by Rob Thurman
“Yes, a peri. Zeke is a peri now. I think.” I started walking down the dusty road. “Not that I’ve run into one like him before. All other peris have Heaven’s stamp of approval on their green cards. Mythology says peris are half angel, half demon. Remember this, guys,” I said firmly, “mythology is most often wrong. Sometimes it’s close, but in the end never completely right.” I hooked my arms through theirs and pulled them close for warmth. “Some angels who lived on Earth among humans for hundreds or thousands of years, watching, doing whatever it is they did, they tended to want to stay on Earth when it was their time to go home. They’d get a taste of free will and the native life. So they’d ask permission to ‘retire’ . . . to become expatriates of Heaven, if you will. I emphasize they asked permission; they didn’t give Heaven the metaphorical finger like Zeke did.”
Zeke didn’t look sorry. He actually looked rather pleased with himself. “What’s Griffin?”
“I don’t know. What the hell, for once we’ll close our eyes and buy into a little mythology. Griffin can be a peri too—the demon half instead of the angel one. He’d be the only one I’d ever heard of.” I pulled them closer, more body heat. “Which makes you as special as you always thought you were, at least from the way you dress. If Eden House doesn’t rebuild in Vegas, you’ll lose the bit paycheck and be shopping at Wal-Mart, Mr. Metrosexual, and then what will you do?”
Griffin started to stay something indignant but let it go as I leaned against his arm. “God, trickster, demon,” he said. “Trickster trumps a demon, eh?”
“Mmmm.” I rested my head on his shoulder and yawned.
“Especially a pissed-off trickster?” he continued.
“Especially,” I agreed wearily with another heavy yawn and a desire to eat the nearest buffet in its entirety. No sharing. I’d carb loaded at breakfast for all the changing I knew I’d do, all the energy I’d need. Now I was drained, had a fifteen-mile walk ahead of me, and couldn’t decide whether I’d rather sleep for days or eat for hours. Too bad I couldn’t do both at the same time.
By the time we made it back to Rachel, population less than a hundred, I gave up on the idea of “borrowing” a car and heading back to Vegas. We stopped at the Little A’Le’Inn. With Area 51 being so close, aliens were the only tourist attraction and business that kept this tiny town going. The inn’s restaurant didn’t have the buffet I’d been wanting to devour from beginning to end. I settled for five burgers, five sides of fries, and three milkshakes. I’d have to start watching it from now on. I couldn’t just melt the fat away anymore or turn it into more hair or height. I sighed and enjoyed my final burger to every last bite.
“So, your sanctuary—you called it the Hearth?” Griffin fiddled with his tuna on toast. He didn’t seem too enthralled with it. He was more into sushi or the expensive restaurants.
“The Hearth.” I nodded, and dipped a fry in ketchup. “I was for Haven myself and Sanctuary is far too clichéd, but we had a committee and voted. You never heard so much bitching over a name. And some of the members kept trying to eat the other—” I stopped at the look in Griffin’s eyes. It wasn’t panic. It wasn’t fear. It was the resignation of “Here comes yet one more nightmare in the world.” He didn’t need that, knowing the whole of what lived in the shadows of this world. He was dealing with enough.
“All different kinds of tricksters, you know?” I changed smoothly. “We don’t always get along.” I finished my fry hastily.
“So it’s just angels, demons, and what did you call your kind? Païens?”
“Drink your juice. It’s good for you,” I ordered. “Yes, angels, demons, and the païens.” As we tricksters tended to call all the supernatural creatures that inhabited the world. But Zeke and Griffin didn’t need to peek that far under the covers into the dark. Demons were enough, especially with them coping with their new lives. Humans with wings, telepathy, and empathy . . . the Light had left them all three. Whether they would live as long as the other peris did . . . thousands and thousands of years, I didn’t know. If not . . . a gray-haired Zeke in a rocking chair with a marmalade cat in his lap, shooting at the annoying neighborhood kids with a BB gun might be amusing. I almost choked at the mental picture.
“Will you be leaving now? Will you be taking off and leaving us like you always said you would?” Zeke demanded, grabbing Griffin’s sandwich when his partner didn’t make any progress on it. He gave me a similar look, as if he wanted to grab on to me the same way and keep me there.
