Trick of the Light t-1

by Rob Thurman

  “What are you singing?” Griffin asked. That he could hear me was testament to the luxury and soundproof ing of the helicopter. The president wished he had one so nice.

  “A song for my kaikunane.” Kaikunane—my brother. I finished up the Hawaiian good-bye and watched as Vegas passed beneath us. I might have stayed in Las Vegas ten years and considered that the longest any of my family stuck around a place, but Kimano had returned to Hawaii so many times, he may as well have lived there. Mama probably wondered how she’d gone so wrong with the both of us.

  “It was . . . nice,” Zeke said, making the effort, as uncomfortable as it was for him. He meant it too. No mocking of my lack of singing talent.

  “Thanks, Kit.” I reached over Griffin and patted the denim over Zeke’s knee.

  “Would your brother have liked us, you think?” Griffin folded his arms and slanted his gaze at me. “I mean, you treat us like younger brothers,” he snorted, not all that appreciative of the younger part, apparently. “Do you think your brother would’ve liked us?”

  An interesting question. “Once he got to know you,” I mused—once he had genuinely, deeply got to know them—“then, yes, he would’ve liked you. He liked almost everyone.”

  There was a long moment of silence except for the muted whirring of the rotor blades. Zeke kicked the back of the seat in front of him. “I want my gun,” he growled flatly.

  “Make that little brothers, not younger ones,” I said dryly. “And me with no PayDays this time.”

  “It’s all right. It’s time for a tutor session. That’ll distract him. Zeke loves tutoring.” Griffin gave a faint, mocking smile.

  Zeke just snarled and slouched further down in the seat. “You suck. We could die today and you want to tutor me?”

  Griffin smiled blissfully, and with that blond hair and blue eyes, his expression was as blissful as on Michelangelo’s David and then some. He crossed his arms, reciting, “A grandmother with a stroller carrying twin babies and a cocker spaniel puppy are crossing the road. They’re about to be hit by a bus. About two blocks down the street, a low-level demon is eating breakfast at an outdoor café and reading the paper. Do you save Granny, kiddies, and pup, or go kill the demon?”

  The scowl on Zeke’s face deepened as he thought, and from the furrowing of his brow, he thought hard. After nearly three minutes, long ones, he asked, “There’s a puppy in the stroller?”

  “Yes.” Griffin said in an aside to me, “This is why we have the tutoring.”

  “Is it cute?” Zeke asked.

  Patiently, his partner answered, “It’s a spaniel puppy. On a scale of one to ten, it’s a ten in cute, and, yes, ten is the highest level of cute you can get.”

  “Damn.” He couldn’t slouch any further, although he gave it his best try. “The demon’s two blocks away. Do I have a clear shot?”

  “No.”

  By the time we arrived at the Worthington Mountain Range, nearly an hour later, Granny, tots, and the world’s cutest puppy had just been flattened by a city bus. But a demon had had his breakfast rudely interrupted with a shotgun slug to the head. “I think you got that one wrong,” I said as the copter hovered above the giant entrance to Leviathan Cave.

  “It’s the puppy,” Zeke muttered. “I know I should always go with the puppy, but I like shooting things.” Demons, robbers, whatever the occasion provided. “Why did God make the NRA if shooting isn’t always the right answer? And grandmas shouldn’t push strollers. They’re too damn slow.” He knocked on the glass of his window, an idea obviously having struck him. “What if I shot the bus driver, then . . .”

  Griffin and I said together, “No.” If anyone was expecting a commentary on Zeke’s slightly psychopathic decision-making skills from the angel Oriphiel behind us, they didn’t get it. If a demon had been sitting back there though, assuming it wasn’t the hypothetical one having breakfast and reading the paper, I imagine Zeke would’ve gotten a cheerful thumbs-up on the hat trick of granny/puppy/kiddy squashing.

  “What now?” asked Goodman from the front.

  “Land inside the opening. It should be big enough,” I said.

  It was and then some. With a name like Leviathan and the massive size of the sinkhole entrance, you almost could believe it was the open gates of Hell itself. But it wasn’t. It was only a cave and a rather beautiful one at that.

