“This is the funniest thing you’re going to see all day.”
Kasabian looks at me and turns abruptly away.
“Jesus. Give a guy some warning. Why are you doing that? You don’t have enough pain in your life?”
“It’s not the cutting that’s funny. It’s that I’m cutting the nice clean stitches the hotel doctor just put in. I need some blood.”
“What for?”
Don’t think for a second that just because I’m hard to kill, getting hit or burned or cut doesn’t hurt. It feels the same to me as it does to anybody else. It’s just that I get over it faster. When it’s happening, though, I feel every little twitch and twinge of pain. Cutting into a recent wound is an especially interesting experience. There’s a lot of internal “What the hell are you doing?” screaming.
“Remember when you tried to shoot me with that booby-trapped weapon? The Devil’s Daisy that Mason gave you?”
“Yeah,” says Kasabian. “Damn thing ruined a perfectly good surrogate body.”
“Remember that I talked to you in the deadlands when you were gone but not in Heaven or Hell yet?”
“Yeah? Is that what that’s about?”
I nod. Grimace when I dig down too deep and hit bone.
“Shit. I’m going back to the same neighborhood to talk to another ghost. She gave me this little paper cut, so I figure blood from the wound will get me close to her.”
“You cut yourself up when you came to see me?”
“Worse than this. Usually you have to slit your wrists and be at death’s door for this trick. I’m hoping I can get away with a little less blood this time.”
He takes a chance and sneaks a look in my direction. The blood is flowing and I’m dripping it around a Magic Circle I’ve carved in the tile floor. Thirteen interlocking circles and lines meeting at seventy-two points. Metatron’s Cube. The Flower of Life.
“The really funny part is that I shouldn’t even have to do this. Lucifer can hop from Hell to Earth. I bet he can get to ghost central too but I still haven’t figured out ninety-nine percent of his power.”
The circle is nearly closed with blood.
“When you see me come back, it would be swell if you helped me out by breaking the circle. Just wipe up a little blood.”
“I was just sitting here thinking that what I’d love to do after a nice lunch is wipe up your body fluids.”
I toss off my sliced shirt and strip naked except for the armor.
“The Tin Man comes out of the closet at last.”
I toss him the ripped shirt.
“Shut up, and when you see me twitch, you can use that to break the circle.”
“You’re not going anywhere, are you? This is just some kind of frat hazing where I have to stare at your sack while standing on one leg and reciting the alphabet backward.”
He picks up a chair, limps over, and sets it down a few feet from me.
“Don’t get lost over there. Candy will find me and break my other leg.”
“That’s the trick. Anyone can go over. It’s the smart ones who come back.”
“I never thought of you as one of the smart ones.”
“Me neither. That’s why there’s Plan B.”
“What’s that?”