Forty minutes and one expensive cab ride later I was standing in the doorway of a small bedroom with approximately fifty handguns mounted on one wall, ten shotguns on another, and a third host to enough knives to supply all the sushi chefs in Vegas. “What?” Zeke asked, aware that I found it somehow lacking but not knowing why. “At least it doesn’t smell like ass and ammonia.”
True. I had to give him that. It was a step up from the storage closet I’d given him and Griffin—or it would’ve been if there’d been a bed. There wasn’t. There wasn’t a couch, no futon, not a sign of a sleeping bag. There were only two chairs, a table, and enough gun oil and cleaning supplies to take care of the army and half of the marines. “This is your happy place, isn’t it, Kit?” I asked.
Griffin answered for him, “This is Zeke porn. I time him when he comes in here. Too long and I have to break out the fire extinguisher and cool him down.”
“That only happened once, and you weren’t supposed to tell anyone.” Zeke waited for a moment, then bumped his shoulder against mine. “That’s a joke, Trixa. It’s not as good as an explosion, but it’s supposed to cheer you up.”
With Eligos, Cronus, and the very probable enslavement of all worlds, I didn’t know there was anything that could. But that was wrong. That was human thinking, not trickster thinking. To the last second of our lives, the fast-talking last breath we took, we always thought we’d pull it off—pull something out of our hat . . . or our ass. And if we couldn’t? We’d laugh the whole way into the maw of death itself. That was the trickster way. That was my way and being human wasn’t going to change that in me. Nothing ever could.
I pinched his ribs. “Actually, it did and gave me a mental picture to share with Leo against his will. That’s almost worth being embarrassed by a demon. Now about that alcohol. Someone whip me up a margarita.”
But this was boys’ town, testosteroneville, and nary a margarita in sight. I made myself at home on a stool at their breakfast bar. It was ironic. I’d left the bar and yet my butt was still parked on a stool as Zeke peered in the refrigerator. “We have beer and . . . um . . . beer.”
I raised my eyebrows at Griffin. “Wine too.” He added, “I picked it out, not Zeke, so it’s in an actual bottle instead of a box.”
I slapped the bar. “What a salesman. Fill me up, sugar.” Contrary to what I’d said earlier, I didn’t want masses of alcohol. Now was no time to be fuzzy headed. All I was looking for was a sense of routine—unwinding, climbing into a bubble bath at the end of a long day with a glass of that non-box wine and relaxing.
Routine.
It bore repeating. I had thought that word and not as a curse. My mama would never let me forget it, if I were stupid enough to tell her . . . and my mama hadn’t raised an idiot. Embracing routine. Forced to exercise. Experiencing human pain, wildly erratic human emotion. I rested my forehead on the bar. It had taken a long time for me to get the news flash that I couldn’t turn being human into a cakewalk, but I’d finally gotten it. Sky and Earth, if I survived this, I didn’t have an inkling how I’d survive the next four years.
“Trixa?”
“I think I’m having a mid-trickster crisis,” I replied to Griffin, without lifting my head. “Ignore the meltdown and pour the wine.”
I didn’t melt down, as cathartic as that would’ve been. I waited for the wine and when it came, like a good little trickster/human, I straightened and got right back on the horse that had thrown me. In this case, life was the horse, and it had kicked me when I was down. It could kick all it wanted. I could be both human and not. I was the fox guarding the henhouse. Watch for the feathers in my grin. Hadn’t that always been true? Damn straight it had been. It didn’t stop me from draining the glass in two quick swallows, but I did feel better. Things were much more difficult than I’d planned for, but that was life . . . for everyone. I would make it work.
“About the medium and talking to a dead person.” Griffin held up the bottle after pouring his own glass. “Care to fill us in on how that’s going to help the Cronus situation? It would be interesting—that’s a good word—interesting if you were to give us some information about the plan, this time, before Zeke and I find out this time that instead of being an angel and a demon that we’re actually Batman and Robin.”
That cheered me up more than the wine. My boy, trying to play rough with his big sister, trying to give me a verbal wedgie. It was cute enough that I wanted to pat him on the head and let him play an extra half hour in the sandbox. As an alternative, I embraced who I was and threw him to the sharks . . . for what I thought was the third time this week. “I’m full of information, sunshine. Like how you’re not supposed to mix alcohol and pain medication.”
Zeke promptly snatched the glass from Griffin’s hand and drank it himself. “You’re welcome,” he said pointedly as he put the glass in the sink.
“Yes, thank you so very much for throwing yourself on the grenade like that for me.” Griffin switched his annoyance to where it belonged—on me. “About the medium . . .”
I held up a finger to stop him and swiveled the stool to face the living room. “Shhh. Incoming.”
Païen could almost always recognize their own, whether we currently looked human or not—and, I’d found out, if we were more human than not. Sometimes you had to be face-to-face, sometimes not. Sometimes it was a whisper in the back of your brain and sometimes it was a scream. Oddly, I couldn’t feel Cronus at all. He could be standing inches away and I would feel nothing. I’d told Eligos that the Titan was outside a demon’s frame of reference. Truthfully, he was outside that of most païen as well. But Leo, I knew, and had known for so long, that when I sensed him, it was as if he were standing right behind me, close enough that I could feel his warm breath on my neck, the heat radiate through his skin as he leaned close . . . and swatted me on the back of my head with a newspaper. Romantic it was not, but that’s what it felt like. Leo was a god and the presence of a god packed a punch. They were brimming with power and although Leo’s power was now gone, I recognized him the same as I always had. Only this time it was double the jolt to the brain.
Griffin and Zeke’s house, while impeccably neat on the inside and full of toys like a huge plasma TV mounted on the wall, was a drab and cracked stucco on the outside and located in North Town. If you wanted to live in Vegas and not worry about your neighbors catching a glimpse of you loading up the car with guns, this was the place. The cops would go there, but when you have a house stashed with your own guns as well as drugs to worry about, who’s going to call them? And as the neighbors were more than familiar with Zeke, my boys were able to keep their toys. Their house hadn’t been robbed once—or blown up. The neighbors couldn’t claim the same.
Besides the plasma TV in the living room, there was also a leather couch Scotchgarded against gun oil and demon blood. When Thor appeared, he was already sprawled on it, his feet on the coffee table and the remote in his hand. “Dude. Nice TV. Is a game on?” he slurred, before his chin hit his chest, the remote hit the floor, and he was out. A split second of semicoherence followed by deep alcohol-fueled unconsciousness, and this was what I was pinning all of reality’s hopes on.
Leo, who had shown up in midair in raven form with wings flapping, changed back to human form. I hadn’t decided yet if I was happy or disappointed that the Light had let him keep his clothes as part of his raven-shifting ability. “Hail the Mighty Thor,” he snorted as Thor began a drunken snore that anyone who’d owned a bar before could recognize. It was thick, loud, and accompanied by just enough drool to make it intriguing. “This is our third attempt to make it here. Midair over the Grand Canyon was scenic.” That would explain the bird shape. There was never a designated nondrinking god around when you needed one. “I thought you’d come here since Cronus has marked the bar as his territory.”