Trick of the Light

by Rob Thurman

  Like he protects you. I understood perfectly. “Okay. No problem.” I waited for him to offer to sleep in the tub since Leo was still sleeping on the couch downstairs. And I kept waiting. Finally, I said, “How about I sleep with Griffin and you take the tub and some blankets.”

  “No.” He went for one of his knives this time, one from an ankle holster, and began polishing it—with my bedspread. My expensive, well-loved bedspread.

  “Zeke . . .”

  “No.” This time he scowled. “He’s my partner. I’ll guard him. Understand?”

  Indeed I did. More than he himself, I thought. I looked at the tub and grumbled under my breath. I really was too softhearted for my own good . . . no matter how many demons I’d killed. I grabbed blankets, enough for a thick pseudomattress and one to cover me. I also took a pillow and climbed in. It was a huge, roomy tub, but it still wasn’t a bed. “You owe me, you know?” I told Zeke over the edge before pulling the curtain and changing into pajamas.

  “I know,” he answered without emotion. “I owe you everything I have in my life. I won’t ever forget that.”

  “But I still can’t sleep with Griffin?” I groused, as I tried to find a comfortable position.

  “No.” This time he sounded faintly amused. I pushed the curtain back and peered over the porcelain edge just in time to see the small smile disappear.

  Sneaky dog. I curled up in the fetal position, felt for the gun under my pillow, and dozed off. Whether Zeke slept at all I wasn’t sure, but when I woke up in the morning he was in the same position and this time cleaning my weapons. At least he wasn’t using my bedspread this round. It was an improvement. I don’t, as a rule, get attached to things. That was the way of the traveler, but I’d been in Vegas longer than I’d been anywhere else. Things started to creep in. Bedspreads. Whimsically carved beds. A large hunk of amber encasing a trapped spider from long ago. That was actually to remind me. I might be in a cage now, one of my own making, but I’d get out eventually, when I’d accomplished everything I’d set out to do. Then again, the amber was a particularly fine orange-gold. Like being cradled by the sun—comfortable and warm. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to stick around a place for a while. Oh, hell, what was I thinking?

  I’d been here ten years. That was a record for my family. Apparently it was taking a toll on my sanity, along with everything else that was going on. I was a wanderer, born and bred. I had to give it up temporarily for the Light and for Kimano, but I’d wander again. It was my nature, and natures don’t change. Hair color, breast size, houses, cars, schools, and jobs—all of it changed. Every second of every day there was change, but never the spots. You were born with spots and you died with the exact same ones.

  I looked at Griffin and Zeke. Then again, there was always the occasional exception to trip you up.

  “He’s still not up?” I climbed out of the tub, the wrinkles falling out of the silk pajamas as I stood.

  “No.” He sat there with two of my guns in my lap; his hands had stopped moving. “Maybe he’d rather stay where he is. I’m nothing more than a damn anchor around his neck.”

  He sounded defeated and angry and neither emotion was like Zeke. There were long stretches where someone who didn’t know him would wonder if he had any emotion at all. He did. He just kept it buried in a dark place, a place I thought was probably host to cold bathwater and a drowned baby. The way he was showing it now was an indication of how truly upset he was.

  “You’re his friend, Zeke, and you’re his purpose. He’s lucky to have you, more than you know. Knowing your true purpose in life, that’s a miracle.” I padded over to the bed. “I’ll show you.” I put a hand on Griffin’s shoulder and shook him. “Wake up, sleepy-head.”

  His head was turned on the pillow facing Zeke. His eyes flickered instead of snapping open immediately, evidence of his exhaustion, but when they did open, they fixed on Zeke first and foremost. They showed instant relief; then he frowned. “Is it morning? Have you had breakfast?”

  Zeke returned to the guns as if he hadn’t been worried, as if he didn’t even know what worry was, but I saw his jaw relax. “No. I was cleaning Trixa’s guns.”

  The frown intensified. “Did you eat supper last night?”

  “No. I was cleaning my guns. Guns are more important than food.”

  Griffin sat up. “You woke me up and made me eat something. I wouldn’t call it food, but it was microwaved, so I’m guessing you would.”

