“You got a taste of blood when you bit that dealer back at Dead Set. Promise me you’ll go to Allegra and get some of the potion that helps you control the craving.”
“I promise.”
I go out onto the balcony, closing the door behind me.
IN THE PARKING lot, foreign exchange students are playing basketball and eating burritos from a taqueria truck parked on the street. A couple have their laptops out and are video-chatting with their families back home.
I head to my room with Kasabian.
Someone taps me on the shoulder.
“Hey.”
Candy comes around in front of me.
She says, “When you’re born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire. But it’s not.”
“What is that?”
“It’s something Doc told me. I didn’t get it at first, but later on it made sense. I thought maybe it could help you.”
“Thanks.”
I nod at the door.
“You coming in?”
She smiles a little and nods.
We go in.
Vidocq, Allegra, and Father Traven are inside talking. Vidocq and Allegra are sitting on the bed and Traven is on a chair across from them. Kasabian is by his computer listening to them and smoking. Candy goes over and sits by Allegra.
There’s a small single bed in the corner. It never gets used, so junk just gets piled there. Magazines. DVDs. Dirty clothes. A few bottles of Jack Daniel’s. I sweep it onto the floor and think about sitting down, but it doesn’t quite happen.>Burning the universe was a lot more fun to think about when Alice was somewhere safe. Some puny hopeful part of me imagined that Heaven would still stand even if the rest of the universe turned to ash. But Alice is Downtown now and I know she was right and I have to let go of her, but I can’t let her die down in Mason’s crazy-house hellhole, and that’s what will happen if I throw the kill switch.
I grab a heavy glass decanter from the floor and step out into Muninn’s underground storeroom.
I yell, “Mr. Muninn. It’s Stark.”
He sticks his head out from around a row of shelves overflowing with Tibetan skull bowls and ritual trumpets made of human femurs decorated with silver. He wipes his brow on a black silk handkerchief as he walks over.
“Just doing a bit of inventory. Sometimes I think I should hire a boy like you to put this all on a computer, but then I think that by the time he’s finished, computers will be obsolete and we’ll have to do it all over again with brains in jars or genius goldfish or whatever other wonders scientists come up with next.”
He sighs.
“I suppose in a place like this, the old ways work best. Besides, I know that while it looks like a jumble to other people, I know where each and every item is. I only do inventory as an excuse to revisit doodads and baubles I haven’t handled in a century or two.”
He sees the glass container in my hand.
“Oh my. You’ve brought it back. Let’s sit down and have a drink.”
Muninn’s desk is a worktable covered in the kind of junk that would give the staff at the Smithsonian nuclear hard-ons. An early draft of the Magna Carta that included the emancipation of ghosts. Little floating and whizzing matchbox-size gewgaws from Roswell. Cleopatra’s lucky panties. For all I know, he has Adam and Eve’s fig leaves pressed in their high school ag high s yearbook.
I set the decanter on the table between us. If you look hard enough into the glass, you can see a flickering match head of fire. It doesn’t look like much, but neither do the few micrograms of plutonium it takes to kill you as dead as eight-track tapes and with a lot more open sores.
“You’ve changed your mind, have you? You’re not going to set us all ablaze like the Roman candles on the Fourth of July?”
“When you put it like that, it sounds fun. Giving this back might be a mistake, but I don’t think it’s mine anymore.”