Sandman Slim with Bonus Content (23 page)

I waited for a minute, not sure I was going to say the next thing.

“I figured out one of your secrets.”

“Which one would that be?”

“The rocks you used on Allegra and me. They’re glass, aren’t they? The glass from Aelita’s story. Glass all full of divine light. Where did you get them?”

“You can find anything on eBay.”

“Or from Mr. Muninn,” says Candy.

“He has some nice things, no doubt.”

“Why did you want them?” I ask. “You don’t seem like a hippie New Age type. And you seem smart enough. Why aren’t you a regular doctor?”

“What do I keep telling you? We’ll talk when you let me take those bullets out.”

“Then it was a bad move using those rocks on me. I don’t even feel them anymore.”

“You will.” The doc keeps moving around the place, putting little things away. Examining others before handing them to Candy. He drops things, clumsy with just the one good arm. Candy leans against the end of the exam table. I pull my legs back so she can sit down. “Keep running around things and you’ll feel them soon enough.” Kinski picks up some green stems with small white blossoms on top. Candy leans over and takes them from him. “See? I told you we had some veratrum,” he says.

“That’s why you’re the doc,” says Candy.

The doc looks at me and crosses his arms.

“You might want to ease up on Eugène. He stood up for you while a lot of folks around here want to see you sent right back to where you came from, but he stood up for you.”

“You one of them?”

“I’m on the fence.”

“That’s why I don’t know if I trust you to cut me open.”

“Imagine how I feel having you in my home, Sandman Slim.”

I hadn’t thought of that.

“Thanks again for fixing me up. I owe you.”

Candy says, “You’re going to have a nice new scar for your collection.”

I rub my chest. She’s right. There’s an almost-healed burn near my heart, right where the sword went in.

“It’s a good one, too. I think I’ll be immune to nukes after this.” Candy’s heart has slowed, but her pupils are still wide. “Listen. I was an asshole the other night. I had no call to talk to you the way I did. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Jades freak out a lot of people.”

“Not me. I know better than that. When I was Downtown, I met Hellions more honorable than ninety-nine percent of the people I have to deal with up here. And I met human souls as vicious and treacherous as any Hellion. So for me to say that stuff to you, that was double shitty. My father would have smacked me and I’d’ve deserved it.”

“I forgive you. We’ll all be freaks together. A blood-sucker who doesn’t suck blood. A human who thinks he’s a Tasmanian Devil driving a tank. And a two-armed witch doctor with only one working arm.”

I ask Kinski, “Why don’t you use the glass to fix yourself?”

He shakes his head.

“They don’t work the same way on everybody and they can’t fix everything. I’ve got my herbs and my ice packs. I’ll be fine.”

“It’s funny, you got mugged by people who didn’t know what they wanted and I sort of did, too.”

“You mean the angel?” asks Candy.

“Yeah. One minute, she’s doing the hard sell and then she’s coming over all beatific and Mother Teresa. Then she suddenly goes batshit psycho. Screams, ‘Abomination,’ and stabs me.”

“You’re sure she said ‘Abomination’?”

“She was screaming it right in my face. I’m sure.”

Candy makes a face and says, “Angels can be such pricks.”

“That they can, darlin’,” Kinski says. “Listen, you’re going to have to watch your back. Just because Eugène stopped Aelita today doesn’t mean he’ll be able to do it again.”

“You think she’ll come after me?”

“Angels don’t use the word
Abomination
lightly. You’re the lowest of the low to her. Worse than a Hellion.”

“So, if Parker or Mason or Hellions or Homeland Security don’t get me, she will.”

“Don’t forget the Sub Rosa,” says Candy.

“Thanks, sunshine. The Sub Rosa, too.”

“You can always come here if things get too hot. I know people who can help get you out of town,” Kinski says.

“I’ll remember that.” I slide off the table and try out my feet. What do you know? I don’t fall over or want to throw up. It’s the little things that make life special. “I should go. Do you know the number of a cab company?”

“I’ve got one in the desk. I’ll go look.” He goes out and Candy and I are alone in the exam room. She gets off the table and brings me a plastic bag full of what looks like mulch.

“Doc wants you to boil this stuff and drink it once in the morning and once at night until it’s gone. Don’t worry. It doesn’t taste any worse than a boiled doormat.”

