by Rob Thurman
Which might have mattered in the end if he were up against another demon, but guess what? He wasn’t. Demonic levels were meaningless to me. We were going by a different sort of rank . . . demons, tricksters, gods. And this bastard was outranked. He’d killed my helpless-in-sleep baby brother, but I was no baby.
And I had never been helpless.
My predator grin widened, the backward curving teeth broadening my coyote jaws even further with the crunch of bone. “Don’t you want me? You once said you wanted to be inside me,” I said, my voice thick from my jaw’s changed shape, “and I want you inside me too, Solomon, but I think we have very different ideas of where.”
He started to shimmer, to travel back to Hell, but I was on him first, taking him to the cave floor, physically pinning him to this world as my claws punched through his shoulders. And that’s when he changed to his true form.
Demon. Wings, scales, jagged smoky teeth. Eyes that were poisonous silver whirlpools that threatened to suck you down to Hell.
Scary.
Not.
“And I bet you thought you were the monster of this little fairy tale,” I said through twisted vocal cords. “I’ve searched for you for fifty years. The killer of my brother. The darkest sorrow of my family. Do you remember? A black sand beach in Hawaii? A trickster in human form sleeping on the sand and you slaughtered him before he even had a chance to wake. Eli did say you liked shooting fish in a barrel. Coward.” His teeth snapped at my throat. I met them with my own teeth. “I thought it was you, handsome Solomon. Mysterious Solomon. For at least thirty years I thought it was you as I followed you from place to place, but I needed to know for certain. There were other demons it could’ve been, others who have your same hobby. Those of the same color, although none had your reputation, your sheer numbers of païen killings. I had to be sure.
“I lie, but I lie to make others see the error of their ways.” I removed the claws from one of his shoulders and shredded his right wing. “I trick to make things right. I even kill, if I have to, to balance the scales. But I need proof. Now I have it. Now you will balance Kimano.”
Although it would take a thousand demons to balance the shining heart of my brother. But every journey begins with a single step and killing Solomon was that step. I roared and buried my teeth in his chest. Black blood pumped free and tasted of fire and bile. His two back feet came up beneath me and clawed at my fur-covered underbelly. The claws were sharp and I felt them tear through my skin. It was good, the pain. Good because it let me know Kimano’s justice had come. I dug my teeth deeper into Solomon’s chest and yanked my head sideways, ripping the flesh away in a massive hunk just as a shark would. It flew and landed across the cave with a meaty thump. I saw obsidian bones, but no heart beneath it.
I wasn’t surprised.
He might manufacture one in human form—I had felt it beat against my back last night when Leo as Lenore had stood watch over me—but Solomon had no heart. I’d known that all along. Not even the spiritual equivalent of one. He surged underneath me, throwing me back, but I didn’t let go of him. He wasn’t escaping to Hell. If I had only one tooth left, one claw remaining, I’d hold him here to his death. His teeth buried in my shoulder and he removed my flesh as well. I tucked my wings tight against me and rolled to my side, then up again and lifted into the air, my massive crow wings flapping with a pure surge of muscle. I still had Solomon’s one shoulder hooked firmly on the claws of my Akamataa shape, the dragon. They had passed through his scales and flesh and come out the other side to catch like barbed fishhooks.
He rose in the air with me, fighting me every inch of the way. His wings thrashed as he tried to pull himself away from me. The rended wing had been remaking itself quickly, but with the gaping hole that stretched the width of his chest, the wing had to get in line. Black flesh and ebon and silver scales began to reform over the ribs. “I hated you,” he spat, all that velvety charm gone. All that sweet, sweet care for me now a ghost. “The only thing I thought of you when we touched is how your flesh would taste as I tore you to a pile of gore and scraps. I only wanted the Light from you, bitch. Three years ago I knew you were looking for it. I heard the whispers.”
“Were they only whispers?” I laughed . . . coyote/ wolf howled—it was all the same. “I told every demon I let live for years and years, many more than three. Until it went full circle and one told me. I’d thought more than whispers. I’d thought they’d been shouts for all the rumor spreading I did. I knew it was somewhere in this vast desert. I could wait for you to catch up before I circled in on it. So I could have my cake and eat it too.
