"If I hurt your feelings, get God down here so I can tell Him to His face."

"Maybe you are worse than Kinski."

"You're the most useless thing I've ever met. Even the worst Hellion has a purpose. What's yours? You can't keep a treaty from falling apart that might destroy the world. You don't even go after Mason. Why is that?"

"Don't you dare interrogate me. We've been looking for Mason for many years."

"But that's not the same as finding him, is it? I mean, the way no one seems to be dealing with the guy makes me wonder if there isn't something else going on."

"We are agents of Heaven and do its bidding."

"And while you do, you let Parker roam around free, slaughtering people, hoping he'll lead you back to the big boy. How many people has Parker killed in the last eleven years and you didn't do anything about it?"

"You're suddenly so concerned about death? People die around you every day and you barely seem to notice. What does that make you?"

"Fuck you, angel. Fuck you and all God's little prison bitches. He slips you some cigarettes and a con job smile and you run off to do his dirty work for him. Go and scare some sinners. No one's listening to you here."

I can't read an angel the way I can a human, but I can read a fighter's body. Aelita shifts slightly, sliding one foot back a few millimeters at a time, letting her weight settle on her back leg.

"God can still save you, Abomination. He can't change the vile thing you are, but through me he can save you from perdition."

"If it's all the same to you, I'd rather go to Hell."

"So be it."

Aelita must have been holding back yesterday. She manifests her flaming sword incredibly fast and shoots forward like a bullet. Thing is, I'm pretty fast, too. Especially when I know what an opponent is going to do. Before she charges me, I already have the na'at out, extended, and I'm sidestepping her. When she blasts forward at me, she also impales herself on one side of the na'at, like she's run onto the cutting edge of a chain saw.

Aelita freezes for a second, stunned to find her angelic body sliced through. That gives me a chance to give the na'at a slight turn so that the barbs lock into her. She lets out a monstrous roar, something to rattle Heaven's gates. Buildings shudder and car alarms go off. I can't let go of the na'at to cover my ears. Her scream is like a vise crushing my skull.

She swings her sword at my head and tries to move forward, but she's stuck on the na'at. I push a stud in the handle and step back, locking her in place while extending the na'at so her sword can't reach me.

Aelita is strong. She lunges at me, but each time she moves she just drives the na'at's razor edge deeper into her body. She stops moving and stands there bleeding. Turning pale. After a few minutes, her sword dims and flickers out. She refuses to fall. She won't submit to an Abomination. If I didn't hate her so much already, I'd probably like her.

Then she crumbles all at once. Like someone pulled the plug and shut her down. When she's flat on her back, I turn the na'at to release the barbs, pull it from her chest, and retract it.

Slipping it back inside my jacket, I go over to have a look at her. Her eyes are open, and even though she's looking up, I know she's not looking at the sky. She's looking a lot farther away than that. I wonder what she sees.

"You'll suffer for this, Abomination. Do you know that? God sees everything and He sees you."

"Does He see you? I have an idea. Call God to come down and save you." I look up at the sky with her. "Nothing." I look down again and shrug. "I guess you're expendable, too."

"I hate you more than anything I've ever seen or known."

"There we go. The truth. You hate me. Not for God's sake, but for yours. Feels good, doesn't it? Feels human."

I wonder if an angel can die the way humans do. I wonder what happens to their bodies. Does their spirit go back to Heaven or Hell or do they just evaporate?

I kneel by Aelita's head. She looks up at me, sort of blank.

"I've been thinking about it. Remember when I asked you why God left me in Hell and you said that He probably thought I was where I should be? Maybe He thought I should be here today. To face you down in this alley. Maybe He wants me to finish what I came here for, only to do that, I had to get past you first. It's something for both of us to think about."

Aelita straightens out her arm and tries to manifest her sword. A fighter to the end. Maybe I do like her a little after all. No. I don't.

I don't really believe that angels can die the way we do. And God wouldn't let an important one like Aelita go so easily. Wells and his Golden Vigil buddies and half of Homeland Security are probably on their way over right now. Time for me to find a cleaners, buy some clothes, and generally, not be here.

