“I had to get rid of it to get here and this one was available.”
“Put it back on. I want to see the real you.”
I look at the floor, smiling.
“Of course you do. But it’s not here.”
“Where is it?”
“Jack the Ripper stole it.”
She takes a deep breath and lets it out. I’m never going to get used to seeing the dead breathe. Or mimic the memory of breathing. I don’t know which it is.
“I almost believe you. Say something else.”
“For almost a year I’ve had the strangest dreams about you. I kno12"t you. w some were just plain old dreams, but others were different. It’s like you were really talking to me.”
She grunts faintly.
“I had dreams about you, too. Some were like you said. Just dreams. But I think a few were something more. Like we were talking to each other. I saw another girl in one of them. She had an accent.”
“That’s Brigitte. She’s Czech. And a zombie hunter. You’d like her.”
“Sounds fun. Is she your girlfriend?”
I shake my head.
“I almost got her turned into the undead, so it didn’t really work out. But I started seeing someone recently. You’d like her, too. She’s a Lurker, and when she gets mad she eats people.”
Alice gives a little laugh.
“They make me sound so boring.”
“That’s the last thing you were.”
She sits on the table and leans in close, like a scientist examining a new kind of bug.
“We need to find your real face because, seriously, human or not, no girl is going to stick her tongue in that thing.” She sits up. “And for the record, I missed you, too.”
She reaches out to touch my Hellion cheek but her hand goes right through me.
“Damn I was afraid of that,” she says.
“What the fuck just happened?”
She stares at her hand.
“It happens with everything down here. I guess since I was in Heaven, Hell things can’t touch me.”
“How did you get dragged down into this cell?”
“It was that crazy angel, Aelita. She had some interesting things to say about you. She said you aren’t human.”
And Medea Bava said some things about you.
“I’m humanish. I’ll tell you about it later.”
“What happened to you all those years ago? Where were you? I know it had something to do with Mason. He’s been behind every lousy thing that’s happened to us.”