by Rob Thurman
Then she got into the truck, and its engine purred as it went down our street to disappear around the corner. Griffin watched it go silently before saying mildly, “Was that the piece of trash that you found stuck to your shoe in the car after we ate in that Chinatown restaurant yesterday?”
“Yeah. They make a lot of girly drinks there. Think it came off one of them. Kind of lucky it was red.” Red being Trixa’s favorite color. The only color that existed, as far as she cared. I gave him a grin. It didn’t have to be sly. He could feel the emotion bubbling in me as I could hear his laughing thought of “I’m doomed” in his head.
“You out-tricked a trickster. If she ever finds out, you won’t have an ass left to kick.” He swatted mine in emphasis. “Everyone, even me, underestimates you sometimes.”
I scuffed my foot again, this time on the empty space where our garbage can had been. You could bet Leo wouldn’t bother to bring it back. Great. Now we had to buy a new one, and I was going to get a few of my own lessons. At least Griffin’s weren’t lethal…not when it came to me. “And sometimes they overestimate. I should’ve thought about the cops.”
“But not the garbagemen?”
“Nah. I’ve been reading their thoughts for years now. They would’ve been good to go on making the extra bucks.”
Griffin gave me a shove back towards our small house. “And that doesn’t make them murderers? As much in need of punishment?”
“More like subcontractors,” I clarified. “The punishment is just. Doesn’t matter who carries it out.”
“No?” He opened the door and we were inside. It was a cave at first. All Vegas houses are. Blinds down, small windows, anything to keep the eye-searing, air-roasting light and heat out.
I dumped the sunglasses and flopped on the couch. “You’re saying no, but you’re thinking yes. You’re thinking it matters a lot. And I don’t know why.” I never knew why. I didn’t know if I’d ever learn. Depressed, I flopped farther from sitting to lying with my knees dangling over the arm rest. “I guess I am stupid after all. Crazy and stupid just like Eden House labeled my chart. Maybe I need a T-shirt to label myself. Batshit Crazy and Stupid as Hell.”
I heard the refrigerator open and the distinct clink and whoosh of two ice-cold beers being opened. Griffin came back, handed me a beer, and used his free hand to lift my head up. He sat down and took the first swallow of his own beer as he lowered my head to rest in his lap. “You’re not stupid and you’re not crazy.” I winced, expecting the flick to my temple or ear I usually received when I said those things. Griffin was determined I think as much of myself as he did of me.
Which was impossible. I could comprehend Heaven and Hell, but what Griffin thought about me, felt for me, that I’d never understand. He deserved someone better, the best there was, and I didn’t come close to being normal, much less the best. I rolled the beer bottle between my hands. “Are we significant others?”
“We are,” he said and instead of the flick to the ear I expected, he slowly and carefully twisted a strand of my hair around his finger.
“What’s that mean?”
“That we’re together and we love each other.” This time he combed fingers through all my hair.
That was simple enough. The truth usually was. “Then why don’t they just say that?” I grumped.
“Because it’s people who are stupid, not you.” He drank more of his beer until the level was down around the top of the label, then he swapped with me. That way I could drink without spilling it on me, as I was all but flat on the couch except for Griffin’s legs being my pillow.
I took a swallow and toed my sneakers off. “So…subcontracting is wrong?”
“Yes.” He didn’t say out loud why, although I heard random thought fragments of “leading them onto a dark road,” “our duty, not theirs,” “our experience, our training,” and he didn’t mean Eden House training with the last one. An ex-demon, Griffin, was really only an ex-ex-angel. We’d both started in the same place, been built on the same Biblical bones. But he didn’t say those things, because saying that would spoil our new lesson plans. He was all about the showing now.
Before we were together…wait, that wasn’t right. We’d always been together—every day we shared on Earth thinking we were human, we’d been together.
Best be accurate: before we started sleeping together, lessons hadn’t been half as goddamn entertaining.
“Do you save the puppy or kill the demon?” “Do you run a red light and knock over a busload of flabby tourists to nail a demon or wait for the green light?” “Do you squash an asshole murdering census taker for annoying you or wait until later when the cops won’t know?” And if I managed to give the right answer, I got Griffin’s approval. When you’ve only depended on one person in your damn life, at least the life you remembered, that approval…it’s everything. When most everyone else thinks you’re a freak and a time bomb and crazy as they come, when you half suspect that yourself, to get nothing but warm thoughts, affectionate slaps on the back, and complete acceptance—I couldn’t imagine what could beat that. Some days, it was all I could see worth living for.
Then came the sex and when getting a right answer equaled a blowjob…hell, let me tell you, you become the best student alive. And alive—it became not such a bad word anymore. The fact that I found out I wasn’t crazy, that I was a victim of Heaven’s lack of free-will training, that helped, too. But, yeah, the blowjobs were pages higher on that list. I finished the half beer and grinned, “Is it time for school? Time for some lessons, Teach?”
He put his beer aside, rested a hand on my stomach, and bent to put his lips against mine. It wasn’t a kiss…it was a silent shaping of the thought front and foremost in his mind.
Will you show me your wings?
Who knew Griffin would have a feather fetish? But I couldn’t say I didn’t have a thing myself for seeing his wings: they belonged on a dragon made out of the sun. Blazing bright and gold scales—they were mine to see, mine to touch. Nobody else’s. And they were fucking beautiful.
I slid fingers in his pale hair and pulled him close enough to make the kiss a reality. It was the sun, too—a heat and fire that only ended when I nipped his bottom lip and grinned wider.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rob Thurman has written three series for Penguin Putnam’s imprint ROC Fantasy: The Cal Leandros Novels, The Trickster Novels, and The Chimera Novels. Debut novel Nightlife, was released in 2006. There are now thirteen books to date and Rob is releasing the ninth Cal Leandros Novel in 2014.
Outside of series work, All Seeing Eye, a paranormal thriller, was written as a standalone novel, as well as several stories for various anthologies, including the Charlaine Harris & Toni L.P. Kelner Anthology, Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, Courts of the Fey, Carniepunk and Kicking It.
Although Rob does not write Young Adult, the first Urban Fantasy book in The Cal Leandros Series—Nightlife—received a 2011 Eliot Rosewater Award Nomination for Excellence in High School Libraries, rather to the author’s bemusement, as Rob would be the first to say the books are not for younger teens. Apparently, the librarians and teens disagree.
Rob’s work is dark, non-stop action from beginning to end, rife with purely evil sarcasm as sharp as a switchblade—and probably nearly as illegal. If one shoved the most sarcastic of comedians along with The Shining and Pulp Fiction into a wood-chipper, the result would be what Rob aims to deliver in all novels, but especially in Urban Fantasy—proof that you can have humor, violence, and fear all simultaneously in one kick-ass moment.
Rob Thurman lives in rural Indiana—land of endless fields, infinite cows and where dial-up is still the only soul-crushing option.
Hang out personally with the author and Rob’s Reaver Army at RobThurman.net—home of Cal and Niko Leandros, The Brothers Korsak, Team Trickster and The Eye of Jackson. But be warned: you may run into Robin Goodfellow there, and nobody is responsib
le for what a puck may do.
