They came for Tobian Marrow on the ninth day, in the alley behind the Sealed Step, in the hour after the lamps had burned down and the honest half of the city had gone to sleep.
There were three of them, and Alistair felt them before he ever saw them.
Not with the Equalizer, since that was no use at all in the close dark against men who carried no power worth reading.
He felt them with the older sense instead, the one that had nothing to do with his Characteristic and everything to do with sixteen years of people deciding to end him.
The alley narrowed up ahead, the way alleys narrow when they mean to do you harm.
A shape waited in the narrow part.
Behind him, two more peeled themselves off the wall as he passed, quiet, and not quite quiet enough.