  “That was lunch. I couldn’t wake you up for supper. And someone has to take care of you. You’re weak and frail,” Zeke said with a sardonic twist of his lips—there and gone so quickly you could convince yourself that you imagined it. “Like a little girl. You asked for a pudding cup.”

  “I did not,” Griffin growled. Griffin of the fine food and fine clothes, who had given up the pedestrian things of a foster child life the moment Eden House had showered him with money. The words “pudding cup” almost literally horrified him. We all do our best to deal in different ways.

  “All this codependency is bringing a tear to my eye, but get up and go eat, the both of you,” I ordered. “At the diner around the corner. I’m ready for a little alone time.” I hadn’t had any in quite a few days. I wanted it, I needed it, and despite them obeying me, I still didn’t get much.

  Fifteen minutes after Griffin and Zeke had gone, Leo was calling for me. I came down the stairs to see Mr. Trinity and his entourage. I was still in my pajamas, but while silk, they covered me neck to ankle. I doubted it would’ve made any difference if I’d come down stark naked or with tasseled pasties rotating like propellers. I didn’t think Mr. Trinity was into sex . . . with either gender. He was an asexual pillar of ice. I didn’t even know that I was a person to him instead of just a thing to accomplish his goal. It seemed all of him, every speck, molecule, iota, belonged to his Creator. His focus lay in serving him and only him. And pardon my political incorrectness, but it was creepy as hell. What was worse was imagining how he might feel if he knew God wasn’t giving him his orders . . . angels were, angels who were using him as a windup tin soldier and didn’t necessarily have a clue as to what God wanted.

  “You’ve had your time,” he said, charcoal suit impeccably tailored. “Where is the next signpost?”

  “Orange juice,” I told Leo, who was standing behind the bar. He poured and handed it to me and I was grateful for the slug of vodka he’d included. He was a man who really knew how to read a woman, especially one who wasn’t particularly a morning person when the night before was spent in the bathtub. I drank the squat glass down and sighed. Better. I turned back to Mr. Trinity with his four men dressed a little more casually, although certainly not Zeke-casual, but enough for fighting demons if they had to. “San Diego. The next bread crumb is in San Diego.”

  “We leave this afternoon. I’ll have someone pick you up at four,” he said flatly. Then he turned and, followed by his loyal dogs, was gone.

  I sat on a bar stool and raised my eyebrows. “If only my trips to the gynecologist were that quick and efficient.”

  “On that note, I’m going to balance the books and puncture my eardrums.” Leo tossed his towel onto the bar. “Do you want me to come to San Diego with you?”

  “No. I’ll be surrounded by Eden House’s second best and most anal.” I tried for the dregs of the OJ. “I’ll most likely be safe from our downstairs neighbors. Will you be okay? I’m leaving Zeke and Griffin to stay here with you. Considering the time they’ve had, their place might not be the best place for them. Besides, they can act as your bodyguards,” I teased.

  “Don’t insult me.” He snorted. “You want me to look after them, I take it? You’re aware my paycheck doesn’t cover babysitting.”

  “Pretend they’re family.” I handed him the glass and he put it in the dishwasher.

  “You do remember how I got along with my family in the days when they were still speaking to me?” he asked wryly.

  True. His family was definit
ely not my family. They lived at one another ’s throats and Leo was the worst of them all. Or he had been. He’d changed over the years. Well, not changed so much as mellowed a few thousand degrees. Same spots but greatly faded. I hoped one day they would give him a chance to prove that. But the bad blood between Leo and his father was very bad indeed. Bile, black and acidic. That kind of burn would take a long time to cool. Either that or a catastrophe.

  Later, I’d be thinking how hindsight was such the bitch.

  “Someday”—I pulled at the black braid that trailed down his chest—“someday they’ll see you for what you are now . . . if I have to kick the ass of each and every one. I promise.”

  “That might be the one thing that does it. They fear you almost as much as they did me.” He returned the favor by wrapping one of my messy curls around his finger. “And with good reason.”

  “You always were one with a compliment.” I slapped his chest and ordered, “And treat Zeke and Griffin like my family, then, not yours.” I told him this, but I didn’t need to. Leo had treated them just that way, just as I had, from day one. Strays who needed help; strays who’d become adopted family because if we didn’t do it, no one else would. And honestly no one else was as qualified as we were. Just because I sold information that occasionally led to the end of a rotten, cheating, and abusive soul didn’t mean I also didn’t have sympathy for those who deserved it.

