Cory's hat fit the crow nicely.

I said: "It looks good on you."

"Thanks." Cory said.

"Wanna learn to play Chess?" I asked.

"We don't have a chessboard, my Lord." Cory cawed.

I sat up and looked around at La Cucharacha. Beyond the inn's windows it was a ghost town, all the survivors cleared out. The ruins nearby testified to the destruction and weirdness. I looked out the window and saw that even days later there were fires burning in the ruins. The remains were slowly burning down.

"This place is closed." The inn keeper had told us when he left.

We had found some stuff, like a doll's hat, now worn by Cory. I tried to focus on that, instead of the news and rumors of wars. I couldn't, of course.

"We sent Agent Gilbery back home." Agent Saint said with slow sadness and mortified shock. She wasn't alone in her own skull anymore. Agent Meroë looked like a statue, a god slayer in quiet repose. His eternity squandered on what felt like murder in his memories. I cared about him feeling that way because I had too, for a long time.

I still did.

When Agent Meroë finally spoke he said: "What about Agent Nomak?"

Cory and I pieced together one collective grimoire from the remains of the books we had. Cory and I spent some time discussing the probabilities that Serephiel's actions indicated. When asked what I had come up with I had an answer for the FBI. I told the FBI that the Triad Killers were no longer a band. Liminiel would be caught or killed by Serephiel and her crown taken also. The only hope we had was to enlist the help of the cats, as Serephiel was surely about to use the Majara, all the jewels of all the crowns on just one crown again. A very sinister amount of magical power, at least four times more powerful than she originally was. At least that was my estimate. Cory pointed out:

"The last witch standing inherits all the power. That's her endgame." Cory pointed out.

"I agree with the crow." Detective Winters agreed with Cory.

Agent Meroë said: "When I find that cat I am gonna put it down." And he gestured with his pistol violently with a crazed look in his eyes. Then before anyone said anything he put away his weapon and just sat there.

We all did find the remains of the farm cat. Somehow a coyote, an animal I had supposed was vegetarian, had picked him off. I couldn't believe it. We had no time to solve what happened to him, however, because another cat arrived, Ket.

"Do not unbehold this cat or it will kill you instantly, probably. Might not kill you quickly." Cory told the FBI.

"Somehow our Majara did not work." Ket sounded somehow calm and somehow very angry at the same time. I magically knew all the nuances of his spoken language, Felidaen. The Egyptian cat in a feline's pharaoh garb was he, prince of all cats, demigod of the Goddess and etcetera. I couldn't recall it all in the span of this story in a way that is conditional to the provision of a will to remember such titles in any detail. Nor would I be able, with my skill in English, be able to categorize the words grammatically, either. I literally could not write it.

Detective Winters fell to his knees at the tirade of horrors and vomited. Agent Saint somehow stood up and drew her weapon and brandished it so nervously that the creature was only amused by it. Agent Meroë translated everything awful the cat had said into his first language out loud and then looked up to the sky for a salvation. The black paw of midnight struck him down, smiting him instantly. I stared only at the proud demigod.

"I am smiling." I said, smiling hideously at the cat. "Because I am going to look away and you are not going to kill me. Not if you want to know what I know. Which is how to find the last piece of the Majara you are assembling." I grimaced.

"What do you want?" Ket asked, bored. I looked away and he didn't strike me because he did want to know. I was the one they had sent and I had known what the farm cat knew. Its death complicated things for the cats.

"First, what is it that Ket wants?" I asked with mock courtesy.

"Just to have the Majara complete, as it was expected to work. All of the Lilim should be dead." Ket confessed.

"There is a place I never went and you never asked me to go there. I do know it though." I told Ket.

"So it is not some counterfeit of bait and switch? You have no deception, just a secret you did not disclose?" Ket yawned dangerously.

"That is true. I am not foolish enough to lie to you when you have come here to ask me questions. You have already killed one of my friends this night." I complained, feeling a great loss in my heart over the death of Agent Meroë.

"What is it that you want? For this information?" Ket said demandingly, completely bored by us and ready to attack and kill everyone.

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"To be spared and for my friend that you killed, Agent Meroë, restored to life by your powers." I spoke my way. Ket considered it and then he was about to pounce on us personally, his cat claws and arrogance would propel the mad cat through us, accompanied by its colossal shadow form, a sphinx that could crush its prey instantly. Suddenly Agent Meroë sat up partially, still alive after the brief mauling by the cat's magic. He fired four shots and one of them took off an ear of the cat god. Startled, he teleported away just as he reached me and my hand was upon Ket and Cory was on my shoulder, his hands gripping me.

We were hurtled through space to Ket's palace on the moon. There we landed in his throne room. Ket meowed pitifully and as he lost his composure his shadow was gone. I looked around and saw it nowhere. I could strangle him and I would be throttling a god to death. I looked at him and considered how much of an enemy he had become, and how much of an ally he could still be. I decided to do nothing.

I saw his Majara, returned to him by his angry mother. It didn't work, it was missing a magical component. I grinned, since my sabotage had taken fruition at last. Ket knew I had done something to switch around something or else I would not have such a ready answer. There was nothing he could do about it, except lose face. It was the only way to deal with cat gods, appeal to their utter vanity at all times like some kind of mirror that never stops staring.

