Trick of the Light

by Rob Thurman

  His mouth tightened and he closed his eyes for a split second. His skin was still pale except for the red blotch, but when he lifted the lids, the pupils of his eyes were now normal. Before they had been black with only the thinnest ring of blue; now the blue was back. Dark with rage but back. So was his control, and we’d need it to get out of this trap we’d so stupidly hopped, skipped, and jumped our way into. I couldn’t remember all the times I’d been underestimated because I was a woman, but I could count the times I’d underestimated demons. This would be number two and there was no way I was letting it turn out the way the first time had. Not again. Zeke wasn’t going to die; Griff wasn’t going to . . . none of us were.

  “Off?” I asked as one of the brown demons headed for us, crisp air purling under its wings

  “It’s off,” Griffin answered grimly as he turned and fired. The demon fell, one wing shredded. It wasn’t off, the empathy, not really. I could see that in the bone white line of his jaw, but he had it under sufficient control to pull a trigger and that was good enough. I hit the other demon swooping at us, this time in the head. A slow one. Good. I deserved a slow one. I also deserved a bubble bath and hot chocolate laced with butter-scotch schnapps and topped with whipped cream. But I didn’t have that. What I did have was a one-winged green demon and the black one I’d shot off Zeke. Neither of them looked anywhere near as warm and fuzzy as chocolate and schnapps.

  Zeke was pushing up to one elbow, ignoring his own gasps for air as he reloaded using a speed-loader. His chest heaved on one side and didn’t move on the other. Pure mission Zeke. Air? Only wimps need air. Just give me something to shoot. It looked like the black demon was going to give him his wish. I was wrong. It passed over its first victim and headed straight for me, wings working furiously. I didn’t have time to reload and I’d never played baseball.

  There’s always time to learn.

  I tossed the shotgun, caught the painfully warm end of the barrel, and swung.

  This time I got his head with a crash that destroyed the shotgun’s stock. Beautifully polished wood splintered and shattered. And all in all, it was about as effective as hitting him with a flyswatter. He did a better job of it with me than I had with him. As I went down, I saw the green demon back up and head for the wounded of the pack. Griffin was right between the two of us, but while Zeke might be almost as ass kicking as he thought he was, with his collapsed lung he was also bleeding and breathing . . . not so good.

  “Get Zeke!” I yelled right before the demon fell on me like the MGM Grand and Caesar’s all rolled into one. I was good, I was fast, but the human body is only capable of so much. I felt the breath jolt out of my lungs, the rough asphalt scrape through my jacket and shirt as we slid up the alley floor like the after-math of a motorcycle wreck. Road rash from Hell . . . literally . . . and it hurt. Damn, did it hurt. It might’ve even come close to how the demon felt when the barrel of my Smith punctured its amber eye. There was a scream of a thousand tortured souls, which he’d probably personally recruited, and then, after I emptied six rounds into its skull, there was silence. Blissful silence.

  Then I was covered in disgustingly warm black goo and the emergency door slammed open. A bouncer was framed there. He had no neck and from the steroid acne he had, probably balls the size of raisins. “Something going on out here?”

  I pushed up on my elbow, the skin of my back a wildfire of pain at the motion. The green demon was gone. Either Griffin or Zeke had nailed it. Zeke was flat on his back while Griffin, who’d stripped off his jacket and wadded it to apply pressure to his partner ’s chest, rapped orders into the cell phone cradled between shoulder and jaw. There was blood on his hands, two shotguns on the alley floor, and a gun in my fist.

  “No. Not a thing.” I holstered the Smith slowly and painfully. “We’re good, studly. Thanks for asking.”

  “Well . . . okay, then. Keep it down.” Dull, mean brown eyes, already half crossed, crossed further, and he slammed the door behind him, the only man I would actually encourage to trade in his soul. Cerebral cortexes were highly underrated in this town. “Evolution,” I groaned as I sat up all the way. “What a myth.”