I always had said it to the boys, warned them, although I hadn’t known exactly what would happen to them when this was over. I’d hoped I could save them. The Light had done more than hope. The Light and my guys had saved themselves.
I was a traveler. Travel came with the job. Very few of us settled down in one spot long. I’d avenged Kimano. I doubted Hell’s lapdog, Trinity, had told the other Houses about Griffin and Zeke letting me hunt with them. I doubted he’d told any other House anything at all in those last days. I thought they’d be safe. They could stay here with a new Eden House or have my bar or come with me if they wanted. Or . . .
Or I could stick around awhile. It was only four or five years. I still had my bar, still had my business on the side; I could still even do my trickster work. I didn’t have to change form to do that. It made things much easier if I’d been able to, definitely, but I could do it.
“Who knows?” I sucked up the last of the strawberry shake. “I might stay around . . . if you stop shooting up my bar. What’s the difference between ten years and fourteen or fifteen? I can see it. Kicking demon ass with you guys for a while longer.” It was hard to take brothers for granted when you’d already lost one. I was born to travel, but I was born into a family too, and then I’d chosen one of my own. I’d gotten used to them. Stay in one place long enough and that’ll happen. Mama would be so disappointed in me, but, you know what? Mama could kiss . . . Get over it, I changed hastily in my mind. What I’d done to Solomon, Mama could do to me and call it a spanking for a dirty mouth. “Maybe I will stick around and hunt demons with you guys. It’s good exercise.”
Zeke took in the five empty plates. “You’re going to need it if you keep shoveling it down like a starved hippo.”
I didn’t stab him with my fork, but it was a close call. “I have to crash. Let’s get one of the motel rooms, because I have about five minutes before I go comatose for at least a day.”
It was a lovely hotel room. I fell face-first on the nearest bed. Actually it could’ve been the grotto at Hef’s mansion for all I knew. I didn’t know if there were pictures of flying saucers on the wall or soap shaped like an alien’s head or a shag carpet that devoured small pets. Nothing registered but sleep and the vaguely distant grumbling of Zeke and Griffin standing beside the other twin bed, all that was available.
“I’m tired of being the big spoon.”
“You’re taller than I am. It just works that way.”
It went on from there I was sure, but I was long gone, so buried under a blanket of sleep that an entire horde of demons couldn’t have woken me up. But what felt like a week later later, the squabbling that put demonic cursing into perspective did.
“You could’ve slept in the bathtub.”
“You could have too, partner. Might have earned you some more halo points. You can’t throw omelets at the cook. Hot melted cheese is like napalm. The guy will probably need skin grafts.” Griffin’s hand was on my shoulder shaking lightly.
“He spit in it.” I imagined Zeke’s eyes narrowing. Telepathy had always given Zeke more reasons to be cranky than he usually had—as if he needed more. “I ‘heard’ it. Because he thought I was rude.”
“You are rude.”
“So? He was an ugly son of a bitch who cheats on his wife and I didn’t spit on him.”
“No. You just scarred him for life with a molten-hot dairy product.”
All of which made perfect sense and that could only mean I needed more food and a shower. I s
at up and saw nothing but black, bronze, and russet tangles. Swearing, I swept back the mop of hair and asked Griffin, “How long has it been?”
“About twenty hours. And we’ve got to be out in another two. Big alien convention in town. Thirty whole people. They’re booked solid.” He handed me a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast. “No spitting on this one, I swear.”
“Good to know.” I took a big bite of greasy diner scrambled eggs, greasier bacon, and loved every second of it.
“Is Leo coming back?”
I looked up at Zeke and took pity on his foodless state. Handing him my toast, I answered, “I don’t know. Loki . . . Leo’s not as much of a wanderer as I am. He’s a trickster not by race but by choice, by calling, and he’s been at odds with his family for a long time. Now that it sounds like he made up with them when he went back to catch the dog, he might want to stay with them awhile.”
“The dog?” Griffin said grimly. “He left us in that clusterfuck to go home and catch a dog?”
