Sandman Slim with Bonus Content (13 page)

Allegra’s keys are in her pocket. She’s walking now, but kind of clumsy. I pickpocket her keys, open the door, and find the light switch. There’s a dark green sofa against one wall. She walks over on her own and flops down, leaning her head back against the wall.

“You want anything? Water? Coffee? A drink?”

She shakes her head. I want a cigarette, badly, but the room reeks of fresh air and nonsmoking vibes. I give up and sit down next to her on the sofa.

“You said I’d be safe if I stayed.”

“I thought you would,” I tell her. “You should have been. I fucked up.”

I’d meant to get Vidocq to splash around some of his voodoo water and slap a protection charm around the place. But I got so caught up with hunting Mason that I forgot. Simple as that. I let down my guard with Mason before and Alice got killed. Now I’m sitting next to another woman I’ve let down.

“It’s my fault.” Now I really want a cigarette or ten. “Sorry.”

She closes her eyes and seems to drift away, still flying high on whatever Kinski slipped her in that dried fruit. Her breathing becomes shallow. Her heart slows down. Then it blasts from around sixty up to a hundred and twenty. She looks at me and starts yelling. “My boss’s head was talking to me without a body. But when I told you, you didn’t even seem surprised. What the
fuck
is going on?”

“Yeah, that.” Suddenly I’m a single dad about to explain the birds and the bees to his kid. “Do you believe in God?”

“Damn. First you say you’re an ex-con, now you’re Jerry Falwell. Who are you really?”

“Do you believe in God? Lucifer? The afterlife. Any of that?”

“I don’t know. My mother used to take me to church when I was little.”

“Remember the stories about miracles? Water into wine? Plagues of locusts?”

“’Course. Everyone remembers that. About when all the rules and commandments got boring, someone would walk on water or turn a city into salt. It was cool. So what?”

“What’s a miracle but another word for magic?”

“Don’t quiz me. Just say what you want to say.”

“Magic. I’m talking about magic.”

“Oh, man.” She stands up, walks across the room, and drops into a beanbag chair held together at the seams with duct tape. “You know, when I first met you, the ex-con thing aside, I thought you might be all right. But you really are just another snake, aren’t you? I mean, either you’re here to scam me or fuck me while I’m high, or you’re just plain crazy. Any way you cut it, goddamn. Me and men.” Her voice trails off and she sinks into the chair, nervously rubbing at the bruise over her left eye.

“You just told me that the decapitated head of your dead boss was talking to you tonight. What do you call that?”

“How do you know so much about that stuff?”

“I do magic. Not Vegas magic. The real stuff.”

“You’re like a witch or a wizard or something?”

“Harry Potter’s a wizard. I do magic. I’m a magician.”

“This is a really strange night.”

“Wait. It gets better. Kasabian’s a magician, too. So is Parker. He’s the guy I’m pretty sure attacked you tonight.”

She sits up and looks at me hard. “Do something. Show me some magic.”

“What do you want to see? What will convince you?”

“Blow my mind. Make that table float in the air.”

“I’m not a floater. I used to be able to do the cute stuff, but most of the magic I’m good at now isn’t furniture-friendly.”

“So, what can you do?”

I think for a minute and pull Azazel’s knife from my jacket. Allegra’s pupils dilate a fraction of a millimeter. I’m getting used to seeing these things.

“Here. It’s for you.” I hold the knife out to her, hilt first. She takes it tentatively, holding it with both hands like it weighs fifty pounds.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

I go over to her walking on my knees, like a kid. Staying lower than the eye level of an opponent often has a calming effect on them. Maybe it will work on a nervous friend.

When I’m at the foot of the beanbag chair, I hold up my left hand and say, “Try to stab me.”

She cocks her head to the side like she’s trying to figure out if her cat suddenly started speaking French. “No, I don’t think I’m going to do that.”

“It’s okay. Don’t hold back. I know you’re pissed at me. Let me have it.”

She just stares down at the knife in her hands. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the knee walk made me look too silly to stab. There’s a way to fix that.

I lean right into her face and scream, “Stab me, dammit!” as loud as I can. She lunges. And jabs the knife all the way through my left hand.

“Oh my God! I’m so sorry!” she says, covering her mouth with her hands.

What most people don’t understand about being hard to kill is that just because getting shot or stabbed or set on fire doesn’t kill you, it doesn’t mean that you don’t feel it. When someone shoves a big knife through my hand, it feels like anybody else’s hand getting stabbed. This is a nice way of saying that when Allegra pigsticks me with the bone blade, I want to scream like a little French girl and roll around on my back demanding a thousand cc of Jack Daniel’s, stat. But I don’t do any of that. I calmly pull the knife out of my hand. I wipe the blood off on my pants leg. I don’t want to piss her off more by bleeding on her carpet.

