The Brothers Black, Part One

The sedan carried five dead men through the dark.
They went to their graves at 75 miles an hour, swerving as the road did and once avoiding a dog that had unknowingly stepped between death and his nightly meal. All of the men in the black sedan were in good spirits, shown by this uncommon mercy for strays.

Most nights they’d have swerved the other way, taken out the dog in a spray without changing expression. They had taken so many lives to date that animal life, really any life, meant nothing.
These were men who solved things; human things, usually. They were called in at great expense to those who summoned them. They arrived from shadow and never seemed equally lit.

They found their target and without emotion dispatched whatever their contract required. Fear was often enough; after sufficient torment many of their targets were more than happy to do anything else.

The First Two Shadows specialized in prolonging the moment before actual death without going over. They could take a man to the edge of his life and hold him there, all the while pulling parts off with hot pliers.
Sometimes a more direct demise was required, and for that this team had an answer. The Second Shadows were experts in fast, silent and faceless killing. They came out of the night without a whisper, ultimately invisible, and left cleanly, not splashing the walls. Examiners are later unable to pinpoint a source of death.
Then there was The Master Shade.
This Warrior-Monk of Darkness possessed several skills of note. None were so feared as his thought-killer; he could literally wish you to death. It was said his thoughts were so dark they drained whatever they fell upon. Some thought it was partly the dark gaze of his eyes, whose very attention could cause weather to cloud, milk to curd and even tears to run red.
They claimed no name, but those few who knew that they even existed knew them as The Dark Wheel or the Brothers Black.
This night they had just made a stop that had engaged all their talents equally, a rare moment indeed and one they did not take lightly.
Their target was held at the top of a The Sharp Scraper, an all-glass high-rise that was narrowness at its best. The structure was deep in the heart of Dark City, a hub between worlds that appeared as a steaming clockwork of perpetual motion, a roaring metal cyclone of tall buildings and acid rain.