by Rob Thurman
While me?
I was seconds away from forgetting the park. Seconds away from forgetting Mr. Invisible. Don’t get me wrong. I was a lion and lions don’t guilt over the four-hoofed fleeing dinner they took down. Remembering the park, remembering the living room and what I’d done to Melanie’s “boogety-man” twice now, I could bear that with no problem.
It just wasn’t worth my time.
Glancing at the clock on the wall, I saw I had three more hours before Niko would be home. I’d have to clean up my mess, but there was plenty of time enough to clean it up later. Right now, I was starving. A good day called for a good meal to top it off. I walked through the salt, leaving a sneaker print in it with no regret or shred of attention as I headed toward the kitchen. Rooting around in the refrigerator, I found three-day-old Chinese from the restaurant where Nik worked. I grabbed a fork and plopped onto a chair. Mr. Invisible already rounding half forgotten and pulling into the home stretch, I dug into the cardboard container with enthusiasm. It was heavily stained with soy sauce, but I didn’t mind. It tasted fine all the same.
If a little heavy on the salt.
From Rob:
Actually, let's be honest, this is less of a story and more of a day in the life of...nope. It's not even a day. It’s about twenty minutes in the life of Griffin and Zeke (the ex-demon and ex-angel) demon destroying partners from the Trickster Novels: Trick of the Light and The Grimrose Path). View it as a snapshot of their average morning. It's harmless fluff—pure and simple. Correction: with Zeke, is anything truly harmless?
Talking Trash
Griffin likes to keep things clean.
His clothes, the house, the car, his hair, anything in his general area. Neat, Trixa calls him; overly fastidious, Leo says…and, yeah, I know what fastidious means. Like I don’t? Like I have to have someone read the back of the cereal box for me? Ass. I know what breaking the fourth wall is, too. How ’bout that?
I got distracted, didn’t I? I do that. Never about the important things. On those I focus a little too much…or that’s what everyone tells me. I think they don’t focus enough, but forget it. That’s not the issue. I was talking about Griffin. He isn’t neat. He isn’t fastidious—seriously, don’t go there again, I mean it—nope, I know exactly what he is.
Psychotic.
I’ve had lots of people say that about me, but why they never see it in Griff, I don’t know. I knew, though, that it was the only explanation for him standing at the curb, dodging the legs that kicked frantically out of our garbage can as he glared at me with a look. Griffin has a shitload of looks—this one was his “Zeke has screwed up and it’s time to run through a puppies-versus-demons scenario again” Look. He grabbed the legs and addressed their owner…current owner, anyway, “Hold still. I’ll get you out in a second.” Then he hissed at me, “Trash goes in the garbage can, Zeke, not people.”
It was clear to me this guy was trash, but Griffin probably wanted to sort him into paper, plastic, glass, and human waste of space. See? Psychotic.
The trash masquerading as a man…or better yet, the asshole’s reply was muffled by his face being smashed against the bottom of the garbage can—it wasn’t the roomiest of garbage cans and the guy was over six feet tall, a little pudgy too. That’s not my fault. If you’re over six feet tall and don’t want to be shoved in a garbage can, you shouldn’t ask stupid questions. He’d asked a whole damn lot of stupid questions. “I called 911!” he yelled, and kept kicking.
I rolled my eyes and held up his cell phone. I made mistakes, but not a rookie one like that. Not that it would’ve mattered. The cops didn’t come to this part of town and weren’t going to unless the Army lent them a tank.
I’d like a tank. Tanks looked fun.
“Why?” Griffin asked, giving up on the disco-dancing legs, and spread his arms. “I go to the store for half an hour and I come back to find a man jammed into our garbage can. You were in the house. You couldn’t have seen him break any of the Big Ten. No stealing. No murdering. No lying. So, Zeke, tell me: why?”
Huh. I’d thought the reason I’d done it was pretty obvious. You couldn’t miss it. And people gave me shit about being in the dark. Unbelievable.
