I’m not even sure I want to kill Mason anymore. I want to force-feed him Vidocq’s immortality potion. Then I’ll do to him what he did to Jack. He can hang from the chain on the balcony, a chunk of raw red meat turning in the wind for a million years.

“Are you okay?” I ask Alice.

She nods.

“Where’s Neshamah?”

She shakes her head.

“He’s dead. Aelita came with raiders. She killed him and took the crystal. Then she brought me here.”

Mason tosses the Singularity back and forth between his hands.

He says, “Do you know what this is?”

“No,” I lie. “But I have a feeling you don’t want to break it.”

He smiles.

“So you do know what it is.”

“I just try not to break anything angels steal from deities. Call it a fetish.”

“He says it’s a weapon,” says Alice.

Mason catches it with a flourish, like a juggler.

“When I couldn’t get the key to work, Aelita told me about the Singularity. It’s been my private project ever since.”

“If you want to blow up everything, you have what you need right there. Go ahead and do it.”

He holds up the crystal.

“With this? It will just start another universe and all the whole humans-versus-God-and-monsters game will start all over again. No. When this place goes I don’t want anything coming back.”

“Neshamah never said it could do that.”

“It can’t. I can. That’s why it was easy to duck out when Baphomet turned the generals against me.”

Mason puts the Singularity in his pocket.

“The trick is to contain the explosion. Allowing the blast to happen, but preventing it from coalescing back into a new universe.”

“How can you do that?”

He walks behind Alice.

“By setting the Singularity off within a divine object. Say a soul fresh from Heaven.”

He puts his hands on Alice’s shoulders.

“Her divine spark will increase the strength of the new Big Bang so that the new universe will blow itself apart before any of it can come together.”

“I bet I can yank out your spine before you do anything with Alice and that goose egg.”

“I don’t need long. I was hoping for just a few more minutes before you got here.”

“Where’s Aelita? Did she desert you in your hour of need?”

He rolls his eyes.

“The silly bitch went back to Heaven. You know her obsession with killing God? She got Neshamah but she wants the brother still in Heaven. Ruach.”

“She knew all about the Singularity,” says Alice. “She said Ruach told her.”

“Why would he give her something that could wipe out everything, including him?”

Mason wipes a few spots of hydraulic fluid from his cheek.

“Apparently, he thinks he’s figured out a way to survive the blast. It’s not possible, but he believes it and it got me what I wanted.”

“So, you’ve got Alice, the Singularity, and the big knife. But you haven’t done anything with any of it yet. What do you think happens now?”

“I’m going to set off my bomb and you’re going to try and stop me, which means that one of us is going to kill the other one. Or we kill each other.”

“I vote for the first one.”

“Me, too.”

Mason puts his hands together like he’s praying. Something in the ceiling explodes, covering me with white powder. Does he want us to make biscuits together or fill me full of anthrax? The room turns to water and I fall through.

I wake up in our bed in the old apartment. I hear Alice showering in the bathroom. My head is a little fuzzy. I drank too much again last night. I’ll cool it tonight. We’ll stay in and watch the Argento marathon and order pizza.

Alice comes out of the bathroom toweling herself off. She’s naked. She comes over to the bed and hands me the to

“Do my back, will you? And my hair?”

She asks like it’s a burden to run the towel and my hands over her. I bend her forward and pull her against me, carefully toweling her from the small of her back to the nape of her neck. I start rubbing the towel through her hair and she leans back into it like a puppy being scratched.

“Kasabian called,” she says. “Your little magic Circle is supposed to meet at Mason’s place at ten.”

I say, “They’re going to have a long wait. I’m not going back. I’m quitting.”

She turns around and hugs me to her naked skin.

“Really?” she asks. “I was hoping you’d say that. I don’t like those people. Mason gives me the creeps.”

“Me, too. I’m going to call some Sub Rosas I know and see if they can help me find a legit job. Nothing behind a desk, but not like the apocalyptic power stuff we’ve been playing with in the Circle. It’s giving me bad dreams.”

“That and the beer.”

“You’re right. We should buy better beer.”

“You always know how to fix everything.”

Alice pushes me down and climbs on top. She leans down to kiss me and her wet hair brushes my face. When she sits up again, her face isn’t right. She morphs into a small brunette and we’re not in the apartment, we’re at the Beat Hotel in a room filled with broken furniture. Her face changes into a distorted combination of Candy and Alice. There’s pressure in my head, like hands are pulling me apart from inside. I try to make sense of the woman’s contorting face but I can’t.

My vision explodes into different spectrums of light. I fall a long way, no longer seeing light, but separate photons working their way through the air.

My eyes snap open. I’m lying flat on my ass. The angel took control and pulled me out of Mason’s hallucination. For the first time in a long time, I’m glad the angel is there.

I say, “Damn. Can I get a six-pack of that stuff before I go? That was more fun than trucker speed.”

The prayer hands caught me off guard the first time, so when Mason curves his fingers into a new configuration, I throw up a defensive shield.

His hex flies past me and hits the office’s big double doors. They turn bone white and fall apart, the dry wood turning to dust before it hits the floor.

That prick almomant prickst hit me with a ball of time. I’ve never tried that. I’m going to have to steal the idea.

I hit Mason with a quick series of hexes, alternating ice and fire, freezing and heating his skin so it splits open like the fault lines in the street. Follow it up with shots of pure pain to make his nerve endings sing. I finish by tossing a dozen pit vipers Mason’s way. Their venom dissolves skin, turning blisters into what look like third-degree burns. They swarm Mason. I hear Alice gasp.

Mason isn’t moving. The vipers haven’t hit him that many times, but he seems out of it. I can’t hear a heartbeat or his breathing. It could be anaphylactic shock.

Standing over him, I should at least be able to read that he’d had life in him once. When I touch his body, it falls to the floor like candy glass. Touching the phantasm broke the illusion. I spin around, looking for the real Mason.

Something crunches through my left shoulder. The pain turns off my brain. When I’m thinking again, I realize I’ve been stabbed three more times. I mumble a healing spell, but Mason is ahead of me, delivering a counterspell before I’ve finished mine. I’m suddenly exhausted. The angel reaches down and reads my body. There’s something funny in my blood all of a sudden, but it’s a Hellion brew he doesn’t recognize. I fall to my knees and Mason pushes me down onto my back.

“I always admired your black knife. So, when I couldn’t make a key to the Room, I made myself a knife. I think I even made some improvements. Let me show you.”

He jabs the blade into me just under the collarbone and makes a downward cut to my sternum. He does this again on the other side so there’s a big V sliced into my chest. He carefully puts the tips of the blade into the bottom of the V and pulls down my body, heading south of the border. Even through the pain I can tell he’s not trying to kill me. He’s looking for something. He drags the knife down my chest and something clinks. He’s found the key. If he’s going for my heart, I’ll return the favor. I shoot my hand out and through his skin and bones, feeling around inside his chest cavity.