“Pretend they’re family.” I handed him the glass and he put it in the dishwasher.
“You do remember how I got along with my family in the days when they were still speaking to me?” he asked wryly.
True. His family was definitely not my family. They lived at one another ’s throats and Leo was the worst of them all. Or he had been. He’d changed over the years. Well, not changed so much as mellowed a few thousand degrees. Same spots but greatly faded. I hoped one day they would give him a chance to prove that. But the bad blood between Leo and his father was very bad indeed. Bile, black and acidic. That kind of burn would take a long time to cool. Either that or a catastrophe.
Later, I’d be thinking how hindsight was such the bitch.
“Someday”—I pulled at the black braid that trailed down his chest—“someday they’ll see you for what you are now . . . if I have to kick the ass of each and every one. I promise.”
“That might be the one thing that does it. They fear you almost as much as they did me.” He returned the favor by wrapping one of my messy curls around his finger. “And with good reason.”
“You always were one with a compliment.” I slapped his chest and ordered, “And treat Zeke and Griffin like my family, then, not yours.” I told him this, but I didn’t need to. Leo had treated them just that way, just as I had, from day one. Strays who needed help; strays who’d become adopted family because if we didn’t do it, no one else would. And honestly no one else was as qualified as we were. Just because I sold information that occasionally led to the end of a rotten, cheating, and abusive soul didn’t mean I also didn’t have sympathy for those who deserved it.
Although these days, fewer and fewer seemed to. Maybe it was the crowd I’d started running with. Demons and the lackeys of angels. I was no one’s lackey.
And despite what Mr. Trinity thought when he arrived to pick me up, I certainly wasn’t his.
Chapter 10
The House had their own jet. No surprise there. It was only a four-hour drive, but I suspected the last thing Mr. Trinity wanted was to be cooped up in a car, no matter how large and opulent, for that long with a bar owner. An annoyingly low-class bar owner with unsuitably tousled waves of streaked hair, equally unsuitable red jacket and pants, and the rude habit of demanding food and pomegranate martinis on an hour-long flight.
At least Eden House had connections far above and beyond the government, because I boarded their plane without showing ID and carrying my gun. And a few knives. I could’ve carried in a shotgun if I’d wanted. I didn’t want. I wanted another martini, but we landed before I was able to order one. Mr. Trinity hadn’t exchanged one word during the flight. His second in command, along for the ride, Jackson Goodman, was less restrained. “Greed and gluttony,” he said disapprovingly. “While we’re on . . .”
“A mission from God?” I smiled winningly. Old movies, I loved them. I’d been waiting a long time to use that line with Eden House.
After that, Goodman didn’t speak to me anymore while we were on the plane. It was for the best. He annoyed me, and I couldn’t spare the concentration right now to think of ways to annoy him back. Not that he didn’t think that I annoyed him already. Poor Jackie. He had no idea what I could do if I put my mind to it. But there was a time for everything.
We disembarked in San Diego to blue skies, the imagined smell of the ocean, and a slowly falling sun. I liked San Diego. I liked the cold, salty ocean, the wet sand, Old Town, the Gaslamp Quarter, the seals flapping and snorting seawater. It was a great place to visit, a great place to live if you could afford it, and apparently a great place to drop a bread crumb. That face, that name, their plans . . . someone had visited the aquarium in Vegas and stared at a particular shark through the glass—and that someone had ended up here. They had good taste.
Maybe I could pack in a minivacation while scooping up a tiny portion of the Light. I ignored the diesel fumes on the tarmac and turned toward the ocean. It wasn’t in view, but I could imagine it. Now, if I actually could get to see it and eat seafood on the docks, it would be a great day. A fabulous day.
I wasn’t holding my breath.
“Where is the next step?” Mr. Trinity said behind me, his voice the drip of a frigid icicle. I’d be willing to bet his greatest regret was that he hadn’t been born in the time of the Inquisition or witch burning. Not that Eden House was Catholic . . . they were an order of their own making, unknown by the public, unaffiliated, and were around before BC clicked over to AD. Ancient indeed.