THERE'S ONE GOOD way to always get what you want from someone who doesn't necessarily want to sell you something. Pay in advance and pay too much. When you're dropping off a coat covered in blood and plaster dust, it's no time to cheap out. The old lady behind the dry-cleaning counter gives me a I-might-call-the-cops look over the tops of her glasses. I slip her one of Muninn's hundred-dollar bills, and just like that, all is forgiven. The coat will be ready later tonight. Civilians really need to remember this. Cash is the magic that anyone can do.

Where did all the Kissi go? The streets were lousy with them yesterday and now they're as gone as a Friday blockbuster with a bad weekend gross.

What the hell is wrong with L.A.? Full of magicians, alchemists, bloodsuckers, soul suckers, the Golden Vigil, and federally funded angels, and no one's been able to touch Mason? That doesn't make any sense. It stinks of protection. It smells like a conspiracy, but I don't believe in conspiracies. Guys will say anything to get laid. If some CIA guy thought he could get a little action by showing a coed how he was the guy on the Grassy Knoll, he'd do it and we'd all know about it by now. But if there's no conspiracy, what does that mean? Maybe there's an asshole A-list that no one told me about. Shake hands with the forces of darkness and get a gift bag from Neiman Marcus and a free pass on murder and apocalyptic power plays.

Is Mason bulletproof because he's tight with the Kissi? Is everyone really that afraid? What did he have to do to cozy up to that celestial vermin anyway? What did he have to steal? Who did he have to kill? What Lovecraftian sewer slug did he have to blow to get up close and personal with God's bastard kids?

I don't believe in conspiracies, but I do believe in bullshit and I believe I'm up to my balls in it right now.

I throw the Veritas and it comes up showing a tangle of what looks almost like barbed wire. The thorn forest in Sheol, Downtown's wild western region. Caatinga thorns will strip and debone anything that wanders into them faster than a piranha with a chain saw. Roughly translated, the Hellion script around the edge of the coin reads, It's not too late to go back and get your GED. I can't tell anymore if the Veritas is giving me advice or just making fun of my doomed ass.

I've pretty much used up any sense of charity or obligation I might have had in this lifetime, but I don't want to turn into just another L.A. dick looking out for number one. I get out my cell and dial Allegra's number. She doesn't pick up. I dial my old number, but no one picks up at Vidocq's. I text Allegra the way I'd seen her text her friends: Keep yr doors locked. Mason 3's suicide bombers.

I wonder if Wells and his G-men have picked up Aelita. It couldn't hurt to make a quick check. The Chinese believe that having a funeral home near your store is bad luck in general and lousy for business. How bad must a dying angel outside your back door be?

I pick up a Jag outside a raw food restaurant next to a tanning salon. Isn't a tanning salon in L.A. like a frostbite salon in Fairbanks?

There's no one is behind me, so I can do a slow drive-by at Max Overdrive and get a look in the alley. Aelita isn't there. There's no blood. No scorch mark from her sword. No sign that anything has ever happened there. Thank you, Marshal. I'll drink to your health on New Year's.

I'D BE A happy camper if between now, when I kill Mason, and when I'm back Downtown, I didn't have to speak to anyone. But that's not how this is going to work out. I drive the Jag over to Allegra's apartment and pound on her door. Do it loud enough and long enough that one of her neighbors comes out and explains to me that she hasn't been home in a couple of days and that I should fuck off. I drive over to Vidocq's and ditch the Jag a few blocks away. There's a little bodega on the corner. I step into a shadow beside it. Two gray-haired men sitting on plastic milk crates and drinking beer ignore the weird white boy doing weird-white-boy stuff.

Vidocq's door is open. That's not so bad all on its own. The door opens and closes all the time when he goes in and out. But now it's standing open and the vaguely diffuse glow that signals a glamour is gone, like someone took soap and water and washed it off.

"When did they put an apartment in over there?" A nosy neighbor stands down the hall staring at the open door. He wants to see it, but he won't get any closer, like maybe the place is radioactive.