  The copter sat down mostly easy, tilted about six inches due to a rock formation that couldn’t be avoided. Outside were deep pink and gray stalagmites and stalactites and a torrent of light from the opening almost twenty feet above. I opened the door once the rotors stopped and stepped out to look up at the circle of sky. I could imagine that’s how being born felt like if a baby could remember that far back. A light, colors you hadn’t dreamed existed, and a brand-new world. If only they could hold on to that moment forever, because there would never be another like it—that moment when everything is new, and evil is just a word you haven’t learned yet.

  Griffin passed me, eyes cast upward—blue reflecting blue. As he moved on, I took Zeke’s arm when he started to follow him and whispered softly in his ear. “Choices are hard, Kit. Someone’s always telling you you’re wrong. But there’ll come a time today that you’ll have to make one and almost everyone around you will tell you what to do. What they say might seem like the right thing, maybe the only thing, but some choices, Zeke, you have to make yourself. Don’t listen to what anyone else says—not to them, not even to me. You do what you feel . . . what you know is right.”

  “You think I can?” he said dubiously.

  “I do.” I meant it. I hoped it.

  “Even after the puppy?”

  “You will this time. I know you will.” I pinched his ribs hard. “Besides, don’t think I didn’t know you were yanking Griffin’s chain with the babies and puppy thing.”

  He smirked. “I was.” The smirk faded and the next words were utterly serious. “I always know about babies. I screw up most of the time. Robbers. Cab drivers. The jackass who cuts in front of me at McDonald’s. But I always know about babies.”

  “I know.” I touched the scar on his neck. “Remember, I have faith in you. Griffin has faith in you. Just have faith in yourself.” He gave a hesitant and confused nod, then trailed after his partner. It would have to do and was all I could do.

  Lenore shifted on my shoulder and gave what suspiciously sounded like a dubious mumble at my ear. “You’re just a bird, Lenny,” I warned. “Don’t forget it or I’ll put a bow around your neck and let the tourists take pictures with you.” Not that the first was close to being true, but ears were everywhere, and not that there would be any more tourists for me once this was over, but Lenore pretended to take the threat to heart nonetheless and winged away, circling the huge cavern.

  “The Light,” came a voice from behind me. I didn’t need the incipient frostbite to know who it was.

  “You’re not a patient man, Mr. Trinity.” I turned and, wishing I’d worn a jacket, folded my arms against the cold. To give the man credit, it wasn’t actually him lowering the temperature. The air in the cave was in the low fifties and I was a woman who preferred the warmer climates. I’d been all over, but Kimano and I both had been sun lovers. I’d done my share of traveling up north, sometimes far up north, but insulation was my friend when I went there. Sometimes you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a polar bear and me if I saw a single snowflake.

  “You’re still alive. I consider that to be exceedingly patient of me. Now, where is the Light?” He and the three other Eden Housers cradled shotguns. Oriphiel stood apart from them, the big boss waiting for his mocha latte no foam to be delivered to him. He was in human form, the same pale gray suit, the same silver hair and eyes, pale skin. The light from above hit him, turning him into a molten metal statue, peaceful . . . not the crystal warrior who’d gouged holes in the metal of my car last night. I couldn’t see him carrying a flaming sword in the old days. A crystal one that shimmered with the l
ight of the moon—I could see that. Could see it cutting a mountain in half or an army of the wicked. All that power, all that lack of empathy for those he should protect. Maybe the best and brightest didn’t make up the middle management that watched the earth. God could be teaching them a lesson in his silence. The lesson might be compassion, or at the very least, that humans had value. And some did learn. They had to—it was the law of averages.

  “Around.” I looked back up at the sky. Kimano hadn’t seen the sky when he had died. He’d been killed in his sleep. The demonic bastard that had murdered him had done it while my brother slept. I didn’t know which was worse: that my brother hadn’t had a chance to defend himself or that he would’ve been awake and died anyway. He’d been good—in spirit and heart, the way the word should be used. Not a fighter unless he absolutely had to. Genuinely too good to be part of our ragtag, scrappy family. When children thought of angels, they thought of someone like Kimano, not the Silver Surfer standing over there.

  Strange, how I remembered that, the Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Superman, but Zeke read a lot of comic books—or graphic novels as he called them—when he was fifteen. Always the superheroes. He’d wanted to fly like they did. Don’t we all?