“I’m not exactly sure. Sharks aren’t as verbal in their communication as people, even with the Light’s help. It took me a while to get his name, Butch—so imaginative—but I can’t get a last name. But I did get this general location. . . . I know he’s here. Somewhere. I’m just not exactly sure where.” I saw it again, a blurry vision of the man through water and a thick layer of glass. Almost unwillingly he’d put his hand up to the glass and the shark had rested its blunt nose on the other side. The trail to the Light had passed. The picture was waving in my head like seaweed—a man, not a very attractive one. He looked like the kind of man who’d toss a hair dryer into his ancient mother’s bathtub to get a measly inheritance—just enough to buy a truly gorgeous guitar. He’d find a band, then, who would take him. They’d all see. I could see the frayed towels, the rubbery flowers on the bottom of the tub to keep the elderly from slipping. A big ratty hair dryer from the eighties bought for twenty-five cents at a yard sale. A smirking grandson who’d kill a neighborhood cat if he could catch it. Sparks flying. The lights going out.
I’m known for my imagination.
Then again, knowing he was in a band wasn’t my imagination. The shark told me that, the Light told me that, the same as it told me to go here. So it could be that Grandma had shuffled off her mortal coil just as I pictured it.
Butch’s smirk in the aquarium had been combined with dyed black hair, a narrow face, weasel eyes, and silver canine teeth flashing in an uneasy grimace as the smirk slid away. Hard to blame him. It wasn’t every day a shark shoved something into your brain. Drugs, it had to be the drugs; I could hear the echo of the thought through the Light. He moved away from the glass, snarling and showing those inlaid silver ca nines again. See? Look at me. It’s just a stupid shark. I’m not scared of it or the cold, saltwater thoughts in my head.
I saw him brush by a man with a two-year-old tucked in his arms. The little boy looked at the silver teeth and whimpered. “Bogeyman.”
Oh, sugar, I thought with sympathetic amusement, not hardly. Here’s hoping that’s the worst thing you see in your life, that pathetic monster wannabe.
“We need to go that way.” I pointed. “Toward the Gaslamp Quarter. He’s there somewhere.”
“Can you be a little more specific?” Goodman spoke up stiffly for the first time in forty minutes. Dressed in a suit an undertaker would’ve found darkly grim, with washed-out blue eyes and hair neither brown nor blond, he barely looked like a human being at all. More of a wax figure that didn’t make the grade and was tossed to molder in Madame Tussaud’s basement. In every way, he was far more frightening than the wannabe with the black hair and silver teeth. That guy had an identity, as pathetic as it was. Goodman looked like an identity vampire. Like he would suck up the essence of everything that made you
you
, to fill up the hollow figure he was . . . fill up what he was missing inside. What was he missing? From the looks of him and the shimmer of what seemed like almost a vacuum around him, that might just be every single thing that made a human human.
“I’m not a bloodhound. Get me closer and hopefully I’ll get more specific. Or the Light will.”
By the time the hired car took us to the Gaslamp Quarter, I did have it narrowed down. Unfortunately it wasn’t in one of the great seafood restaurants, but rather the looming presence of Petco Stadium. There was a concert coming up in two hours and the teenagers were already rowdy, shouting and cursing good-naturedly as the line curved around the stadium.
Goodman flashed his ID—CIA, FBI, Homeland Security; whatever Eden House provided him with got us through the door and past the crowds. I took the lead, a glowing thread reeling me in. I walked through the circular halls and past security guards and bodyguards, all who stepped back as if whatever laminated card Goodman continued to flash was kryptonite. Several bands were playing here tonight and our goth emo-imitation monster from the aquarium was no doubt in one of them. Finally reaching a door relatively untrampled by headset-wearing men and women who seemed frantic just for the love of the emotion, I opened the door without knocking. No one would’ve heard me anyway. It was a party. Drugs, alcohol, and underage girls galore. I grabbed a beer from a table and waded in. I looked over my shoulder to see that Mr. Trinity and his entourage had decided to wait in the hall out of the crush. Wimps. Demons they’d take on. Sweaty, half-naked, puking groupies were a little too much for them.
