowing down the specific kind of summoning technique that new hunter of yours is using. She thinks maybe it'll help you figure out who she is or where she comes from." Lady shrugged. "I'm certainly no expert on summoning rituals, but I suppose I can look through books as well as the next girl. Nico says she took photos of the seal at the hotel."

"I don't know what good it will do, but I guess it's the only lead we have right now." His hands were submerged to the elbow in suds, so Nero scratched his nose against his shoulder. "You gonna take your bike?"

"No, I think I'll just walk. There's no rush, and I don't want to have to unload all the pyrotechnics in case we need to transport them somewhere later." Lady collected her dishes and carried them to the sink. "Do you need any help with that?"

"Nah, I do this four days a week. I'm a pro. Just put them in the water with the others." Nero bobbed his neck forward to point at the left side of the divided sink with his chin.

Lady laughed. "I believe it. You've got the hands-free communication down."

In return, Nero flicked a few soap bubbles in her direction. She easily dodged and escaped the kitchen to find her boots.

Soon Lady had departed for Nico's, all the dishes were dried and put away, and Kyrie had confirmed that there was no pressing housework he needed to do. Without a task to focus on, Nero's mind fretted at the loose threads of every challenge they'd encountered since his return. Where had the Nilepoch gone, and when would it return? Who was this teenage girl, and why was she summoning demons? Why were Rosso and Zaffiro growing so fast, and how much did they truly remember? What would they do for money once Nero's last paycheck from the docks had been spent?

To distract himself from his frustration at the endless dead ends, Nero went upstairs and dug his old guitar out storage.

Rosso was flopped across the couch when Nero entered the living room, but he bolted upright when he spotted the dusty case. "A guitar!"

"Yep. I used to play a lot when I was younger. Scoot over, will ya?" Nero laid the case out on the couch and flipped down the latches. "Now, you gotta be real careful with this thing, okay?"

Rosso nodded enthusiastically, and his eyes stretched wide as Nero lifted the acoustic guitar from its case. "It's so cool!"

Nero laughed. The secondhand instrument had been the first purchase he'd made with his meager salary after joining the Holy Knights. He had initially used a sticker advertising his favorite band to cover a scuff on the front, and gradually added more until nearly the entire wood surface was covered in colorful decals. It really looked like something only a teenager could have produced, but it held a lot of sentimental value for him. "Okay, let me see if I can get this thing tuned. I haven't played it in years."

Rosso watched, fingers twitching in anticipation, as Nero adjusted the strings. At last he handed it over to the boy, who settled it over his lap on the couch. "It's really big," Rosso observed, stretching his small fingers to fit around the neck.

"Yeah, I don't have a kid-sized one. But I bet you'll grow into it pretty quick." At the rate they were growing, Nero suspected the twins would be pushing adulthood within just a few months. The realization that he might soon have to deal with teenage versions of Dante and Vergil petrified him, and he quickly shoved the image from his mind.

After a few false starts, Rosso managed to produce a series of chords and work through a simple fingering exercise. His playing wasn't nearly as fluid as Zaffiro's, but he displayed just as much enthusiasm. Nero watched as the boy tried to pick out a melody and wondered what role music had played in their early lives, and if they still carried the same passion for it as adults. Dante kept his electric guitar and drum set on display, and Nero knew the ancient jukebox in his office was loaded with rock tunes. Vergil, on the other hand, didn't strike Nero as the rock-and-roll type.

Nor, it seemed, did he care much for Rosso's halting attempts at playing the guitar. Zaffiro had been curled up in the armchair, finishing his latest book, but as Rosso fumbled through chords his expression soured. After several minutes he scrambled out of the chair and replaced the book on the shelf.

"Are there any more books?" Zaffiro asked Nero, raising his voice over Rosso's exploratory strumming. "I've read all of these."

"All of them?" Nero stared at the kids' bookshelf in the corner. There weren't more than a few dozen books, and Zaffiro certainly read at a staggering rate, but he hadn't expected him to exhaust their tiny library so quickly. "I'm not sure we have anything else for your age level."

Zaffiro's eyes shifted to the stack of leatherbound books beside the armchair. "They don't have to be children's books. I don't mind reading longer ones."

Nero made a mental note to move the remaining volumes from the Order library well out of sight. "I know you can read those, but you shouldn't. They're strictly off-limits."

The boy frowned. "But if I don't practice my Latin, I'll forget it."

