SANDMAN SLIM

Beside me, Allegra bounces on the balls of her feet. She's wearing shiny boots with thick soles and a belly-revealing T-shirt tight enough to be have been spray-painted on. Probably because I told her that Vidocq is French. She looks cute enough, but one side of her face still sports a dark purple bruise and her cheeks and jaw are a little puffy, so she's also trying to distract people's eyes from her face to her body. It's working.

She's doing a lot better than me. I crashed at her place to keep an eye on her. All I can tell you is to never fall asleep on a beanbag chair. My back feels like someone beat me with a pillowcase full of tuna-fish cans.

Vidocq opens the door and does a comical little eyebrow raise.

"There you are. And you've brought a friend."

Allegra 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 Franjois Eugene 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.