“Because you like things neat.” I frowned at him and his lack of appreciation. “Psychotically neat. He came in the house. He annoyed me. I threw him out. And when you throw things out, you put them in the trash.” I followed the rules and this was the thanks I got. Didn’t it just figure? Which was life. I follow the rules and then everyone gets upset because I follow them too much. How can you follow rules too much? They’re rules. It was in the damn dictionary. Being human is a pain in the ass. It really is. Worth it for Griffin…even if he was still giving me the look. Anything in the entire damn universe was worth Griffin, but there was no denying that this whole free will thing was aggravating as hell to get a grip on.
“Neat? Because I like things neat, you threw some man in the garbage.” He took a deep breath, pulled off his sunglasses, and folded his arms. “All right, this is going to be a good one, I can tell. Start at the beginning.”
By now I was figuring out that, again, I’d done something wrong. Same as that time I’d taken one of my guns and had gone after our neighbor, Mrs. Pepperhorn, three doors down who threw rocks at kids and dogs, keyed the cars on the block when she was wasted, and yelled at Griffin and me, calling us “goddamned perverts.” Maybe I had been wrong, okay, but it hadn’t my fault. I dozed off a lot in Eden House during Bible study. I really hadn’t known I’d mixed that up, that it was actually “you shall not suffer a witch to live.”
Bitch made more sense anyway. Witches never bothered me.
And Griffin caught me before I shot her. No harm, no foul was what I thought.
But people don’t always think the same as me, not even Griffin. He didn’t look as if he was simpatico with me now. That’s right, simpatico…another big word for Zeke. Yeah, I’ve got my eye on you. Don’t think I don’t. Now keep moving. The rest of the story is this way.
Jeeee-sus.
“He came…he asked annoying…never mind. Why did you let him in to begin with? You never let people in. They piss you off.” Griffin ducked as a shoe finally came off the foot of one thrashing leg to go flying. “Point in case.”
“I’m a census taker!” was the stifled but still loud answer from the garbage can.
“He said it was my civic duty.” And duty was the same as rules. You obeyed, more or less, if you could. “So I let him in. But then he started asking a lot of questions. How many people live here? How much money did we make? How are we related? Are we roommates? Are we significant others?” Significant how, I hadn’t figured out. Was it being the Chosen One like that douchebag Anakin in Star Wars? Or significant to some religious whacko who wanted to worship at my feet because I used to be an angel? It hadn’t mattered, because by then, “snooping bastard” overrode civic duty. “But he was nosy and I didn’t see any reason any of those things were his business.”
“I’m a census taker!” came the repetition. I picked up a telepathic spike of angry and exasperated thoughts—an internal babbled “crazy, stupid son of a bitch”—beginning to override his fearful ones. Too bad. Fear kept you healthy. Exasperation just made your blood pressure higher and got your ass kicked…by me, who was not stupid, by the way. Crazy, I’d give him, although Griffin would punch him in the face for it if he could hear it, but I was not stupid. I smacked the side of the garbage can.
“Shut up. I’m done talking to you.” I reached over and took Griffin’s sunglasses out of his hands and put them on in the early morning light. Nice. They were new. I liked them. “Anyway, when I told him to shove it up his ass, it was none of his business, he said he needed to know for things like roads and schools and it was how the government used our tax dollars. I told him we didn’t pay taxes.” I pushed the sunglasses down a notch. Perfect. “And I guess we’re supposed to, because that’s when he started thinking.” And as a telepath, I had to listen to i
t. “Cops and the IRS and prison and garnishment of our wages. In case you didn’t know”—I did try to educate when I could—“that last one sounds good, like a side order of something awesome at that great steak place on Paradise, but it’s not. It’s when they take money away from us. Our money.” I gave the garbage can a kick and ignored the yelp. “Which is stealing, which is one of the Big Ten.” If I had genes as an ex-angel, the Ten Commandments were tattooed on them.
Griffin rubbed at his mouth as if he were trying to hide a smile or a frenzied twitch. But he was an ex-demon empath and I was an ex-angel telepath, which made the motion a waste of time. I knew exactly what he was thinking, but I pretended I didn’t, because if I blew this off now, he might not find it as funny in a few seconds, because he was going to ask…no way around it, ask and might not see eye to eye with me.
Sometimes, I overreacted. It was difficult for me to tell until after the fact whether I had or not. And it was impossible for me to tell unless Griffin told me first. That didn’t change the fact that was all Griffin ever called it…overreacting. Never anything else.
