Aloha from Hell (Sandman Slim 3)

“All these small-time bitches have habits. If I ever did know a Carolyn, I don’t know her anymore.”

“Why would you? She dosed the kid for you and that makes her too dangerous to keep around. What I want to know is whether you dosed Hunter Sentenza on your own or did someone pay you to do it?”

He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t walk away either. He’s trying to decide if he wants to talk some more or fight.

“I’m guessing the second,” I say. “If you wanted Hunter dead, you’d have sent one of your monkey boys to do it. That means you did it for someone. I want to know who.”

Cale subtly shifts his weight, dropping it onto his back foot. He’s trying to be subtle, but I know a fighting stance when I see one. His crew is showing a lot of teeth. Candy is behind them in the street. She keeps an eye on them while they keep an eye on me.

Someone screams off to my right. Two drunk girls have fistfuls of each other’s coiffed hair and are rocking back and forth trying to hit each other. Drunk catfighting for the crowd’s amusement. Every town has its arena.

But I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off Cale. By the time I refocus, he’s throwing a hex at me. And it isn’t in the textbooks in Sub Rosa school. He’s been hanging out with a bad crowd. I bet he cheats on his spelling tests, too. But there’s no time to think about that. A buckshot hurricane of wasps blasts from his hands right at my face.

The first wave hits me square in the chest and face before I can throw up a shield spell. The wasps are coming so fast that most of them don’t have a chance to sting me. They splat and bounce off into the crowd. The young and the beautiful scream in pain and run. Fuck ’em if they’re too dumb to get out of the way of a hoodoo street fight.

I get a shield up, covering my front from ground to head. The stream of wasps is coming at me so hard that I hn="ard thaave to lean into them to keep from being blown onto my back. I expand the shield over and around Cale and his crew. Shouting in Hellion, I slam the shield shut, trapping them inside with Cale’s ballistic bugs.

There’s a couple of minutes of hilarious screaming and self-flagellation as Cale and his people crouch, crawl, and slap themselves silly trying to get the wasps off. Cale is barely in control of the hex, but finally turns off the bug spigot.

Cale is pissed. He shouts a string of hexes and chips away at the sides of my shield dome. I let him. I’ll give the kid some credit. He’s got some power and he’s on his way to learning how to use it, but he isn’t there yet. That’s a dangerous place to be. It can make you do stupid things. Like now, for instance.

Finally, he blasts my shield dome into a million pieces of formless aether. A guy like this with lots of showy magic tends to forget the basics of fighting. The physical part. I rush him and get a hand around his throat before he can throw any more hexes.

Cale’s boys just stand there like pricy mannequins. It’s the girls who finally do something and make to throw some hoodoo my way. Candy is on them before either of them can get more than a syllable out. She puts the boot to them, but has enough control of herself not to go Jade on them.

I let go of Cale long enough for him to take a swing at me. Then I speak a single Hellion word.

He collapses. Not like he fell. More like a giant invisible foot from the sky is trying to squash him like a bug. He fights it, writhing and twisting. Almost pushing himself up on two arms and then collapsing again. His face is a few inches from the street when he starts vomiting blood. Some of it splashes onto his face and his bleached white hair. Cale’s crew freezes. They don’t run, but they don’t try to help him either. Blood does that to people. I let him keep vomiting. In fact, I make him vomit more blood than any ten human bodies could possibly hold. Gallons and gallons of it. It spreads in a widening puddle in the street, covering him and threatening to touch his crew’s expensive shoes. They want to stop the mayhem, but they’re torn between their loyalty to their leader and their look.

One of the girls, Cale’s squeeze I guess by her haughty high-toned look, rushes to his aid, but slips and ends up on her ass in the gooey red slip-and-slide pouring from her boyfriend’s mouth.

I can hear the electronic beeps and boops of people dialing cell phones. Good citizens calling 911. I shout a bit of mind-control abracadabra. It’s something you use on people and hell beasts, but it does weird things to electronics. I once blew out all the traffic lights on Hollywood Boulevard with it when I drove Allegra to Doc Kinski’s clinic. This time it just fries some smartphones.

I let up on Cale. He can’t breathe while puking and I don’t want him to die of oxygen deprivation. The moment the blood stops, he sucks in big mouthfuls of air.

“Hurting your boss here is fun, but only one of you pricks is goeatpricks ing home alive, and it’s the one who names your Akira supplier. The one who makes it. Just shout out a name and address and you get to walk away.”

One of the boys who’s gone even paler than when he came out of the club waves a bony arm in the air like a drunk praying mantis.

“It’s Hunahpu,” he says. “He runs the cookers.”

“Where can I find him?”

“Shut your fucking mouth, Jonas.”

It’s Cale, still on the ground, but still in command. His latex glistens with blood. He’s gone from platinum blond to I Love Lucy red.

Candy moves behind him in case he freaks and takes a runner.

Jonas says, “I don’t want to die here.”

Cale shouts, “Say another word and I’ll kill you myself!”

“Who do you think is in better shape to kill you, Jonas? Cale or me? Tell me where to find Hunahpu.”

“I’ll tell you if you don’t kill anyone.”

I nod.