by Rob Thurman
Not in this lifetime.
I closed my eyes and let the Light flash through my brain around and around and then curl up like a cozy cat. If the Light had emotions, this tiny molecule of it was probably glad of the new, less drug-addled home. The ferret screamed under my hand. No one heard him. It was too loud, my hand was too tight, and the alcohol had flowed like a river in this room.
“Sharks and guitars,” I whispered to him. “Which is real? One or both?”
His thin chest heaved and the breath died against my palm. I pulled my hand away and he gagged in disbelief, “I’m high. I’m so high.”
“Depends on what standards you’re going by.” I moved off his lap, one of the better shifts in location I’d made all day, and headed back for the door.
“We’re on. Let’s go!”
Someone from the band actually said it. It was like a rockumentary, a very bad, fake rockumentary. I stepped to the side as the room emptied in a rush, all the bad music lemmings flowing out into the hall. I waited until they were gone and followed. Trinity, Goodman, and the others were waiting, completely wrinkle and rumple free. Untouched. Quick of foot, force field of holier-than-thou superiority—either way it was impressive.
“I have it,” I told Mr. Trinity. “It’s not telling me anything yet, but I have it.”
“Good,” he said, as if he expected nothing less. There couldn’t be too many failures among the agents of Eden House. Trinity wouldn’t tolerate it, which is why he didn’t suspect Griffin and Zeke of being double agents. He couldn’t imagine anyone going against his authority, especially not for the likes of Leo and me.
I leaned against the wall and folded my arms. “Give me a second. I’m still a little dizzy.”
Goodman looked impatient, Trinity was impassive, as usual, and the minions were as blank of face as they’d been throughout the entire trip. I bowed my head and studied the toes of my boots for several minutes before I said, “All right, I’m ready.” I straightened, stepped away from the wall, and started down the hall. Goodman was ahead of us with his magic card in hand, parting the Red Sea. We were almost out when I heard the band start tuning up out on the field. I turned and saw them on the stage set in the grass. Singer, bassist, drummer, and my friend, the guitarist. He did have a gorgeous guitar as I’d seen, the one the Light had said Grandma had paid her life for. It was red. Of course I was sure he had lots of guitars, all colors. He just happened to pick my favorite color. Wasn’t that ironic?
What was more ironic was when his fingers touched the strings, there was an arc of white fire that arched him up on his toes with his back bowed and his head thrown back with tongue jutting forth. Not a pretty sight. Fortunately, the roadies were bright enough not to touch him, but it was a few seconds before they managed to turn off the electricity. They tried CPR, but he was gone, just like Grandma had been.
“Damn,” I murmured to Mr. Trinity, “a real act of God. I’d never seen one before. You guys . . . sometimes Hell takes too long, huh?”
He looked at me blandly, as if he didn’t know what I was talking about, but that symmetry? Grandma and grandson going out the exact same way? Justice. It couldn’t be denied, and I certainly wasn’t going to. There was power behind this. Real power, the kind to be respected.
Trinity didn’t bother to discuss it, turning and walking away. His men stayed behind me, keeping me in sight. Keeping me in line, they thought. One seemed to think I wasn’t moving quickly enough and gave me a push. I whirled quickly enough that none of them had a chance to slide a hand inside their jackets. I punched the one who thought he could put his hands on me uninvited hard enough to knock him flat. I turned back and kept walking. “You shouldn’t take things for granted, especially not women who work in bars. Sometimes we have to act as our own bouncers,” I said over my shoulder. “Sometimes we have pervert dates.”
“And sometimes you even face demons.” Trinity slowed until I moved up even with him. “And that,” he said flatly, “is something civilians don’t do.” Not shouldn’t do or couldn’t do, but didn’t do. Mr. Trinity and the House of Eden had plans for me after this was all done. It wasn’t so far-fetched. The firstborn wiped out, the cities destroyed, angels had been God’s warriors in the Old Testament—Eden House had taken it on themselves to do that job now, and no middle-management Gabriel or Raphael had bothered to tell them differently.