"I'm pretty sure you won't." A sudden thought struck Nero. "Hey, I do have one book I could let you look at, if you promise to be careful with it."

Zaffiro looked insulted at the implication that he might be anything but. "I'm always careful with books."

"Right." Nero weighed the odds that Zaffiro might sneak a peek inside one of the Order's volumes as soon as he left the room. "Why don't you wait for me in your bedroom, and I'll bring it down, okay?"

Zaffiro agreed, and Nero hurried upstairs to find the book. When he returned to the ground floor, he could still hear Rosso plucking at the guitar in the living room. In the bedroom, Zaffiro was sitting patiently on his bunk. Nero sat beside him, summoning the fortitude to go ahead with this test.

"What kind of book is it?" the boy asked, stretching forward to see what Nero was carrying.

"It's a book of poems." Almost reverently, Nero handed him the slim volume. "This is a special book. It… uh, it belonged to my father. He really liked it, and I think maybe you will, too."

Zaffiro traced his fingers over the debossed V in the cover before opening it. The bright watercolors seemed to leap from each page. "I know this book," he said slowly, turning the pages one by one. "I've read it before. I remember the pictures." He stopped at a page with flowing script framed by a tree, crowning a rather bulldog-like rendering of a tiger. "Oh, I like this one!" He rested his hand on the page and recited:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Nero's eyes never left the boy's hand as he continued through the six stanzas of the poem. Zaffiro's fingers lay directly over the words; there was no way he was reading them off the page. The awful suspicion that had been growing in Nero's mind was solidifying into a certainty. "Where did you learn that poem?" Nero asked when Zaffiro had finished.

"I used to read it a lot." Zaffiro casually swung his dangling feet as he paged through the remainder of the book, the picture of careless innocence. "My neighbor gave me a book just like this. He said I should have it because I like books so much. I wrote my name in the back, so my brother wouldn't take it." The child scowled, a familiar crease appearing between his fine eyebrows. "Mother is always making us share everything. So I wrote my name in it before I took it home, because then it would just be mine."

Nero's pulse quickened, but before he could ask anything further, Kyrie appeared in the doorway. "Lunch will be ready soon," she announced. "Zaffiro, you can wash your hands first, since Rosso is still playing guitar."

The boy handed the book back to Nero and hopped down from the bed. "I do like this book. May I read it again some time?"

"Of course." Nero's smile felt wooden. "You'd better hurry and wash up."

When Zaffiro had vanished down the hallway, Nero turned the book over. With trembling hands, he opened it to the inside back cover.

There, in neat but unmistakably childish printing, the letters VERGIL were inked onto the endpaper.

"They remember," Nero said to the space beneath his arms. He was sitting on his bed, back to the headboard, knees drawn up and arms crossed over them, forehead resting on his forearms. It was a crude but efficient way of blocking out the rest of the world. He wasn't sure he could process anything other than the single thought hammering away at the inside of his skull. "They remember."

"Who remembers what?" Kyrie's voice snapped him into the present, and Nero raised his head to find her staring at him from the doorway. She tilted her head and frowned. "Lunch is ready. Are you feeling all right?"

Nero wasn't sure how to answer that, and apparently he took too long to decide on a response, because Kyrie came to sit beside him. "Nero?" she prompted gently. "What's the matter?"

"The kids. Zaffiro and—" He shook his head. "Vergil and Dante. They remember their life." He relaxed his coiled posture and slumped back against the headboard. "I don't know how, but their memories are coming back."

"I heard Rosso playing your guitar this morning. Is that what you mean? We already knew that Zaffiro retained some skills."

Nero shook his head. "I showed Zaffiro this book." He handed her the Blake volume. "Vergil left it with me last year, and I see him so rarely, I've never gotten around to returning it." They'd also never had the promised rematch, for which the book had served as a promissory note—though after everything that had happened since, Nero wasn't sure he wanted one.

Kyrie paged through the book. "And what did Zaffiro have to say about it?"

"Not only did he have the poems memorized, but he told me who originally gave it to him. He even remembered writing his name in the back."

Kyrie opened the back cover, and her eyes widened. "Oh. I see."

"Yeah." Nero let his head fall back and winced as it cracked against the headboard.

"But isn't that a good thing?" Kyrie handed the book back to him. "We wanted them to be restored to their adult selves, right? Memories and all? You wouldn't want them to be the correct age but not know who they are."