  Although these days, fewer and fewer seemed to. Maybe it was the crowd I’d started running with. Demons and the lackeys of angels. I was no one’s lackey.

  And despite what Mr. Trinity thought when he arrived to pick me up, I certainly wasn’t his.

  Chapter 10

  The House had their own jet. No surprise there. It was only a four-hour drive, but I suspected the last thing Mr. Trinity wanted was to be cooped up in a car, no matter how large and opulent, for that long with a bar owner. An annoyingly low-class bar owner with unsuitably tousled waves of streaked hair, equally unsuitable red jacket and pants, and the rude habit of demanding food and pomegranate martinis on an hour-long flight.

  At least Eden House had connections far above and beyond the government, because I boarded their plane without showing ID and carrying my gun. And a few knives. I could’ve carried in a shotgun if I’d wanted. I didn’t want. I wanted another martini, but we landed before I was able to order one. Mr. Trinity hadn’t exchanged one word during the flight. His second in command, along for the ride, Jackson Goodman, was less restrained. “Greed and gluttony,” he said disapprovingly. “While we’re on . . .”

  “A mission from God?” I smiled winningly. Old movies, I loved them. I’d been waiting a long time to use that line with Eden House.

  After that, Goodman didn’t speak to me anymore while we were on the plane. It was for the best. He annoyed me, and I couldn’t spare the concentration right now to think of ways to annoy him back. Not that he didn’t think that I annoyed him already. Poor Jackie. He had no idea what I could do if I put my mind to it. But there was a time for everything.

  We disembarked in San Diego to blue skies, the imagined smell of the ocean, and a slowly falling sun. I liked San Diego. I liked the cold, salty ocean, the wet sand, Old Town, the Gaslamp Quarter, the seals flapping and snorting seawater. It was a great place to visit, a great place to live if you could afford it, and apparently a great place to drop a bread crumb. That face, that name, their plans . . . someone had visited the aquarium in Vegas and stared at a particular shark through the glass—and that someone had ended up here. They had good taste.

  Maybe I could pack in a minivacation while scooping up a tiny portion of the Light. I ignored the diesel fumes on the tarmac and turned toward the ocean. It wasn’t in view, but I could imagine it. Now, if I actually could get to see it and eat seafood on the docks, it would be a great day. A fabulous day.

  I wasn’t holding my breath.

  “Where is the next step?” Mr. Trinity said behind me, his voice the drip of a frigid icicle. I’d be willing to bet his greatest regret was that he hadn’t been born in the time of the Inquisition or witch burning. Not that Eden House was Catholic . . . they were an order of their own making, unknown by the public, unaffiliated, and were around before BC clicked over to AD. Ancient indeed.

  “I’m not exactly sure. Sharks aren’t as verbal in their communication as people, even with the Light’s help. It took me a while to get his name, Butch—so imaginative—but I can’t get a last name. But I did get this general location. . . . I know he’s here. Somewhere. I’m just not exactly sure where.” I saw it again, a blurry vision of the man through water and a thick layer of glass. Almost unwillingly he’d put his hand up to the glass and the shark had rested its blunt nose on the other side. The trail to the Light had passed. The picture was waving in my head like seaweed—a man, not a very attractive one. He looked like the kind of man who’d toss a hair dryer into his ancient mother’s bathtub to get a measly inheritance—just enough to buy a truly gorgeous guitar. He’d find a band, then, who would take him. They’d all see. I could see the frayed towels, the rubbery flowers on the bottom of the tub to keep the elderly from slipping. A big ratty hair dryer from the eighties bought for twenty-five cents at a yard sale. A smirking grandson who’d kill a neighborhood cat if he could catch it. Sparks flying. The lights going out.

  I’m known for my imagination.

  Then again, knowing he was in a band wasn’t my imagination. The shark told me that, the Light told me that, the same as it told me to go here. So it could be that Grandma had shuffled off her mortal coil just as I pictured it.