“Thanks. Is this what the doc gives you to wean you off being a Jade?”

“My tea tastes a lot worse than yours.”

“How’s sobriety working out for you?”

“You know. One day at a time.”

“Were you bitten or something? How do you become a Jade?”

“You’re born to be a Jade. The gift, or affliction, depending on who you ask, descends through the female line in the family. I can trace all my Jade ancestors back to the First Crusade.”

“If it’s your nature to eat people, doesn’t it feel funny to go against that? And against a thousand years of your family history?”

“We drink people. We don’t eat them. And giving it up isn’t so bad. Everything has to evolve, right? We’re monkeys in trees one day and the next we’re monkeys with dental hygiene and cell phones. Best of all, we don’t throw shit at each other anymore.”

“Speak for yourself,” I say, and Candy laughs. Her heartbeat goes up a little. “Do you think that if the doc can get you off drinking people juice, you’ll feel like a regular person someday?”

“Project much, Sandman Slim? What you mean is that if doc can make me less of a monster, can he do it for you, too?”

“I didn’t say you were a monster.”

“But I am. By any human definition, I am a monster. And I always will be, so, no, I don’t think I’ll ever feel like a regular person. I’ll just be a monster who chooses to be a little less monstrous. Who knows? I might fall off the wagon and start drinking people milk shakes again. But I’m going to try not to. Are you asking because you want to see if doc can turn you into a librarian when all this is over?”

I’m walking circles around the table, trying to get my sea legs back. Candy cranes her neck around to watch me. It’s weird being alone with her.

“I don’t know exactly what I want. I know that no one outside of Hell can stand what I am. I’m not wild about it most of the time myself. But I can’t picture being something else.”

“Try. Just imagine it for a few days. See how it feels.”

“Why not? But I’m lazy. When it’s time, I’ll probably go for a simpler fix.”

“Like what?”

“Going back to Hell isn’t the worst thing I can imagine. I know the place. I have a rep. I can probably get my old job back, fighting in the arena.”

“Are you talking about killing yourself?”

“Nah. I’m not the suicide type. I just mean that if I get to pick my moment, it might not be so bad. That was the problem last time. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t get to pick the moment. I could this time.”

“I hate to break it to you, but planning your own violent death, whether it’s you murdering yourself or letting someone else do it, is still suicide.”

“You think so?” I shake my head and lean against the wall, suddenly out of breath. “Ignore me. I’m babbling. I’m tired. My only friends narced me out to Norman Bates’s mom. And every time I get up close to death, I think about Alice.”

“You know she’s not down below. You let yourself be killed and you’ll be farther away from her than ever, and it will be forever.”

“Point taken. Truth is, enough people want me dead that I’m probably never going to have to make that choice.”

“See? Things are looking up already.”

“Let’s see if my cab’s here yet.”

I WAKE IN
the early afternoon, wander into the bathroom, and see myself in the mirror. Candy was right. Aelita’s sword has given me one of my best scars. It looks like a rattler set itself on fire and did a GG Allin stage dive into my chest. This scar is a work of art. It deserves an Oscar and a star on Hollywood Boulevard. It deserves its own power ballad. Now I sort of know how Lucifer must have felt when that last thunderbolt hit and he fell out of Heaven’s cotton candy clouds and into the deep, deep dark.

Aelita seems to have given me something else, too. Back in Hell, each new scar was a gift. Protection against a new attack. That attack in Aelita’s chapel seems to have left me with something besides a new scar. She’s given me some part of her angelic vision. Or maybe she just tore open my third eye, the one that’s been sensing other people’s moods and heartbeats. Whatever it is, I see with different eyes now and I see what she was trying to tell me. The Kissi are everywhere.

There’s graffiti on the alley wall behind Max Overdrive. It’s painted on the buildings and street corners. Store windows and telephone poles. The marks aren’t in any language I know, but I can almost understand them. Like a name on the tip of your tongue that just won’t come. The marks are greetings, warnings, and messages. Hobo signs for eldritch hicks.