"Of course I want them back the way they were. But I don't think they have all their memories yet; otherwise, they'd know who I am, wouldn't they? Or at least be asking some questions? I think they're getting the memories back as they age. So what they remember now is only what happened to them up until they were six or seven—whatever age they are now. They've both mentioned dreaming about their parents and things, so maybe it's coming back to them while they sleep."

"If it's all subconscious, perhaps that's why they haven't questioned their new names." Kyrie cocked her head at him. "But it doesn't much matter how they are getting the memories back, so long as they do, right? I still don't understand why you're worried about it."

"I'm worried because…" Nero's fingers tightened on the book. "Because Dante never talks about his past. I mean never. I've asked him things—just normal conversational stuff, like where he grew up, or who taught him to fight—and I swear, I've never seen him clam up so tight about anything. I didn't even know he had a brother until V told me."

"But Dante's always kept plenty of secrets."

"Well, sure—I mean, he could have told me I was his nephew about five years sooner. But normally when he doesn't want to answer a question, he just brushes it off with some stupid joke and changes the subject. It's really weird when he refuses to say anything at all. And that makes me think there was a reason he wasn't talking. A reason he didn't tell me we were related until he absolutely had to. Like there was stuff I wasn't supposed to know."

"And if the children are getting their memories back a little at a time, you think maybe they'll let those secrets slip out?"

"Yeah. I mean, I can't deny that I'm curious about some things, but I don't want to find out this way. It feels… dishonest, I guess. Besides, these are Sparda's own sons we're talking about! There might be a very good reason they aren't talking. I mean, what if they're the only ones who know what happened to Sparda, or where he is now?"

Kyrie grimaced. "You're right. If the Order had suspected someone had that information, I hate to think what lengths they would have gone to."

"Exactly." Nero shrugged. "Or maybe it's nothing like that at all, and Dante just didn't want to talk about it for some personal reason. I don't know. I guess I'm already feeling a little guilty about how much I've learned about them since all this started."

"You mean what Trish and Lady told you?" Kyrie hesitated. "Is it something you can share with me, or…?"

"I'm not sure." Nero found her hand and squeezed it. "I really want to tell you, so you know where they're coming from, but I'm not even sure they would want me to know."

She nodded. "I understand. It's not your secret to share."

"It really wasn't Trish or Lady's, either." He sighed. "But both of them met Vergil when he was young—well, not young young, but younger than we are now—so they knew more about how he came to be… the way he is." Nero pushed away the images of torture the memory of that conversation conjured and stared instead at the book in his hand. He'd seen V reading it so often, he should have guessed it was something that had been precious to Vergil from childhood. He'd never dreamed that Dante's eccentric, poetry-quoting client would become so important to him. "You know, V let a few things slip, too. We were walking through the ruins of Red Grave, and he pointed out the house he grew up in." A wry smile tugged at his mouth. "It was pretty much in ruins, but it looked like it had been a really nice place. Big, you know, one of those fancy old private estates. Probably had a servants' entrance."

Kyrie laughed. "Well, it is hard to picture the Legendary Dark Knight Sparda living in an efficiency apartment."

Nero chuckled. "Fair enough. But man, it sure would be nice to have a chunk of that kind of inheritance right about now."

Kyrie rested her head on his shoulder. "From what you've told me about the way Dante lives, it doesn't sound like there's much to go around."

"No, I guess not. Even if there had been, he probably would have squandered it all on pizza years ago." Nero frowned thoughtfully. "Huh. I wonder if Vergil cooks for himself. Dante doesn't have much of a kitchen, but Vergil doesn't strike me as the pizza-for-every-meal type."

"Well, when this is all behind us and things are back to normal, you can ask him."

"Yeah, I guess so." Nero set the book on the nightstand. Against the darker cover, the V seemed to glow in the light streaming through the window. "I think I'm gonna have a lot of things to ask him, once this is over."

Nero was just finishing up the dishes from lunch when the telephone rang. He balanced the plate he was washing on the edge of the sink and extended one soap-covered hand, but his reach fell just short of the receiver. A little burst of devil power and a flash of a spectral limb brought the phone to him, and he cradled it on his shoulder as he rinsed the plate. "Hello?"

"Open up the garage an' grab your gear!" Nico's breathless voice reached him. "Just got a call from th' Neighborhood Watch. Somethin' big's goin' down, an' Lady's comin' to meet you."