  “Trixa, you’re hurt.” Griffin had let the phone fall, disconnected, and I knew Eden House’s own personal ambulance was on the way. They had a medical unit at their headquarters and better doctors and equipment than the local hospitals had. They’d take care of Zeke. He’d be all right, be pissing off Griff and shooting demons again in no time. He would be, because life without Zeke—sociopathically efficient, endearingly psychotic Zeke—wasn’t going to happen. It simply wasn’t.

  I knelt beside him, my own bloody hands cupping his face. I’d made it there and touched his chest without remembering the motion of it. Much as I’d done with Kimano. “Kit, you got to use your big gun. I can practically smell the testosterone on you.”

  I called him Kit, a baby fox, back when he was fifteen for his fox-colored hair. I’d almost forgotten the nickname in the ten years that had passed.

  His eyes, that pale green, were hazy but managed to find me. “Kit.” He dragged in several wet breaths. “When . . . do I make . . . full-grown fox?”

  “When you know thyself,” I said solemnly.

  “What the hell’s that mean?” Each word was slow and said with bloody lips.

  “Ask the fortune cookie company. It came with last night’s takeout.” I gave him a smile, the best one I could manage when we were surrounded by shadows and the smell of copper and garbage.

  A bloody hand gripped my shoulder and my attention. “You’re hurt,” Griffin repeated.

  I already could hear the siren in the distance. Eden House didn’t waste any time and they couldn’t find me here. It wouldn’t be good for Zeke and Griffin and it wouldn’t be much better for me. “Superficial. Skin’s strictly optional, right?” I already had my own cell phone out. “I’ll call Leo. He can take me to the ER.” I stood, refusing to bite my lip, but the “Shitshitshit” I didn’t bother to hold back. I backed up toward the alley mouth as I made the call, watching the guys—my guys. I watched as Zeke closed his eyes, but kept breathing. He kept breathing.

  “We walked right into it,” Griffin said with dark disgust. He looked down at Zeke and back at me. “Black demons. High-level demons. What were they doing here? Besides making us look like amateurs. Like complacent assholes. We screwed up.”

  “No. We fucked up.” It wasn’t a word I used often, but the situation called for it. “There’s a difference. We won’t do it again.” High-level demons like Solomon. Well, perhaps not like Solomon, no one was quite like him, but higher than the usual demons we dealt with. “Like Solomon.” I couldn’t make myself believe that was a coincidence. I stopped at the corner. “Call me and let me know.” I didn’t need to elaborate. Griffin knew. Then I rounded the corner and walked away, sticking to the shadows to hide the damage to my clothes and back . . . waiting for Leo.

  No, I wasn’t going to let Griff and Zeke follow Kimano into death.

  Never.

  Chapter 5

  Hospitals were not fun.

  My family and I tended to be completely healthy up until the second we were dead; we went out old as hell and wicked as they came. It was a nice quality; saved on health insurance. So this was my first visit to one of the places, and hopefully it would be the last. I waited four hours to get the dirt and bits of asphalt washed out of the raw stretch that was my back by a nurse who thought “gentle touch” was the slogan for some sort of toilet paper. Leo sat with me the entire time, alternately shaking his head and muttering, “This is what happens,” and eyeing a blond doctor walking by with intriguing shadows in her violet eyes. Secrets. Leo was a sucker for a secret. For that matter so was I, but certainly not now.

  “Thanks for the ‘I told you so,’ Grandma. Pain pills. You have the pain pills?” I asked as I slowly slid on the scrub top the nurse had given me to replace my shredded one.

  “I have the pain pills.” He shook a paper
bag at me, having gone to the hospital pharmacy while they finished salving my back. “And the antibacterial cream. They didn’t have any anti-fuckup pills. Maybe we can check with a Canadian pharmacy online.”

  “Ass.” I didn’t put much into the insult. He was right. “And you didn’t even look when I put on the top. I know we’re not going there, but you could at least boost the ego and look.”

  His stoic lips twitched. “I looked.”

