“And now you’re debasing yourself with that rabid dog in your room.”
“Candy and I are only at the shoc Yo at thek and awe stage. Debasing is penciled in for next Thursday.”
Medea glances up the street as the bloody frat boys stumble out of the van. She turns and looks at me.
“Now you’re sacrificing yourself for dear sweet Alice.”
“You already know that, and I want to be dead before one, so I’m leaving. Have a nice time playing pranks on civilians.”
I get into the car, but suddenly she’s next to me with her hand on the door.
She says, “Are you really going to sacrifice yourself to save your great betrayer?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You and Alice didn’t find each other by chance. We sent her to you.”
She lets that sink in for a minute. It doesn’t. It just sits there staring at me, ugly and cold.
Medea says, “Do you think the Sub Rosa is so blind that it wouldn’t notice a child as powerful as you being raised by ordinary parents? You were dangerous when a child and became more so as you grew. Then you chose to distance yourself from the Sub Rosa, its codes and bylaws.”
“Codes and bylaws? What are you? The Rotary Club? Fuck off.”
Medea leans in closer. A faint smile plays around her mouth as it morphs from a young woman’s full lips to a crone’s, as dry and cracked as a desert plain.
“When you left us we needed to know what you were up to. A simple spell wouldn’t do. You would have broken it. So we sent something you would accept wholeheartedly. The girl.”
“Alice wasn’t Sub Rosa. She didn’t have any magic. I would have known.”
“You’re right. Poor Alice was an invalid. But her parents had the gift. They’re Sub Rosa, which makes her Sub Rosa, too. Alice’s infirmity is what made her the perfect operative. With no magic of her own, you would never suspect her. And keeping watch over you was the one way she could contribute to her people’s welfare.”
Alice flashes in my memory. A thousand snapshots of her face. Her hands. Her body. There’s nothing that reads as magic or lies.
“I don’t believe you.”
“The truth doesn’t require your belief. Alice was never yours. She belonged to us.”
“Did Mason put you up to this? Aelita? Maybe both of them. What did they promise you, Baba Yaga? Your owdivaga? Yon Kentucky fried-chicken-leg house?”
Medea laughs. Up the block frat boys are pulling glass fragments out of each other’s faces. One sits on the curb staring at the phone in his hand. He can’t think of who to call.
“I’m the Inquisition and the Inquisition is beyond the sort of desires that make bribery possible.”
Medea takes something from an inside pocket of her coat and tosses it into the car with me. Wolf teeth and crow feathers bound in linen with horsehair. An Inquisition death sign. She even went to the trouble to dribble a bloody X on top.
She says, “You’ve used up your nine lives. Go back to your room and be with that animal you rut with. Be happy and ruin yourself quietly the way you should have done years ago. If, however, you continue on the course you’re planning, the Inquisition will deal with you permanently. This is your last chance for redemption.”
I toss the death sign over my shoulder and take a puff of the Malediction.
“Redemption? I want redemption about as much as I want to be one of the blue-blood Ren Faire masters of the universe you report to. Lucifer chose me to deal with this. Not the Sub Rosa or you or the Golden Vigil or Mickey Mouse. Me. I’m the one who can stop Mason. You get in my way and he wins. That will be the end of everything and it’ll be your fault. So why don’t you go back to your gumdrop house in the forest and eat some lost children, witch?”
Medea walks to the curb and swings out her arm like a maître d’.
“I won’t stop you, but remember this. When your final judgment arrives, I won’t come for you. You’ll be the one who comes to me, and of your own free will.”
“So no hug good-bye?”
I pull the door closed and turn the ignition. The Geo coughs a few times, but the engine finally catches. Medea knocks on the passenger window and I push the button to lower it.