Trick of the Light (31 page)
Read Trick of the Light Online
Authors: Rob Thurman
He smiled then, showing one missing tooth at the bottom, and the look he gave Trinity and his crew wasn’t the respectful one he gave me. “A truck. I would like a new truck. Mine only runs when it rains.” Which out here was to say never.
I turned, pushed up, and sat on the counter. “Well? Someone go buy Mr. Blackhawk a truck. It’s a small town, but I’m sure someone has something for sale.” They didn’t move. Neither did I, other than to examine my nails. I kept them short, but the bronze was still chipping. Considering the week I’d had, I wasn’t surprised. I’d gone with the red first, but, no, the bronze was better, I thought. In fact . . .
“The Light,” Trinity said tightly.
I raised my eyes. Who was pulling whose leash now? “When we have the truck.”
He could have shot me. He wanted to, I knew. But there were Griffin and Zeke and civilians. He wasn’t running the show anymore, not that he would admit it. He turned, back straight, and left the store to confer with his men. Thirty minutes later Samuel had his new truck. It was big, desert worthy, and a dark metallic green. I frowned, but took the keys from Goodman’s stiff fingers and handed them to Samuel.
“Paint it red,” I said. “Red is my color. Red is good luck. Red will always bring
you
good luck.”
you
good luck.”
He nodded instantly. “I will.”
The teenager, Aaron, protested, “But that’s a cool-ass green. Why should we—” He received another smack on the back of the head.
I took the bag of water and sugar and started back toward the door. I gave one last smile over my shoulder. “I liked you, Samuel Blackhawk. I still do.”
Outside it was full dark and it seemed as if the stars should’ve been dancing as the cool wind blew through. “I thought you said you’d never been to Rhyolite,” Griffin said.
It was true. I’d mentioned it in the car. “I haven’t, but I’ve traveled around the desert. Just because I didn’t stop at a tourist trap ghost town doesn’t mean I don’t know where the good-looking men are.” I winked back at the door where Samuel stood and waved. Back on the road, we headed west to the ghost town, and Zeke ate all our candy bars.
“Killing takes a lot of energy. Sugar gives you energy,” he said as he avoided Griffin’s grab at the last bar.
“So killing and sugar go hand in hand? Is that what you’re saying?” Griffin snorted.
“That is what I’m saying,” came the answer, without a shred of doubt. Lenny, sitting on the top of the backseat, leaned closer and reached for a nut with his black beak. Zeke, who’d just denied one of the most prolific demon killers other than himself the chocolate bar, hesitated, then let him pick out a peanut and crunch placidly on it.
“Zeke, swear to God. You’re not afraid of a demon, but you’re afraid of a bird. I have so lost any respect I ever had for you.” Griffin shook his head and swiveled to face the windshield again.
“No, you haven’t.” Unconcerned, Zeke finished the chocolate.
“And how do you know that?” Griffin fiddled with the radio before shutting it off
“If you had, you would’ve shot me and taken the candy bar.”
The side of Griffin’s mouth curled. “True.”
“This is all entertaining,” and it was, “but I’m hoping we can go for no killing tonight. I want to find the Light itself before any moves are made. This isn’t the Light, only the last step before we get there. So be good boys. Don’t kill the jackasses.”
“Which is everyone in this convoy but us?”
I leaned over and opened the glove compartment to pull out a PayDay I’d been saving for emergencies and tossed it back to Zeke. “Good answer.”
Griffin glared, a very much out of sorts Griffin indeed. The worst I’d seen him. In his life I’d seen him scared, sad, confident, in pain, angry, amused, happy, but I don’t think I’d ever seen him quite this pissed. We had had some bad, bad days this week, and he’d taken the brunt of it—literally feeling the pain of his partner being wounded, not knowing if he would live on top of it, losing more friends—even if he would’ve lost them anyway when Eden House kicked him out or put a bullet in the back of his skull. It was a lot to deal with. I reopened the compartment and gave him two PayDays and a kiss on the jaw.