“Well, Fenris is a little more than just a dog.” I took another bite of eggs. “He might not be able to swallow the sun like Norse legend says, but he could wipe out a few hundred—maybe thousand—people if he made it to civilization. And he only likes Leo, so, there you go.” I wiped my hands on the napkins Griffin had brought. “Anyway, I don’t know if Leo will want to go back for some family time or not. It’s up to him. He’s been with me ten years straight now. He might need a break.”
“He’ll come back,” Zeke said as he ate the toast, looking not the slightest less lethal in his new black T-shirt that read AREA 51—DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED, the sentiment emblazoned beneath the words by a small green alien in army camos and aiming an M-16. “He will,” he reiterated with a confidence that couldn’t be shaken. “I know it.”
Because Leo had to come back. Because the four of us were family, belonged together, and Zeke couldn’t see it any other way.
“Maybe so, Kit.” I deposited my plate on the bed, kissed the top of his copper hair where he sat on the next bed, and headed for the bathroom. “I need fifteen minutes. Either of you gentlemen up to ‘borrowing’ a car?” I peered around the bathroom door. Two rooms shared one bathroom, but I’d lucked out. Whoever had rented the other room was out alien hunting or practicing his Klingon at the café. “But only from someone who deserves it.”
An hour later we were on the road, listening to static, which was more entertaining than country music, and riding in the saddest Winnebago I’d ever seen. But per Zeke, the owner had been the worst kid-slapping, wife-beating, cheating-on-his-taxes, drunken bastard in Rachel, Nevada. If he thought getting his Winnebago ripped off was just deserts, he had no idea whom he was screwing with. Within a week he’d be in prison—the bad kind where he’d learn what it was like to be a beaten wife himself.
“So this guy deserved it,” Griffin mused as he drove. “Who else has deserved it lately? You didn’t retire from being a trickster while looking for the Light, did you? That doesn’t seem like you.”
I slid down in the passenger seat and tried to look sheepish, but I couldn’t. I quirked my lips. “Well, there was the zoo.”
Zeke leaned forward. “The zoo? Where the wolves ate the perv? Really?”
I was amused by his excitement. “It wasn’t hard to get him over by the wolf habitat. Very secluded. He did seem pretty surprised that such a little girl could toss him over a fence that high and convince a wolf pack that they were hungrier than they thought they were. I left my signature: the red balloon tied to the bench.”
“That truck of red paint overturning on the road crew that did nothing for weeks in a row but sit on their asses.” Griffin shook his head. “You didn’t go ahead and tip it all the way over the overpass and crush them?”
I frowned. “They were lazy, not evil. The punishment matches the crime. I’m fair. Mostly.” I switched off the radio. “Then there was the guitarist. I electrocuted him, but gave the credit to Trinity and Heaven. That had that bastard’s eyes crossing in confusion.” I tapped my finger on the glass of the window. “That the guitar happened to be red was just the perfect touch. If I were a church-going woman”—which by now I thought was apparent was not the case—“I would’ve thought it a sign from the angel factory.” I stopped tapping and pointed up.
“You electrocuted him?” Griffin hissed, swerving around a desert tortoise in the road. “Why?”
“Was it a bad song?” Zeke added helpfully. “Did he suck?”
“No.” I groaned, reached, and pushed his face back. “He threw a toaster in his mother ’s bath for the insurance money. Probably paid for that guitar with it. He had it coming.”
“So you’re judge, jury, and executioner.”
Griffin . . . how he had become so damn good, I would never know. It was a miracle, if you believed in those things, but now he was irritating me with his Eagle Scout tone. I pinched his ribs. “Yes, I am. Just like the two of you were . . . the executioner part anyway.”
He shut up after that. There wasn’t much he could say to it. We all choose . . . for good or for bad, and we all pay the piper. There were simply a lot more of us pipers out there than he was able to remember. “What about Eligos?” he said quietly after several minutes. “If he knows you’re human, even if only for a couple of years . . .”
“I know,” I said, brooding. “It’s going to be a long few years if he hangs around.” Long for him, maybe not so much for me. Eligos would make me his personal project of pain and torture if he found out I wasn’t the same Trixa from the cave. God, trickster, demon . . . human. I’d tumbled a few ranks. I might still be trickster at heart, but the body was human for now.
“I have a feeling he will stay. Take over Vegas now that Solomon is dead.”