It sounded better than Eden House’s label on my agent chart that had read Antisocial Personality Disorder, Arrested Development, Paranoid Personality Disorder, Frontal Lobe Disinhibition NOS. There’d been pages and pages of entries in that chart…until I burned it. They should’ve had Pyromania Tendencies in that list. Too bad, so sad.
Now, I knew none of that was true. Well…sort of true, but it was a result of learning how to use free will without a manual. It was hard—hard on me and generally a catastrophic bitch on those around me. But somehow, finally knowing the reason made it a little better...for me. I wasn't sure it had helped those around me any.
“And after your master plan of throwing him in the trash, what did you think would happen?” Griffin asked.
Now I folded my arms in a mirror image of him and did my best to seem puzzled. I wasn’t going to lie—thou shall not lie. Some of the old, old ways I couldn’t shake and didn’t want to, as they were as much a part of me as my red hair. If that hadn’t been the case, I would never lie to Griffin anyway—it was Griff. On the other hand, I could look harmless and confused, just another puppy from Griffin’s “save the puppy or kill the demon” mental lessons. “Well….”
The grinding and groaning sound of the garbage truck turning onto our street answered that question for me. I shrugged. “It is trash day.”
His amusement took a nose dive. “You were going to let them throw him in the truck to be crushed? Zeke, you weren’t going to do that. Tell me you weren’t going to do that.”
He made it sound so simple, as if the garbagemen wouldn’t see the guy kicking or hear him yelling. I’d have to drop a fifty on them each to toss him in. That was pizza and beer money. That had been a difficult decision to make. I shrugged again. “I wasn’t going to do that.”
“You were. You lying son of a bitch.”
I scowled at him. “I was not lying. I don’t lie. You said tell you I wasn’t going to do that. So I told you. You really need to make up your mind about things like that if you don’t want me to say them. Yeah, I absolutely was going to do that, and it was going to cost me a hundred bucks, probably. No pizza for a week at least. A whole week.”
“You were going to kill me?” It was a pretty pathetic squeak from such a big man. “Kill me? Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”
I leaned closer so I could peer down into the garbage can and almost see his crumpled, fleshy face. “That’s not who you should be talking to. You cheat on your wife. You told your girlfriend if she didn’t get an abortion, you’d have her deported. You kicked your neighbor’s cat. And you broke your son’s arm and told your wife he fell down the stairs. God isn’t listening to you, asshole.” I wasn’t sure God was listening to anyone, but definitely not this guy. “You’ll be going south, burn in torment until some demon gets hungry and eats you, but, hey, no taxes there.” I paused. That was a good point. It might make him feel better. He was a bad guy. He shouldn’t feel better. “Then again, maybe there are.” Maybe wasn’t a lie. Maybe was maybe.
“Which is why you were going to, mmmm, punish him?” Griffin jumped on it with a small but relieved smile. He always wanted to think the best of me, since the beginning, and that was nice. But I wasn’t the best. I wasn’t even good…I was righteous. And righteous—Old Testament righteous—and good hardly ever go hand in hand. Angels were the Punishment of God. If you weren’t a pregnant virgin and you saw us, your ass was in trouble of the bloodiest kind.
“Nope, for the stealing. Trying to steal our money.” For the annoying, too, but annoying wasn’t officially punishable by death in any religion. I’d asked Trixa, because that would be a convenient loophole. As a trickster, Trixa knew everything there was to know about loopholes. It was irritating that not one single religion included something as widespread as annoying, but I still had the stealing to go with. Stealing, lying, murder. Mr. Census had a ton of sin covered. It didn’t matter which one I punished him for. I picked stealing, as that was a sin against me, but if he’d only stolen, I wouldn’t have gone for the death penalty. Griffin had finally gotten that one through my head after a few years, but this asswipe had done the other things, and dead is dead. I didn’t think the corpse cared which road it took to get to the mortician, but I’d be a little more satisfied. Everything worked out that way. It feels better smiting and shit when it’s personal.
Getting to say “smiting” was the only good thing about being an ex-angel.
“Good plan, right?” I grinned at Griffin, forgetting for the moment about the look and Mrs. Pepperhorn and that somehow, someway, I’d screwed up.
