Aloha from Hell

“Yes. I didn’t plan them. They seemed to happen when I slept too. Upstairs they told me it wasn’t all that uncommon for people who died in a violent and unsettled state. You’re still tied to a person or place like a ghost. Those dreams were me kind of haunting you.”

“That’s funny. It always felt like I was calling you.”

“Maybe it was fifty-fifty.”

“I’m just glad it wasn’t all me. I felt pretty pathetic when I thought it was.”

I pick up a rag from the workbench and wipe Mason’s blood off the armor. She doesn’t need that to be her last image of me.

I say, “But that last dream was different, wasn’t it?”

&ont="#0000#x201C;Yeah.”

“We both knew it, but you were the one with balls enough to say it. It’s time to let go.”

“We can’t go on haunting each other forever. Actually we could, but what kind of life is that?”

I toss the rag on the bench and walk over to her.

“You really like your friend, Candy?” she asks.

“I really do.”

“Is she going to wait for you?”

I shrug.

“Who knows? I’ll wait for her and the rest will go however it goes.”

“What happens now? We just say so long and never see each other again?”

“No.”

I want to talk but my jaw doesn’t want to move. I have to concentrate to get the words out.

“I’ve been ducking something ever since I first got out of here. I didn’t think I could stand to hear it but things will never be right between us unless I say it.”

My Kissi arm throbs. I rub it but the pain doesn’t let up.

“How did you die? How did Parker kill you?”

She starts to say something, shakes her head and starts again.

“All this time I thought you knew.”

She looks at me.

“Parker didn’t kill me. I did. Parker broke into the apartment, cuffed me, and dragged me to a crack head motel on Sunset.”

“The Orange Grove Bungalows? The magic Circle used to rent the rooms for rituals sometimes.” The Grove is also where I killed Parker back on New Year’s Eve. There’s a kind of funny symmetry in that that was probably lost on him.

“That’s the place. Parker called Mason when we got to the room so I knew this wasn’t his idea. I asked Parker what was going on and he laughed and said Mason had plans. He was going to do to me what he did to you but he didn’t say what that was. Before then, he said, we were going to have some fun together. All there was in that shitty little bungalow was a bed and a filthy bathroom so I had a pretty good idea of what he had in mind.”

My throat is closing up. I can’t stand this. I need to make her stop but wider stopI don’t. I let her keep talking.

“He took off his jacket, pushed me down on the bed, and climbed on top. I didn’t even fight him. He was twice my size. He had a gun. And he was Sub Rosa so he could use magic.”

She smiles to herself.

“Parker was never the brightest penny, remember? When he climbed on I held on to his shoulders like I was getting off on the scene. The horny asshole must have thought Mason was going to take a bus or something. He was shocked as hell when Mason magicked himself into the room. Parker didn’t get more than two minutes of fun. When Mason got there, let me tell you, he wasn’t laughing when he saw what was happening. He got hold of Parker with a ghost hand spell, lifted him off the bed without touching him and bounced him off the walls like he was playing air hockey, yelling the whole time about damaged goods. Neither of them noticed that I’d gotten the gun out of Parker’s shoulder holster while he was on top of me.

“When he was done with Parker, Mason did another spell and a hole opened in the floor of the room. I couldn’t see where it went but I knew damn well I didn’t want to go down there. So I shot him.”

She cocks her head for a second.

“I shot at him. But I missed. He looked at the hole and he looked at me and I knew what was coming next. Before he could grab me with the ghost hand I put the gun under my chin and pulled the trigger.”

The pain in the new arm won’t stop and my vision is getting tunneled. It could be a stroke but I know it’s just my brain trying to crawl out of my body and away from the sound of Alice’s voice.

“You can stop there,” I say. “I get the picture.”

“For the record, shooting myself wasn’t my first choice. I thought of you when I did it. I thought, ‘What would Jim do if he was here and he knew he couldn’t beat the other guy and something horrible was going to happen when he lost?’ And it came to me. Mason might have won the fight, but that didn’t mean he got to keep the prize. I took it away from him and all he could do was stand there and watch me pull the trigger. Mason didn’t win. I did. And it was because of you.”

Because of me. It’s because of me she was in that room at all. There’s nothing I could have done about it then and there’s nothing I can do about it now and that’s what I have to live with. Maybe that right there is the definition of life. Being alive is learning how to live with the intolerable. I’ll be explaining that to Parker soon enough. I’ll send a search party for his soul and teach him all about the intolerable.

I look at Samael.