  “Thank you. It’s been a bitch of a night. I lost my strategic skills, almost lost my friends. I’d hate to think I’d lost my sex appeal too.” I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the sink in the curtained-off ER cubicle at Desert Springs Hospital. Smeared mascara, absent lipstick, curls stained and coated with demon residue at the ends. And a back that looked like roadkill, but at least that didn’t show now. I smiled breezily at him. “Pucker up and get some of this.”

  He snorted. “Tempting, but as you said, that’s not us, and the fact that you smell like demon isn’t helping. That”—he closed the magazine on his knee—“is not a good smell.”

  At that moment, before I could take offense—and I would have—my cell phone rang. It was Griffin. “Zeke?” I said immediately. “Is he all right?”

  Griffin’s exhausted voice returned. “He’s on a ventilator, but should be off in a few days. He has a chest tube and has gotten two transfusions so far, but they say he’ll be good as new in a few weeks. He’ll be up and taking candy from babies in no time.”

  To be fair, that kid had stolen that candy from some other child first. It wasn’t his candy to begin with. Zeke was merely repossessing stolen goods. That he kept it taught a valuable lesson to the victim about being more careful not to leave your candy lying around.

  And Zeke, well, Zeke liked his candy.

  “Good,” I said, exhaling. “Good. Now go to sleep yourself. And, Griffin, you know you’re the strongest empath the House has. Work on it or it’ll do you more harm than good.” Empaths were rare among humans and the Houses tended to recruit every one of them they could find, but none was close to Griffin’s level.

  “I know. I made things worse tonight. If you hadn’t been there . . . shit.” He didn’t want to think about that possibility and neither did I.

  “Go to sleep,” I repeated. “I’m going home now and doing the same.”

  “Trixa,” he said quietly, slowly, “will there be scars?”

  It took me a second to grasp what he was asking. “Oh. On my back?” I laughed, winced as the pain spiked through the cotton wool of the pain pills the nurse had already given me, then laughed again. “Griff, I don’t care about that. If a guy wouldn’t want me because I had scars, why would I want his superficial son of a bitch ass? Now go to bed, all right? And call me in the morning to give me an update on Zeke.”

  “I will.” He hesitated. “You’re sure about the scars?”

  “Sweetie, I’m not half as vain as you. Sleep,” I ordered, then disconnected.

  “Vain enough to want me to sneak a look,” Leo drawled as he discarded the magazine and stood.

  “Well, I’m not vain, but I’m not dead either,” I retorted, sliding off the gurney. The shock that ran from my feet to my back was bearable. Yes, pain pills were my friend.

  In the car, Leo sat behind the wheel for a few silent seconds and then turned and kissed my temple. “You have to be more careful,” he said soberly. “You have to be on your game.”

  “I know. I do. Those were high-level demons out there—but I was cocky too.” I shook my head. “It’s not like me.”

  He snorted and started the car. “It’s exactly like you. It always has been. And you’ve always gotten away with it. I hope this time’s no different.”

  Back at my apartment I couldn’t shower without removing the medicine from my back; at least that was what grizzly-paw nurse had told me. I turned the taps until the water barely fizzled out and I washed my front, slowly and carefully. I bent forward and washed my hair, then stepped outside of the curtain wrapped around the claw-foot tub into a warm towel held by Leo. He made sure it draped only over the front of me and I held it to my shoulders. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I closed my eyes as he dried my hair with a smaller towel and combed it out, careful with the tangles, and I had a ton. The price you paid for wildly curly hair. That and humidity is never your friend. But soon it was its usual damp cascade of waves and corkscrew curls that followed a bath or shower.

  He touched the pale gold skin beside my almond-shaped eye and then touched one of my curls, a deep black one with a streak of red and a hint of bronze, pulled at it lightly, and watched as the spiral sprang back. “How can you be so many things at once and make it all work?”

  I leaned forward and kissed him beside his mouth . . . kissed him for his help and a little more. “Why are you asking silly questions?” I tugged at a long strand of his hair before sliding under the covers nude, lying on my stomach with the sheet and coverlet only up to my waist. I wanted nothing but air touching my back tonight.

