Rob Thurman - Trick of the Light

“I don’t think the two of us are going to fit on your couch,” he said dryly.

“Spoon.” I gave him a light shove toward the stairs. “Or one of you can sleep on the floor. It all depends on how secure in your masculinity you are. Either way, I’m sleeping in my own bed.”

“It’ll be hard to get Zeke to give up all that decadence, but I’ll do my best. And no one is that secure in their masculinity,” he finished as he headed for the stairs.

“I wish I’d taken a picture last night. Curled up like puppies in a basket,” I lied without a qualm. As for Zeke, his appreciation of my décor went as far as cleaning weapons with it.

“You are truly evil.” He disappeared, but I heard the repeated, “Evil,” as he went.

Several seconds later someone added from behind me, “I like that in a woman. Malevolence is good too. Do you have that on tap, Miss Trixa?”

I swiveled on my stool, automatically training the gun pulled from my waistband directly at Eli’s head. He was leaning against the end of the bar and was every inch as I remembered him. Gorgeous and charismatic. Also deceptively deadly, and that didn’t bear forgetting. I didn’t need the take-out box of noodles he held in one hand to remind me.

He used the chopsticks in his other hand to point at the container. “Want some? Best in the world . . . now.”

Was making the ultimate sweet-and-sour worth your soul? I didn’t think so, but apparently the restaurant chef had. “No thanks.” I kept the gun pointed. “If I want food of the damned, I’ll just microwave a Hot Pocket.” Griffin and Zeke didn’t come running down the stairs, shotguns in hand, which meant Eli was as powerful as he said he was—or at least equally as powerful as Solomon. He couldn’t be “seen” by a psychic or empath, no matter how good. He was simply better. Stronger.

“Suit yourself, and I’m assuming you usually do.” He stabbed the chopsticks into the noodles and set the cardboard box on the bar. “I don’t have to ask if you found the next step to the Light. I can see it, glowing around you like a halo, which, by the way, is a huge turnoff.”

“Sorry about that.” Not quite. “Do you have any information for me or are you here for the ambience?”

He looked around at the scarred tables, dartboard, small pool table, TV mounted over the bar and shrugged. “Add a floor of knives and air of pure unholy fire and it’d be just like home. Except for the TV. We don’t have satellite yet. The boonies are always the last to get it.” He peeled off his jacket and tossed it over a stool. “Actually, I’m here to dance.”

Leo’s radio behind the bar came on and jumped from station to station until a slow song came on. “Once again, before your time,” he observed. “A flash from the past, but it’s easy to move to . . . vertically. Horizontally too, if one were in the mood.”

“Which I’m assuming you always are.” I considered the situation, then replaced the gun in the back waistband of my pants. If he wanted to play, I could do that. In fact I was rather good at that. Demon good? I guess we’d have to see. “And the halo?”

“I’ll close my eyes.” He gave me that smile, far more warm and intimate than a monster had any right to, as he held out a hand. I took it as he looped an arm around my waist, deftly avoiding my gun. We moved to the music. “Amazing. You can dance like you’re all grown-up.” He whirled me around slowly.

“I’m thirty-one. I’ve been to a dance or two. Hit the floor at weddings with more than one grandpa.”

“Ouch.” He tilted his head down to look at me. “Are you going to hold a million years or so against me?”

He smelled nice, which wasn’t fair. There was no clichéd whiff of the traditional sulfur and brimstone. He smelled clean—like soap and wet spring grass with the faintest trace of ozone. Of lightning and a thunder-storm in the distance, ready to wash over you to bury you in rain and shake the ground like an earthquake. I could play all right, but he wasn’t an amateur by any stretch of the imagination.

“I’ve dated older men before. Age doesn’t matter.” We did another slow turn as I added, “It’s the killing innocent people and the taking of souls I have a problem with.”

“I’m sure they weren’t all innocent. I mean, really, what are the odds of that? Three out of ten might be mostly innocent, I’ll give you that. But all of them? Statistically impossible for the human race.” He dipped me and smiled as he hung over me. “And surely you’re not claiming innocence, Trixa. I see things behind your eyes that tell a different story. A far more interesting story, by the way. Innocence is so boring.”

“Speaking of boring, if you don’t have any information for me, then that’s all you’re doing.” I mirrored his smile, my back twinging from the dip. “Boring the hell out of me.”

“You do make a demon work for his due.” He straightened, pulling me upright, and let go of me. The radio shut off. “When did this demon kill your brother and where? The one you want so badly?”

“If you need that to do your job, you’re not half as good as you say you are.” I sat back down. My back was healing, had healed quite a bit in the past few days, but the dancing hadn’t done it much good. I’d thought of having Whisper heal it when she healed Zeke, but it was just scraped and torn skin already mending on its own. Zeke’s pain had been out of control. My pain was more of an inconvenience. When you find inconveniences too much to handle, then you’ll find life to be exactly the same.

“Oh, I’m good and I’ll find him, but I could find him more quickly if you’d be a little less of a bitch and a little more cooperative.” He said “bitch” the same way he would’ve said “sugar” or “honey” or “darling”—as if it were an endearment. He really was something.

“You’re a straight talker, I’ll give you that. And only that.” I retrieved the bourbon, poured him a shot in my glass, and slid it down the bar about four feet to him. “I’m not here to help you. You’re here to help me . . . that is, if you want the Light. If I make things too easy for you, Eligos, who’s to say you’ll wait for me to find the Light? Who’s to say you won’t try to take me from Trinity and put me on your own leash?”

“Who is to say?” he echoed blandly before he swallowed the shot quickly and smoothly, sitting down himself. “I might be transparent to your eye, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be easier and quicker for both of us.”

“Quick or easy—it doesn’t matter, because it’s not going to happen,” came a new voice, deep and rough.

Which was all we needed to make a party.

Solomon.

He stood by the door, not that he’d needed to use it. His gray eyes were slits. I’d been right when I’d guessed that Solomon wouldn’t care for Eli any more than Eli cared for him. “This is my territory, Eligos. This place is mine. She is mine. You can leave now, whole and intact, or you can leave it in a spray of blood and flesh. A pool of rotting fluid on the floor.” The gray blazed to silver, the first physical hint of demon I’d ever seen in Solomon—the first true loss of temper.

“He’s a cranky son of a bitch, isn’t he?” Eli turned over the shot glass and tapped it once, to all appearances bored. Certainly the farthest thing from intimidated without actually dozing off. “Tell me you never found him entertaining. No one’s taste could be that bad. The brooding. The smoldering. He’d fit in fine on the soap opera channel or a vampire movie, but real life?” He raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “Real sex? You’d be better off with a Ken doll. Same personality, and probably the same equipment.”