“And hated me, my Solomon? Hated me? How you hurt my feelings.”
But it certainly didn’t hurt as much as what came next.
His wings tried but they couldn’t do it. He bit and clawed at me. It wasn’t enough. Fifteen feet in the air, I folded my wings back and let us fall. I twisted to one side as he was impaled on a stalagmite that rose up from the cave floor. It passed through his back and thrust its way through his stomach. Fluid gurgled in his throat and his tail undulated sluggishly, but that wasn’t enough to kill a lower demon. It definitely wasn’t enough to kill Solomon—until I fastened my jaws around his serpentine neck and tore his head from his shoulders with one ripping motion. My four feet on the ground again, I let the head drop before me and stared into eyes that were still aware . . . if only for a moment. “For Kimano, you bastard. For my brother.”
The silver hate didn’t fade until the head as well as the body melted to black sludge. That’s when I lifted my gaze and saw it. I saw Kimano standing in the volcanic sand, hand upright in acknowledgment, his grin as happy and bright as always. It wasn’t true, but I wanted it to be so badly that I did what I’d done for the past fifty years and pretended that I saw him. I pretended hard enough that maybe I almost did. Almost. It didn’t matter. You take what you can get in this life. If almost was all I could have, then almost was what I would take.
I turned my heavy head toward Eli, who stood frozen in place, his normally nonstop sexy mouth slightly agape. I grinned the shark grin that dripped black demon blood. “You still want to hit this or what, Sunshine?” Eli disappeared in an instant, so fast he left a tiny sonic boom in the space where he had stood.
My crow wings fell away and vanished. Eligos hadn’t even complained I’d not lived up to my end of the bargain: handing over the Light, not that I’d ever truly planned to. He was more concerned with making sure that gorgeous ass of his wasn’t grass. My tail disappeared and my jaw began to change and change again. The demons had learned to lie when they fell, but it was a trickster who had told the very first lie. Demons . . . they were nothing more than amateurs. Although Solomon getting to Trinity, that had been unexpected, actually a little clever. I hadn’t looked beyond Griffin for the demon-touched in Eden House. Shame on me. My fur disappeared, my eyes back to two, then from gold to dark amber.
And I was Trixa again. Trixa in black pants and a sweater that had never been hit by a bullet. A Trixa who wavered and fell unceremoniously on her butt. Ah well, things never go quite as you picture them.
I looked at the angel and the demon who were shielded by Leo’s wings, and a light more alluring than the sun that came through the cave entrance. Glowing green eyes and moonstone blue ones looked at me. “You told Heaven and Hell no,” I said, my voice a little hoarse, but mostly Trixa’s normal voice. “Heaven won’t have you now, Zeke, even if you changed your mind. And, Griffin, Hell would have you, but you wouldn’t like it much. They would unmake you and remake you over and over until the last star in the sky winked out.” He would scream for an eternity . . . a literal one.
Their hands still clasped the other ’s arm and if anything, their grip tightened. “Screw Heaven,” Zeke said, oblivious to those words coming from an angel’s crystal carved mouth. “I want to stay. I don’t want to be one of them. I want here. I want Griffin.” The angel-man who loved to kill the demons the most, yet not once would he
deny his demonic partner. It didn’t even cross his mind. I would’ve loved Zeke for that, if I didn’t already love him.
And Griffin . . . a high-level demon. Not as high as Solomon or it would’ve been him on the outside and Solomon undercover, but still high-level. Who knew how many he’d killed? How many souls he’d damned? The Light didn’t let him know. I still felt a small tickle of it in my head. I felt how it took Hell from Griffin’s mind and Heaven from Zeke’s, took those memories away forever. Griffin wouldn’t know what he’d done, so he’d be free to be the good man he was now. And Zeke would be able to hold on to the scrap of free will he’d managed to wrangle for his own and keep working on it. Who knew? Someday . . . a long time . . . but someday, he’d learn, he’d get it right. They looked up as the Light, which existed to protect, protected them from themselves. It brightened as it rained down on them. Glass and scales became flesh. They became human again.