  “Then I suggest you look around and find it, before I retire Reese or Hawkins now. I will let you choose which one if you like,” he offered, his finger resting on the trigger. “I’d suggest Hawkins as first choice. An excellent telepath, but an inferior everything else. Our gardener never quite recovered from the punch in the face and the subsequent mauling by an angry rodent. Plastic surgery can only do so much.”

  I was with Zeke. Gophers deserved living more than the rich deserved a smooth lawn of Spanish Trails grass. But I moved to play my part. Trixa the Bloodhound. Only this bloodhound was about to gnaw through that Eden House leash and start the action and the auction.

  I looked at Zeke and Griffith across the cavern. They were ready. They might not have weapons, but that didn’t make them not dangerous. It only put them at a disadvantage. “Even having all of Heaven on your side can’t keep your House whole or get your panties out of that massive wad. What a shame.” I started away from them. “It’s this way.”

  There were several offshoots, crawl spaces, off the main cave, and I passed three of them before stopping at the fourth. It was just big enough to wriggle through, if you were five feet five and average size. Trinity and his boys were paying the price now for their testosterone- and milk-pushing mothers. They weren’t going to make it. Jeb himself, the caver who’d originally found the Light, wouldn’t have either. He must’ve rolled it in as far as it would go. It turned out to be pretty far. And then there it was.

  The Light of Life.

  That which could protect anything. Keep anything or anyone in the world safe. It sat on the stone and it looked like . . . like nothing I’d ever seen. I’d felt it in my head for days now, but I hadn’t pictured it. It was a crystal, but it was alive. I didn’t need it in my head to tell me that. It was the size of a cantaloupe with too many facets to guess at first glance and each facet was a different color. Gold, green, blue, purple . . . until I touched it, and then it glowed the purest white. It wasn’t a blazing light to hurt the eyes, but a soft radiance. It went through you . . . the soft give of a mother ’s breast against a baby’s cheek. First love. Last love. Lying alone under a blanket of summer stars and knowing at the moment that was enough, that was everything.

  “The lesser of evils. Truly?” I smiled and placed my hand on top of it and it was home. To a traveler like me, home was where you stopped moving for more than a day. Almost a dirty word. Something you turned your nose up at, although Vegas had managed to show me that a home could be not so bad . . . for a few years maybe. But the Light gave the word new meaning. You could live in that light, that love, that hope, float there cradled in warmth forever. “You like me,” I murmured, my hand tingling pleasantly, “don’t lie.”

  “Iktomi!” The hard shout came from behind me. “Is it there?”

  “You can call me Trixa if you want,” I told the Light. “It’s for friends. You and I, we will be the best of friends.” My name was shouted again. I sighed, “For as long as you’re around. Let’s go. You have quite the crowd waiting to meet you.”

  “I can’t back out,” I shouted back. “Too many stone projections. But I think the tunnel curves back around into the main cavern. I’ll see you there.” I added under my breath, “Ass.” I ignored the further shouts behind me and scooped up the light and held it against my chest as I awkwardly crawled on, using one arm and two tired knees.

  It wasn’t that far, but it took me almost fifteen minutes of inching along, the Light humming against my chest, a subtle vibration I could feel even in the muscle of my beating heart. Its glow was the only light for several minutes before I saw the illumination of an opening ahead. “And here we go,” I murmured. “Are you ready for this, because it’s going to be all sorts of interesting.”

  I received the intriguing sensation of a swat inside my brain. My mama would’ve swatted me the same, actually. She would’ve swatted me for taking so long. I wasn’t sure, but I thought the Light thought I was taking unnecessary risks . . . although its thoughts weren’t quite that concrete. They were expressed in concepts more fluid than those in my mind. But if that’s what it was thinking, it was right. Kimano would have his day and I didn’t care about risk. It was mine to take. Griffin and Zeke weren’t quite as at risk as Mr. Trinity thought. Mr. Trinity, while ruthless and a pain in every body part I owned, wasn’t quite as smart as he imagined he was. Maybe those panties of his were cutting off his circulation and not letting enough blood to his brain.