"Stay here," I tell him, and reach under my jacket for the na'at. The day I don't pack a gun, that's when I really want one.

"Should you go in there? Should I call the landlord?"

I throw him a quick keep-talking-and-you'll-be-shitting-out-your-tongue look and he backs off.

There's something really wrong with the apartment. Like the one out-of-tune string on a guitar. I can feel it before I even get inside. When I step over the threshold, something else hits. A taste and a smell. Vinegar at the back of my throat. Josef smelled like that when the Kissi revealed themselves. Not that I need another clue that there's something wrong with Vidocq's place.

The walls, ceiling, and floor are covered in twisting, spiky ideograms and letters, intertwined with endless spirals. Spirit faces or maybe images of God the Father, looking more like some saucer-eyed alien than a deity, are smeared around the room. The colors run from rust to a snaky, metallic green, but I've smelled enough dried blood in my time to know what the basic ingredient in all these pigments is.

I stop and I listen, waiting for something. The nosy neighbor is so freaked out, I can feel his heart and breathing. Don't stroke out, guy. We've got enough problems here.

Or not. I don't feel anything. There's nothing alive in the apartment. I can't read the Kissi, but between my own heightened senses and the new sight that Aelita has given me, I think I'd know if there was a Kissi lurking in the corner with a lamp shade on its head. As much as I don't want to wrestle anything magic for a while, not finding a single Kissi is a letdown. Finding the body is worse.

It's a man's body. Naked. Nailed face-first to the wall about six feet off the ground. Someone has carefully peeled back the outer layers of skin. Let them fall back like pale, fleshy leaves on a plant, leaving the muscles and bones untouched. There are only two or three drops of blood on the floor. At least I know where the blood for the frescoes came from. And that whoever peeled and drained a body that cleanly really knew what he or she or they were doing.

The body is nailed the wrong way around for me to see the face. I can tell from here that it's the body of a middle-aged man. Vidocq has been in his fifties for two hundred years. Is that still middle-aged? I wish the old bastard had some tattoos I could look for. The body is too badly beaten up to look for scars.

I know I should take the body down. All I have to do is stand on a chair, yank the nails from the hands, and it's taken care of. But I don't want to get near it. I can't look away, either. I had the same reaction seeing my father at the funeral home. I couldn't get near him and I couldn't move away. My brain knew that I needed to react, but my body wouldn't go along with any of it. I only got over it by forcing myself to go to my father's body and touch his face. Looking just vapor-locked my brain. I had to feel that he was dead.

There's a stepladder next to the refrigerator in the kitchen. I bring it to the living room and open it up right below the body. Before I can start the dirty work, out of the corner of my eye I see the nosy neighbor sticking his nosy face in where it shouldn't be.

"Oh God. Oh my God. I'm calling the cops."

I move fast. Fast enough that I scare him more than the body does. Before he can finish dialing, I snatch the cell phone out of his hand and perp-walk him to a window. Lean him out and make him watch as I drop his phone into a Dumpster several floors below.

I say, "Go get it. Then you can call."

Nosy Neighbor looks at me like I just told him that I'm Darth Vader and I fucked his sister, but he doesn't say a word. He heads straight for the stairs.

Back at the body, I pull the nails from the feet first. They're some kind of heavy concrete nail. Perfect for going through muscle and bone and into a wall stud.

With the feet free, I can get the body down on the ground. I climb onto the top step of the stepladder. Yank one nail out of one hand and the other out of the other. Suddenly free, the body drops heavily into my arms. The limbs flop. The head tilts, snaps, and falls off.

Too much. I let go and it hits the ground.

I should have seen it the moment I started to move the body, but I was distracted, trying to decide between collapsing into a queasy heap or pulling a John Wayne to see what was right in front of me.

Kasabian's corpse is lying on the floor. That's why the body is so beaten up. The Kissi didn't torture Vidocq. They just stitched back together what Parker blew apart last night.

How do you steal and clean a body from the bottom of a ten-thousand-year-old tar pit? Why do you steal and clean a body from the bottom of a ten-thousand-year-old tar pit?