While Trinity must have known every word of the Bible, I thought he rarely spent much time mulling over the love and forgiveness in the New Testament. Whatever he thought he was going to do to me, none of it would give the man a second’s pause or a single night’s bad sleep. After all, wasn’t it God’s will? Did anyone know that will better than Trinity? That doubt couldn’t exist in his mind. I knew that for a fact. He didn’t need to check it out first with any dagger-feathered angel; he already knew. Superiority, arrogance . . .
Pride. We all knew whose fall that went before. Mr. Trinity knew his Bible, but did he know his Bible?
Probably not.
Yes, Trinity no doubt had plans for me or just one in particular. A swift and ruthless one. It was entirely too bad for him, because he simply wasn’t man enough for the job.
“Hawkins and Reese may have foolishly trusted you, but I know differently. Whatever your reasons for killing demons, they aren’t ours. You don’t know the greater good.“
It was far too cuddly to call your employees by their first names, but I so rarely heard their last names—Zeke Hawkins, Griffin Reese—that I often had to think twice when I did hear them, just to remember who was being referred to. It was easy to forget. Just like Trinity would be quick to forget them once they were gone. His plans for them weren’t any better than the one he had for me. Regardless of whether they were true double agents on his side and not mine, watching Leo and me for Eden House and ready to help drag us in at any moment, their fates still wouldn’t have been any better. Working with outsiders? That was worse than failure to Trinity. That was treachery, intended or not.
Griffin and Zeke knew they were in trouble, knew they were playing with fire, but I wasn’t sure they knew how far their boss would go. When all was said and done at the end of this, they were the same as demons to their House. We all were.
The greater good, as they saw themselves, didn’t want us.
When I got home just after nightfall, the place was empty. The bar was closed and dark. Leo had hung his version of a Gone Fishing sign on the door—black marker on white cardboard that said GO THE FUCK AWAY. There are men of few words and then there are men of perfect words. Leo was the latter.
I let myself in, waving at a car parked across the street that held two Eden House agents. Trinity’s cover for Zeke and Griffin, and a check because it never paid to trust anyone too much, not even your own “double agents.” Our Mr. Trinity was so untrusting.
Flipping on the light behind the counter, I looked for a note. Not that Leo and I usually kept that close an eye on each other. We knew we could each take care of ourselves, and our social lives weren’t crossing paths. Leo’s taste in women—except for me—didn’t lead to double-dating. Amazons and bimbos with IQs half their cup size. Leo’s bad taste aside, this situation was a little different. I’d asked him to watch Zeke and Griffin. If he had left, there’d be a good reason. There’d be a note.
There was. It was held down by a bottle of bourbon and a shot glass. That wasn’t a good sign. I read it and sighed. I was lucky Leo had applied the antibiotic ointment to my back that morning, because it didn’t look like he’d be here to do it tonight or to bunk on the couch again. I folded the note on the words Family emergency. The dog is loose. Back tomorrow. In a way though, it was a good sign. Leo’s family was reaching out. It might only be to use him, but that was better than the past years of not speaking to or acknowledging him at all. And that dog was mean, mean enough that no one but Leo could deal with it, but mean or not, it was family too. They’d simply have to catch it before it ate anyone.
“Wan
t to share the bourbon?”
I looked up to see Griffin on the stairs. “Still hanging around, you two?”
“Zeke still thinks I’m off my game. Besides, how could Zeke and I send Trixa reports back to Eden House if we’re not here to actually watch you?”
He still looked tired, gray smudges under his eyes. No, Zeke wouldn’t be happy with that, and an unhappy Zeke could rarely be budged. “So your fellow demon hunters outside don’t have a clue, then, I take it?” I retrieved another glass and poured him a shot as he sat down beside me.
“No.” He rolled the glass between his hands, then tossed it back. “You and Leo are damn good at keeping your thoughts and emotions under wraps. The agents outside aren’t as strong as Zeke and I. No one in the House is, and you two are the most self-possessed people I’ve come across. You don’t give off anything you don’t want to give off. I didn’t pick up on you while I was upstairs until you walked through the door. Normally I can pick up on someone I know or a demon a good three blocks away. Even now I’m not sure exactly how things went in San Diego, except you’re not disappointed.”