  Wasn’t he wondering where the demons were? Did he think he and the other three with shotguns would do the trick . . . against higher demons? No. And he had to know about the higher demons. He was first in Vegas Eden House. He knew about Solomon, if not about Eligos, although Oriphiel could’ve informed him about Eli. In this situation, even a lowly human such as Trinity needed all the information possible. On the other hand, angels liked to play it close to the chest. Oriphiel thought no human was worthy of the Light—not even to hold it, not for a single moment—I knew that. He could actually be right this time.

  I crawled out into the main cavern, black pants smeared with dirt, as was the palm of my hand. I happened to come out closer to Griffin and Zeke, which was no accident. They were almost as powerful as demons and angels in their empathy and telepathy, and they knew me. Had known me for years. That put them up on the one angel there. They felt me coming and stood on each side of me as I stood up. Lenore flew down to land on my shoulder.

  “That’s it?” Zeke peered at it curiously. “It’s a giant lightbulb. What’s the big deal?” Then the hard jade of his eyes softened. “Oh.” He touched it with a reverent finger. “That’s . . . nice.”

  I didn’t think I’d ever heard Zeke say nice unless it related to a gun or an explosion or two, which made this moment nice indeed. Griffin only studied it with that line between his brows, and he didn’t touch it—as if he thought he wasn’t good enough. It was an odd change of places for the two, and I knew Griffin. He was more than good enough. I wiped off my hand on my pants and took his hand to place it on the faceted surface. He started to pull away as if he’d been burned, but then let his hand rest there. And he smiled—one of those rare smiles of an utterly innocent child seeing his first swarm of lightning bugs at twilight.

  Delight.

  Magic.

  Of course, Trinity had to ruin it. He had an incredible knack for ruining nearly everything. “Give me the Light.” He stood across the cavern about twenty feet away, now holding a Desert Eagle, which was pointed, not surprisingly, at us. Behind him with shotguns stood Goodman and the other two. They were grouped a little close and that wasn’t good. Respect for their boss equaled bad tactics.

  Especially when your boss turns around and puts two bullets in the head of each of you. Oriphiel, still bath
ed in the sun streaming through the opening, came to life. I didn’t think I’d often seen an angel surprised, but he was. “What have you done?” he demanded, all glass and silver again—Heaven’s warrior. Human fa çade gone. He hadn’t known what Trinity was about to do, which meant Trinity had a shield as good as mine or it meant . . .

  Solomon appeared beside Trinity, as if a clot of shadows from the corners of the cave had joined together to make a demon. “Ready to be a duke in Hell, Trinity?” he asked pleasantly. “You led me to the Light; you gave up Trixa; you’ve more than bought your way.”

  It meant he had help.

  Trinity’s face showed the first emotion I’d seen beyond disgust, ruthlessness, disdain. It showed pure satisfaction. A prince in Hell. Better than a peon, a nobody soul in Heaven. He wasn’t the first one to think so, but apparently the lesson of the story had escaped him. “Give me the Light,” he repeated, ignoring Oriphiel’s flat, “Damned. You are damned.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “You can’t have it, and if you think you’ll be anything more than a side order of fries to some random demon downstairs, you’re the most idiotic man alive.” Speaking of alive, I didn’t think he’d be that way for long.

  “Give it to me,” he spat before firing the gun. I would’ve thought that after the “Give it to me,” I would’ve perhaps had the chance to actually give it to him. I wouldn’t have, but he could’ve waited. But that was a man for you—always shooting his wad early.

  Dark humor, dirty humor, any kind of humor—it made you feel better when you were lying on your back with a .50-caliber bullet in your stomach. It didn’t hurt though, not yet. My abdomen only felt bruised and cold. Not the stereotypical kicked-by-a-mule feeling—kicked by an elephant was more like it. Griffin and Zeke’s faces hung over mine as they knelt beside me. Griffin’s was twisted, bloodlessly white. He knew. You didn’t survive this—a gut shot this far from a hospital, you simply didn’t make it. Zeke . . . Zeke just didn’t understand. Besides Griffin, Leo, and I were the only ones in his world. No one else existed for him, not really. People didn’t understand him, didn’t know how alien and lost he was. They were strangers and mysteries, and they didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Zeke had the three of us and that’s all he had. He couldn’t have lost Griffin and survived. I know he didn’t want to lose me.