LITMIR.BIZ

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puts out her hand and gives Vidocq a smile that would make a dead man swoon.

      “I’m Allegra,” she says. “Stark’s new zookeeper.”

      “I’m François Eugène Vidocq. Lovely to meet you.”

      She looks over his shoulder into the crowded room. “Are all those books and potions yours?” She steps past him into the room like she’d just bought the place. Vidocq turns and gives me a conspiratorial look.

      “Forget it. Just a friend,” I say.

      “Then you are a very foolish boy.” He nods at her examining his ingredient racks. “What happened to her face?”

      “Parker.”

      “Brave girl.”

      “It’s why I bought her here. If Parker knows who she is, then she’s already part of this. But she’s a civilian. She doesn’t know magic or charms or anything. Think you could teach her some of what you do?”

      “You want to trust her with me? After what I’ve done to myself?”

      “If she’s on Parker’s list, she could do worse than be cursed with immortality. And she needs something. I can’t teach her what I do. I won’t.”

      “What’s this?” Allegra asks. She holds a small vial up to the light. It’s red, but it shimmers like mercury.

      “That’s the blood of a Chimera. A rare beast that, it’s said, can change its shape to anything it eats. It’s also said that its blood can give a man that power, too, but I’ve never been able to make it work.”

      “You have so many amazing and beautiful things here. I don’t know how you can remember them all.”

      “The trick is not to try and remember. You learn what the ingredients are and how to use them, what to mix or never to mix. You learn how to distill the essence and find the true heart of each ingredient and potion. As you learn those things, you learn the names and the methods, which books are good for one type of potion, which instruments produce the best results. You don’t try to remember. You just learn. Once you’ve done that, your hands will remember what to take and what to use and which books to open.”

      She picks up a parchment scroll and opens it. It’s a diagram of a woman’s body, but she has wings and an eagle’s head. There are diagrams and small, precise handwritten notes all around the drawing.

      Still holding the scroll, Allegra asks, “You can read Greek, too?”

      Vidocq glances at the scroll and nods. “German and Arabic, too. Some Sumerian. A bit of Aramaic and some others. There are so many books to read, and I’ve had a lot of time to fill.”

      “Do you think that I could learn this?”

      “Alchemy? Why not? People have been learning the craft for thousands of years. Why not you?”

      Allegra looks over Vidocq’s endless racks and picks up a crystal box with what looks like bugs moving around inside. “What’s this?”

      “Babylonian scarabs. Very powerful. Very wise.”

      The old man goes off on a lecture of the virtues of these particular bugs above all others. Allegra hangs on every word of his spiel. I leave them alone and wander into the bedroom. They don’t need me. It’s geek love.

      The bedroom I used to share with Alice is now completely Vidocq’s. The walls are painted a bright arsenic green and are covered with protective runes and sigils. The Goodwill and surplus store blankets are gone from the bed and replaced with a dark red velvet comforter and pillows that don’t look like they were found under a dinosaur’s ass. There are books everywhere, tins of fresh tobacco, bottles of sleeping potions, and bowls of hallucinogenic mushrooms. On a sideboard are framed pictures—fading ink silhouettes, a crumbling daguerreotype, and even a few faded photos. Most of the images are of women. He’s never talked about any of them.

      I check the floor of his closet and the shelf at the top. I look under the sideboard. I find what I’m looking for in a box under the bed.

      It’s full of Alice’s things, whatever things Vidocq could salvage from whatever happened to her that night. I know that the box will be safe to open. He wouldn’t have saved anything with blood on it, but it still takes a minute to work up the nerve.

      There are neatly folded T-shirts and panties on top, which is funny because I don’t think Alice or I ever folded anything in our lives. Under those are her favorite shoes, a pair of glow-in-the-dark leopard-spotted Chuck Taylors. There are pesos and taxidermy frogs playing toy instruments we got on a road trip to Mexico. Tucked in a corner near the bottom is a pair of vintage Ray Bans she’d hot-glued back together after a bouncer knocked them off her face for slamming too hard at a club in Culver City. These days, I would have pulled the guy’s spine out through his ass, but I wasn’t such a hands-on type back then. A simple Sumerian spell gave the bouncer the worst case of food poisoning he’d have in this or any other lifetime.

      When I piled it all on the bed, a small white box that had been stuffed in with the T-shirts fell out. When I opened it, I recognized the box instantly. It was that stupid magic-shop box with the hole in the bottom and the fake bloody cotton inside. The one she’d used to show me that she could do magic, too. I put the magic box in my pocket and the rest of her stuff back in the big box and carry it out into the living room.

      Allegra and Vidocq are still taking inventory, but pause long enough to grin at me.

      “Eugène says that I can be his apprentice and learn to be an alchemist.”

      “Congratulations. Just don’t forget that we had a deal. I’m letting you into the other world, the Sub Rosa, but you still have to help me with a few things, too. And you can’t abandon Max Overdrive. It may not be much, but it brings in money and, unless things changed while I was gone, that’s what makes the world go round.”

      “I’ll remember. We’ll go out tomorrow and get you a phone.”

      “And the Internet. We need to get that, too.”

      “First thing, never say ‘Get the Internet.’ You sound like the Beverly Hillbillies. You ‘use’ the Internet or you ‘access’ it. You never ‘get’ it.”

      “See? That’s why I hired you.”

      She turns to Vidocq. “Don’t listen to him. He didn’t hire me. I blackmailed his ass.”

      “Is this true?” he asks.

      “Ignore her. She’s schizophrenic and a pathological liar. I only let her work at the shop to keep her from swindling widows and orphans.”

      “You just can’t handle the truth, can you?”

      “And what’s that?” I ask her.

      “That I totally made you my bitch.”

      “See? Not a word of truth can pass her lips.” I take the box with Alice’s things and go to the door. “I don’t know how long it’ll take me to pay you for the Spiritus Dei.”

      “I was going to bring that up. I know someone who can help with both the Spiritus Dei and provide some work. Work that’s more in line with your talents than your video store. The fellow’s name is Muninn. Mr. Muninn.”

      “Why do I want extra work? I have a job. Killing Mason.”

      “And how is that money you stole from the man near the cemetery holding up? How much did that jacket and those boots cost you?” Vidocq crosses to the window and pulls back the curtain. Clouds have softened the sunlight, but it’s still all billboards, brown hills, and asphalt below. A couple of burly kids in baggy denim jackets are doing a brisk trade in what the buyers will be hoping is crack, but in this part of town is probably baking soda and plaster. Across the street, a couple of leathery-skinned old men are selling oranges and watermelons off the back of a pickup truck. They’re probably illegals and new in town. They don’t know which neighborhoods

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