Except for the wings.
Zeke’s glass and crystal turned to the very traditional feathered kind—all copper as his hair with only the faintest barring of cream at the bottom. Griffin’s were the same dragon wings of before, only less tarnished . . . a brighter gold. They were beautiful, the both of them, just as they’d always been.
“Leo.” I met brown raven eyes the size of lemons. “Take the Light to the Hearth.” Hearth and home. We would have a home now. A safe harbor. A place no angel or demon could breach, one where they could never kill one of our kind again—where the very first who’d walked this world could be the very last as well. One eye winked and he was gone, the wind from his wings nearly knocking us all from our feet. It would have if I hadn’t already been sitting, courtesy of my wobbly legs. I felt the Light caress my mind, saying good-bye, holding me as I imagined Kimano doing; then it was gone . . . every last mote of it. Off to its new home.
Sanctuary. Finally. No more Kimanos. No more païen dead.
Of course, that’s not to say one had to go there right away. Yes, if all out-and-out war came between the three: angels, demons, and the païens. Or if you needed a rest after a hard hundred years of work tricking those who deserved it. You could go at any time. It didn’t mean you had to stay, hidden from the world if you didn’t want to . . . sheltered from the tricks and the dangers. The surly girls and fat dogs. The desert wind and an old Indian who never forgot you, no matter if you were coyote or human. The bar fights and the pool games. The red balloons left tied to benches. The fields of spring flowers and the tsunamis that drowned islands beneath the sea. You didn’t have to give up the good, the bad, and the miles and miles of everything else that stretched between.
I mean, where would be the fun in that?
Chapter 16
Getting out of Leviathan turned out to be relatively simple, although none of us knew how to fly a helicopter.
“How old are you? Really?” Griffin asked. “You told us you were twenty-one ten years ago, but you said you’d been looking for Solomon a damn sight longer than that. So that picture you have of your brother in your room, the black and white—”
“Was taken when black and white was your only option, about sixty years ago.” It was Kimano, Leo, and I. Leo had been the raven, as usual. I think he did it to irritate his father who had two ravens of his own, annoying little spies that they were, sitting on Odin’s shoulders. I’d been the coyote in the picture, and it had been the old American Indian who’d recognized me at the gas station yesterday who’d taken the photo for us. It was nice when someone remembered the old ways. I’d given him a red silk bandana for that, clutched in a pointed furry muzzle then. I’d given him a truck for it yesterday.
“And I’m old enough to know you don’t need to know.” I waved my arms at them imperiously to be helped up. “Still young and hot, got it?” The two of them let each other go, reluctantly if my eyes were good, and they were.
“I just liked to think if I’m older than you, that I could finally give you shit instead of the other way around, big sister,” Griffin drawled.
“Look at the ex-demon with his big-boy pants on now,” I snorted. I took his hand and Zeke’s with my other and managed to get upright and stay that way. “It’s not the age of the brain cells, boys; it’s how you use them. Do you want to talk about what you did with yours before you came to Vegas?”
He grimaced. “No.”
“I didn’t think so.” But I let go of his hand to give him a sympathetic rub of his back. It would take a lot of processing to come to grips with being what you imagined to be the worst evil in existence. They actually weren’t. Only the second most evil, but there was no need to get into that and it probably wouldn’t make him feel much better anyway.
We païens had our own version of demons, but oh so much worse.
“So we’re all old. Any of us know how to fly a helicopter?” Zeke said, more to the point than anything Griffin and I had brought up.
“Never needed one. Wind beneath my wings and all that.” I held out my arms beside me and shook my head. “But that’s over. I won’t have my own again for a while.”
“Why?” Griffin took his turn and asked, the thick hair a tangle from the wind of Leo’s flight.
I shrugged a little uncomfortably. “I showed off a little. I didn’t just want Solomon dead. I wanted him afraid, terrified, and I wanted him to suffer. For my brother. I pulled together a lot of forms at once. Too many. My battery has been drained for a while.” I wasn’t sorry I’d done it, but there are consequences for everything. Especially vengeance—big vengeance. I’d known the price. Kimano was worth paying that price.
