by Rob Thurman
It was far too cuddly to call your employees by their first names, but I so rarely heard their last names—Zeke Hawkins, Griffin Reese—that I often had to think twice when I did hear them, just to remember who was being referred to. It was easy to forget. Just like Trinity would be quick to forget them once they were gone. His plans for them weren’t any better than the one he had for me. Regardless of whether they were true double agents on his side and not mine, watching Leo and me for Eden House and ready to help drag us in at any moment, their fates still wouldn’t have been any better. Working with outsiders? That was worse than failure to Trinity. That was treachery, intended or not.
Griffin and Zeke knew they were in trouble, knew they were playing with fire, but I wasn’t sure they knew how far their boss would go. When all was said and done at the end of this, they were the same as demons to their House. We all were.
The greater good, as they saw themselves, didn’t want us.
When I got home just after nightfall, the place was empty. The bar was closed and dark. Leo had hung his version of a Gone Fishing sign on the door—black marker on white cardboard that said GO THE FUCK AWAY. There are men of few words and then there are men of perfect words. Leo was the latter.
I let myself in, waving at a car parked across the street that held two Eden House agents. Trinity’s cover for Zeke and Griffin, and a check because it never paid to trust anyone too much, not even your own “double agents.” Our Mr. Trinity was so untrusting.
Flipping on the light behind the counter, I looked for a note. Not that Leo and I usually kept that close an eye on each other. We knew we could each take care of ourselves, and our social lives weren’t crossing paths. Leo’s taste in women—except for me—didn’t lead to double-dating. Amazons and bimbos with IQs half their cup size. Leo’s bad taste aside, this situation was a little different. I’d asked him to watch Zeke and Griffin. If he had left, there’d be a good reason. There’d be a note.
There was. It was held down by a bottle of bourbon and a shot glass. That wasn’t a good sign. I read it and sighed. I was lucky Leo had applied the antibiotic ointment to my back that morning, because it didn’t look like he’d be here to do it tonight or to bunk on the couch again. I folded the note on the words Family emergency. The dog is loose. Back tomorrow. In a way though, it was a good sign. Leo’s family was reaching out. It might only be to use him, but that was better than the past years of not speaking to or acknowledging him at all. And that dog was mean, mean enough that no one but Leo could deal with it, but mean or not, it was family too. They’d simply have to catch it before it ate anyone.
“Want to share the bourbon?”
I looked up to see Griffin on the stairs. “Still hanging around, you two?”
“Zeke still thinks I’m off my game. Besides, how could Zeke and I send Trixa reports back to Eden House if we’re not here to actually watch you?”
He still looked tired, gray smudges under his eyes. No, Zeke wouldn’t be happy with that, and an unhappy Zeke could rarely be budged. “So your fellow demon hunters outside don’t have a clue, then, I take it?” I retrieved another glass and poured him a shot as he sat down beside me.
“No.” He rolled the glass between his hands, then tossed it back. “You and Leo are damn good at keeping your thoughts and emotions under wraps. The agents outside aren’t as strong as Zeke and I. No one in the House is, and you two are the most self-possessed people I’ve come across. You don’t give off anything you don’t want to give off. I didn’t pick up on you while I was upstairs until you walked through the door. Normally I can pick up on someone I know or a demon a good three blocks away. Even now I’m not sure exactly how things went in San Diego, except you’re not disappointed.”
“I’m not disappointed. You’re right there.” I drank my own shot. “As for giving off thoughts and emotions, having a psychic and an empath hanging around the place will teach you better. Especially when it comes to Zeke. He wouldn’t see the harm in watching my last date in his head like it was rent-a-porn.”
“Your last date was that good, eh?” He held out his glass for another.
“Since the last man in my bed was you, drooling and unconscious, with Zeke nobly defending your virtue, not especially.” I poured, then stretched out the kinks from the two plane rides. My back protested and I gave myself another shot of my own. Purely medicinal.
“I don’t drool.” He tried for outrage, but with his weariness couldn’t quite pull it off.