I moved through the room, ears deafened by bad music—this band’s music. Had to be. I came to an unconscious guy on the floor and bent for a closer look. Not my guy, not Butch. I stepped over him and kept going. I finally found the weasel on a couch with four women, two sandwiched on either side of him. He looked unbearably smug and rapacious. He thought he was a predator surrounded by his prey—a ferret with small, silver fangs.
Since the couch was full, I plopped on his lap and flashed him a smile, wide, sexy, and stupid as they came. “Hi.” I had to fit in with everyone else for the few seconds this was going to take. I needed him to hold still. The passing of the way to the Light was dis orienting. I didn’t need him having a shark/aquarium flashback and freaking out. Then I’d have to knock him unconscious and that was more work than I wanted to invest in.
“Hey,” he said back, trying to fake being bored and cool during our scintillating, monosyllabic conversation.
I reached a hand up and touched his hair as if I were going to comb my fingers through the limp strands. Instead, I clamped my fingers on the curve of his skull and let the shining bit of Light pass into me. It poured out of the drug-soaked brain into mine. It was like before, running to the edge of the cliff and jumping, arms spread. Flying for a split second, and then falling. Falling and falling. Forever. On top of whatever drugs he was on, it had to be ten times worse for him than for me. His mouth dropped open. He gurgled, then started to yell. I slammed my hand over the chapped, cracked lips of his mouth. Kissing him would’ve been more convincing to those around us.
Not in this lifetime.
I closed my eyes and let the Light flash through my brain around and around and then curl up like a cozy cat. If the Light had emotions, this tiny molecule of it was probably glad of the new, less drug-addled home. The ferret screamed under my hand. No one heard him. It was too loud, my hand was too tight, and the alcohol had flowed like a river in this room.
“Sharks and guitars,” I whispered to him. “Which is real? One or both?”
His thin chest heaved and the breath died against my palm. I pulled my hand away and he gagged in disbelief, “I’m high. I’m so high.”
“Depends on what standards you’re going by.” I moved off his lap, one of the better shifts in location I’d made all day, and headed back for the door.
“We’re on. Let’s go!”
Someone from the band actually said it. It was like a rockumentary, a very bad, fake rockumentary. I stepped to the side as the room emptied in a rush, all the bad music lemmings flowing out into the hall. I waited until they were gone and followed. Trinity, Goodman, and the others were waiting, completely wrinkle and rumple free. Untouched. Quick of foot, force field of holier-than-thou superiority—either way it was impressive.
“I have it,” I told Mr. Trinity. “It’s not telling me anything yet, but I have it.”
“Good,” he said, as if he expected nothing less. There couldn’t be too many failures among the agents of Eden House. Trinity wouldn’t tolerate it, which is why he didn’t suspect Griffin and Zeke of being double agents. He couldn’t imagine anyone going against his authority, especially not for the likes of Leo and me.
I leaned against the wall and folded my arms. “Give me a second. I’m still a little dizzy.”
Goodman looked impatient, Trinity was impassive, as usual, and the minions were as blank of face as they’d been throughout the entire trip. I bowed my head and studied the toes of my boots for several minutes before I said, “All right, I’m ready.” I straightened, stepped away from the wall, and started down the hall. Goodman was ahead of us with his magic card in hand, parting the Red Sea. We were almost out when I heard the band start tuning up out on the field. I turned and saw them on the stage set in the grass. Singer, bassist, drummer, and my friend, the guitarist. He did have a gorgeous guitar as I’d seen, the one the Light had said Grandma had paid her life for. It was red. Of course I was sure he had lots of guitars, all colors. He just happened to pick my favorite color. Wasn’t that ironic?
What was more ironic was when his fingers touched the strings, there was an arc of white fire that arched him up on his toes with his back bowed and his head thrown back with tongue jutting forth. Not a pretty sight. Fortunately, the roadies were bright enough not to touch him, but it was a few seconds before they managed to turn off the electricity. They tried CPR, but he was gone, just like Grandma had been.