Bina sings a song she made up as her manifestation enters my demesne. She’s only found the lyrics for the chorus so far, which goes:

Reenie Reenie Reenie / Wants to be a Queenie / Reenie Reenie Reenie / In a teeny bikini / Trying to get steamy

Thusly she serenades me as she pads up the balustraded promenade to my lounge. “I have managed the stairs on two legs,” she announces in triumph. “Hello, Reenie!”

“Did I not say we weren’t doing that name?” I coax my flagstones into a telescoping whorl and fill it with fluid to display my view for my sister.

“I’m returning fire. If I’m Beany, you’re Reenie.” She flops down on my couch, glad to be free of her bipedalism. “I’m here to confront you. Why are you crying?”

“What?” I touch my face and my finger comes away damp. “Oh. What the hell.”

“I don’t have to call you Reenie. I’m sorry. I’m just fucking about.”

“It’s not that. It’s—” I surmount a step aloft of my humanoid’s emotional cocktail and peer into its admixture. “I think it’s because Caspar just took an innocent life.”

“The Degmar guy?” Bina lays her wolfy head on my lap. I absently scratch it. “That was Jordan.”

“That’s not how he sees it.” My exhale has an unwelcome shake in it. “He feels himself disappearing. Metaphorically,” I hasten to add, as a curious look crosses Bina’s face.

“Just because he’s killing people?” Bina’s ear quirks. “But you’re scooping them up and giving them all that room to run around. And they’d end up here anyway in a few decades.”

“I know. I know that. But it’s hurting him.” I manifest a handkerchief from lacy epidermis. “Oh, Bina. I think I made a mistake.”

“What? By picking Caspar? You love Caspar.”

“No. I untethered my manifestation.” I indicate my body. “And now I cry and such.”

“Oooh.” Bina licks her chops. “And you can’t just tether it again?”

“I can. I should. I don’t know.” I wipe my eyes. “I don’t want to. I’m not making any sense.”

“Crying’s okay. You can cry. I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to.”

“Thank you, Bina.” I scratch her muzzle. “Do me a favor, all right? If ever I make a decision and you think Irene’s compromised, because of this whole—” I indicate my body. “Me situation. Tell me, all right?”

“I will, my love.”

“And if I still don’t listen to you, kill this body. Eat it or something. I give you permission ahead of time.”

“Okay.” She repositions her fuzzy body to facilitate my scratches. “It smells tasty. I wouldn’t mind.”

“Thank you, my dear.”

I observe Caspar’s calloused fingers work through his stolen uniform’s buttons. It’s tighter on him than it was on the dead man. With luck, nobody’s looking as closely as I am. “What did you want to confront me about?” I ask.

“You keep scooping the guys Jordan kills,” Bina says. “You don’t need to, right? Not according to your agreement.”

“What, do you want them? You can have them.”

“Oh, no. No, it’s no problem. I don’t imagine Jordan cares overmuch.” Bina crosses her paws. “I’m just curious.”

“It makes Caspar happy.”

Bina noses up against my palm and I dutifully start scratching her muzzle again. “Will that keep him kind, do you think?”

“I don’t need him to be kind,” I say.

Bina’s lupine eyes fix on mine. “Yes, you do.”

“Fine. I do.” I sigh in defeat. “I suppose I’ll have to steal a page from the Father’s stupid precepts. How his servants keep their spirits through the shit he has them do.”

“How’s that?”

Caspar’s vision fills with the glassy vacancy of the dead man’s face. He tilts the dumpster lid shut.

“Faith,” I say.

₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪

“You killed me, y’know. I got over it.” Jordan sits atop the dumpster with poor dead Degmar inside it and sips her tea. “Our mission is too important. I’m not leaving these things to chance. We’re facing too many vectors of failure already. We get the chance to eliminate one, by any means, we do it. One man’s uncomfortable transition into a cozy afterlife can’t be balanced against the agony of all our ancestors.”

Caspar makes a noise of disgust in his throat.

“You’re mad,” Jordan says. “You think I could be wrong. Maybe Degmar would have kept quiet. Maybe he’d have made noise, and someone would have found him. This is one fewer maybe. I locked eyes with my father, Caspar. At Bina’s. Saw what the capital-F Father let happen to him. You ever see your dad without his skin on? What we’re doing is too important for maybes.”

“You sound like an inspector again.”

“That’s right.” Her probing blue eyes are unmoving on him. “I’ve done much worse deeds for a much worse God.” She blows across the surface of her drink. “I am sorry, but I won’t stop. Go ahead and hate me for it if you have to.”

Caspar takes another bite of his crumb cake so he doesn’t have to respond. They need to waste another ten minutes of this dead fellow’s lunch break before he can convincingly clock back in.