“Maybe not, but your virtue did survive the night intact,” I pointed out, putting the bourbon away. It might be medicinal for me, but it would only make Griffin more tired. I didn’t need den mother Zeke down here trying to kick my ass.
“Thanks for that, Zeke,” he said glumly.
“He was very cute—in an unsocialized-pit bull kind of way.” I patted him on the back. “Now, pack up your things and move them down to the office. The two of you are sleeping on the couch. I want my bedroom back.”
“I don’t think the two of us are going to fit on your couch,” he said dryly.
“Spoon.” I gave him a light shove toward the stairs. “Or one of you can sleep on the floor. It all depends on how secure in your masculinity you are. Either way, I’m sleeping in my own bed.”
“It’ll be hard to get Zeke to give up all that decadence, but I’ll do my best. And no one is that secure in their masculinity,” he finished as he headed for the stairs.
“I wish I’d taken a picture last night. Curled up like puppies in a basket,” I lied without a qualm. As for Zeke, his appreciation of my décor went as far as cleaning weapons with it.
“You are truly evil.” He disappeared, but I heard the repeated, “Evil,” as he went.
Several seconds later someone added from behind me, “I like that in a woman. Malevolence is good too. Do you have that on tap, Miss Trixa?”
I swiveled on my stool, automatically training the gun pulled from my waistband directly at Eli’s head. He was leaning against the end of the bar and was every inch as I remembered him. Gorgeous and charismatic. Also deceptively deadly, and that didn’t bear forgetting. I didn’t need the take-out box of noodles he held in one hand to remind me.
He used the chopsticks in his other hand to point at the container. “Want some? Best in the world . . . now.”
Was making the ultimate sweet-and-sour worth your soul? I didn’t think so, but apparently the restaurant chef had. “No thanks.” I kept the gun pointed. “If I want food of the damned, I’ll just microwave a Hot Pocket.” Griffin and Zeke didn’t come running down the stairs, shotguns in hand, which meant Eli was as powerful as he said he was—or at least equally as powerful as Solomon. He couldn’t be “seen” by a psychic or empath, no matter how good. He was simply better. Stronger.
“Suit yourself, and I’m assuming you usually do.” He stabbed the chopsticks into the noodles and set the cardboard box on the bar. “I don’t have to ask if you found the next step to the Light. I can see it, glowing around you like a halo, which, by the way, is a huge turnoff.”
“Sorry about that.” Not quite. “Do you have any information for me or are you here for the ambience?”
He looked around at the scarred tables, dartboard, small pool table, TV mounted over the bar and shrugged. “Add a floor of knives and air of pure unholy fire and it’d be just like home. Except for the TV. We don’t have satellite yet. The boonies are always the last to get it.” He peeled off his jacket and tossed it over a stool. “Actually, I’m here to dance.”
Leo’s radio behind the bar came on and jumped from station to station until a slow song came on. “Once again, before your time,” he observed. “A flash from the past, but it’s easy to move to . . . vertically. Horizontally too, if one were in the mood.”
“Which I’m assuming you always are.” I considered the situation, then replaced the gun in the back waistband of my pants. If he wanted to play, I could do that. In fact I was rather good at that. Demon good? I guess w
e’d have to see. “And the halo?”
“I’ll close my eyes.” He gave me that smile, far more warm and intimate than a monster had any right to, as he held out a hand. I took it as he looped an arm around my waist, deftly avoiding my gun. We moved to the music. “Amazing. You can dance like you’re all grown-up.” He whirled me around slowly.
“I’m thirty-one. I’ve been to a dance or two. Hit the floor at weddings with more than one grandpa.”
“Ouch.” He tilted his head down to look at me. “Are you going to hold a million years or so against me?”
He smelled nice, which wasn’t fair. There was no clichéd whiff of the traditional sulfur and brimstone. He smelled clean—like soap and wet spring grass with the faintest trace of ozone. Of lightning and a thunder-storm in the distance, ready to wash over you to bury you in rain and shake the ground like an earthquake. I could play all right, but he wasn’t an amateur by any stretch of the imagination.
