Rob Thurman - The Grimrose Path

I sent only the clients I thought tough enough to hear what they wanted to know to him. Not like little lost Anna. Her type I would never send to be gobbled up by Galileo Riogas. I smiled at him. “What a funny one you are. I like a man who makes me laugh.” Four thousand dollars my gym-aching ass. Let’s see how much of a shark he could be when he met the real thing. “And I do love to laugh.” I put my elbows on the table, rested my chin in cupped hands, and asked him to do something I never had before—not in the days when I’d been undercover. “Why don’t you see how I laugh, Galileo? In my eyes. Look. See how I laugh.” My smile widened. “See why I laugh.”

And he did look . . . because he had no idea what he was looking into.

Dark brown eyes widened to show the jaundiced yellow around them. His sausage fingers gripped the table hard. His voice struggled from a tight throat, and I think if he could’ve kept the words to himself he would have. But he wasn’t strong enough. “I see . . . forests. Mountains. Deserts. Seas. I see animals with your eyes. I see . . . What is that?” He tried to close his eyes, but it didn’t work out for him. “It floats. It floats like water come to life, with a thousand fireflies swimming in it, every color there is. It’s heading for the sky, an iridescent phoenix.” That was very poetic of him. Who knew he had that rattling around in his heartless lump of a body?

No human, no one that wasn’t family, except for Leo, had ever seen me. The true me—as I’d been born. For tricksters it was our last line of defense—the ultimate truth beyond all our trickery. It was sacred, putting the face on all of our lies. Showing the man behind the curtain in the merry old land of Oz. I let this lump see mine because I wanted immediate and total cooperation . . . and because the image likely had fried that bit of his brain. He wouldn’t remember for more than a minute at most.

He’d shut his eyes for a second time, succeeding for a moment, but they wouldn’t stay closed. He didn’t want to see, but at the same time he did. Curiosity, it didn’t just take out the cats. People were far worse when it came to being nosy. Galileo, no cat and as nosy as they came, swallowed and leaned back. “The colors are gone.” He swallowed again. “I see teeth and fangs and blood. I see . . . no . . . I hear you. I hear you laughing.”

I tilted my head. “I told you I liked to laugh.” I did laugh, once in a while, over flowing blood, but there had never been anyone who hadn’t deserved to lose that blood. “Leo,” I called. “Why don’t you come here and visit for a second? Galileo has never looked deep into your gorgeous eyes either.” I grabbed the man’s arm as he started to get up. “Oh no. That’s bad manners, Galileo. Don’t be that way.” My smile faded. “Like you shouldn’t have been that way when I sent a Mr. Jake Stein to see you. I’ve told you before, I screen them, but some slip through and I don’t know what you’ll see in their future. I told you to let a fish go now and again if the truth might be too much for them to handle, but you didn’t. You say you saw colors? I never hid my true colors from you, but you didn’t listen. You told him the truth and whatever truth that was made him hang himself in his family’s garage. Now”—I tightened my grip on his sweat-slick arm—“let’s see what happens to you when you see Leo’s truth.”

“But . . . that can’t be you.” He was still trying to pull away as Leo approached from behind the bar, but considering the most weight he lifted in a day would be an order of two double cheeseburgers to go, he didn’t have much success. “The blood. The fur and scales and your smile. God, that smile .” He was a psychic. He knew about vampires and werewolves and things that go bump in the night, but one little trickster, that he couldn’t believe?

Then Leo was certainly going to be educational for him.

Leo pulled up a chair beside me as I squeezed Galileo’s arm. “A smile is just a frown turned upside down. What do you think, Leo?”

Galileo’s gaze moved to Leo’s black eyes and he froze. He stopped trying to pull away, he didn’t blink, and I was positive he gave up on breathing for a while. After almost a minute he sucked in a breath, whistling and weak, and moaned, “The end. You almost ended it. Ended us all. You tore down mountains, boiled oceans, nearly pulled down the sky. You were the Omega before there was an Alpha, and you did it for no reason. For no reason .”

“Boredom is a reason.” Leo gave a shrug of acceptance. “And I’m in a program. I’m in recovery now. Ten thousand years Ragnarok free.”

Galileo crossed himself, several times, and was turning a rather pretty if unhealthy shade of lavender. I honestly didn’t care. Fate was fate, after all. Maybe that man I sent to him, Stein, would’ve killed himself regardless of what Galileo told him, but if the son of a bitch had kept to our referral agreement, I wouldn’t have to be wondering about it now. I’d been meaning to take care of the situation for a few weeks now and this was an opportunity to both clarify and conduct a business arrangement. I’ve always been a great believer in time management.

“Galileo,” I said patiently.

Nothing.

I sighed and snapped my fingers in front of his glazed eyes with a little less patience as he muttered the Lord’s Prayer under his breath, getting a good deal of it wrong. A very lapsed Catholic with an equally poor memory. “Galileo, before you have a heart attack or stroke, whichever you seem racing toward right now, I need to know what’s killing the demons? More than nine hundred in six months. What’s doing that?” I pulled a piece of folded paper from my jeans pocket and pushed it across the table to him, pulling one of his hands out of a praying position and slapping the wet palm on top of it. Within that doubled-up simple yellow piece of paper, a Post-it Note actually—so mundane and ordinary—was a scrap of demon ichor left from last night when Griffin and Zeke had brought in the one-winged, mentally absent demon. That hadn’t been mundane and ordinary at all.

“Come on, Galileo,” I prodded. “It’s right there. Right under your hand, right in front of your eyes. What do you see?”

I was hoping he wouldn’t shut down as Zeke had. Zeke was a telepath, but Galileo was a psychic. Zeke saw some things; Galileo saw everything, and no matter how worthless a creature, he excelled at it. Elvis might have been the King of Rock and Roll, but Galileo was the King of Psychics . . . at least in Vegas, probably in the entire Western Hemisphere. He was disgusting, perverted, greedy, and an entire dictionary full of more slimy adjectives, but he did know his business. He didn’t have talent. He had Talent with a capital T, and throw a little boldface on there while you’re at it. Zeke was good, but no better than your average angel . . . ex or otherwise. Galileo was an Einstein, and one with an excellent sense of survival. He might be able to see from a safer mental distance with that talent of his.

If it didn’t burn out like a flickering lightbulb. Zeke had gone down. If Galileo went down, considering his physical health, he might not get back up. As long as he did it after giving over the information . . . what will be, will be. The psychics said it often enough—now one of them would have to live with it.

Or not.

If Galileo had ever done a selfless thing in his life, I might have cared. But I knew his type. I’d known those like him for a long, long time. They were born without that ability to care for anyone but themselves. Despite psychology textbooks, loving yourself doesn’t automatically mean others will love you. My hand might rest on the back of his, but I wasn’t feeling any love. “The demon blood, Galileo. What took the demon? What destroyed his mind? And hurry up,” I added, “because you’re looking a mite peaked there, sugar.”