“Fella told me not long ago that I had every right to be mad, but I was wasting it on him.” She blows across the surface of her drink. “Pretty sharp statement, I came to find.”

Caspar wipes the crumbs from his front. “Give me time.”

“Fair enough, friend.” Jordan slides off the dumpster. “Your hair’s shrinking. Freshen up before your entrance.”

Caspar comes face-to-face with their victim in the reflection of a storefront. He focuses hard and watches his skin shift and lighten, his whiskers push themselves from sinking cheeks. “Five minutes,” he says. “Then come in.”

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He leaves the alley without looking back. Slouch in the right shoulder. One hand in the pocket. Hips forward. Good boy, Caspar. He may not be a fast talker, but my warlock’s observant of body language.

He joins the inflow of Platinum patrons. Clockers-in, burners-out, fuckers-up. Microcosmic and eyes forward, united in departure from their better selves.

The river trudges down a mosaic hallway with plush silver carpet. Dizzying joy beams from the painted faces as they celebrate their Father-granted prosperity. New car, new tits, new grill. Just look at those tiled t-bones.

A knot of hard-faced men idle around a gleaming row of metal detectors, herding the crowd through and waving chunky wands across petitioners like aspergillums. Caspar sidles from the line, raising his wrist in the air and gesturing the time to one of the frowning guards. “Late from lunch,” he calls.

The guard huffs in annoyance. The silvery goggles atop his helmet flash as he jerks his head past the pillars. “Go on through, Deg. Fuck around less next time.”

“Blessings, brother.” Caspar grasps the man’s shoulder as he edges past the detectors. Sofia’s gravity knife nudges his shin from its seat in his boot.

Out from the sparse hallway and into the great chamber of acquisition. Through the rows of neon saints beckoning from their perches atop the slots. Along the thoroughfares where the barflies perambulate, dizzy with their victories or simmering with resentful loss. Past sunken conversation pits paneled in hardwood and attended by glittering bottle girls. The live band is playing something peppy, something to put a pop in your step and a vacancy in your heart. A musical progression ending on a tension note, a sonic question mark. Will you win big? Are you the sanctified mogul of whom we sing?

Caspar glances at himself in the mirrored column bolstering the bar. The disguise holds.

Beyond a crash barred door, Caspar moves through a bland and unadorned back hallway, past the smells and sounds of an industrial kitchen. Clattering cutlery and caramelizing protein. Pork ribs, maybe. He didn’t realize how hungry he was.

I make a mental note to feed my faithful servant some barbecue next time he’s in my demesne.

Caspar squeezes between a barking middle-aged man and the trembling, damp-eyed hostess he’s chewing out. He flattens against a wall to grant passage to a pushcart full of champagne flutes, dominated by an ice sculpture of an unrealistically nubile priestess in prayer.

He follows a pair of chattering dealers to the locker room. Here’s Degmar’s locker and here’s Degmar’s lock, keyed to a combination my warlock doesn’t have. Caspar checks his peripherals, then runs his hands along the cool metal frame. Cheap and flimsy. He takes a deep breath and exhales a curling cloud of acid, which melts the lock and a chunk of the door to powdery slag. He pries his fingers through the resulting hole and tugs the locker open. They’re going to dock poor Degmar’s pay for that one.

He shrugs the frock across his shoulders and hangs the charm braid over his heart. Its wooden clacks add themselves to his strident footsteps as he returns to the casino floor.

Halfway through his trek back through the dingy hallway, a woman dressed in the same getup as he makes smiling eye contact and changes her steps to fall in with him. “You’re back on time,” she says. “Miracle of miracles.”

I am not endeared by the way she’s looking at my warlock.

“Yeah.” He tries a dry chuckle and an affable departure. “Busy day.”

“Hey.” Her hand brushes his arm. “You need a hand at the tables? I can ask Oren to swap over.”

He tries not to leap back like her touch is a live wire. “Oh, no. No, it’s all good.”

“You sure, Deg? You look sort of…” She squints at him. Her brow furrows as her touch solidifies on his (significantly more muscular) arm.

“Yes, I’m sure.” And he threads a vein of cold iron into it as he pulls away. “Just got to get this day over with.”

“Okay. Sheesh.” She steps off. But as he returns to the floor, she’s watching him with clear and attentive concern. I share his fervent hope that my sister’s warlock comes through for him, fast.

He returns to the casino floor and slow-rolls his return to the blackjack table. Caspar, man of virtue that he is, has never played a game of cards for stakes that rose higher than a pile of toasted almonds. He’s familiar enough with Blackjack, of course—no scoring to remember like Poker or equations to run like Inquisition—but his able hands are not built or trained for the rapid riffling and dextrous displays of the Platinum dealers. A blessing that Degmar’s a dawdler, then. The pit boss on duty raises her tweezer’d brow at his slow circuit but doesn’t lay into him.