  I watched as Leo went to my closet for one of my many spare shotguns and sat in a chair a little too puffy for his tastes, I was sure, but the reds and golds of the cloth suited him. “Babysitting?” I asked.

  “You know Solomon was behind this.” He looked over the Browning, semi-automatic and self-loading. He nodded approvingly. It was new. An impulse buy from a basement with a lot of unpleasant men, one of whom didn’t appreciate me or my favorite copper-colored boots. He was so damn lucky his blood came out of the fine stitching or I might have gone back to that basement to try out my new purchase.

  Just to scare him, of course.

  Boots were just boots, not worth a human life. Although, technically, without DNA proof, I wasn’t jumping on that guy being on the human bandwagon just yet.

  I didn’t need DNA to know Solomon wasn’t human . . . at least not all of the time.

  I doubled the pillow with my arm and rested my head against it. “Probably. No matter how interested he is in me, he might be getting tired of our games and I’m sure the other demons tease him about his human pest problem, pyromaniac cockroaches.” My lips curved. “Poor Solomon. No one will do lunch with him anymore or take his calls. I doubt he even makes his soul quota, what with his obsessing over us all the time.”

  But it wasn’t just us or just me. Solomon had another obsession, one I thought we shared. A big powerful demon here these past few years, rumblings at Eden House . . . Solomon had come to Vegas for a reason. Hadn’t we all?

  The Light of Life.

  We all wanted it, only who had it now? Someone had wasted his time torturing that poor old caver. If the demons or the House had it, we’d know about it. I’d know about it. The heavens themselves would know about it. But no one knew. It was still out there. I still had my chance to get it and make things right.

  “If he visits tonight, he can spend his time obsessing over his castration,” Leo said calmly, breaking open the shotgun to make sure it was loaded. Take no chances . . . that was Leo. “Do what you have to do. Be who you have to be with him. Be true to yourself.” His black eyes were darker than Lenore’s feathers. “But not tonight. No taunting, no teasing, and none of the other things I don’t care to think about. Tonight you sleep.”

  “If only your father knew,” I said, my eyelids already falling fast. “See what you’ve become inside.”

  “I doubt my father will ever know me again or care to.” He turned out the light on my bedside table. “He can’t forget. I was bad . . . evil.” Being around demons will show you the real meaning of the word evil, and how people so rarely see the real thing even when it’s right in front of their faces.

  “Not evil.” I let my eyes shut, remembering a younger Leo.

  He snorted sharply.

  “Not good.” I gave in a little. “But not evil. You had a . . . wildness in you.”

  “Evil,” he repeated with a sigh. “Don’t sugarcoat it. I was what I was. I’m different now. But back the
n, I was evil.”

  And, honestly, yes, he had been more than a toe over the Dark Side. More like a California commute over. Hours from the line we all walk. Going, going, gone. But he’d come back, and while he wasn’t now, he had been then—evil. Bad as they came.

  “You were.” I reached out blindly and rested a hand on his knee. “Love you anyway.”

  “What about the bad old days? What about then?” Patient, undemanding—all with cold steel across his knees. A quiet and serene hunter.

  I told him the truth. I had to. It was Leo. I curled my fingers into the warmth under his knee . . . seconds away from sleep.

  “Even then,” I whispered.

  The next morning, after Leo helped clean and cream up my back again and then left to open the bar, I noticed it. It was the smallest fleck of dark brown in a crease of my knuckle. Could’ve been dirt, but it wasn’t. It was blood. A tiny remnant of Zeke left on me. It had somehow survived two showers, that one stubborn speck. Even his blood was stubborn.

  I scrubbed at it thoroughly with a washcloth until it was gone. My skin was red and abraded, but the blood was gone. I shouldn’t have let Zeke and Griffin get to me. I’d known that from day one, the day I’d let two wary teenagers into my bar, handed them cleaning supplies and enough money for breakfast until we got the deep fryers going. I’d known I shouldn’t get attached. They weren’t like puppies you planned to find good homes for. No, I’d known I’d be seeing the wary blond one and his emotionally frozen friend with the lost eyes for a long time. Seeing, yes? But not getting close to.