“I’ll always be your family, Griffin. Leo and I, as long as you want us.” I would travel again, but there was no reason Griffin and Zeke couldn’t come with me if they wanted. A newly rebuilt Vegas House wouldn’t want them anymore and that was if they weren’t actively trying to kill them for betraying House secrets. “You and Zeke will never be alone.” Or lost as they’d been those seven years in foster care, when they’d had only each other. “Now, have some sugar, Sugar. We have work to do.”
I don’t know if the candy bar or the hand that I saw Zeke secretively place on Griffin’s shoulder helped him more. They might be able to block out other human empaths and telepaths as well as the angel and demon variety, but I don’t think since they’d come into their powers they’d ever put that to the test. I thought they were most likely wide open with one another, and that was what helped them survive before they knew what empathy and telepathy were. Before Eden House had come to clue them in, and once they did know, why close the barn door when the horses are jumping the fences and running for freedom? They were whole together in a way they couldn’t be apart. Zeke needed Griffin to keep him human, to meet society’s and the mental health system’s definition anyway, and Griffin needed to be needed. Most of all he needed to save Zeke, but he also needed to save people, to save everyone he could, to save the world in essence. Why?
It was a good question, and like all good questions had to wait until the end of class. Or the end of it all.
Whatever emotion Zeke passed on to Griffin through his touch, it worked. The stiff shoulders slowly relaxed as did the bunched muscle of his jaw, and his eyes, hard as stone, returned to the blue warmth I was used to. “Thanks,” I heard him murmur softly. Then I heard him think it as well. Not in my head, but I felt the shimmer of it pass through the air back to Zeke, the gratitude in it so strong that the night air itself reflected it.
“Wuss.” Zeke grinned. “You’ll make me cry.”
Although he never had. A baby died and he tried to slit his throat, but he hadn’t cried. I didn’t think Zeke was capable of crying, not yet. Self-mutilation and suicide, yes, but crying was far down the spectrum when one had to learn the full range of human emotions instead of being born with them. Suicide was easy; crying wasn’t. It was a thousand small suicides scattered throughout your life. It made the big one, the only one, more logical—at least to the teenage Zeke, who was mystified by most emotions every moment of the day. He was still mystified, but he was better. Much better. Without Griffin, he would’ve been a sociopath. I knew it. But look at him now. I did just that, glancing at him in the rearview mirror.
“Ass.” But Griffin passed back one of the PayDays.
I laughed and shook my head. Both of them scowled at me this time. “What’s so funny?” Zeke demanded as he clutched the candy bar possessively.
“Just something I saw on the Discovery Channel once.” I turned into Rhyolite. “Are you coming with us, Kit, or are you going to stay in the car and play with your shiny pebble?” I nodded at the PayDay.
They were both confused now, but I didn’t have time to explain it. I also had no future plans of explaining it. They’d have to stumble their way through this on their own. I wasn’t going to rob them of the thrill, the excitement of their entirely ridiculous and oblivious natures.
Rhyolite wasn’t much to see at night. There was a caretaker, but Goodman and his magic encyclopedia of fake IDs took care of him. With Eden House though, they may not have been fake. Everyone might be as genuine as my knife in a demon’s gut. We moved past the ruins of a foundation, some kind of miner ’s building, and stopped at the Bottle House. The train station and abandoned Cook Bank were farther down the gravelly dirt road.
The Bottle House was fenced in, sadly enough, with chain-link topped with barbed wire and the saddest paddock lock I’d seen in my life. A five-year-old could’ve strolled through in less than thirty seconds, although I imagined our guitarist had climbed the fence and vaulted the wire. A five-year-old probably could’ve done that as well, the security was that half-hearted.
On the front of the gate was a plaque telling us that it had been originally built by a Tom Kelly in 1906. All the bottles, set in concrete, were beer or medicine bottles. Tom Kelly must have spent most of the early 1900s in a happy haze. The house had fallen to ruin once and since been redone—just a tiny L-shaped structure with the walls of bottles of clear green and amber glass. All the round bottoms of the bottles faced outward. It wasn’t particularly attractive or interesting, not to me, but Jeb had liked it for some reason. Griffin popped the fence lock with the universal key—a pair of bolt cutters. The windows were boarded up and I tried the door. It was locked or relocked after the guitarist had broken in, and Goodman had sent away the caretaker with the key.
