As I knelt above Takezo, Kallisto observed me with her piercing eyes on her angelically beautiful face, thin, long horns pointed forward at me. Dressed in a mixture of medieval armor and a suit, her back covered by a cloak made of interwoven chains, she looked exactly like I last saw her.

  I yelped, jumped away, and took a stance.

  Takezo turned his head towards me. “What?”

  “You’re taking the completely wrong stance for the occasion,” Kallisto remarked. “Plus, you’ve still got stuff to pick out from his back.”

  “Can’t you see her?” I shouted.

  With a painful grunt, Takezo looked around. “See who?”

  “Nope.” Kallisto snorted. “He doesn’t seem to hear me either. I’m all yours and only yours.” With a chuckle, she stepped to Takezo, pointing with her steel shoe at one of the shards. “This one is piercing the liver. That must hurt.”

  What the Hell was going on?

  The woman I stared at didn’t just look like Kallisto. It was Kallisto, down to the tiniest detail, with precisely matching voice, down to the light accent, including every tiniest voice inflection.

  The explosion must have messed with my head.

  Yeah, that’s what this was. A delusion conjured by my mind. I picked a steel shard from the wall and tossed it at Kallisto.

  It passed through her as if she wasn’t there.

  “That was rude,” she said. “Like, really rude. Couldn’t you pick something nicer to throw at me?”

  “Sorry,” I said automatically, and immediately regretted it.

  “Who are you talking to?” Takezo asked.

  “I’m imagining things.” I ducked above Takezo and continued picking steel shards from his back. “Damn explosion.”

  Takezo grunted. “That was sloppy. Breakfast’s on me.”

  “So, leftover toast and tap water?”

  He rolled his eyes, but said nothing.

  I caught him eating that for breakfast a couple of days ago. And he was enjoying it until I walked in on him.

  Given we had a stocked fridge on the floor, I wasn’t going to let him live that down just yet. I removed all the pieces.

  Kallisto pointed to his thigh. “There’s one more here, and another behind his left knee.”

  With a sigh, I removed those. How did this hallucination function?

  If it wasn’t gone in an hour, I had to put serious thought into that. Now, I just pulled the last shard of Takezo. “You should be fine.” I caught his shoulder and pulled him up.

  He stabilized on his feet, stance wobbly. “Thanks.”

  “This should be all of it, as far as the mission’s concerned.”

  “Yeah.” He stretched. “Let’s not talk about this again.”

  “Sure.” I drew my phone, and on the way out, I texted the cleanup staff.

  The interventions department wiped out the opposition, and the cleanup department handled the rest. I’ve never met anyone from it, but I also never got into trouble for any stuff we ever did.

  We walked out of the building, returning to the car.

  Kallisto hung around as if she were a part of the team. She walked through walls like nothing and even through Takezo at some point, so I kind of hoped she would vanish if I ignored her.

  We got in the car and drove out. This went faster than expected, so we could catch a meal before returning to Isabella’s place.

  And there was only one place that was open at this hour in this part of the town.

  A few hours before dawn, we arrived at the only non-stop in the area, a Taco Bell.

  The local fluorescent lighting almost had a sense of comfort to it. Reminded me of the days when my biggest issue was the Python coding classes. A simpler time, and the food cost like a third of what it costs today.

  Takezo and I slid into a corner booth, trailing a wake of dried blood, fresh bruises, and unambiguous intent. The other two groups of customers, a pair of off-duty strippers with glitter on their cheeks and an HVAC tech with a nametag that read CRAZY FRANK, gave us precisely as much attention as they'd give a taxidermized racoon.

  Kallisto, or well, my imagination of her, also sat down by the table with us. Still immaterial, invisible to others, making no sound other than her voice. “You’ve sure picked a classy place to take me out to.”

  Talking to air would look weird, so I said nothing to her, but instead, turned to Takezo. “I’ll have a large water, a chicken quesadilla, a beef burrito, large nacho fries, and two sets of chicken strips.” I haven’t eaten in like twenty hours, so this was my food for the day.

  He grunted, glaring at me. But he said the meal was on him, so he could handle the order. He left for the counter.

  When he got far away, I leaned to Kallisto. “What are you?”