“I have a feeling you’re right,” I agreed with my Eagle Scout, and a very glum and disagreeable feeling it was too. “Vegas seems like Eli’s kind of town. So how about we not let him know about me being more or less human, although one with amazing taste and style. I really don’t want to end up a notch on his impaling post.”
That ended the conversation for a while as I reassured myself silently that I was a trickster. No one could outthink me, manipulate me, lie to me, fool me, and no one but no one could trip me up on a lie of my own. Eli would believe I could turn him into a Solomon PEZ dispenser if the mood struck me, because I wouldn’t let him think anything else.
An hour from Vegas, Zeke had sprawled in the back of the Winnebago and was snoring lightly. I slid in an old-style cassette tape and listened to ABBA. Yes, the wife beater listened to ABBA. I ejected it hurriedly and started digging in the floor for something a little less nauseating and much more current. “I’m curious,” I said to Griffin as I kicked the garbage around. “I’ve never measured you, but I think Zeke is taller. So does that make him the big spoon?”
He didn’t give me the cold shoulder or the frozen blue eyes, which rather worried me. He just kept driving, hands flexing on the steering wheel. “I’m a demon,” he said suddenly. “After all I’ve seen them do, and that’s what I turn out to be? A killer, a stealer of souls, a monster?”
“You’re not a demon.” I sat up. I was surprised it had taken him this long to crack. Griffin, always in control . . . calm, collected, ready, but no one was ready for this.
“Fine. I was a demon then. I was a murderer, a soul eater, a hell-spawn,” he said bitterly, keeping his voice low so as not to wake our napping ex-angel. The last thing he wanted Zeke doing was worrying about his partner’s mental health. Zeke’s security in his own mental health wasn’t that high.
“No. You are not a demon and you weren’t a demon. Glasya-Labolas is dead. You killed him and you killed every horrific deed he ever did. You’re Griffin Reese. You were born at the age of ten with a few false memories of parents who abandoned you and you were born human. A human with extra empathy, but lots of humans are born that way. They made you all human, or an angel would’ve known. Just as they made Zeke all
human, or a demon would’ve known. Only a trickster like me or a god like Leo had known. Switching your body whenever you cared to taught you to see when a change had been made in others. The low can’t recognize the high-level, but a high-level can recognize any angel or demon of equal or lower rank.” I rested my hand on his tense leg. “You were and are human. Because you chose to be,” I finished quietly. “Then when Solomon pushed the demon back into you in the cave, you still chose to be human, you still chose to be a man, and you still chose to be good. And if that’s not the greatest accomplishment since the world appeared out of the darkness, I don’t know what is.”
I squeezed his leg and let go with a pat. “I don’t know that I could’ve done it. I honestly don’t. To give up all that power, to become something a demon has nothing but contempt for?”
“But you did.” His fingers relaxed on the steering wheel. “Not the contempt, but you gave up your power for your brother. Not for as long maybe, but you gave it up. Sometimes there are things . . . people worth giving it up for.” He automatically turned his head to check on a still-sleeping Zeke.
“Big spoon or little spoon?” I asked coyly.
“Oh, shut up,” he shot back, but not as crossly as I’d expected, and when I put in the cassette,of the Eighties’ Greatest Hits, the best the floor had to offer, he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel along in time with “Duran Duran . . . Yes, Duran Duran.” Those were the days. They all were the days.
“An old Sicilian proverb says, ‘Only the spoon knows what is stirring in the pot,’ ” I said with a grin. “So what’s cooking?”
“On-the-bench trickster or annoyed peri with a Lou isville Slugger, who ranks there?” He gave his lips a none-of-your-business quirk as he patted the bat leaning against his door.
“Truthfully, I don’t know.” I smiled and leaned my seat back farther, ready to join Zeke in a nap. “Who could say?”
Me.
I could say.
On the bench or not. Griffin’s memories—or those of the demon Glasya—were gone because the demon was gone. But my memories? I still had them. Six thousand years of doing bad things to very bad people. Not to mention some of the best tricksters in the world couldn’t change shape. . . . In fact there is one race of tricksters who all have the same shape—clones of one another. One of them had actually ruled Greece for a while, although most were car salesmen now. I’d be damned if I let a puck like Robin Goodfellow think he was better than I was. Eli didn’t stand a chance.