I sighed and dug in my pocket. Within seconds I was picking the lock, which was quite a chore considering the difference between locks now and then. I’d have been better off picking it with a fork than my tiny instruments. “Why not just kick it in?” Zeke asked, already losing his patience. No demons, no gunfire—what a waste of time in his opinion.
“Because, unlike some”—I tossed a narrow-eyed glance at Trinity, who stood to the side—“I respect other people’s property.” There were two things wrong with that statement. Granted, Trinity had one of his Eden Housers kick down my door, but I burned down Solomon’s nightclub anytime I couldn’t find anything good on late-night TV. That was the first thing. The second thing came in a matter of minutes, and it wasn’t my fault. I could do a lot of things, but predicting the future wasn’t one of them.
Once I was able to get the door open, Griffin, Zeke, Trinity, Goodman, Oriphiel, and I all went inside. It was a tight squeeze for just the six of us and the others were sent back to the cars. As Griffin turned on a small flashlight from his pocket and Zeke pumped a slug into his shotgun, Goodman moved in front of Trinity and raised a shotgun of his own.
“Stop with the testosterone. I’m trying to concentrate,” I said absently. I could feel it—a sliver of the Light. But where? Before it had been easy. Touch a shark’s brain, touch a drug addict’s melting mind, but this—this was different. The Light wasn’t in anything organic. It was here and everywhere, but I couldn’t pin it down. I knelt down and touched a hand to the wooden floor. No. Here, everywhere, but not there.
I stood and looked around as Griffin’s flashlight hit one of the thousands of bottles that made up the wall. It shone in the light like diamonds. In the Light. That was it. . . . That was where it was. The last sign. The last stepping-stone to the Light and vengeance. Awed, almost unbelieving after all this time, I stepped forward and placed a hand against the cool glass of the bottles.
That’s when the house blew up.
Technically, not true. The house blew outward, every bit of it. Had it simply blown up, I doubt too many would’ve been left, sliced to pieces, to tell the tale. It sounded as if the roof landed in two or three sections several hundred feet away, and the walls . . . those incredible walls of glass . . . how had I not seen how beautiful they were? The glass poured outward into the night like a sideways rainfall. And every fragment of them, every piece, every shard, glowed like a white-hot sun.
Trinity and Goodman had dived to the floor. The angel had disappeared. Griffin and Zeke flanked me as I stared at my hand that glowed as brightly as the flying glass. None of the three of us had a single cut. The shattered glass hung in the air for nearly a minute, shimmering brilliantly, before finally settling in the sand like the glitter of thousands of falling stars; the glow faded away slowly as it did in my hand. But I could still feel it. Warm, powerful, mine.
If anyone lurking around had seen that, we’d just created a new Roswell—Elvis-loving aliens welcome. Either that or they’d think something had made it out of Area 51. It was only about one hundred miles northeast—a short hop for escaping aliens.
Zeke looked around at the debris: the scattered glass, the pieces of roof—all the remains of a miracle of light and destruction. “Huh. Cool.” Then he shrugged, walked back over the now-flattened door, and headed for our car. And probably that PayDay. Mysteries of the universe, yeah, whatever, was his attitude. Job done. Let’s go. There were times I almost envied Zeke’s been-there, done-that, live-in-the-moment attitude. Not the consequences of it, but the escape it could be.
“Holy shit,” Griffin said, scanning the space where the walls had once been, then up to see sky where a roof once was, and finally back down at the floor still sturdy beneath our feet—and beneath Trinity’s and Goodman’s bellies. “You . . . Damn . . . Holy shit,” he repeated, and managed to slide it by without comment as Goodman, normally our “Thou shall not blaspheme” enthusiast, was still covering his head and praying fer vently under his breath. Although I didn’t think “holy shit” counted as a true blasphemy.
“Not me,” I denied. “The Light.” If such a minute bit of the Light could do that, what kind of power would the entire thing hold? I knew if I was wondering that, Trinity was as well. Savoring it. Picturing the moment he held it in his hands, although I didn’t think the now-absent Oriphiel was picturing the same thing. Let a mere human touch such a glory? I couldn’t see him allowing it.
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