  She shrugged. “You tell me. I don’t seem to be seen or heard by anyone other than you.”

  So, my personal delusion had a sense of self. Great. “Can’t you just, like, vanish or something?”

  “Why? Is my presence that annoying?”

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  I rubbed my face with my palm. “You are a delusion that makes me look crazy, so kinda, yeah.”

  “I don’t think I’m a delusion.” She looked at her hand, covered by a glove with steel on the fingertips. She moved her hand through the table, as if it wasn’t there. “Though, admittedly, I seem to be unable to do much.”

  “Can you disappear?”

  She focused for a second. “If you see me now, then no.”

  Damn it.

  Takezo returned, bringing me the ordered feast while having a large Coke, a fat burrito, and four servings of chicken strips with triple fries for himself. He sat down and dug into the strips.

  I did the same, grabbing the quesadilla.

  Kallisto reached for my burrito, but her hand only passed through. “I suppose all I can do is to cheer you on.”

  Or she could shut up, but I knew better than to say that. Even as a delusion, she could annoy me to no end if I gave her a reason to.

  All my decency left me the second I bit into the quesadilla. In a mad frenzy, I started devouring the meal. Takezo maintained a higher decorum, but he still ate fast.

  This was why I enjoyed going to fast-food restaurants. Since I pretty much ate once per day, the meals weren’t pretty, but no one who was at Taco Bell at three in the morning had any right to judge me.

  I only regained my senses when I was chomping down the last piece of chicken. The fat burrito remained untouched on Takezo’s tray. “You aren’t thinking about bringing that to Isabella, are you?”

  “She’ll be happy we brought her a meal. As far as I understand her tastes, a double beef burrito should be right up her alley.”

  A smirk spread over my face. “If she were to come here herself, then yes, that’s what she would have ordered. It has the correct meat, as she only eats beef, salmon, and tuna, and double meat is also correct, as she considers veganism an American psyop. But she would never enter Taco Bell unless it was to burn it down, together with the rest of the block.”

  Takezo tilted his head. He weighed the burrito in his hand. “I’ll trust my judgement on this over yours.”

  “Okay.” I snorted. “That’ll be fun.”

  We packed up and left. Kallisto came with us, passing through the closed part of the door. We got in the car and drove to Isabella’s place.

  Given the late hour, the trip went moderately well. Takezo sat shotgun, holding the burrito while Kallisto sprawled over the back seat. I did not question how she maintained her position relative to the moving car and classified it as ghost stuff.

  Well, if I were imagining her, then it probably made sense that I imagined her moving naturally around me. Though I wasn’t sure, I was imagining her. I just lacked a better explanation… for now.

  We reached Isabella’s mid-rise, an eight-floor building that all belonged to her. It didn’t have apartments, just large continuous floors, each filled with a different type of things, like a training room, or her shoe collection, or a pool, or a torture chamber.

  I left the car in the garage and took the elevator up to the living quarters on the eighth floor.

  Kallisto stuck to us in the elevator, calmly observing. “You know, the black tie suits you. Lifeless, with no energy, and no spark for fun.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I know you can’t answer. That’s why I’m saying it now, because this isn’t something for you to argue over. You two celebrating a successful mission by going to Taco Bell and then heading home like a couple of good boys is an absolute disgrace to all agents everywhere. Right now, you two are supposed to be doing the cocaine you’re having in your pocket, and drinking expensive rum from between the lips of a young hooker.”

  Oh, yeah, this was exactly the type of commentary I was missing from my life. Though the thought amused me. Maybe this delusion of Kallisto represented some repressed part of my consciousness.

  We reached the top floor, and I stepped out of the elevator. We almost ran into Isabella.

  She sat perched cross-legged on a low table, all four-foot-nine of her dressed in her usual outfit of a black suit and a white shirt with a heavy cross amulet for a tie. Her hair fell down to the floor like a glossy curtain, and her blue eyes glared up from the glow of a tablet. “That took forever.”

  “We’ve eliminated the targets,” I said.

  “While getting beaten up. Both of you are drenched in blood, and your clothes are so damaged that the blood’s clearly yours. Is there not a mission you two can accomplish without suffering near-mortal wounds?”

  Takezo stepped forward. “This went smoothly, relatively speaking. We had a meal at Taco Bell, so we took you a burrito.”

