“You’re telling me? I’m the one who got a knife in the back.”

She says it right after I light up. I try to move away, but she holds on to me.

“That’s really what happened?”

“Yeah. You’ve got to give Mason credit for that. Sending Parker to do it fast. The guy knew how to do it. I hardly felt a thing.”

“If you know that, then this isn’t a dream.”

“Maybe not a hundred percent. But it’s still a dream.”

“For a long time I was afraid of knowing what happened to you.”

“Gee, I hadn’t noticed. Now you do know. It’s time to get your ass past it.”

I take a drag off the cigarette. She takes it from my hand and puffs. Hands it back to me. Her fingertips are blue to the point of almost being black. They don’t look like a living person’s hands.

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“I don’t know what to do next.”

Alice punches me on the arm.

“Were you even listening to the crossword, dumb-ass? It’s all finally happening. What you knew was going to happen. You can either keep watching movies until the sun burns out or you can stop running from who you are. You’re Sandman Slim, goddammit. You’re that or you’re nothing. Your choice.”

“Isn’t there a curtain number three? I don’t mind a year’s worth of Turtle Wax.”

“Sorry. The money’s all down. Betting is closed. Play or walk away.”

I nod toward the crossword puzzle on the table.

“What’s with the hen scratching? I can’t read a damned word.”

She glances at the crossword and shakes her head.

“It’s a puzzle. You’re supposed to figure it out. That’s why they call it a puzzle.”

“How?”

“Once again, it’s called a puzzle for a reason.”

“Okay.”

Some kind of magic being, a stand-in for the caterpillar, I think, is hitting on Alice.

“You know I’m in bed with another woman, right?”

“It’d be pretty creepy if you were in bed with me, Ed Gein.”

“It’s okay with you?”

“I thought we went through this when you fucked Brigitte. Get on with your life.”

“It’s more like she fucked me. I was pretty much just an innocent bystander.”

“Every guy tries that line at least once. It never works.”

“Why did you pick that particular song?”

“Who says I picked it? Who says it’s about me?”

Alice takes the cigarette from my hand, finishes it, and stubs it out on the sole of her shoe. She nods at the TV, where a barely dressed female Jabberwock is flying Alice across Wonderland.

“If you dream about me again, dream me like that hee like Alice. She gets to fly around, have adventures, and isn’t stuck in this fucking apartment forever.”

“I’ll work on it.”

“Do that. You know I’d look good as an anime schoolgirl. I love you, but I’m over your moony guilt trip. Dream about that girl you’re lying next to for a change.”

She kisses me on the cheek, gets up, and walks away.

“See you around, Miyuki-chan.”

“Later, alligator.”

I wake up and take my arm from around Candy. I’m sweating. I go to the bathroom, run some water on my face, and wipe myself down on one of the hotel’s rough white towels. I find my phone and check the time. Still early enough to get some sleep. I sit on the edge of the bed, letting my head clear. In a little while I lie down and put my arm back around Candy. She moves back against me.

Yeah, I could get used to this.

I WAKE UP around one and start putting my clothes on. Candy hears me and turns over.

“What’s up?”

“I’m going to a zombie industrial club to track down a drug dealer. What are you doing?”

She throws off the covers and starts looking around for her clothes.

“No way I’m letting you tough-guy-solo it and hog all the fun.”

“Then shake a leg, Modesty Blaise.”

I KIND OF regret having ditched the Volvo in the afternoon. I have a bad feeling about where all this drugs-and-demon bullshit is heading, especially after talking to Alice. Or talking to myself. Or talking to some combination of Alice and my subconscious. I don’t hate the dull anonymity of the car or, when I’m being honest with myself, the last month and a half of quiet. Things are changing and they’re going to change faster. You’ll be able to boogie-board on all the blood that’s coming.

Tonight, though, the universe throws me a bone.

A BIKE RIDE is what I need to blow out the dust and clear my head, and what do you know? Someone’s left a red Ducati Monster in the street just for me. Every day is Christmas if you know how to get around locks.

I look at Candy.

“You okay riding without a helmet?”

“What’s a helmet?”

I take out the black bone knife, slice through the Cobra lock in one pass, and toss it away. I climb onto the bike. Candy gets on behind and puts her arms around me. I jam the knife into the ignition, turn, and gun the throttle. The Ducati purrs like a big mechanical cat. I kick up the stand, turn, and speed off to find Cale. At the corner I remember we’re going across town and there might be cops. I grunt a little Hellion trickster hoodoo so civilians will see helmets on our heads. Sometimes magic is as dull as taking out the trash.