Freedom to move around in his throne room led me to the vermin creatures I had seen in corpses of the past. These ones were alive and wore a blue belt over their orange tunics and each of them carried a curved sword and other weapons. They looked very fearsome and I guessed by their bloodied armament that their rebellion was going relatively well. Perhaps it had cost them tens of times the number of them that arrived in the throne room to get there and they had done so. I wondered if only the most vicious and cunning of the rats could survive such a battle in rebellion against the cats.

"You two must help me." Ket meowed pitifully.

"Why should we?" I asked him.

"Those enormous moon rats that feed on the very core of the planet! They have survived and now they have formed an Insurrection against us." Ket trembled.

"I cannot help you. What could I do?" I announced.

"I should have granted you a wish as a reward, for the Majara." Ket meowed. Terror made the god pace weirdly. "Wish for me to take you home, and I could focus my prayers for safety, from the Goddess."

"Can we trust you not to kill us when you get your powers back?" I asked the cat.

"I give my word I will no harm you when I have returned here and dealt with these vermin." Ket swore.

I put my hand on him and prayed he take me home, to show his favor for helping him assemble the Majara. One of Ket's lives depended on Cory and I to be pardoned for tricking him by not telling him what we had learned about the Majara. He was still missing a component to make a duplicate.

So we left the moon and arrived back at La Cucharacha and beheld that Agent Meroë was alive, his disintegration was incomplete and he survived. I thanked him for being alive with a hug.

"Please don't ever do hugs." Agent Meroë said quietly to me in his native tongue while I hugged him.

"I had to." I grinned. He didn't remember dying.

"That cat just played you, and now he knows the nature of my Lord's biggest secret." Cory chastised in our Corvin and English hybrid.

"I must go there and find out if the crown of flames is still there." I told Cory.

"Obviously." Cory agreed.

"Good night." Detective Winters told me.

I went under the spell and walked again in that desolate limbo, except now it was corrupted by the darkness and the monsters were feeding on those that dwelled in Limbo. It was a horrifying scene of gruesome carnage. I stared in awful horror at it and then moved on to the cave, intent on learning the truth. I worried it might cost me my mind.

I forgot, for a long time, what I had seen in my return to Lilith's Tomb. For the longest time I just recall walking in and seeing something, but I couldn't remember what it was. At first it was a dreadful emptiness, that lingered in my dreams. Then it was a feeling of profound defeat, somehow worse than death. Then my thoughts and feelings about it became an actual dread of seeing nothing but emptiness. There was something else there too, I could not get past the vivid memory of the encounter with that one, the soulless.

When I did remember that Lilith's Tomb stood empty, it was too late to have ever said anything about it. The creature was like a person except morbidly deformed and yet as nimble as an acrobat and despite empty eye sockets, severed ears and nose and parts, the creature was wizened and had other sensory organs that detected an even greater range of information about me and its surroundings. I asked it:

"How are you here? This place requires part of you to be elsewhere. It is its nature." I wondered.

"I am here in body and soul, as I am, a creature that does not know death but only an endless rebirth. I am the first born and the one who was never recognized or given form and the soul from a Creator." The hideous thing spoke in a hideous voice and waved its talons menacingly, its rubbery flesh gleaming with invincibility.

"How did you get here?" I asked about its conveyance in Corvin. Cory repeated my words with more clarity.

"Enslaved by witch." The creature said.

"Why?" Cory cawed.

"To devour this man when he comes here looking for the crown." The unseen first born, my oldest cousin from the Dawn, an immortal related to all living persons, a living uncle of some kind, spoke in dreadfully bad Corvin.

Cory fell over, twitching with cringe.

"Must go now!" I cawed in Corvin to rally my crow. The monster was closing in.

"It is just too funny, to be killed by this horrible speaker!" Cory spoke while laughing, speaking in jabbered Corvin as he laughed crazily.

I picked him up and tried to back out of Lilith's Tomb. We made it to a park, a place that was safe when we got out and into a dream. It wasn't my dream but I took it as a sign we would live. The creature followed us. It sulked in the bright sunlight of the dream and hastened away to hide. I worried at the wonder of the park and the emptiness I felt.

We were awakened by Agent Meroë and Agent Saint from our slumbers. It was a good idea to teach them the spell to make us sleep. Agent Meroë said it wasn't really magic, just hypnotism. He still complained that doing it gave him a headache and a nosebleed. He swore he was done with magic, after that.

"Whose dream was that?" I asked, worried.

"Mine." Agent Saint said.

"My Saint will have a troll in her dream of the park." Cory predicted. "Be careful."

"Thanks for the warning, I saw that thing." Agent Saint was brave sounding, for a change from witnessing the recent atrocities.

"You sound like you are feeling better? Ready to solve the case?" I asked her.

"I think the case is solved. Whatever Serephiel does next will surely result in some days of chaos. You must stand against it, no matter what." Agent Saint predicted.

"The case is solved?" Cory asked. "I knew it."