“Then you’re stuck in your original form?”
I laughed as I touched his gold wing. It felt like silk strung between smooth metal. “This isn’t me. It has been one of my favorite forms though. And I’m only stuck in human form for four or five years or so. It’s not that long.” It wasn’t. Although the human vulnerability rather sucked—no healing, no making wounds disappear as I shifted form. All human. I did like this Trixa though. I’d thought carefully about who she’d be. I’d wanted to be all things, not just one. I wanted to be literally all ethnic varieties on the planet. I might appear mostly Asian and African, but I hadn’t stopped there. You named it and it was in me. Caucasian, Arabic, Polynesian, Aborigine . . . everything. It was rather clever: If there is a pheromone component to race and gender, anyone would be naturally inclined to trust me or be attracted to me, because in a small genetic way, they were family. To have your foot already in the door with everyone you met, what more could a trickster want?
Not that it seemed to work with Leo’s bimbos of the moment. Nothing could penetrate their own Light, their own shield—one of stupidity.
“You can choose any form you want?” Zeke asked curiously. “Why not one with bigger boob—” Griffin elbowed him hard and we were back to where we’d been weeks ago. Zeke without an internal filter and Griffin saving his ass. It was . . . wonderful. The best.
“You better go get your guns out of the helicopter,” I ordered, “if you’re going to talk trash like that, and because the two of you are about to take your first flight. The first one you’ll remember anyway.”
While Zeke cursed inside the copter trying to get the weapons locker open and cursed Leo while he was at it for not waiting to give us a ride, Griffin at my side said quietly, “I’m a demon.”
“No, you were a demon,” I corrected, cupping his face. “You’ve been human since you first came to Vegas to watch over Zeke for literally all of your human lives. That proves that you, Griffin, are one of the most hon orable and truly good men I know.” He opened his mouth, doubt written all over his face. “And,” I added, “you wanted to know how old I am? More than six thousand years old. Old enough to have known many good men. More bad men, but many good ones too. You rank at the top. I promise you that.”
“Hard to imagine how that happened,” he said, frowning at the sight of his own wings.
“You are how it happened. You were given a secon
d chance. With that chance, you chose good, and you chose Zeke. Remember that.” If he didn’t, I’d remind him until it finally took. It might take a lot of work, but I was up for it.
It turned out Zeke and Griffin were up to it as well. Both took an arm and we flew, the wings of a falcon beating in perfect harmony with the wings of a dragon. At the base of the mountain Zeke was grinning, the grin of a happy five-year-old who’d flown his first kite. “This is going to be fun.” He looked at the Colt Anaconda in one hand and his wings and grinned wider. “Really fun.”
“No, no. With flight and massive firepower comes responsibility. The last thing we need is a guided missile with feathers. You’ll have to earn your license first.” I ignored his glare as I went on. “Put the wings away. It’s a fifteen-mile walk back to Rachel. We don’t want any roadside conversions on the way. No shrines, not unless they’re to Elvis. It’s the Nevada law.”
“How?” Zeke touched the feathers over his shoulder with a curious finger and said skeptically, “Seems pretty solid.”
“Just . . .” I hesitated as I thought of the last time I’d talked to a peri, pulling my sleeves down over my hands. Despite the bright winter sun, it wasn’t warm. “Think them away, I guess.” It seemed like that’s what the peri had said. “Tell them to go. They are yours. They should listen.”
It took a few minutes, but they were able to get the hang of it. Copper and gold flickered in and out of existence with glints of gold light until finally they disappeared altogether. Zeke reached over his shoulder and slapped his back. There was nothing but the meaty thump of flesh. “Will they come back? Where’d they go?”
“When you want them to, yes. As for the rest”—I shifted my shoulders in an unknowing shrug—“I’ve no idea. Next time you see a peri, ask him.”
“A peri?” Griffin bent down and picked up a stray red-gold feather of Zeke’s that had fallen to the ground and stayed when the wings had gone.