Allegra finds a couple of paper napkins next to a half-eaten sandwich on a plate on the floor. She presses the napkins hard against the hole in my hand.

“Thanks. You’re being nice for someone who thinks I’m crazy or a snake.”

“Shut up. Now I know you’re too dumb to be a snake. You’re probably too stupid to be crazy. I don’t know what you are.”

“I’m magic,” I say. I pull the napkins away from my hand and wipe off the last of the blood. The wound is already closed.

She shrugs. “That just makes you a freak, not the Wizard of Oz. Or maybe it was a trick knife.”

Tough crowd at the Angels’ Hideaway. “Go get one of yours.”

She goes to the kitchen, rattles some drawers, and comes back with a hefty butcher knife. Nice. She’s getting into the spirit of things.

“Now what?” she asks.

“Try to stab me again.”

“What is wrong with you? If you want a girl to hurt you, there’s professionals for that in the phone book.”

I hold up the hand she just stabbed. “One more time. Come on. Have fun with it. Most people don’t live long enough to do this twice.”

I don’t have to shout this time. She shoves the blade straight into my hand. But it sticks there, only about an eighth of an inch into the skin. There’s no blood at all. She keeps trying to push the knife through. Really starts leaning on it. I have to take the knife out of her hand and set it on the floor. She takes my hand and examines it, looking for blood or a new wound. All she finds is a fresh red scar from where she stabbed me a couple of minutes ago.

“My whole body is kind of magic. Once you attack me a certain way, it doesn’t really work all that well again.”

“So, no one can ever stab you again?”

“I wish. The new scar you gave me just means that this hand is protected from being stabbed like that.”

“Is that what all those scars are from? Getting stabbed?”

“That and other things. Kasabian shot me when I walked into his store, so I have some new ones from him. It’s not so bad. Some people wear a crucifix or a pentagram for protection. I wear my protection right in my skin.”

“Talking heads and magic scars. That’s not what I thought magic would be like.”

Allegra’s looking a little pale right now and I don’t think it’s the concussion. My little magic show might have gone too far too fast for her. I root around in my memory for magic that doesn’t involve anything blowing up. I come up with half a little spell. Something I would have done at lunch in grade school. I’ve always been lucky at making partial spells work, so I silently recite the words I remember, then tack on my own ending, careful to recite only human words and not the Hellion that keeps trying to sneak out.

Nothing happens. Then I feel a fluttering in my chest, like the old days on Earth when the magic was flowing.

I hold up my stabbed hand and blow across the fingertips. Five yellow flames flicker to life, one on top of each of my fingers. Candles made of flesh. The fire is real, but it doesn’t burn me. I take a cigarette from the pack in my pocket and light one off my index finger, blowing the smoke up into the air.

Allegra glances from me and back to the flames, her eyes wide and staring. She reaches over my burning fingertips and snatches her hand back a second later.

“It’s hot.”

“That’s why they call it fire. Put up your hand,” I tell her. “Palm toward me.”

She holds up her right hand. I touch my hand to hers and say a few words. The flames drift down my fingertips and over to hers.

“Blow on your fingers lightly.”

She does it. The flames disappear.

“Do it again, only blow harder this time.”

She puffs her cheeks and blows. The flames reignite.

“I can feel it. It’s warm, but it doesn’t hurt.”

“Blow really hard.”

The flames flare, from one to six inches. The moment she stops blowing, they shrink back to birthday candles.

“Is that magic enough for you?”

“Yeah, I’d say that covers it.”

I blow lightly on her fingertips and the flames fade away.

“Now you’ve got a little charm on your hand and you can do that fire trick anytime you want. So, next time you start doubting, you’ll know that what you’re seeing is real because part of you is magic, too.”

She stares at her unburned hand for a minute.

“Tell me about Mr. Kasabian’s head. Is he dead? Did you do that to him?”

“No to the first question, and yes to the second.”

“Tell me about it.”

For the second time tonight, I’m confessing my sins. This time it’s easier because it’s not just my bad moments, but also Mason’s, Kasabian’s, and the rest of the Circle’s. Plus, I’m lying. Just a little. I tell her that Mason sold me out, sent me to a dark and rotten place. I just leave out Hell and the hitman part.

“So, that guy tonight—Parker—he killed your girl?” she asks.

“That’s what Kasabian said.”

