SANDMAN SLIM

"This is a really strange night."

"Wait. It gets better. Kasabian's a magician, too. So is Parker. He's the guy I'm pretty sure attacked you tonight."

She sits up and looks at me hard. "Do something. Show me some magic."

"What do you want to see? What will convince you?"

"Blow my mind. Make that table float in the air."

"I'm not a floater. I used to be able to do the cute stuff, but most of the magic I'm good at now isn't furniture-friendly."

"So, what can you do?"

I think for a minute and pull Azazel's knife from my jacket. Allegra's pupils dilate a fraction of a millimeter. I'm getting used to seeing these things.

"Here. It's for you." I hold the knife out to her, hilt first. She takes it tentatively, holding it with both hands like it weighs fifty pounds.

"What am I supposed to do with this?"

I go over to her walking on my knees, like a kid. Staying lower than the eye level of an opponent often has a calming effect on them. Maybe it will work on a nervous friend.

When I'm at the foot of the beanbag chair, I hold up my left hand and say, "Try to stab me."

She cocks her head to the side like she's trying to figure out if her cat suddenly started speaking French. "No, I don't think I'm going to do that."

"It's okay. Don't hold back. I know you're pissed at me. Let me have it."

She just stares down at the knife in her hands. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the knee walk made me look too silly to stab. There's a way to fix that.

I lean right into her face and scream, "Stab me, dammit!" as loud as I can. She lunges. And jabs the knife all the way through my left hand.

"Oh my God! I'm so sorry!" she says, covering her mouth with her hands.

What most people don't understand about being hard to kill is that just because getting shot or stabbed or set on fire doesn't kill you, it doesn't mean that you don't feel it. When someone shoves a big knife through my hand, it feels like anybody else's hand getting stabbed. This is a nice way of saying that when Allegra pigsticks me with the bone blade, I want to scream like a little French girl and roll around on my back demanding a thousand cc of Jack Daniel's, stat. But I don't do any of that. I calmly pull the knife out of my hand. I wipe the blood off on my pants leg. I don't want to piss her off more by bleeding on her carpet.

Allegra finds a couple of paper napkins next to a half-eaten sandwich on a plate on the floor. She presses the napkins hard against the hole in my hand.

"Thanks. You're being nice for someone who thinks I'm crazy or a snake."

"Shut up. Now I know you're too dumb to be a snake. You're probably too stupid to be crazy. I don't know what you are."

"I'm magic," I say. I pull the napkins away from my hand and wipe off the last of the blood. The wound is already closed.

She shrugs. "That just makes you a freak, not the Wizard of Oz. Or maybe it was a trick knife."

Tough crowd at the Angels' Hideaway. "Go get one of yours."

She goes to the kitchen, rattles some drawers, and comes back with a hefty butcher knife. Nice. She's getting into the spirit of things.

"Now what?" she asks.

"Try to stab me again."

"What is wrong with you? If you want a girl to hurt you, there's professionals for that in the phone book."

I hold up the hand she just stabbed. "One more time. Come on. Have fun with it. Most people don't live long enough to do this twice."

I don't have to shout this time. She shoves the blade straight into my hand. But it sticks there, only about an eighth of an inch into the skin. There's no blood at all. She keeps trying to push the knife through. Really starts leaning on it. I have to take the knife out of her hand and set it on the floor. She takes my hand and examines it, looking for blood or a new wound. All she finds is a fresh red scar from where she stabbed me a couple of minutes ago.

"My whole body is kind of magic. Once you attack me a certain way, it doesn't really work all that well again."

"So, no one can ever stab you again?"

"I wish. The new scar you gave me just means that this hand is protected from being stabbed like that."

"Is that what all those scars are from? Getting stabbed?"

"That and other things. Kasabian shot me when I walked into his store, so I have some new ones from him. It's not so bad. Some people wear a crucifix or a pentagram for protection. I wear my protection right in my skin."

"Talking heads and magic scars. That's not what I thought magic would be like."

Allegra's looking a little pale right now and I don't think it's the concussion. My little magic show might have gone too far too fast for her. I root around in my memory for magic that doesn't involve anything blowing up. I come up with half a little spell. Something I would have done at lunch in grade school. I've always been lucky at making partial spells work, so I silently recite the words I remember, then tack on my own ending, careful to recite only human words and not the Hellion that keeps trying to sneak out.