  Butch’s smirk in the aquarium had been combined with dyed black hair, a narrow face, weasel eyes, and silver canine teeth flashing in an uneasy grimace as the smirk slid away. Hard to blame him. It wasn’t every day a shark shoved something into your brain. Drugs, it had to be the drugs; I could hear the echo of the thought through the Light. He moved away from the glass, snarling and showing those inlaid silver ca nines again. See? Look at me. It’s just a stupid shark. I’m not scared of it or the cold, saltwater thoughts in my head.

  I saw him brush by a man with a two-year-old tucked in his arms. The little boy looked at the silver teeth and whimpered. “Bogeyman.”

  Oh, sugar, I thought with sympathetic amusement, not hardly. Here’s hoping that’s the worst thing you see in your life, that pathetic monster wannabe.

  “We need to go that way.” I pointed. “Toward the Gaslamp Quarter. He’s there somewhere.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?” Goodman spoke up stiffly for the first time in forty minutes. Dressed in a suit an undertaker would’ve found darkly grim, with washed-out blue eyes and hair neither brown nor blond, he barely looked like a human being at all. More of a wax figure that didn’t make the grade and was tossed to molder in Madame Tussaud’s basement. In every way, he was far more frightening than the wannabe with the black hair and silver teeth. That guy had an identity, as pathetic as it was. Goodman looked like an identity vampire. Like he would suck up the essence of everything that made you you, to fill up the hollow figure he was . . . fill up what he was missing inside. What was he missing? From the looks of him and the shimmer of what seemed like almost a vacuum around him, that might just be every single thing that made a human human.

  “I’m not a bloodhound. Get me closer and hopefully I’ll get more specific. Or the Light will.”

  By the time the hired car took us to the Gaslamp Quarter, I did have it narrowed down. Unfortunately it wasn’t in one of the great seafood restaurants, but rather the looming presence of Petco Stadium. There was a concert coming up in two hours and the teenagers were already rowdy, shouting and cursing good-naturedly as the line curved around the stadium.

  Goodman flashed his ID—CIA, FBI, Homeland Security; whatever Eden House provided him with got us through the door and past the crowds. I took the lead, a glowing thread reeling me in. I walked through the circular halls and past security guards and bodyguards, all who steppe
d back as if whatever laminated card Goodman continued to flash was kryptonite. Several bands were playing here tonight and our goth emo-imitation monster from the aquarium was no doubt in one of them. Finally reaching a door relatively untrampled by headset-wearing men and women who seemed frantic just for the love of the emotion, I opened the door without knocking. No one would’ve heard me anyway. It was a party. Drugs, alcohol, and underage girls galore. I grabbed a beer from a table and waded in. I looked over my shoulder to see that Mr. Trinity and his entourage had decided to wait in the hall out of the crush. Wimps. Demons they’d take on. Sweaty, half-naked, puking groupies were a little too much for them.

  I moved through the room, ears deafened by bad music—this band’s music. Had to be. I came to an unconscious guy on the floor and bent for a closer look. Not my guy, not Butch. I stepped over him and kept going. I finally found the weasel on a couch with four women, two sandwiched on either side of him. He looked unbearably smug and rapacious. He thought he was a predator surrounded by his prey—a ferret with small, silver fangs.

  Since the couch was full, I plopped on his lap and flashed him a smile, wide, sexy, and stupid as they came. “Hi.” I had to fit in with everyone else for the few seconds this was going to take. I needed him to hold still. The passing of the way to the Light was dis orienting. I didn’t need him having a shark/aquarium flashback and freaking out. Then I’d have to knock him unconscious and that was more work than I wanted to invest in.

  “Hey,” he said back, trying to fake being bored and cool during our scintillating, monosyllabic conversation.

  I reached a hand up and touched his hair as if I were going to comb my fingers through the limp strands. Instead, I clamped my fingers on the curve of his skull and let the shining bit of Light pass into me. It poured out of the drug-soaked brain into mine. It was like before, running to the edge of the cliff and jumping, arms spread. Flying for a split second, and then falling. Falling and falling. Forever. On top of whatever drugs he was on, it had to be ten times worse for him than for me. His mouth dropped open. He gurgled, then started to yell. I slammed my hand over the chapped, cracked lips of his mouth. Kissing him would’ve been more convincing to those around us.