Rob Thurman - Trick of the Light

I heard a pounding on the floor, Leo slamming his fist on the ceiling below. “Trixa, get your ass down here!”

Leo was not in a good mood. It would have been “your beautiful ass” or “your gorgeous ass” if he had been. I sighed, rolled over, and checked the alarm clock. It was just past eight p.m. Considering the day I’d had, I felt I deserved to sleep around the clock, but that particular timbre of pounding meant something was up. And by the time I made it downstairs, that something was up all right, in full force.

Zeke.

Zeke and Griffin, to be more specific, but Zeke was the one making all the trouble, as usual. It was his gift. He was still drugged as he’d been in Eden House’s minihospital, but he was conscious this time. In a way. Griffin was holding him up—Griffin and the hair of a customer with his face smashed against his small table. “Tip . . . your . . . server,” Zeke slurred. Lank strands of his hair fell over a completely bloodless face and the green of his eyes was almost completely obscured by the huge black of his pupils. He was dressed in hospital scrubs and sneakers, no socks.

“You were going to tip Leo but good, weren’t you, sir?” I managed to pry Zeke’s fingers from the unfortunate cheap bastard’s hair. A small trail of blood crept down from the man’s right nostril to pool onto his upper lip.

“Tip. Yeah, tip. Was about to do that.” He wiped at the smear of red, left a wad of bills for Leo on the table, and bolted for the door.

“What the hell?” I helped Griffin ease Zeke into the just-vacated chair. Barely in time, too. His legs melted like butter and he collapsed into the wooden framework without a single moan. Yes, very, very good drugs. You couldn’t look as transparently pale as he did, with Tim Burtonesque charcoal smudges under his eyes, without being host to a shitload of pain. I hoped Griffin had brought some of those excellent painkillers with him, because Zeke was going to need them for a few more days at least. “I’ve heard of bad doctors, Griff, but not even a chiropractor with an online degree would’ve let Zeke out of bed, much less into a slightly less than sterile bar.”

“Eden House kicked us out. Trinity said we’re tainted by our association with you and painted as liars for keeping your demon hunting a secret.” His fine suit jacket rumpled beyond repair, he crouched beside Zeke to keep him upright in the chair. His eyes looked up at me with perfect candor layered like frosting over the perfect lie. He didn’t bother to give me a little empathic jolt. I’d read him like a book when he was a kid, and I’d only gotten better at it over the years. He knew I’d grasped the real reason right away.

Eden House had sent two spies to keep an eye on me, sent their two best men. The trouble for Mr. Trinity was I’d gotten hold of those men . . . boys then . . . first. I had fed them and sheltered them and I hadn’t used them in the meantime. Trinity couldn’t say the same. Now in return for his emotionless employment, lies, and icy coldness, he had two double agents. They simply were double agents for me.

I touched blond hair as mussed as I’d ever seen it. Griffin was riding a thin line. Being betrayed by his employers, his partner injured, more or less at a loss as to what was really going on, he had had a hard day. Knowing I’d gotten what he’d been trying to tell me, he turned a haggard face toward Zeke . . . a thin face. Leo and I had eaten at Eden House, but I didn’t recall Griffin doing so. “Come on.” I motioned Leo over. “We’ll get Zeke up to my bed and get you both some food.”

Leo and I took Zeke’s weight from Griffin—probably the first time that had happened in days, physically or emotionally. We basically carried him up the stairs. His legs made uncoordinated motions that were more unhelpful than anything, but he did make an effort. Griffin followed us. By the time we reached the bed, Zeke’s jaws had begun to tighten and he was shaking in our grip. We got him under the covers while Griffin went to the bathroom for a glass of water to go with the two pills he’d fished from the amber bottle in his pocket.

By the time I returned upstairs barely fifteen minutes later with food, Zeke was out, his profile marble pale against the deep red of my sheets. The bedspread was pulled up to his chest and his right hand was curled upright against the fiery colors . . . still as stone. His chest moving was the only thing that let me know he was breathing. Beside him, on top of the covers, Griffin was out too, as deeply unconscious without the drugs. I wasn’t surprised. Who knew the last time he’d slept. Before Zeke had been sliced to pieces, I was sure. I left the food, meat loaf and mashed potatoes from the deli down the street, on the bedside table. Ear-length, light blond hair covered Griffin’s closed eyes, and there were deep brackets besides his mouth. Poor damn guy. I covered him up with an extra blanket.

“You and your strays,” Leo commented as he touched Zeke’s forehead to check for fever.

“Yes, so glad I’m not as hard-hearted as you.” I didn’t roll my eyes. Instead, I used them to look around the room for a place to sleep. It looked like it was the bathtub for me, as Leo would no doubt be taking the couch downstairs in my office. I could take care of myself, but Zeke and Griffin couldn’t say the same, not right now.

“I’ll take the couch tonight,” he said, a virtual echo of my thoughts. As predictable as the Vegas summer sun and as predictable as me. I wouldn’t have left him either.

“He’s too sick to be here,” Griffin said in the morning. “He’s too sick to be anyplace but the hospital.”

The pills the Eden House doctors had given to Griffin weren’t touching Zeke’s pain. Only morphine and sedation would have. He’d fisted the sheets and covers beneath his hands and was sweating profusely. “F-fine,” he stuttered between clenched teeth. “I’m . . . fine.”

“Which is why I feel like I’m fucking dying,” Griffin spat, hand clamped tightly around Zeke’s wrist as if he wished he could take the pain instead of only feel it. “God.” His other hand was tangled in his hair and he looked like he needed a shower in the worst way since I’d first seen his dirty, scrawny seventeen-year-old frame.

“No hospital.” Zeke transferred his grip from the sheets to Griffin’s leg, the fingers biting in hard. “They’ll know. They’ll recognize me. Fingerprints.”

He was paranoid. Although his fingerprints were in the juvy system, they wouldn’t have made it to the adult one. And even if they had, the hospital wasn’t going to fingerprint him. You couldn’t tell him that though, couldn’t get him to believe it. After what he’d gone through as a child, I wouldn’t have believed it either. Not to mention the fact that Eden House had planned this. They’d seen Zeke getting stronger and stronger with his psychic abilities. They’d set Griffin up as a spy and if Zeke ended up in a psych ward from what he babbled under the IV drugs at a hospital—well, was that so bad?

“When can he have more pills?” I asked Griffin.

“Three more hours.” Torture was relative, but no matter how you looked at it, for Zeke—for Griffin, three hours was more than a long time. It was forever.

I pried Zeke’s fingers from Griffin’s arm and Griffin’s hand from Zeke’s wrist. “Take a shower. I’ll take care of Zeke.”

Griffin looked at Zeke’s gray face, tightly screwed eyes, then back at me doubtfully, a little hopelessly. “How?”

“Because I will. Now go. Robe and towels in the closet to the right.” He followed my directions blankly after gripping his partner ’s shoulder lightly. He didn’t pay attention to the fact that the bedroom and bathroom were one room and that he was showering feet away from us, the shadowed silhouette of his body showing through the curtain. Too far gone to care or flirt. And he moved like an old man . . . an old man in a lot of pain. A harsh shadow of Zeke’s pain.