  For a second, Isabella stared at the burrito. But then, she smiled. “Oh, that’s so sweet, thank you. Put it here.” She patted the table next to her.

  With a victorious smirk, Takezo put the burrito there. He returned to me.

  “Such a good boy,” I whispered. “You’ll surely get a treat.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Anyways,” Isabella said. “I’ll be fully recovered in about two days, so we will return to the main objective. Lillith is going to summon Kallisto through the Tokyo portal in about three weeks, because she’s a religious nut and that’s what they do.”

  I made a point of staring a bit at the cross hanging from her neck. Yes, she didn’t wear it for the original meaning, but still.

  “The problem is,” she continued. “That being in the leadership of the Vatican Inquisition, Lillith has an army of angels around her. We’re not dealing with them if they’re united, so we need to break them up.”

  Takezo snorted. “Do you expect angels to turn on their leader because she’s too much of a religious nut?”

  “Actually, yes. What we call angels aren’t really angels, they are hallowed, humans blessed by an angelic blessing. They have a connection to the angel, but they have their human bullshit in them, and some of them are a lot less religious than you would expect them to be.”

  That reminded me of someone. I fished through my pockets and found the business card of Hutriel. He gave it to me a few days ago. Now, it was irradiated, a bit torn, had one corner burned, and blood stains covered most of it. I scrubbed the blood off to see the number. “I can call Hutriel. He helped me earlier.”

  “Of course he did. Do it.”

  She didn’t have to make an order out of it. I rolled my eyes, but typed Hutriel’s number into my phone, anyway. I dialed him up. Four in the morning wasn’t a time most people would pick up a phone, but he was married to a vampire, so I liked my odds.

  A few beeps later, he picked up.

  “Hey, Hutriel,” I said. “How’s it going? Do you have a minute to talk?”

  “He doesn’t,” an alluring, female voice answered me through the phone. Cassandra. “But I do. Is my ex-pet around?”

  I involuntarily glanced at Isabella.

  With a murderous scowl, she softly shook her head.

  “Nope,” I said. “It’s just me.”

  “Really? What about the Japanese demon bitch boy? Don’t tell me he left you.”

  A smirk spread over my face. Finally, it wasn’t me who was addressed like that. “He’s close, but he won’t butt in.”

  “Go into a room where he can’t hear you.”

  I shrugged and walked in a circle through the lobby. I opened my room’s door and then slammed it shut. After I returned to the spot I started from, I said, “I’m alone.”

  Cassandra clicked her tongue into the phone. “Obedient. That has its uses. But anyway, why are you calling my beloved husband?”

  Oh, they were married? I didn’t expect that. “I need to talk to him, in private.”

  “About?”

  “Certain matters of the members of the Church. The Vatican Inquisition, to be precise.”

  “Too general,” Cassandra snapped. “Be concrete or buzz off.”

  I rolled my eyes. The thing was, I didn’t know what her relationship to Lillith was. Especially if she was married to an angel, she might have been friends with Lillith for all I knew. “Could I just talk to him or meet him? It would be a lot easier.”

  “Hmmm, I think I’ve got the perfect suggestion for you then. Crawl back to your mistress, borrow the tentacle dildo from her, she knows which one, and go fuck yourself with it.” She hung up.

  I shrugged, slipping my phone back into my pocket. “Well, that didn’t work. I’ll try to catch him in the day, I guess.”

  “Don’t bother,” Isabella hopped off the table, her hair moving by itself to pick up the burrito with a few strands. “Take a good sleep, and tomorrow morning, you’ll go talk to your mom.”

  That froze me in the spot.

  Isabella stopped in front of her door. Her hair extended, snaked by the wall, and swished through the air, lashing me across the back so hard it drew blood.

  I yelped in pain. “What was that for?”

  “You were supposed to defend my honor when she called me her ex-pet.” Isabella vanished into the door of her chambers, and the lock rattled as she locked it.

  Typical. There was no winning with her.

  Takezo’s face split into a broad grin. “She liked the burrito.”

  Oh, just wait for the morning. I didn’t say that, though, instead, I just yawned. “I’ll hit the bed. G’night.”

  “’Night.” He headed to his chambers, and I to mine.