"Okay, but where are we—" Nero sighed as the line went dead. "Somebody really needs to teach Nico some phone protocol," he growled aloud.

"Did something happen?" Kyrie entered the kitchen and took the receiver from Nero's shoulder.

"That was Nico. Apparently there's a job, or something. She didn't say, but Lady's on her way and I'm supposed to meet her in the garage."

"All right." Kyrie held out a towel. "Leave the dishes. You'd better get ready."

Nero hesitated. "Are you sure? I just have a few—"

"Nero, I can do the dishes. I can't kill demons. Go."

"Thanks." Nero kissed her cheek as he wiped the soap from his hands.

By the time Nero had prepped his weapons and unlocked the garage door, Lady was only one house away. "On the bike," she panted as she jogged the last few yards. "Gotta go now."

Nero freed Red Queen from her case and slung her across his back before swinging a leg over Lady's motorcycle. There was scarcely room for his legs amid the missiles and grenades she'd brought, but he didn't have time to rearrange anything; within a few seconds, Lady was in the seat in front of him, cranking the ignition. "Hold on," Lady called back to him. It was all the warning he had before she released the clutch. The bike swung in a tight pivot, rotating around its stationary front wheel and leaving a thick layer of rubber on the floor of the garage, before rocketing out onto the street.

Nero clung to the frame behind the seat as Lady sped through the narrow streets of Fortuna, cutting the corners close enough that Nero feared losing a kneecap. The roar of the engine bounced back from the high stone walls on either side, making conversation an impossibility, but he realized soon enough that they were headed toward the old garment district.

At last the motorcycle's velocity reduced to something resembling a safe speed, and Lady pulled into the shadow of a crumbling warehouse and cut the engine. "This is the place Nico described," she called over her shoulder. Her voice sounded distant, and Nero realized his ears were still ringing from the unfiltered motorcycle noise. Lady hastily strapped on a belt and slotted several pistols into the attached holsters before unbuckling the straps holding Kalina Ann to the side of the bike. "Let's go."

Nero thought about asking her what they were hunting, exactly, but decided he'd find out soon enough. It was rare for anything other than Scarecrows or Chimeras to appear on Fortuna nowadays, and most days, those were barely enough to provide him with a good warm-up. He followed Lady through a sagging doorway into the warehouse, squinting into the dim interior as his eyes adjusted from the bright sunlight outside.

The back of his neck prickled, and Nero ducked just in time to avoid the spear of ice that lanced through the space his head had just occupied. The projectile lodged in the wall beside the doorjamb, scattering flakes of snow. "Frost!" Lady shouted from a few paces away. She was coming out of a roll; a patch of jagged ice protruded from the floor where she'd been standing a moment before. As she rose from her crouch, she swung Kalina Ann forward and launched a missile into the ice-covered demon that hovered a short distance away. The rocket punched a hole in the creature's ice shield. Before it could recover, Nero lunged forward with Red Queen, plunging the tip of the blade through the narrow gap. The Frost screeched and swung a claw at him, but Nero ducked the attack and stepped in closer. He used his leverage to swing the demon in an arc over his head, still impaled on the sword. As the Frost's head hammered into the floor on the other side, Red Queen cleaved the rest of the way through its body, and the demon burst into ash and snow.

"Haven't fought one of those in a while." Lady brushed some ash off her sleeve and shrugged Kalina Ann's strap higher on her shoulder. "You get many Frosts around here nowadays?"

"I've seen exactly one other in the last two years, and that one was summoned." As Nero spoke, two more Frosts charged them from either side. Lady engaged one while Nero battled the other, alternating exploding ammunition and fast sword slashes to wear down its ice shield. He knew lighting up Red Queen would melt through it faster, but that was a trick he could use only once—the sword's chamber only held so much fuel—and with this many demons in one place, he needed to conserve it until they knew exactly what they were up against.

When the next two demons had been turned to ash, Nero registered what he hadn't before: The sound of gunfire echoed deeper in the building. He and Lady separated, moving forward along parallel trajectories to cover more area. There was a pause in the gunfire, filled by the chittering of demons and the scraping of bladed feet, and then six more shots sounded in rapid succession. Nero counted the seconds before the next shots and swore. "Manually reloading a revolver. I bet it's that girl again."

"You think she summoned these?" Lady raised a handgun and blasted a nearby Scarecrow into sawdust. "Seems ambitious, for a novice."

