Rob Thurman - Trick of the Light

He shut up after that. There wasn’t much he could say to it. We all choose . . . for good or for bad, and we all pay the piper. There were simply a lot more of us pipers out there than he was able to remember. “What about Eligos?” he said quietly after several minutes. “If he knows you’re human, even if only for a couple of years . . .”

“I know,” I said, brooding. “It’s going to be a long few years if he hangs around.” Long for him, maybe not so much for me. Eligos would make me his personal project of pain and torture if he found out I wasn’t the same Trixa from the cave. God, trickster, demon . . . human. I’d tumbled a few ranks. I might still be trickster at heart, but the body was human for now.

“I have a feeling he will stay. Take over Vegas now that Solomon is dead.”

“I have a feeling you’re right,” I agreed with my Eagle Scout, and a very glum and disagreeable feeling it was too. “Vegas seems like Eli’s kind of town. So how about we not let him know about me being more or less human, although one with amazing taste and style. I really don’t want to end up a notch on his impaling post.”

That ended the conversation for a while as I reassured myself silently that I was a trickster. No one could outthink me, manipulate me, lie to me, fool me, and no one but no one could trip me up on a lie of my own. Eli would believe I could turn him into a Solomon PEZ dispenser if the mood struck me, because I wouldn’t let him think anything else.

An hour from Vegas, Zeke had sprawled in the back of the Winnebago and was snoring lightly. I slid in an old-style cassette tape and listened to ABBA. Yes, the wife beater listened to ABBA. I ejected it hurriedly and started digging in the floor for something a little less nauseating and much more current. “I’m curious,” I said to Griffin as I kicked the garbage around. “I’ve never measured you, but I think Zeke is taller. So does that make him the big spoon?”

He didn’t give me the cold shoulder or the frozen blue eyes, which rather worried me. He just kept driving, hands flexing on the steering wheel. “I’m a demon,” he said suddenly. “After all I’ve seen them do, and that’s what I turn out to be? A killer, a stealer of souls, a monster?”

“You’re not a demon.” I sat up. I was surprised it had taken him this long to crack. Griffin, always in control . . . calm, collected, ready, but no one was ready for this.

“Fine. I was a demon then. I was a murderer, a soul eater, a hell-spawn,” he said bitterly, keeping his voice low so as not to wake our napping ex-angel. The last thing he wanted Zeke doing was worrying about his partner’s mental health. Zeke’s security in his own mental health wasn’t that high.

“No. You are not a demon and you weren’t a demon. Glasya-Labolas is dead. You killed him and you killed every horrific deed he ever did. You’re Griffin Reese. You were born at the age of ten with a few false memories of parents who abandoned you and you were born human. A human with extra empathy, but lots of humans are born that way. They made you all human, or an angel would’ve known. Just as they made Zeke all human, or a demon would’ve known. Only a trickster like me or a god like Leo had known. Switching your body whenever you cared to taught you to see when a change had been made in others. The low can’t recognize the high-level, but a high-level can recognize any angel or demon of equal or lower rank.” I rested my hand on his tense leg. “You were and are human. Because you chose to be,” I finished quietly. “Then when Solomon pushed the demon back into you in the cave, you still chose to be human, you still chose to be a man, and you still chose to be good. And if that’s not the greatest accomplishment since the world appeared out of the darkness, I don’t know what is.”

I squeezed his leg and let go with a pat. “I don’t know that I could’ve done it. I honestly don’t. To give up all that power, to become something a demon has nothing but contempt for?”

“But you did.” His fingers relaxed on the steering wheel. “Not the contempt, but you gave up your power for your brother. Not for as long maybe, but you gave it up. Sometimes there are things . . . people worth giving it up for.” He automatically turned his head to check on a still-sleeping Zeke.

“Big spoon or little spoon?” I asked coyly.

“Oh, shut up,” he shot back, but not as crossly as I’d expected, and when I put in the cassette,of the Eighties’ Greatest Hits, the best the floor had to offer, he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel along in time with “Duran Duran . . . Yes, Duran Duran.” Those were the days. They all were the days.

“An old Sicilian proverb says, ‘Only the spoon knows what is stirring in the pot,’ ” I said with a grin. “So what’s cooking?”

“On-the-bench trickster or annoyed peri with a Lou isville Slugger, who ranks there?” He gave his lips a none-of-your-business quirk as he patted the bat leaning against his door.

“Truthfully, I don’t know.” I smiled and leaned my seat back farther, ready to join Zeke in a nap. “Who could say?”

Me.

I could say.

On the bench or not. Griffin’s memories—or those of the demon Glasya—were gone because the demon was gone. But my memories? I still had them. Six thousand years of doing bad things to very bad people. Not to mention some of the best tricksters in the world couldn’t change shape. . . . In fact there is one race of tricksters who all have the same shape—clones of one another. One of them had actually ruled Greece for a while, although most were car salesmen now. I’d be damned if I let a puck like Robin Goodfellow think he was better than I was. Eli didn’t stand a chance.

I waited almost ten minutes before I said it:

“You’re the little spoon, aren’t you?”

It was good to be home, and I didn’t feel the need to bite my tongue at the word. Incredible. Home. I looked around the bar. Same stained floor. Same pool table and dartboard. Same beat-up tables and chairs. Despite myself, I was fond of it. Oh hell, I loved it. It beat Ramses II’s palace hands down. Forget gold, carnelian, or lapis lazuli; this was better. This was home, the first one I’d ever known and the first one I’d ever wanted. It wasn’t the dirty word I’d always thought it. I think Kimano had figured that out before he died, as much time as he spent in Hawaii. Not a fighter, not close to being a halfway good trickster, but he’d been smart in a way I hadn’t. He’d known what a home could do for you—what it could be—when I hadn’t had a clue.

“You’ll be all right?”

I looked over my shoulder at Griffin. “More than all right. Go home, boys. You’ll get to sleep in your own beds tonight. No sharing and no napping in bathtubs.” I was a good little trickster and didn’t say any more, although I did measure them with my eyes. Yes, Zeke was definitely an inch or two taller. Big spoon all the way.

Griffin walked over to the bar, took a bottle of whiskey, and said in explanation, “It’s been one hell of a week. Put it on my tab, would you?”

“As if your money’s any good here.” I waved him off.

“Your money would’ve been good replacing my ostrich skin jacket you ruined,” he grumbled halfheart edly, but nodded and disappeared out the front door.

Then there was Zeke. He stood there, looking the same as he’d always been. But could he be? Finding out he’d been an angel, and that’s what had made his human brain different from others, not a drug-addicted mother. Discovering his partner and best friend had been a demon—the one thing he lived and breathed to kill, his one and only purpose. Learning the head of his House was a traitor in Hell’s pocket. Seeing that his friend/surrogate big sister wasn’t human and had been involved in some elaborate plot of revenge and espionage for more than fifty years—what was he thinking? Behind those placid eyes and blank face, how did all of that impact on someone like him?