Rob Thurman - Trick of the Light

“Funny you should say that.” His lips curved. “You’re not the first.”

I narrowed my eyes behind dark sunglasses. “She did not.”

“Said you’d be her first shiksa-poo. She could get one for all her friends. They’d be the toast of the temple.”

I narrowed my eyes further and a brown finger wagged once. “Nuh uh, little girl.” He emphasized “little,” the bastard. “That’s not how it works. We don’t screen one another’s hookups or dates. No retaliation, no matter how low our opinion, remember? Which means you can’t fill her car with mating tarantulas . . . again.”

“Fine. Fine,” I said irritably as we pulled into town. We talked to the dusty locals, who knew all of Jeb the aver ’s friends. Turned out Jeb even had a last name: McVann. “One-sixteenth Indian, he was,” said one old guy who’d been around long enough for that term to go from politically correct, to incorrect, to back again without any idea things had ever changed. “Get the old sot drunk and he’d go on and on so much, you’d think he’d been the one to stick the arrow in Custer’s dick at Little Bighorn himself.”

He, one Artie Beaver, served me another canned lemonade at his trailer/refreshment stand. “Yeah, he was all about the land and saving your home. I told him if the Indians had saved their home, fifteen-sixteenths of his ass’d be back in Scotland drinking warm beer and wearing a kilt.” He shrugged. Artie was a big guy, happy and helpful, but he didn’t know much more than that. He knew Jeb was dead and that his friends would be down today to say a few words, restock, and head back up. And for a few dollars he’d point them out for me. I handed over the money willingly. Artie was working hard entertaining me. He deserved to be paid.

“Guess he just wanted roots.” He carefully swiped at my rickety plastic table. If he’d wiped too hard, it probably would’ve collapsed under the attention. It was older than Methuselah and cheaper than a bleached-blond, teenage pop star. “We all want roots, right?”

But sometimes only the ones we pick. Still, that might have been why Jeb found the Light. He believed in saving and protecting. No better person around here to have found it. Leo and I sat and watched as the day dragged on. It was comfortable. I didn’t miss the summer heat. I enjoyed it when it was there and I enjoyed the cooler temperatures when it was gone. Mama had taught us that. Appreciate what you can’t change, and change what you can’t appreciate. She was as tough as the mountains around us and filled to the brim with common sense. I liked to think she’d passed that on to me, but she’d also said more than once that I wasn’t half as clever as I thought I was. Considering what I thought of myself, that still made me pretty damn clever. That attitude had gotten me more than a swat or two when I was younger. I’d learned to temper my self-belief in my quick wits with a dash of caution. It wasn’t enough. A swat to my ass was still waiting for me at every family reunion. I yawned, stretched my legs out, and let Leo be my eyes for a while. I didn’t nap, but I let the world slide gently out of focus.

“How’s your back?” Leo asked.

“Well, I’m off it, unlike your Amazonian ex, so that’s something,” I retorted, resting a shoulder against the iron pole holding up the canopy.

“This is ridiculous. If you would just . . . ,” he started.

“No.”

He sighed and passed over two Tylenol, a far stretch from what my back really needed, but it would have to do. “Once, my brother lied and told my father, this was after he and I stopped speaking, that I was spending time with you. . . .” He shook his head, the black braid undulating along his back. “I heard that the old bastard laughed so long and hard that he choked on his venison and passed out at the table.”

Our families were familiar with one another, to say the least, and we followed the same general ideological path, had the same long lineage. What my family knew of the world, Leo’s knew equally as well. We hadn’t grown up next door, hardly anything that mundane with the travel blood so strong in me and mine, but we passed their way now and again. Leo’s family had what Jeb had wanted: roots. Leo could follow his family back as long as I could, an oral history that put the most convoluted and far-reaching of family trees to shame. Back to the mammoths and beyond wouldn’t be an exaggeration. A historian would be foaming at the mouth to talk to him. Of all of his family, though, only Leo was a wanderer now. When you’re kicked out of house and home, you don’t have much choice.

“Did he think I would be a little much for you?” I rested my sunglasses in my hair.

“More than that. He thought you’d be the death of me.” He pulled off his hat and waved it at a raven far overhead. “And I’m not so sure he would be wrong.”

“Chicken,” I teased. “Oh, come on. Where’s the harm? Lots of twosomes do just fine. Friends or lovers, and living it up.” I toasted him with the can of lemonade.

“Like Butch and Sundance?” he said knowingly. “Thelma and Louise? Romeo and Juliet? Nitroglycerin and a pogo stick?”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” I tsked as I finished the flat lemon drink. “And I think the wake has started. Let’s go see who didn’t show up.”

About six people were there, including the truck molester. We mixed and mingled. I’d dressed down. Leo looked like he looked. We had “good folk” written all over us. After some talking, we discovered the only friend of Jeb’s missing was John Wilbur. I’d wriggled directions to the guy’s place out of Artie. Normally, he wouldn’t have, but I was playing cute and feisty for all I was worth and Leo was dessert from the looks of him. Charisma, Leo and I had it in spades when we wanted. Demons weren’t the only ones who could bring out the flash, and even Artie couldn’t stand against it. “You’d make great con men,” he’d grumbled as we took off.

Isn’t it great when your calling and your work are the same?

It was dark by the time we reached John Wilbur’s short, squat mobile home. There was a bright generator light flooding the place and the sand around it. In that sand someone had literally drawn the line. And it surrounded the trailer in a circle twice as brilliant as the generator light. My sunglasses were in the glove compartment, although I wished I had them back as I shaded my eyes for a better look. Flakes—minute flakes of glass or crystal made up the circle, and the fact they glowed almost as bright as the sun said one thing and one thing only.

The Light. They came from the Light.

Leo mirrored my frown. “Someone knows something.”

There was the faintest of sounds behind us. A whisper of sand. A rustle of cloth against cloth.

“Our Mr. Wilbur is clever . . . for a human.” The tone was so bored. So very “have been there and had a stained-glass window designed in my image.” So “Why oh why must I suffer the indignity of discoursing with the unfaithful and the sinning?” I turned and considered shooting the angel dead center in his chest. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d shot one. But I knew if I did, he would bleed a ray of luminous white light for a few seconds; then he would be whole again. It would be all for nothing. While the angel I had once shot had deserved it, I wasn’t sure this one did simply for being annoyingly superior and in the right place at the right time—when I wished he weren’t.

“Look at this. Temptation in the desert, but it’s not the devil this time—only a parakeet with delusions of grandeur.” I kept the gun aimed at him. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure you could kill an angel. Then again, maybe the same would hold for them as held for demons. If you could keep their bodies anchored on Earth and blow out their brains . . . After all, as Solomon had said, he was an angel too—simply a fallen one. Seemed what would work for one, destruction-wise, would work for the other. I’d never had the need to put it to the test. Yet. But if he got between me and the Light, that might change.