“I’ve dated older men before. Age doesn’t matter.” We did another slow turn as I added, “It’s the killing innocent people and the taking of souls I have a problem with.”
“I’m sure they weren’t all innocent. I mean, really, what are the odds of that? Three out of ten might be mostly innocent, I’ll give you that. But all of them? Statistically impossible for the human race.” He dipped me and smiled as he hung over me. “And surely you’re not claiming innocence, Trixa. I see things behind your eyes that tell a different story. A far more interesting story, by the way. Innocence is so boring.”
“Speaking of boring, if you don’t have any information for me, then that’s all you’re doing.” I mirrored his smile, my back twinging from the dip. “Boring the hell out of me.”
“You do make a demon work for his due.” He straightened, pulling me upright, and let go of me. The radio shut off. “When did this demon kill your brother and where? The one you want so badly?”
“If you need that to do your job, you’re not half as good as you say you are.” I sat back down. My back was healing, had healed quite a bit in the past few days, but the dancing hadn’t done it much good. I’d thought of having Whisper heal it when she healed Zeke, but it was just scraped and torn skin already mending on its own. Zeke’s pain had been out of control. My pain was more of an inconvenience. When you find inconveniences too much to handle, then you’ll find life to be exactly the same.
“Oh, I’m good and I’ll find him, but I could find him more quickly if you’d be a little less of a bitch and a little more cooperative.” He said “bitch” the same way he would’ve said “sugar” or “honey” or “darling”—as if it were an endearment. He really was something.
“You’re a straight talker, I’ll give you that. And only that.” I retrieved the bourbon, poured him a shot in my glass, and slid it down the bar about four feet to him. “I’m not here to help you. You’re here to help me . . . that is, if you want the Light. If I make things too easy for you, Eligos, who’s to say you’ll wait for me to find the Light? Who’s to say you won’t try to take me from Trinity and put me on your own leash?”
“Who is to say?” he echoed blandly before he swallowed the shot quickly and smoothly, sitting down himself. “I might be transparent to your eye, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be easier and quicker for both of us.”
“Quick or easy—it doesn’t matter, because it’s not going to happen,” came a new voice, deep and rough.
Which was all we needed to make a party.
Solomon.
He stood by the door, not that he’d needed to use it. His gray eyes were slits. I’d been right when I’d guessed that Solomon wouldn’t care for Eli any more than Eli cared for him. “This is my territory, Eligos. This place is mine. She is mine. You can leave now, whole and intact, or you can leave it in a spray of blood and flesh. A pool of rotting fluid on the floor.” The gray blazed to silver, the first physical hint of demon I’d ever seen in Solomon—the first true loss of temper.
“He’s a cranky son of a bitch, isn’t he?” Eli turned over the shot glass and tapped it once, to all appearances bored. Certainly the farthest thing from intimidated without actually dozing off. “Tell me you never found him entertaining. No one’s taste could be that bad. The brooding. The smoldering. He’d fit in fine on the soap opera channel or a vampire movie, but real life?” He raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “Real sex? You’d be better off with a Ken doll. Same personality, and probably the same equipment.”
I’d felt differently when Solomon had paid me that uninvited visit several nights ago, straddling me in bed. And I do mean felt it. But true or not, it was enough to tip Solomon over the line from temper to rage. I’d never seen him angry; I’d only seen the imitation of it. Solomon didn’t care that much about his club and our arson of it. He played as if he had emotions, because that’s all Solomon had ever done with me—play. With Eli he was serious—the kind of serious that would end with demon blood and entrails on my floor, neither of which could be put right with your average household cleanser.
The fight wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was Solomon pulling a gun from under his jacket and nailing Eli with several shots midchest. The two that should’ve hit him in the head missed and for one reason only, because Eli could move that fast. It was a flicker of brown so quick that my eye only caught an afterimage of it. Caught it from the floor, by the way, where I was crouching below the bullet path. I was good, but I wasn’t a fool.