“Damn. Was Mr. Kasabian in on it?”

“He’s too much of a jellyfish for murder. And he’s too afraid of me to lie about it. But he was there for the rest of it.”

“I’d have cut off more than his head if he’d done that to me or mine.”

“Then you know why I’m back.”

“You’re Clint Eastwood in the
Outlaw Josie Wales
. Max von Sydow in
Virgin Spring
.”

“I don’t know who that second one is, but if he was out to fuck up the people who fucked up someone he cared about, then, yeah, okay, I’m Max. And that’s why I’m leaving.”

“You’re giving up?”

“No. I’m leaving Max Overdrive. I’ll crash with the meth heads in Griffith Park. I’m too dangerous to be around actual human beings. I should have left that first night.”

“No way. No damned way,” says Allegra. “I’m in.”

“In what I’m doing? No way, girlie.”

She crawls off the beanbag chair and sits beside me on the floor. “Listen, I’ve been looking for something extraordinary my whole life, but I kept getting it wrong. I ended up in bad places with bad people, bad drugs, bad lovers, and a lot of other bad shit I don’t want to think about. But this, right here, this is it. You’re it. The thing I’ve been looking for all my life. I want in.”

“Tough. I didn’t come back here to be your guidance counselor.”

“Yes, you did. That’s exactly what you’re here for. Maybe not the whole reason, but part of it.”

“You’re not a killer and you don’t have any magic. You manage a video store.”

“So, teach me.”

“Teach you what? I can show you a few tricks, but when it comes to the hardcore fuck-you-up magic, you’re born with that or you aren’t.”

“What about your friend, Vidocq?”

“He’s an alchemist. It’s not the same thing.”

“I could learn that.”

“You could have died tonight.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’m not dragging you into this.”

“You already did. And you’ll take me along cause you need me.”

I don’t say anything. I get up so that I’m standing right over her. Earlier, I’d set the bone blade beside me on the floor. I pick it up and scabbard it inside my jacket.

“For eleven years, I’ve been worked over and abused in ways you can’t imagine by things you don’t want to know about. I’ve killed every kind of vile, black-souled, dead-eyed nightmare that ever made you piss your pj’s and cry for mommy in the middle of the night. I kill monsters and, if I wanted, I could say a word and burn you to powder from the inside out. I can tear any human you ever met to wet rags with my bare hands. Give me one reason why I could possibly need you?”

She looks straight up at me, not blinking. No fear in her eyes.

“Because, you might be the Tasmanian Devil and the Angel of Death all rolled into one, but you don’t even know how to get a phone.”

I hate to admit it, but she has a point.

LATE AFTERNOON THE
next day, I knock on Vidocq’s door, which I still can’t help thinking of as my door, which makes my brain spin around like a blender full of ball bearings. Fortunately, I’m good at ignoring a lot of what my brain does.

Beside me, Allegra bounces on the balls of her feet. She’s wearing shiny boots with thick soles and a belly-revealing T-shirt tight enough to be have been spray-painted on. Probably because I told her that Vidocq is French. She looks cute enough, but one side of her face still sports a dark purple bruise and her cheeks and jaw are a little puffy, so she’s also trying to distract people’s eyes from her face to her body. It’s working.

She’s doing a lot better than me. I crashed at her place to keep an eye on her. All I can tell you is to never fall asleep on a beanbag chair. My back feels like someone beat me with a pillowcase full of tuna-fish cans.

Vidocq opens the door and does a comical little eyebrow raise.

“There you are. And you’ve brought a friend.”

Allegra puts out her hand and gives Vidocq a smile that would make a dead man swoon.

“I’m Allegra,” she says. “Stark’s new zookeeper.”

“I’m François Eugène Vidocq. Lovely to meet you.”

She looks over his shoulder into the crowded room. “Are all those books and potions yours?” She steps past him into the room like she’d just bought the place. Vidocq turns and gives me a conspiratorial look.

“Forget it. Just a friend,” I say.

“Then you are a very foolish boy.” He nods at her examining his ingredient racks. “What happened to her face?”

“Parker.”

“Brave girl.”

“It’s why I bought her here. If Parker knows who she is, then she’s already part of this. But she’s a civilian. She doesn’t know magic or charms or anything. Think you could teach her some of what you do?”

“You want to trust her with me? After what I’ve done to myself?”

“If she’s on Parker’s list, she could do worse than be cursed with immortality. And she needs something. I can’t teach her what I do. I won’t.”

“What’s this?” Allegra asks. She holds a small vial up to the light. It’s red, but it shimmers like mercury.