The wind feels good on my face and Candy is warm against me. Talking to Alice has taken a weight off my back, one I didn’t even know I was carrying. I’m amazed I haven’t been walking around like Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I know some of what I’m feeling comes from Alice’s tough-love, leave-me-alone-and-find-a girl-that-breathes pep talk, but the more important part is finding out how she died. Not knowing was killing me and I never had a clue. I’m not saying that knowing feels good, but it feels more human. I’ve broken things and killed people for what happened to her and I don’t regret any of it. But now it feels like the bottomless fury that both pushed me forward and held me back might have an end to it. Or at least it won’t be cranked up to eleven all the time. I’ll never let go of Alice entirely and I’ll never forgive what happened to her, but I know I don’t have to destroy myself to make things right. I just have to kill Mason.

Sometimes, when I’m out at night and things are quiet, I take pity on the angel in my head and let it take the lead.

The angel can see in the dark, but not like it’s an owl or has night-vision goggles. The angel sees the world the way God must see it. Nothing is solid. Objects don’t exist except as strings of vibrating pearls of light. Molecules are interlocked Tinkertoys of atoms hiding in smudged electron fogs, all wrapped in the twisted folds of superstring taffy. Swirling and flowing, the universe folds in on itself in a multidimensional Technicolor Busby Berkeley dance of the celestial spheres. And that’s just in the city. I wonder what the ocean would look like with these eyes? Waves within waves within waves within waves, a fractal whirlpool dropping down forever, past Heaven and Hell and what? Could eyes like the angel’s see the Big Bang? Could I pick out the atoms of Alice’s ashes where I dumped them by Venice Beach? No. None of that tonight. I’m alive and I’m driving and there’s a pretty girl at my back. I’m a goddamn Bruce Springsteen song.

When we get near the club, I leash the angel and stuff him back in his doghouse. I need to see with my eyes now.

I stop the bike in the driveway of a gated warehouse down the block from Dead Set. The scene is pretty much what Carolyn said it was. The Goth industrial crowd wrapped in latex and chrome. Girls and skinny boys wearing boots with heels high enough to tickle Gabriel’s ball sac mill around outside, smoking.

Dead Set is in a converted furniture warehouse. There’s a projector on the low brick building next door splashing Stacy, a Japanese-schoolgirl zombie flick, across three floors on the side of the Deade o of the Set warehouse. A horde of barely legal shoujos in bloody school uniforms stumble toward soldiers firing automatic weapons. It goes the way these face-offs usually do. Schoolgirls one. Soldiers zero. I light up a couple of Maledictions, hand one to Candy, and we wait.

“Shouldn’t we go inside?” she asks.

“Too crowded. If we get into a tussle, all those extra bodies are just going to get in the way. A club like this only has one entrance. Give it some time. Cale will come to us.”

“I love it when you talk all Sam Spade.”

A cop car cruises by every half hour or so to let the crowd know they’re there. I smell some undercover bacon in the crowd, too. Their sweat is different. They’re excited, but it’s not by the drugs or possibility of sex. It’s at the possibility they might get the chance to put a beat down on the young and beautiful. The cool kids who wouldn’t let them sit at their table in the lunchroom. Fucking cops. They’re making me side with these preening assholes.

I have to wait around an hour for Cale to come outside. Yes, it’s boring. You can only make so many catty comments about the crowd when everyone looks pretty much the same. Candy and I burn through more Maledictions than we should. Fuck Lucifer, too. I saved his life. He could have at least sent me a crate of smokes before he fucked off back to Daddy’s condo in heaven.

I get back on the bike and gun the ignition.

“Follow me over on foot,” I tell Candy.

I hit the throttle and blast across the street like a twin-cylinder RPG. Cale and his crew have come outside. I screech-skid to a hard stop inches away from him. However high he is, his reflexes are good enough that he jumps back a few inches when he sees me closing in on him.

“Hey, Cale. Long time no see. How’ve you been doing?”

“Do I know you?”

“Sure. Carolyn McCoy introduced us.”

“Sorry. You’ve got the wrong guy. I don’t know you or any Carolyns or any McCoys.”

I’m close enough to see that yes, he does have runes and sigils tattooed on the sides of his head. I want a closer look, but the lights are shit and he’s too high to stand still.

He turns and tries to walk away.

“Sure you know Carolyn. You’re her Akira connection.” I say it loud enough so that everyone nearby can hear.

Cale turns and heads back, his long lanky body moving with a dancer’s practiced grace but a boxer’s strength. I Carength.2019;m pretty sure he’s armed, but I’m not sure what with.

“What did you just say?”

There are five in his crew. Three girls and two other guys. They spread out behind him, blocking the street in case I try to rabbit away.

“Akira. The Akira that Carolyn sells to stupid college kids and, for all I know, underage go-go dancers. Damn, how many felonies is that?”

“That’s what she says? And you believe everything every dumb junkie cunt tells you?”

“I believe her because you said you didn’t know any Carolyns, but you know she’s a dumb junkie cunt.”

He does a little grunting laugh.

“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.