“I’m not disappointed. You’re right there.” I drank my own shot. “As for giving off thoughts and emotions, having a psychic and an empath hanging around the place will teach you better. Especially when it comes to Zeke. He wouldn’t see the harm in watching my last date in his head like it was rent-a-porn.”
“Your last date was that good, eh?” He held out his glass for another.
“Since the last man in my bed was you, drooling and unconscious, with Zeke nobly defending your virtue, not especially.” I poured, then stretched out the kinks from the two plane rides. My back protested and I gave myself another shot of my own. Purely medicinal.
“I don’t drool.” He tried for outrage, but with his weariness couldn’t quite pull it off.
“Maybe not, but your virtue did survive the night intact,” I pointed out, putting the bourbon away. It might be medicinal for me, but it would only make Griffin more tired. I didn’t need den mother Zeke down here trying to kick my ass.
“Thanks for that, Zeke,” he said glumly.
“He was very cute—in an unsocialized-pit bull kind of way.” I patted him on the back. “Now, pack up your things and move them down to the office. The two of you are sleeping on the couch. I want my bedroom back.”
“I don’t think the two of us are going to fit on your couch,” he said dryly.
“Spoon.” I gave him a light shove toward the stairs. “Or one of you can sleep on the floor. It all depends on how secure in your masculinity you are. Either way, I’m sleeping in my own bed.”
“It’ll be hard to get Zeke to give up all that decadence, but I’ll do my best. And no one is that secure in their masculinity,” he finished as he headed for the stairs.
“I wish I’d taken a picture last night. Curled up like puppies in a basket,” I lied without a qualm. As for Zeke, his appreciation of my décor went as far as cleaning weapons with it.
“You are truly evil.” He disappeared, but I heard the repeated, “Evil,” as he went.
Several seconds later someone added from behind me, “I like that in a woman. Malevolence is good too. Do you have that on tap, Miss Trixa?”
I swiveled on my stool, automatically training the gun pulled from my waistband directly at Eli’s head. He was leaning against the end of the bar and was every inch as I remembered him. Gorgeous and charismatic. Also deceptively deadly, and that didn’t bear forgetting. I didn’t need the take-out box of noodles he held in one hand to remind me.
He used the chopsticks in his other hand to point at the container. “Want some? Best in the world . . . now.”
Was making the ultimate sweet-and-sour worth your soul? I didn’t think so, but apparently the restaurant chef had. “No thanks.” I kept the gun pointed. “If I want food of the damned, I’ll just microwave a Hot Pocket.” Griffin and Zeke didn’t come running down the stairs, shotguns in hand, which meant Eli was as powerful as he said he was—or at least equally as powerful as Solomon. He couldn’t be “seen” by a psychic or empath, no matter how good. He was simply better. Stronger.
“Suit yourself, and I’m assuming you usually do.” He stabbed the chopsticks into the noodles and set the cardboard box on the bar. “I don’t have to ask if you found the next step to the Light. I can see it, glowing around you like a halo, which, by the way, is a huge turnoff.”
“Sorry about that.” Not quite. “Do you have any information for me or are you here for the ambience?”
He looked around at the scarred tables, dartboard, small pool table, TV mounted over the bar and shrugged. “Add a floor of knives and air of pure unholy fire and it’d be just like home. Except for the TV. We don’t have satellite yet. The boonies are always the last to get it.” He peeled off his jacket and tossed it over a stool. “Actually, I’m here to dance.”
Leo’s radio behind the bar came on and jumped from station to station until a slow song came on. “Once again, before your time,” he observed. “A flash from the past, but it’s easy to move to . . . vertically. Horizontally too, if one were in the mood.”
“Which I’m assuming you always are.” I considered the situation, then replaced the gun in the back waistband of my pants. If he wanted to play, I could do that. In fact I was rather good at that. Demon good? I guess we’d have to see. “And the halo?”
