“I need you to look up something for me in the Codex.”

“That sounds like work. Didn’t you see the sign? I’m closed for the evening.”

“You may be the boss, but I pay the beer bills a

Kasabian puffs on his cigarette and frowns. His little legs take the Malediction out of his mouth and tap ashes onto the floor.

“What do you want to know?”

“I need to know about a . . . Qlifart? Qlifuck? Screw it. Demon. This one is different. It’s confident. Maybe even smart. It does possessions, but it doesn’t automatically attack unless it feels threatened. I thought for a while it might be a Kissi, but I know them, and this doesn’t feel like their work.”

He shakes his head.

“That doesn’t make sense. If it’s a demon, it’s dumb. All demons are dumb. Which means they have an inferiority complex that makes them trigger-happy.”

“If it made sense, I wouldn’t ask you to look in the Codex.”

“Why are you dragging me into this thing? I don’t like demons. Just because you’re feeling magnanimous doesn’t mean I am.”

I sit on the end of the bed and smoke. I flick the ashes onto the carpet, too. Got to give the maid something to do when she comes in so she won’t notice the dead man on the skateboard.

“Yes, you are. Candy’s working with me on this. Do it for her. Dazzle her with your kung fu.”

“Nice try. I was kidding before.”

“She’s a Jade. You never know what kind of fetishes they have.”

Faint traces of cigarette smoke drift from the bottom of Kasabian’s neck and hang around his face like mountain mist.

“I was going to watch Blue Velvet and order chicken wings. What more could a guy want?”

“How about a body?”

His eyes narrow.

“Is this case of yours going to get me one?”

“I doubt it. But fucking off in here isn’t either. The more hoodoo work we do, the more likely one of us will stumble on a fix-it spell for your situation.”

“My situation,” he mumbles. “You put me in this situation.”

“After you shot me.”

He smacks the keyboard and the computer wakes up.

“Asshole. Here I was, talking to a pretty girl, content as Jayne Mansfield’s pasties, and you come in and want me to flip burgers on the night shift.”

“You’ll check the Codex?”

“I’ll check.”

“Cool.”

I get up to go out. He yells something at me.

“I need highly concentrated carbs to do this brain work. Get me something cold and I’ll make you Employee of the Month.”

I go to the kitchen and get a six-pack from the fridge.

I set it on his table and say, “You want a soufflé or something, too? I’ll need to warm up the oven.”

“This will do. Don’t forget to punch out when you leave.”

“I’m about to punch something.”

Aloha from Hell

I ASK THE night manager what room Candy is in and head upstairs to the last one at the back. It has a nice view of a used-car lot.

I stop for a second before going in, feeling a little strange. Candy and I have been dancing around each other for months, but we’ve hardly ever been alone together. Maybe the one and only time was when she stabbed me in the heart to give me the zombie serum. Does that count as a first date? And if so, on what planet? I’m thirteen again, trying to figure out how to talk to a girl. This is ridiculous. We’ve killed and fought side by side and kept the gates of Hell from opening. I should be able to string enough words together not to drool on myself.

I open the door and Candy is waiting for me, standing naked in the middle of the bed. I barely get the door closed when she jumps all the way across the room and lands on my chest, pinning me against the wall. A pure predator ambush.

Candy’s skin is as corpse cold as I remember from the first time she pecked me on the cheek outside Doc Kinski’s clinic. But she warms up when we fall onto the bed and I’m on top of her and we’re kissing like it’s the cure for cancer.

She shreds my shirt with her nails and I barely get my pants off before she destroys those, too.

Candy wraps her legs around me. I slip inside her and the world goes black and hot. Her teeth woombHer teelf into my shoulder. I pull her hair as her nails dig into my back. I pull harder and bend her head back so I can see her face. I catch a glimpse of the Jade lurking just under the skin. Her nails extend into claws and our grinding bodies torpedo us from this soft and stupid human world to someplace where monsters can tear and bite. No one’s afraid of it and all the groans and pain and craziness are beautiful.

The hotel bed makes a sound like a bullet and collapses beneath us. I pull her legs onto my shoulders and push deeper inside her. When she throws back her arms, her hands smash through the cheap wall paneling. She shifts her weight and rolls on top of me. My elbow comes down on the nightstand, cracking it and demolishing the phone.

We fall out of bed and onto the floor. Candy is on her hands and knees and I’m in her from behind. She doesn’t hold the Jade inside anymore. Her body starts its transformation but she holds it halfway. Not quite girl and not quite beast. She moans and snarls as one clawed hand rips the stuffing and springs out of the sofa next to us.

The mirror on the dresser falls and shatters on the floor. I’m not really sure which one of us did that.

We crawl back onto the bed. Candy crawls back on top and thrusts down on me hard enough to crack the San Andreas Fault. I swear I hear plaster falling from the ceiling in the room below us. I don’t care. All that matters is the girl and the monster thrusting down against me.

In the dim distant parts of our brains that can still form thoughts, I know we’re both thinking the same thing.

This has been a long goddamn time coming.

LATER WE LIE in the ruins of the room. We push some debris out of the way and move the bed so it’s at least flat on the floor. We lie down, wrapping ourselves in torn sheets and what’s left of the bedspread.

“I like this hotel. The rooms are simple, but kind of pretty,” says Candy.

“I think we broke this one.”

“Want to do it again?”

“Sure.”

Later, when Candy falls asleep, I put on my pants and boots and go back to the other room to get a new shirt. Kasabian hasn’t moved from the computer. Beer cans are piled under his table.

“Your shoulder is bleeding,” he says. “Let me guess. On the way over you ran into a midget with an armful of razor blades and barbed wire.”

“I don’t kiss and tell.”

“You don’t have to. I could hear you all the way over here. The whole hotel could hear you. Everyone was out of their rooms. They thought it was a gang fight. The hoe sight. Ttel manager called 911.”

I find a clean Max Overdrive T-shirt and put it on.

“Cops are coming?”

Kasabian shakes his head.

“Relax. I routed the call to a phone-company all-circuits-are-busy message.”

“You know how to do that?”

“I’m on this computer all day. Making it do bad things is the only fun I have. Did you really think I spent all my time looking at video catalogs and porn?”

“Yeah. I sort of did.”

His eyes narrow at me.

“See. That’s exactly the kind of thing I expect from you. No respect whatsoever. After all the research and information I’ve found for you.”

“That’s not how I meant it. I just never pictured you as the high-tech type.”

“I have to be. All my magic goes into keeping this goddamn skateboard upright. I don’t have extra for anything else, so I have to use machines.”

“That’s actually a real smart way to deal with things. You’re a credit to your race, Alfredo Garcia.”

“Hey, don’t call me that when you’re off getting laid and I’m in here keeping LAPD off your back,” he says, pissed and with a right to be.

“You’re right, man. I owe you.”