The smile disappeared and became something else. It was a twitch. Then it was two twitches and, damn, a third. I saw it on his face and heard his thought behind it in my mind. I sighed, echoing that thought. “Not right?”
No, it was not right, plan-wise or any other-wise.
That sunk in fast when Griffin waved the garbage truck past us while reaching for his phone to call Trixa and Leo. It didn’t stop me from grumbling under my breath and giving the garbage can a kick now and again as we waited. None of our neighbors, at least none of them awake from an alcoholic or drug stupor, came out to investigate the increasingly hoarse and aggravating wails of “Don’t kill me! Please, don’t kill me!” Our neighbors knew better than to get involved in anyone else’s business around here. Especially ours.
I didn’t care what Trixa said. There had to be a religion where annoying was punished by stoning or something. Had to be.
Finally, she and Leo showed up in his pickup truck. Trixa called it his penis extension. I liked it. The truck, not Leo’s penis. I’d never seen his dick, but I knew I liked big trucks, big guns, pretty much big anything. Trixa had told me that was a problem I’d have to work out between Griffin and me. I still hadn’t figured out what that problem was supposed to be. Big things are cool. What’s wrong with that? Although if Leo was somehow strapping his truck to his penis, there might be something weird with that whole thing. I’d have to Google it later.
Griffin gave me both a pointed glare and thought to go with it that had me stepping to help Leo pick up the garbage can and the garbage in it to toss in the back of the truck. Leo, once known as Loki, usually gave me a semi-hard time about some of my “social problems,” but on this, he flashed me an amused grin. “I like this one. It has its own poetic trickery to it. I could’ve used you at Ragnarok.”
I rubbed the dust from the can onto my jeans, remembering the one time he’d called in a favor from his particular pantheon. “I don’t know. Thor’s bleach fumes made my eyes water. It put off my aim.” The stench of his spray-on orange tan hadn’t been much better.
Leo liked that. He really despised his relatives, foster or not. I hadn’t liked Thor either, if you could dislike an unconscious lump. With the god of thunder, disliking an unconscious lump was easy.
But the hard pinch to my ribs said somebody didn�
�t like anything about this at all. Trixa pinched again, avoiding my swatting hand. “Kit, you have done it now. A census taker? Honestly?”
“And an adulterer, a murderer, a child abuser, and a cat kicker,” Griffin added quickly, all for my sake.
Trixa waved her hand in dismissal, scattering all that like scarlet butterflies. Huh. In a way, that’s what she was—a bright red-and-gold butterfly but with a lethal bite. That made me think. I dug in my pocket. I’d worn these jeans yesterday and they’d still passed the sniff test this morning—it should be there. Triumphant, I pulled out a crumpled paper butterfly from Chinatown. Forget that in Vegas it was a strip mall, Chinatown was still Chinatown. The butterfly was a bright shade of red with gold foil around the edges of the bent wings. I handed it to her. “I know you like red.” I scuffed my sneaker against the concrete. “And things that fly.”
She looked at the small bit of paper in her palm, shook her head and gently took a handful of my own red hair, bending my head to place a kiss on my forehead. “All is forgiven. But no more government workers, Kit. That’s attention you don’t want, okay? Remember that. Be sneaky like the fox you are. We’ll pay this guy off. He can’t disappear. His supervisor has his schedule. The police would know this was the last place he didn’t make it into or out of, so to speak. And I like you guys in Vegas where I can keep an eye on you. I don’t want you on the run.”
“Pay him off?” I growled. “Griffin said: murderer, adulterer, child abuser, cat kicker, and nosy asshole. He’s the one who has to pay.”
She cupped a hand and whispered in my ear, “He will, Kit. His name is on my list, and in a few months when this is mostly forgotten and he’s burning through the money, I’ll pay him a visit. I’ll show him the error of his ways, teach him the lesson he deserves.”
As Trixa’s trickster lessons were almost always lethal, I could settle for that. She straightened the wings of the butterfly and put it in her hair. It caught immediately in the wild explosion of curls. She always looked like she was standing in a wind machine or had a fork stuck in an outlet. I liked it. It gave you the same feeling as unscheduled fireworks, wild and unexpected. “I won’t ever lose this, Kit. I simply can’t stay mad at you. I can’t get mad at you, you thinking of me like that, sugar.”
