Rob Thurman - Trick of the Light

Solomon had stood as I was seated, then sat again. “You look. . . .” He smiled and raised his glass, already filled with wine. “I have no words.”

“Funny. Leo had quite a few words.” I tasted my wine. It was the good stuff, as they say, very, very good. There were some advantages to the high life.

“But you came anyway.” Solomon put his glass down. “Have you ever listened to anyone in your life, Trixa?”

“Oh, I listen and then I do what I want, but I do listen. I’m not rude.” I had another sip and savored the cherry and spice flavor of it.

“Homicidal, seemingly suicidal at times, with a smart mouth you never bother to rein in, but not rude. I see.” His eyes were warm in the candlelight. “In all my years, and they have been many, I’ve not met anyone quite like you.”

“No?” Food was placed before me. Solomon had taken the liberty of ordering before I’d arrived—I hated it when dates did that, but this wasn’t a date, I reminded myself. And as it was a small, enormously thick, and extremely tender piece of steak, I let it go. “I still think I’ve met plenty like you. So, tell me, Solomon—make me truly believe you aren’t like all your kin. Tell me. . . .” I thought for a moment. “Tell me about the Fall. The real story, not the made-for-TV version.”

His eyes went from warm to somber. “It’s not as different as you might think.” He looked at his own steak but didn’t cut it. It seemed his appetite was gone. Slowly, he started. “Lucifer was best loved by God, when he was an angel. You’ve heard that, I know. But fathers shouldn’t do that. They shouldn’t love one of their offspring more than the others. And that’s what we thought we were . . . children of God—not tools. But actually we were creations with a purpose, no more a child than a television or a car. Lucifer was the first to tell us it wasn’t right. He told us that if he ruled Heaven, he’d be our father and he would love us as children and love us all the same.”

“And did he mean it?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. At the time I was sure that he did. God didn’t deny what he said. He said nothing and left it up to us . . . with our precious free will . . . to decide. In the face of that silence, it didn’t cross my mind that Lucifer might lie, that God might be testing us.” Solomon was looking into my eyes, but I didn’t think I was the one he saw. “Lucifer was an angel. Angels do not lie, or didn’t then, and, truthfully, we thought him the best and brightest of us all. If you could have seen him. His face was the sun, his wings the moon, and now”—his lips pressed tightly together and he drained his glass—“you would die. One glimpse of him and you would die. When we fell, we all became the opposite of what we were. He changed most of all. Our would-be father was turned into something so hideous, even we demons can only glance at him from the corner of our eye. The Morning Star fell, and an endlessly hungry Abyss came to life. Destroying him would’ve been much kinder. But perhaps he deserves it for taking us all with him.”

I was quiet for a moment as he abruptly turned and called for more wine. When he had it and was making his way through it with a grim intensity that had a passing waiter wincing at the lack of appreciation for its age and taste, I asked, “You said free will. I’ve always wondered how there could be a revolution in Heaven if angels had no free will. That doesn’t make any sense. How could you rise up without wills of your own? I know angels learn it eventually if they spend enough time among humans, but the Fall was a long time ago.”

He put the glass down and gave a faint smile, pleased to be one up on me for once. “Contrary to popular argument, angels did have free will in the beginning. It was after we were cast down that God stripped free will from the remaining angels. Not much of a reward for loyalty, is it?”

Or perhaps he thought it was like a fast car and a sixteen-year-old new driver. Dangerously beyond their control. Not that it mattered. The angels that interacted with humans on a regular basis regained the will they’d lost. I’d seen it, seen them. It didn’t automatically make them the Precious Moments angels with the oh-so-cute tipped halo. Free will can make you a saint or a bastard. There were no guarantees. “So demons didn’t learn free will on their own. They had it all along?”

He raised his glass. “We did and we kept it. The one single parting gift left to us by God. Which is ironic. Since with our free will many of us wanted to return home.”

“Even if you had had to lose that free will if He let you in?”

“To be in his grace again, it would be worth it. Even without, even as not best loved.” He pushed his untouched plate away.

Give up my free will? There was no grace worth that. He read my face. “You don’t know. You can’t know.” For a second, bleak misery flickered behind the gray as his hand fisted on the table. “Grace and home, I’ll never have either again.”

There were two sides to every story—three sides on some occasions, but I couldn’t say that to him, not then. Instead I reached over to rest my hand over his fist. He turned his hand under mine to clasp my wrist lightly. “I want the Light, Trixa, but I want you too. I always have. To talk with you, laugh with you, to sleep late in cool sheets with you.” His pupils dilated. “To be inside you. To be one with you.”

“Clichéd,” I said, a faint flush warming my face. “So very clichéd.”

“But effective?” he smiled.

We didn’t talk about the Light as I’d expected. We didn’t talk about anything else at all. We sat and stared at each other before he kissed my wrist and let me go. I went. I hesitated at the table and I looked back at him halfway across the room, but I went. As I took my last look at the strong planes of his face years familiar now, I thought. . . .

Solomon, what am I going to do with you?

It was a good thing that I flew the “Slayer Not Layer” flag, because when I did get home, my bed wasn’t empty. There wasn’t room for Solomon. There wasn’t room for me either.

Zeke was sitting cross-legged in the middle of my bed, unloading and reloading his gun. I blinked. No, he was really there. He and Griffin had gone back to their house earlier. They had a dingy box of a house in a concrete alley in a neighborhood over by Lake Mead in North Vegas. It was a perfect choice for them—a part of town so bad that an occasional gunshot from a demon attack wouldn’t be investigated by their neighbors or the police.

I was sure Griffin would’ve preferred something more like the District at Green Valley where expensive condos were located over the top of expensive stores, all painted a rainbow of pastel colors that reminded me of the houses known as Painted Ladies in Charleston, South Carolina. Gracious Southern living brought to the West. Griffin did like the finer things in life, the things he’d never had as a foster kid. But personally I felt my brain twitch at the thought of shotgun-toting Zeke living above a Pottery Barn or a Williams-Sonoma.

The outside of their current shack might have been for work, but the inside was the dream bachelor retreat. Huge flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, surround sound, slate floor, leather couch and chairs, spartan glass and bamboo wood kitchen, all in desert colors. Griffin had gone all out, although the TV was probably Zeke’s baby. If Griffin couldn’t live where he wanted location wise, he’d make the inside up to his standards. Then it had been a simple matter of Zeke using his telepathy to pick out the dealers and thieves in the neighborhood, knock on their door, and stick a shotgun muzzle in their face with a matter-of-fact, “Do not fuck with our house. Do not fuck with our car. Do not fuck with the blond guy.” Thanks in advance for your cooperation and lack of future bloodstains on our driveway. I doubted he’d actually added the last sentence. Politeness wasn’t one of Zeke’s strong points. I also knew Griffin didn’t need Zeke acting as his bodyguard. He was as deadly a fighter in his own right. He didn’t need babysitting.