“That’s the blood of a Chimera. A rare beast that, it’s said, can change its shape to anything it eats. It’s also said that its blood can give a man that power, too, but I’ve never been able to make it work.”

“You have so many amazing and beautiful things here. I don’t know how you can remember them all.”

“The trick is not to try and remember. You learn what the ingredients are and how to use them, what to mix or never to mix. You learn how to distill the essence and find the true heart of each ingredient and potion. As you learn those things, you learn the names and the methods, which books are good for one type of potion, which instruments produce the best results. You don’t try to remember. You just learn. Once you’ve done that, your hands will remember what to take and what to use and which books to open.”

She picks up a parchment scroll and opens it. It’s a diagram of a woman’s body, but she has wings and an eagle’s head. There are diagrams and small, precise handwritten notes all around the drawing.

Still holding the scroll, Allegra asks, “You can read Greek, too?”

Vidocq glances at the scroll and nods. “German and Arabic, too. Some Sumerian. A bit of Aramaic and some others. There are so many books to read, and I’ve had a lot of time to fill.”

“Do you think that I could learn this?”

“Alchemy? Why not? People have been learning the craft for thousands of years. Why not you?”

Allegra looks over Vidocq’s endless racks and picks up a crystal box with what looks like bugs moving around inside. “What’s this?”

“Babylonian scarabs. Very powerful. Very wise.”

The old man goes off on a lecture of the virtues of these particular bugs above all others. Allegra hangs on every word of his spiel. I leave them alone and wander into the bedroom. They don’t need me. It’s geek love.

The bedroom I used to share with Alice is now completely Vidocq’s. The walls are painted a bright arsenic green and are covered with protective runes and sigils. The Goodwill and surplus store blankets are gone from the bed and replaced with a dark red velvet comforter and pillows that don’t look like they were found under a dinosaur’s ass. There are books everywhere, tins of fresh tobacco, bottles of sleeping potions, and bowls of hallucinogenic mushrooms. On a sideboard are framed pictures—fading ink silhouettes, a crumbling daguerreotype, and even a few faded photos. Most of the images are of women. He’s never talked about any of them.

I check the floor of his closet and the shelf at the top. I look under the sideboard. I find what I’m looking for in a box under the bed.

It’s full of Alice’s things, whatever things Vidocq could salvage from whatever happened to her that night. I know that the box will be safe to open. He wouldn’t have saved anything with blood on it, but it still takes a minute to work up the nerve.

There are neatly folded T-shirts and panties on top, which is funny because I don’t think Alice or I ever folded anything in our lives. Under those are her favorite shoes, a pair of glow-in-the-dark leopard-spotted Chuck Taylors. There are pesos and taxidermy frogs playing toy instruments we got on a road trip to Mexico. Tucked in a corner near the bottom is a pair of vintage Ray Bans she’d hot-glued back together after a bouncer knocked them off her face for slamming too hard at a club in Culver City. These days, I would have pulled the guy’s spine out through his ass, but I wasn’t such a hands-on type back then. A simple Sumerian spell gave the bouncer the worst case of food poisoning he’d have in this or any other lifetime.

When I piled it all on the bed, a small white box that had been stuffed in with the T-shirts fell out. When I opened it, I recognized the box instantly. It was that stupid magic-shop box with the hole in the bottom and the fake bloody cotton inside. The one she’d used to show me that she could do magic, too. I put the magic box in my pocket and the rest of her stuff back in the big box and carry it out into the living room.

Allegra and Vidocq are still taking inventory, but pause long enough to grin at me.

“Eugène says that I can be his apprentice and learn to be an alchemist.”

“Congratulations. Just don’t forget that we had a deal.

I’m letting you into the other world, the Sub Rosa, but you still have to help me with a few things, too. And you can’t abandon Max Overdrive. It may not be much, but it brings in money and, unless things changed while I was gone, that’s what makes the world go round.”

“I’ll remember. We’ll go out tomorrow and get you a phone.”

“And the Internet. We need to get that, too.”

“First thing, never say ‘Get the Internet.’ You sound like the Beverly Hillbillies. You ‘use’ the Internet or you ‘access’ it. You never ‘get’ it.”

“See? That’s why I hired you.”

She turns to Vidocq. “Don’t listen to him. He didn’t hire me. I blackmailed his ass.”

“Is this true?” he asks.

“Ignore her. She’s schizophrenic and a pathological liar. I only let her work at the shop to keep her from swindling widows and orphans.”

“You just can’t handle the truth, can you?”

“And what’s that?” I ask her.