"I never said she was smart. She's just a teenager." Nero decapitated another with Red Queen and fired a dual shot into one that lumbered toward him.

"So was I, when I started." Lady parried the blade of another demon before running it through with Kalina Ann's bayonet. "For that matter, so were you."

"Yeah, but I had training. And you had…" Nero watched her handspring through twin attacks, stick the landing, and follow up with a high kick that knocked a demon off its feet. "…gymnastics, apparently."

"Well, when we find this girl…" Lady paused to roll a grenade under the feet of an approaching trio of Scarecrows. They went up in a riot of flaming burlap. "…we'll find out what she's got."

Finding the girl didn't take long, as she obligingly dashed through a door and into their path only seconds later, panting for breath. Strands of auburn hair were plastered to her sweat-glossed face, but the fear in her expression turned to vitriol when she caught sight of the more experienced hunters. The battered .45 revolver in her hand twitched menacingly toward Nero.

"Aw, hell no." Nero tossed Blue Rose into his left hand before his devil arm shot out and snatched the revolver from the startled girl's grasp. "You do not point a gun at me, you little b—" Just in time, some part of his brain reminded him that she was little more than a child, and he choked off the word he'd been inclined to say. "—brat!"

The girl slammed the door behind her and made a dash for the exit, directly in line between Nero and Lady. This time it was Lady who acted, dropping low and sweeping one leg in a graceful arc that knocked the girl's feet out from under her. She tumbled forward and cracked her chin hard on the concrete floor, and a few seconds later her arms were pinned behind her back as Lady knelt over her.

"Don't make this any harder than it needs to be," Lady said. "Why don't we start with your name?"

"Lasciami—" The girl thrashed helplessly in Lady's grip. "Let me go!"

"Strange name," Nero drawled, twirling the revolver and Blue Rose in unison. "You wanna try another one?"

"Let me go!" The rage in the girl's voice was beginning to sound more like panic. "Please, let me go! He is coming!"

Lady and Nero exchanged glances. "Who is coming?"

"The light demon! The big one!" The girl risked bumping her bruised chin on the pavement again to twist back toward the door she'd run through. Her eyes were stretched wide with unfeigned fear. "Please, please let me go!"

"So you accidentally summoned something a little bigger than you could handle, is that it?" Nero dropped into a crouch and grinned down at her. "Maybe you should think twice about messing with powers beyond your understanding, Red."

"I did not summon him!" The girl squirmed for all she was worth. "We must go before he—" From the next room came the sudden groaning of strained metal, and the door shifted in its frame. "Please, we must go now!" the girl sobbed.

More metal creaked, and this time the door itself dented inward. Nero rose from his crouch, eyes on the bulging door. "Okay, Red, if you want us to let you go, tell us what you know. What's on the other side of that door?"

"I don't know!" she shrieked. "I was training, and he suddenly appeared. Please, he will kill all of us!"

Lady glanced up at Nero. "If it's something big, we can't fight it and hold onto her."

Nero frowned. "She could be bluffing. She did that last time I had her."

The door shuddered as something large collided with it from the other side. "If that's a bluff, this kid could clean up at the World Poker Championships." Lady rose, maintaining her grip on one of the girl's wrists and hauling her to her feet as well. "Do we let her go, or put her to work?"

"I don't trust her with a gun," Nero said, but the last words were lost beneath the screech of rending metal as the doorframe tore free from the wall, leaving a sizeable gap. Nero pitched the girl's .45 aside and drew Red Queen, and beside him Lady released their captive to level Kalina Ann at the new threat. The girl bolted for the exit, but Nero hauled her back with his devil arm and dropped her beside her revolver. "Pick it up. You wanted to play at this job, now you get to see what it's really like."

"He'll kill me!" the girl wailed.

"Should have thought of that before you started summoning demons," Nero snarled. "Now pick up the gun before I decide to use you as bait."

The girl eyed his right arm, still glittering with demonic power, and reluctantly scooped up the revolver. "Bullets do not harm him. I tried before."

Whatever Nero was about to answer was wiped from his mind as the rest of the doorframe peeled away from the wall, and they got their first look at their target. Only a fraction of it was visible through the hole in the wall, but that was enough for Nero to recognize the bulbous purple-black form, the energy pouring off it like smoke, the traces of violet light that seeped from its mouth.

"Shit," he breathed.

The Nilepoch's head angled toward them.

"Shit," Nero repeated. "Run!"