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“Just doing what he was told,” she says.
I reach for Traven, but before I can get to him, his eyes flutter closed and he slumps to the floor, his head cracking on the pavement. Brigitte starts for him but I grab her and push her behind me.
I take a couple of steps toward Hattie. I want to rip her apart. Traven is bleeding where his skull hit the floor. I want to see her bleed too. She steps back, but not because she’s afraid.
“Who are you?”
“Don’t you recognize me?” she says, her voice coolly amused. “You destroyed my home. You humiliated me. You’re an Abomination and your presence in this city has brought it and me nothing but misery.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Her face shifts. Her skin crawls. The old woman becomes a young one, then cycles back to a crone, like the phases of the moon.
“Medea Bava,” I say. “I heard you were Deumos’s sorority sister. Shouldn’t you be in Hell?”
“And leave the world to your tender mercies?” she says.
“You killed Hattie and took her place. Why?”
“For just this minute. To see the look on your face when you knew.”
“Why didn’t you just take the 8 Ball and go?”
“I didn’t know where it was in here any more than you did. Besides . . . letting you find it for me was a chance to watch you and your friends suffer, and that alone was reason enough to watch and wait.”
I pull the SIG from my pocket and aim for her head.
She holds up the 8 Ball.
“You say it works when you’re angry or threatened? How do you think you make me feel?”
I lower the SIG and put it back in my pocket.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Why, return it to its rightful owner.”
She pulls out a pendant from under her robes. I recognize the shape. It’s Aelita’s angelic sigil. Hattie kisses it three times.
“Come to me, sister. Come and receive what’s yours.”
“Medea.”
It happens instantly. The voice comes from behind us. Aelita, in a Maggie Thatcher power suit, shoulders her way past Vidocq and Candy. Bumps my shoulder as she goes past.
“You have the Qomrama, I see.”
Medea uses it to point in my direction.
“The Abomination almost had it. I took it from him and now I want to do what’s right.”
“Thank you, sister,” says Aelita, and reaches for the 8 Ball.
Medea’s lips go from a smile to a hard straight line. The 8 Ball shoots from her hand like a cannonball, slamming into Aelita over the heart, driving her across the lobby and into the wall. Spinning blades sprout from the ball, whirring like rotary saws burrowing into her chest. An angel’s scream is a terrible thing to hear. It’s the death wail of something that was never supposed to die but has lived long enough to see the universe turned upside down as it now stares down death’s gullet. Holy angel blood splatters the floor and our feet as the Qomrama punches through Aelita’s chest and out her back. She slumps to the ground, and for a few seconds she twitches, trying to breathe, trying to focus on something besides the pain, her blood, and fractured bones. Medea hasn’t moved. The 8 Ball flies from Aelita’s chest and back into her hand. Aelita gasps one more time and fades away. An angel’s death. Leaving nothing behind but one more hole in the universe.
Medea looks at me.
“Her war with God was a child’s thing,” she says. “It got in the way of the true work.”
