Rob Thurman - Trick of the Light

I blinked against it all, not sure whether I was seeing angels or an impressionist masterpiece come to life, roiling the night sky—even the stars and moon seemed part of it all.

It was beautiful and it was terrible, all in one.

“You won’t have them,” Solomon said to the angels, having returned from wherever he’d gone, his face twisted as the car rocketed by.

“Neither will you.”

I expected that angelic retort to be the music of battle, the symphony of a storm. What I got was a familiar voice through a bullhorn. Griffin. There was the also the rapid chop of rotor blades behind his voice. Lots of rotor blades. The demons kept coming. Angels and Eden House weren’t enough to have them giving up—not when they thought they might have a link to the Light so close. They weren’t believing Wilbur’s act of running me off as thoroughly as I’d hoped.

Two managed to grab on to the back of the car as I drove over them. They climbed up, hissing like an entire nest of rattlesnakes—pissed and hungry. I could see the mottled, moist inner flesh of their mouths in the rearview mirror. Leo unloaded the other barrel of the shotgun into the face of the one on the right, dropped the empty gun, then pulled a sword from under the blanket covering the back floorboards and turned the second demon into a less than politically correct alligator bag. The head bounced into the front passenger seat, glass teeth still gnashing. Separating the brain from the body worked as well as liquefying the organ.

“A sword?” I swerved the car, smacked a few demons with the side, and shot one in the head as it climbed over the front windshield. Blood and scales sprayed in a fine mist over us. I was going to have to rethink the whole convertible situation. “You and a sword. I am boggled.”

“Sometimes you really do have to embrace your roots, just like your lemonade man said.” Luckily there were no tourists around to explain that to as Leo gave an unaccustomed grin and swung again as a demon launched itself into the backseat. Another head bounced up front. Now I had two heads with teeth still slowly chomping away. Would they just hurry up and die already? The last thing I wanted was them stripping flesh from my ankle and calf all the way down to the bone like piranha in an old Tar zan movie .

“It’s getting crowded up here. Swing the other way, Babe Ruth,” I called as I turned the car into another high-speed spin with one hand and used the other to toss the heads out, getting one nice slice across the back of my hand out of it. Bastard. The dead should be dead . . . immediately. No hanging around snapping like ill-tempered, satanic Chihuahuas. I fired again, this time upward as a demon dropped from the sky. My Smith & Wesson 500 was no shotgun, but it knocked him off course. He missed the car. The car did not, however, miss him. There was a very satisfying ka-thump as I careened over the top of him. It wouldn’t kill him, but it’d slow him down for a few minutes and make him respect a good American-made car. Or Japanese. Or maybe it was German. I kept forgetting which. I liked pretty things, but I also liked moving on to the next pretty thing fairly quickly. It made it hard to keep track.

Unless the pretty thing was riding on your hood.

“What did he tell you, Trixa?” Solomon said over the rush of the wind from the speeding car. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. I heard him as clearly as if he were at my ear . . . which he suddenly was. He sat in the demon-bloodstained passenger seat and repeated it calmly. “What did he tell you?”

“He didn’t tell me a thing.” And Wilbur hadn’t—not really. It was the Light that had told me.

“Then what did it tell you?” he asked, catching on quickly. “Where is it?”

“It told me I was a naughty girl, but the lesser of evils.” I smiled brightly. “And while a girl does love hearing a compliment, I have no idea where it is.” Sadly, that was true enough.

But I did know how to find it.

Before Solomon could ask any more questions, a helicopter swooped down and hovered right in front of us. I slammed on the brakes. I was wearing a seat belt. Leo, who knew how I drove, was also wearing one, even in the back. Solomon was not. But he disappeared to black smoke as he went through the windshield, cracking it into a spiderweb mansion. “Wonderful,” I sighed. “My insurance company already hates me.” Then I tried for a look on the bright side. “It might be a sign. Time for a new car.”

Leo leaned over the seat as the helicopter landed and the rest of the demons finally gave up and disappeared when men with machine guns jumped out. “So, what did the Light tell you?”

I told him. I had no secrets from Leo. Not about Kimano. Not about the Light. “The lesser of evils,” he snorted. “That doesn’t say much for the company we keep, does it?”

“Come on,” I protested on my behalf at least . . . but, honestly . . .

It was true.

The helicopter had brought us to Eden House. They, like everyone else, definitely had a finger in this pie. So here I finally was, and this time it wasn’t just hearing Griffin describe its elegant glory of antiques, the library of secret books and documents that historians would give ten years of their lives to see, and the magnificent showcase of ancient demon-fighting weapons.

Or Zeke saying, “Yeah, it’s big. Hard to find the bathrooms. Now can I have another beer?” I was here to see it with my own eyes. Unfortunately, the higher-ups knew it. They now knew about Leo and me, and knew that we knew about them . . . worse yet, about the Light. And you can bet they didn’t like it—all that knowing. They were probably discussing it right now, their complete and utter dislike of it all.

The hell with it. There was nothing I could do about it now, and I had something far more important right in front of me.

I held Zeke’s limp hand and rubbed the pad of my thumb softly across the back of it. He was still out of it, drugged to the gills, but he was off the ventilator and on an oxygen mask. I took that as a good sign. He was in a hospital bed, and for all intents and purposes was in his own hospital ICU. It was in Eden House’s basement. He was hooked up to a heart monitor, oxygen, a pulse oximeter to read the level of oxygen in his blood, IVs . . . too many things to count.

A sheet was pulled up to his hospital gown-clad chest. Next to all that white and green, he was gray. The ashy skin next to the color of his gown wasn’t a good combination and it made me feel . . . I looked over my shoulder and let Griffin feel that mood. I didn’t bury it or hide it as I usually did. I let him feel it because it let him feel it himself—something I didn’t think he’d allowed himself. Not until then.

He stood by my side as I sat. “He’ll be all right.” He was telling himself the same as he was telling me. “The doctors said that he’s recovering faster than they anticipated.” He reached down and lightly knuckled the top of the unconscious, reddish bronze head. It was the same move a kid would make to another kid—a younger one. It wasn’t surprising. They’d been in the same foster home since they were ten and twelve, at least until they came to me five years later. When something had gone drastically wrong. Griffin had always said it was Zeke’s story to tell.

He changed his mind.

Why? Could’ve been any number of reasons. He could’ve known that Zeke would never tell. It might have been he was still so angry over what had happened back then that he had to tell someone and that someone wasn’t going to be a member of Eden House. They valued Zeke for his strong psychic skills, but without Griffin around to keep him in check, Eden House wouldn’t have anything to do with Zeke. And I think Griffin had just now realized that. He’d seen them virtually kidnap Leo and me and for a thing his boss refused to elaborate on. He would name it, but he wouldn’t explain it.