I flick the cigarette butt at him and burn a small hole in his pullover before he flinches out of the way.
“You left me to the monsters when you blew Hell. Let me change what I said before. It’s not that I don’t need you. I don’t want you. Have fun in Blue Heaven.”
I get off the Volvo hood and start around to the driver’s side.
“You mean it, don’t you? This isn’t just the anger talking. You really intend to give up half of yourself forever.”
I pull up my shirtsleeve and show him the Kissi arm.
“Remember this? I lost part of me already and I learned to get along without it. I can do it again.”
“Can you honestly say you don’t miss the Room of Thirteen Doors? The quiet. The perfection. Knowing you’re at the still silent heart of the universe and that no one can touch you.”
“I miss it like a junkie misses the needle. But it’s like Herodotus said—and that guy I know is Greek: ‘Very few things happen at the right time and the rest do not happen at all.’ ”
“How does that even apply?”
“ ’Cause you’re a day late and a dollar short, so fuck off.”
He leans on the top of the Volvo.
“Without the Key you can’t get to Blue Heaven and you’ll never see me again.”
“You can travel with the Key but I have people who watch my back. What do you have besides frequent flier miles?”
“Everyone who watches your back gets shot, stabbed, or punched. How long will they put up with that?”
I get in the car. Talk to him through the open window.
“Good-bye. Say hi to Amelia Earhart for me.”
Saint James steps into a shadow and is gone.
“You know, I had to kill myself a little in Hell a few days back.”
“Maybe you’ll get it right this time,” says Kasabian.
When someone asked Willie Sutton, the safecracker, why he broke into so many banks, he said, “Because that’s where the money is.” When you want to find a ghost who tried to kill your girl (okay, not technically mine but I like her a lot), you go to the Tenebrae because that’s where the ghosts are.
I stick the tip of black blade into my arm until the blood flows.
“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