The Kissi wander the streets ghosting the holiday merrymakers. Giddy families window-shop, trying to fill some of their desperate hours together with anything that gets them out of having to talk to each other. In some of those families, Mom or Dad is a Kissi. Or possessed by one. A little Kissi girl follows her parents, holding her big brother’s hand, literally draining the life from him as the family stops to admire a blinking LED wreath outside a Burmese restaurant.

There are Kissi as pale and tenuous as vapor from a car exhaust. They whisper lies into people’s ears. Slip hotel receipts into a husband’s wallet. A phone number into a wife’s jacket pocket. They merrily plant little cells of paranoia that grow like a melanoma, because what’s more fun at this time of year than a holiday family slaughter?

I have to get off the street. I can’t stand looking at this. Regular people are bad enough, but regular people being made worse by chaos-sucking bottom feeders is something I can’t take right now.

What’s going on in the street doesn’t look much like a détente to me. The Kissi don’t care who sees them. The Vigil might be right about the Kissi breaking the treaty, but they don’t seem to have a clue how to do anything about it.

There are plenty of cops out, too. Unis and plainclothes. More than I’d expect around Christmas. Aren’t people supposed to be nodding off on tryptophan, eggnog, and fascist Santa’s order to be merry? Maybe the cops know something the rest of us don’t know. Maybe they just feel the undercurrent of craziness in the air. They try to blend in with the holiday wanderers, but they’re as inconspicuous as spiders on a birthday cake.

I just want quiet, a cup of coffee, and no one talking to me. I head for Donut Universe.

Some genius has installed a TV on the wall behind the doughnut counter. Those of us stupid enough to want to sit and drink our coffee inside get a complimentary twenty-four-hour-a-day slice of weather, sports, and genocide with our glazed old-fashioneds. When the local report comes on, it confirms more of what Aelita told me. Robbery. Murder. Rape. Arson. They’re spiraling up and out of control. The local politicos and law dogs don’t have a clue why or what to do about it. Sounds like someone moved Devil’s Night to December and forgot to tell the rest of us to duck and cover.

The green-haired pixie counter girl I’ve seen before is working today. She’s good at her job. Chats up the customers. Smiles and listens without looking fake or like a mental patient. At another time and place, I’d steal a car for her every night and leave it in the parking lot with the keys in the ignition. But here and now I can’t keep falling in instant love like this. It’s embarrassing and distracting. If Vidocq was around, I’d ask him for a potion. A temporary lobotomy, please. Just something to get me through the holidays, and maybe kill off this idiot nineteen-year-old who still lives in my head.

I look up from the pixie girl to burning houses in East L.A. Crying mothers. Screaming kids. There’s blood in the water, so the TV reporters swim up with blank eyes and a mouthful of shark’s teeth. They stick microphones in the faces of new widows and ask, “How does it make you feel?” I love L.A.

I wonder if things have always been this way. Are the Kissi the devils on our shoulders? Or do they just like us because our devils are so loud and hard to miss? I see why Heaven and Hell want to control the Kissi. They can’t ever let regular people hear about them. After the panic, it’d be too easy to pin all of humanity’s bad habits on them. Plus, someone would have to explain where they came from. That means people finding out that God is a fuckup and the devil doesn’t matter. Neither side wants that.

I wonder if the Kissi are strong enough to jack an angel? Maybe. If they really are anti-angels. Muninn said someone was dragging angels up the hill to Avila. That sounds like urban-myth bullshit to me. Like that kid down the street who made a funny face and it stayed that way, so his family had to move away. If someone is snatching angels, it’s probably the Kissi. I don’t think even Mason could mug Aelita.

Two guys come in from the parking lot. I can feel them from all the way across the room. Heat and crazy breathing. Their hearts are going off like machine guns. But they look boring. An older guy in a gray suit. A junior high boy with a skateboard under his arm. They’re bent over the counter ordering doughnuts. I can’t get a look at their faces. They order a few dozen. A whole box full. The green-haired girl rings them up, and when she tells them the total, the guy in the suit pulls a .44 from his jacket and shoots her. And he keeps shooting her. He has to lean all the way over the counter to get off the last few rounds.

I’m up while he’s still concentrating on the girl. Junior drops his deck, pulls his own piece, and aims it at me. I stop. They’re both Kissi.

This isn’t a good time. I’m weak. I don’t want to get shot right now and they know it. They laugh at me.