“Please. You’re kidding, right?” Eli brushed at the front of his shirt that had turned black with demonic blood. “A gun? Oh, I get it. You don’t want the girlfriend to see you for what you really are, warts and all. Or should I say scales and all?” He didn’t move from the stool. Instead he grinned, gloating and smug. “I have news for you, Solomon. She likes that. There’s a whole level to her you didn’t even suspect.” He looked back at me as I waited ready on one knee with my own gun drawn. “What do you say, Trixa? Want to see the real thing fighting over you? You want to see scales and fangs and everything we truly are as we rip each other to shreds?”
First, it wasn’t me they were fighting over. It was the Light. If I forgot that, I’d be another puddle on the floor that Leo would have to Clorox the hell out of. Second, it appeared my system of hell-spawn checks and balances might go all the way to balancing each other out altogether. That wouldn’t do me any good when it came to Kimano’s killer.
Third, Zeke wasn’t going to let any fight go down that he wasn’t part of. He came down the stairs in a rush, followed by Griffin. Both had shotguns, but only Griffin was polite enough to tell me to duck right before they fired. Both went for head shots, the surest way to put a demon down; both missed. And that, that was unheard of. If nothing else, it showed that all the demons we’d killed in Vegas, except for the black ones that had taken Zeke down, were nowhere near as powerful and inconceivably quick as the two that were in my bar now.
Eli swiveled on the stool to take in the two partners. The slugs that should’ve blown through his skull had instead blown through one of the wooden posts that went from counter to ceiling. “Pets, Trixa?” he drawled. “You should have them neutered. Makes them less likely to piss on your rug.”
I ignored him, ignored Zeke and Griffin who were reloading, and looked at Solomon. “What happened to the two guys in the car out front? The two who were watching me.” Why hadn’t they come running at the shots as Zeke and Griffin had?
The silver darkened back to gray and his eyes focused on Eli. “I imagine he killed them. That’s what he does, Trixa. I take the willing souls. He takes it all.”
Eli shrugged. “Right, as if you don’t. But if those two angel ass-wipers are dead out there, Solomon did it. He likes easy targets, the fish-in-the-barrel types. Lazy, lazy. I prefer a challenge.”
“Liar.” Solomon had let his gun fall to the floor. That he had even tried the weapon meant he hadn’t known Eli was equally as good as he was. He’d suspected maybe, but he hadn’t known. From the animosit
y between them, it couldn’t be their first battle, but it could be their first one in human form. Solomon could’ve thought he’d have the advantage there for some reason, or that he’d simply surprise Eli with something as outrageous as an actual human weapon. If that were the case, he’d been wrong.
“Of course I’m a liar. I’m a demon, just like you, Solomon. Or have you played human so long, you’ve forgotten what you really are? Pathetic.” He turned his gaze on me as I slowly stood from my crouched position. “If those men out there were sliced and diced by yours truly, I wouldn’t deny it. I’d brag on it. I might lie about most things, like all good demons, but I never lie about my body count or the notches on my bedpost. Some things are sacred. Right, darlin’?”
“I don’t notch my bedpost.” I put my gun away. It wouldn’t have done me any good anyway. “I cut off their tackle and hang it from my rearview mirror.”
“Damn, you must taste great,” Eli said with admiration. The trouble with that admiration was I didn’t know if he thought I would taste great sexually or in a culinary sense. Probably both.
“Go. Get out. The both of you. I’m tired and going to bed. Alone.” I stood up. “And one of you take the bodies and the car with you. I’ve had my fill of cops around here.”
“Bossy, bossy, bossy,” Eli sighed as he slid off the stool. “Rather fun being on the receiving end of it for once.” He passed a hand over his shirt and it was pristine again. “I’ll take the car. Like I said, the Chinese doesn’t stay with you. Not when you have an appetite like mine.” If anyone was going to have the last sexual innuendo, it was going to be Eli. He waved a hand and went to the door and through it, passing so close to Solomon that their shoulders brushed. Solomon briefly bared his teeth in a snarl; then his eyes met mine intently for several seconds before he silently disappeared.
“I should’ve opened a women’s shoe store. Demonic visitors don’t just drop into a women’s shoe store.” I went and locked up.