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And Alice is gone. Hunter collapses onto the platform. It’s over.
Traven rubs away some of the binding hex marks. He and Vidocq lift Hunter from the platform and lay him out on the floor.
I’m stuck where I am. I feel a sucking sensation in my chest and for a second I can’t breathe. Gradually I feel Candy’s armsowix2019;s around me. I squeeze her hand and she lets me up.
Hunter is breathing. His eyes flicker open and closed. He doesn’t look like he’s going to drop dead this minute, but he’s still pretty Linda Blair. Traven isn’t looking so good either. He’s pale and his neck is dark with bruises and broken blood vessels where Hunter grabbed him.
I pick Hunter up and tell Candy and Vidocq to help Traven.
“We’re going out the fast way.”
They get their arms around Traven’s shoulders and steady him. Vidocq is closest to me, so I grab his arm and walk the few steps to the wall. We disappear into a shadow.
Come out again in the minimall parking lot. Pedestrians pass us on the way to their cars with take-out pizza and new manicures. A few of them stare. They must have seen us. Fuck ’em. The way we look, no one is going to tell anyone about it without a doctor shoving Thorazine down their throat.
We head across the lot for Kinski’s old hoodoo clinic. The place Allegra has taken over. A sign on the door reads EXISTENTIAL HEALING. Vidocq gets out his cell and dials Allegra. I don’t wait. I start pounding on the door.
A few good raps later, someone opens the doors looking pissed. It’s Allegra. She looks at Hunter and her eyes narrow. Then she sees Vidocq and Candy holding up Father Traven.
“Jesus, Stark. You’re like the Antichrist Santa Claus. Bring in the presents.”
We get Hunter inside and on the exam table. Allegra takes over, looking at Hunter’s eyes, shining a light into his blackened mouth. She turns and takes things out of a drawer. She presses one of them to Hunter’s forehead. A silver crucifix. Nothing happens. Then she touches iron. Gold. A mixture of garlic and holy water. Nothing happens with any of them.
“Good,” she says.
She rubs a yellowish salve on the inside of a mortar and tosses in thistle leaves, white ash bark, and things I can’t identify. She holds a match to the gloop and the whole thing goes up in a whoosh of fire, leaving only ash. She dumps it into her hands and rubs the ashes across Hunter’s forehead and eyes.
“Get me the glass, will you, Candy?” she says.
Traven is standing on his own now, so she leaves him and lifts several bundles of purple silk from a cabinet. Allegra takes one as Candy sets the rest on the exam table.
Allegra unwraps the first one and sets it over Hunter’s heart. It looks like a heavy white stone. She sets other pieces of glass on Hunter’s hands and diaphragm.
The stones are really pieces of ancientanys of an glass vessels saturated in divine light. Shards of the first stars. Kinski once used six of them to save Allegra. Now Allegra is the doctor, using them to save a kid she’s never seen before and has no reason to care about. But she does it like she’d die, too, if the kid doesn’t make it. It’s a funny world.
Hunter shudders and opens his mouth. Vapor drifts from his mouth again, but it’s the same gray now as the ash. Allegra nods.
“Whatever was in him is gone.”
“You sure?”
She looks at me.
“I know what possession looks like. This one took more stones than usual. What was in him?”
I don’t want to tell her. I’m feeling stupid and the last thing I want to do is have to hang around and explain anything.
“Candy and Vidocq can tell you.”
“Well, whatever it was, it’s gone now.”
“Good.”
She nods at Traven.
“What happened to him?”
“That’s Father Traven, the exorcist. No hoodoo injuries. The demon just grabbed his throat and squeezed like it was trying to make orange juice.”
