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.>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.