And here comes Jordan Darius. Thank—well, thank Bina, he supposes. I’ll allow it; I can’t get too used to my man’s monotheism if I’m going to be wheeling and dealing my way into a pantheon.

“Here comes my ladyyy,” my fellow goddess in question trills. “Oh, Irene, she’s so cool. You don’t even know.”

Caspar is cooler, I think. “Do you mind if I eavesdrop?”

“Go ahead, honey.”

I slip into a passenger seat in Jordan’s head, and am met with a blast of irritation. Miss Darius has had a hell of a time slumming it through the security line. She remembers a time when a flash of her badge and a crisp word of authority could bypass any civilian checkpoint. Reminds her of how she hates this kind of place. Reminds her of the way the money just disappeared through these doors every time she managed a windfall and her dear old uncle found the proceeds.

She crosses to the bar and makes a quick study of its customers. This early in the afternoon, it’s a careworn type crowd. The sort of fellow she’s looking for shouldn’t be a difficult one to find. Here he is. Mister bolo tie with the forehead sweat.

Jordan scans the floor. There’s Caspar. Good old Caspar. A throb of sheepish sorrow. She’s met few people as dependable and mindful as that simpleton. (Hey. Only I can call him that.) His upset at the dead dealer is still raw in the glance he returns to her. He’ll come around, she knows that. And she knows there isn’t room to force his forgiveness when she was so prickly with him at the onset of their partnership.

Jordan regrets Caspar’s resentment. But Jordan doesn’t regret killing the man. She did it with the same annoyed ease you might swat a fly.

She spent years of her life in service to a false idol, praying in secret terror for a certainty she never truly reached. But she has reached it now. Hers is a mission unimpeachable in its virtue. Hers is the true cause, and training and doctrine have made her a causal weapon.

Jordan is broken. Broken like a window, all edges and shards, ready to draw blood at the first touch. Death was cheap to her before she saw it as a vacation. Now it’s nothing at all. But that’s fine. Creatures like her are necessary. Her faith in my sister is her solace, her anchor to human decency. She will see our task finished.

Here’s what I’m realizing: If Bina required it, Inspector Jordan Darius would kill every person in this casino, one at a time, looking them in the eyes.

“Jealous?” Bina’s hearing the same interior monologue I am.

“No,” I lie.

Jordan parks next to the bolo tie drunkard and counts to ten. One bless-the-father. Two bless-the-father.

She slams her palm on the bar and stands up. “Do we have a fucking problem?” she demands.

“What?” Bolo Tie looks up from his drink in belligerent bewilderment. “Me?”

Her eyes narrow. “Do we have a problem.”

He tries to look bigger. “Do we?”

“If we don’t, I wanna know why you’re looking at me like that.”

“You’re nuts, lady.”

Jordan tips his lager into his lap.

She takes the first swing to the face and lets it land. Got to make this guy think he’s got a chance, if she wants this dragged out, and the first punch never has the whole heart behind it. Still, she’s shocked at how little she feels it. Belatedly she remembers her warlock fortitude, and sells a staggering drop backward, then a surge forth. Over her foe’s shoulder she notes with satisfaction the security man powerwalking her way, unhitching his boxy radio as he comes. Away from the door he stands in front of, the one designed to meld into the wall. The one they beckoned Perry through on the last day he was outside.

Caspar moves.

I light from Jordan as she throws a pulled punch into Mr. Bolo Tie’s stomach, sweeping her foot out and tipping her opposite neighbor off her stool. The din rises. Back behind Caspar’s eyes as he slips through the exit door into the metallic guts of the casino.

Caspar only has secondhand details of the place, and these from a drugged-out prisoner who’d been thwacked on the head. But he told Saoirse, and Saoirse told me, and I told Caspar, that the Platinum bruisers took Perry down. Down and down, he said.

Down a sheet-metal hallway, Caspar finds a gated elevator door. That’s down. He flashes the button to summon it and waits as the guts of the Platinum churn and shift. A surgical ping sounds with its arrival and Caspar slides the portcullis aside to climb inside. A suite of a half dozen buttons wait for his instruction. He scans the metal-punched labels next to each. Garage, that’s one. Good. There’s his exit, he hopes.

Security is another. His finger hovers over the diode, then drops two rows lower, to the lowest button on the panel. This one is unlabeled. Down and down. He pushes the button in and cues the elevator.

The slide and whirr of machinery is his only accompaniment as the elevator tick-tick-ticks down the floors. Please, please. Please, nobody hail this lift. Caspar knows I’m powerless to prevent it; he prays to me anyway. Irene, don’t make me hurt these people in your name.

Sorry, Caspar. No dice.