“I’ll close my eyes.” He gave me that smile, far more warm and intimate than a monster had any right to, as he held out a hand. I took it as he looped an arm around my waist, deftly avoiding my gun. We moved to the music. “Amazing. You can dance like you’re all grown-up.” He whirled me around slowly.
“I’m thirty-one. I’ve been to a dance or two. Hit the floor at weddings with more than one grandpa.”
“Ouch.” He tilted his head down to look at me. “Are you going to hold a million years or so against me?”
He smelled nice, which wasn’t fair. There was no clichéd whiff of the traditional sulfur and brimstone. He smelled clean—like soap and wet spring grass with the faintest trace of ozone. Of lightning and a thunder-storm in the distance, ready to wash over you to bury you in rain and shake the ground like an earthquake. I could play all right, but he wasn’t an amateur by any stretch of the imagination.
“I’ve dated older men before. Age doesn’t matter.” We did another slow turn as I added, “It’s the killing innocent people and the taking of souls I have a problem with.”
“I’m sure they weren’t all innocent. I mean, really, what are the odds of that? Three out of ten might be mostly innocent, I’ll give you that. But all of them? Statistically impossible for the human race.” He dipped me and smiled as he hung over me. “And surely you’re not claiming innocence, Trixa. I see things behind your eyes that tell a different story. A far more interesting story, by the way. Innocence is so boring.”
“Speaking of boring, if you don’t have any information for me, then that’s all you’re doing.” I mirrored his smile, my back twinging from the dip. “Boring the hell out of me.”
“You do make a demon work for his due.” He straightened, pulling me upright, and let go of me. The radio shut off. “When did this demon kill your brother and where? The one you want so badly?”
“If you need that to do your job, you’re not half as good as you say you are.” I sat back down. My back was healing, had healed quite a bit in the past few days, but the dancing hadn’t done it much good. I’d thought of having Whisper heal it when she healed Zeke, but it was just scraped and torn skin already mending on its own. Zeke’s pain had been out of control. My pain was more of an inconvenience. When you find inconveniences too much to handle, then you’ll find life to be exactly the same.
“Oh, I’m good and I’ll find him, but I could find him more quickly if you’d be a little less of a bitch and a little more cooperative.” He said “bitch” the same way he would’ve said “sugar” or “honey” or “darling”—as if it were a
n endearment. He really was something.
“You’re a straight talker, I’ll give you that. And only that.” I retrieved the bourbon, poured him a shot in my glass, and slid it down the bar about four feet to him. “I’m not here to help you. You’re here to help me . . . that is, if you want the Light. If I make things too easy for you, Eligos, who’s to say you’ll wait for me to find the Light? Who’s to say you won’t try to take me from Trinity and put me on your own leash?”
“Who is to say?” he echoed blandly before he swallowed the shot quickly and smoothly, sitting down himself. “I might be transparent to your eye, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be easier and quicker for both of us.”
“Quick or easy—it doesn’t matter, because it’s not going to happen,” came a new voice, deep and rough.
Which was all we needed to make a party.
Solomon.
He stood by the door, not that he’d needed to use it. His gray eyes were slits. I’d been right when I’d guessed that Solomon wouldn’t care for Eli any more than Eli cared for him. “This is my territory, Eligos. This place is mine. She is mine. You can leave now, whole and intact, or you can leave it in a spray of blood and flesh. A pool of rotting fluid on the floor.” The gray blazed to silver, the first physical hint of demon I’d ever seen in Solomon—the first true loss of temper.
“He’s a cranky son of a bitch, isn’t he?” Eli turned over the shot glass and tapped it once, to all appearances bored. Certainly the farthest thing from intimidated without actually dozing off. “Tell me you never found him entertaining. No one’s taste could be that bad. The brooding. The smoldering. He’d fit in fine on the soap opera channel or a vampire movie, but real life?” He raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “Real sex? You’d be better off with a Ken doll. Same personality, and probably the same equipment.”
