Their hands still clasped the other ’s arm and if anything, their grip tightened. “Screw Heaven,” Zeke said, oblivious to those words coming from an angel’s crystal carved mouth. “I want to stay. I don’t want to be one of them. I want here. I want Griffin.” The angel-man who loved to kill the demons the most, yet not once would he deny his demonic partner. It didn’t even cross his mind. I would’ve loved Zeke for that, if I didn’t already love him.
And Griffin . . . a high-level demon. Not as high as Solomon or it would’ve been him on the outside and Solomon undercover, but still high-level. Who knew how many he’d killed? How many souls he’d damned? The Light didn’t let him know. I still felt a small tickle of it in my head. I felt how it took Hell from Griffin’s mind and Heaven from Zeke’s, took those memories away forever. Griffin wouldn’t know what he’d done, so he’d be free to be the good man he was now. And Zeke would be able to hold on to the scrap of free will he’d managed to wrangle for his own and keep working on it. Who knew? Someday . . . a long time . . . but someday, he’d learn, he’d get it right. They looked up as the Light, which existed to protect, protected them from themselves. It brightened as it rained down on them. Glass and scales became flesh. They became human again.
Except for the wings.
Zeke’s glass and crystal turned to the very traditional feathered kind—all copper as his hair with only the faintest barring of cream at the bottom. Griffin’s were the same dragon wings of before, only less tarnished . . . a brighter gold. They were beautiful, the both of them, just as they’d always been.
“Leo.” I met brown raven eyes the size of lemons. “Take the Light to the Hearth.” Hearth and home. We would have a home now. A safe harbor. A place no angel or demon could breach, one where they could never kill one of our kind again—where the very first who’d walked this world could be the very last as well. One eye winked and he was gone, the wind from his wings nearly knocking us all from our feet. It would have if I hadn’t already been sitting, courtesy of my wobbly legs. I felt the Light caress my mind, saying good-bye, holding me as I imagined Kimano doing; then it was gone . . . every last mote of it. Off to its new home.
Sanctuary. Finally. No more Kimanos. No more
païen
dead.
Of course, that’s not to say one
had
to go there right away. Yes, if all out-and-out war came between the three: angels, demons, and the
païens
. Or if you needed a rest after a hard hundred years of work tricking those who deserved it. You could go at any time. It didn’t mean you had to stay, hidden from the world if you didn’t want to . . . sheltered from the tricks and the dangers. The surly girls and fat dogs. The desert wind and an old Indian who never forgot you, no matter if you were coyote or human. The bar fights and the pool games. The red balloons left tied to benches. The fields of spring flowers and the tsunamis that drowned islands beneath the sea. You didn’t have to give up the good, the bad, and the miles and miles of everything else that stretched between.
I mean, where would be the fun in that?
Chapter 16
Getting out of Leviathan turned out to be relatively simple, although none of us knew how to fly a helicopter.
“How old are you? Really?” Griffin asked. “You told us you were twenty-one ten years ago, but you said you’d been looking for Solomon a damn sight longer than that. So that picture you have of your brother in your room, the black and white—”
“Was taken when black and white was your only option, about sixty years ago.” It was Kimano, Leo, and I. Leo had been the raven, as usual. I think he did it to irritate his father who had two ravens of his own, annoying little spies that they were, sitting on Odin’s shoulders. I’d been the coyote in the picture, and it had been the old American Indian who’d recognized me at the gas station yesterday who’d taken the photo for us. It was nice when someone remembered the old ways. I’d given him a red silk bandana for that, clutched in a pointed furry muzzle then. I’d given him a truck for it yesterday.
“And I’m old enough to know you don’t need to know.” I waved my arms at them imperiously to be helped up. “Still young and hot, got it?” The two of them let each other go, reluctantly if my eyes were good, and they were.
“I just liked to think if I’m older than you, that I could finally give you shit instead of the other way around,
big
sister,” Griffin drawled.
“Look at the ex-demon with his big-boy pants on now,” I snorted. I took his hand and Zeke’s with my other and managed to get upright and stay that way. “It’s not the age of the brain cells, boys; it’s how you use them. Do you want to talk about what you did with yours before you came to Vegas?”
He grimaced. “No.”
“I didn’t think so.” But I let go of his hand to give him a sympathetic rub of his back. It would take a lot of processing to come to grips with being what you imagined to be the worst evil in existence. They actually weren’t. Only the second most evil, but there was no need to get into that and it probably wouldn’t make him feel much better anyway.
We
païens
had our own version of demons, but oh so much worse.
“So we’re all old. Any of us know how to fly a helicopter?” Zeke said, more to the point than anything Griffin and I had brought up.
“Never needed one. Wind beneath my wings and all that.” I held out my arms beside me and shook my head. “But that’s over. I won’t have my own again for a while.”
“Why?” Griffin took his turn and asked, the thick hair a tangle from the wind of Leo’s flight.
I shrugged a little uncomfortably. “I showed off a little. I didn’t just want Solomon dead. I wanted him afraid, terrified, and I wanted him to suffer. For my brother. I pulled together a lot of forms at once. Too many. My battery has been drained for a while.” I wasn’t sorry I’d done it, but there are consequences for everything. Especially vengeance—big vengeance. I’d known the price. Kimano was worth paying that price.
“Then you’re stuck in your original form?”
I laughed as I touched his gold wing. It felt like silk strung between smooth metal. “This isn’t me. It has been one of my favorite forms though. And I’m only stuck in human form for four or five years or so. It’s not that long.” It wasn’t. Although the human vulnerability rather sucked—no healing, no making wounds disappear as I shifted form. All human. I did like this Trixa though. I’d thought carefully about who she’d be. I’d wanted to be all things, not just one. I wanted to be literally all ethnic varieties on the planet. I might appear mostly Asian and African, but I hadn’t stopped there. You named it and it was in me. Caucasian, Arabic, Polynesian, Aborigine . . . everything. It was rather clever: If there is a pheromone component to race and gender, anyone would be naturally inclined to trust me or be attracted to me, because in a small genetic way, they were family. To have your foot already in the door with everyone you met, what more could a trickster want?
Not that it seemed to work with Leo’s bimbos of the moment. Nothing could penetrate their own Light, their own shield—one of stupidity.
“You can choose any form you want?” Zeke asked curiously. “Why not one with bigger boob—” Griffin elbowed him hard and we were back to where we’d been weeks ago. Zeke without an internal filter and Griffin saving his ass. It was . . . wonderful. The best.
“You better go get your guns out of the helicopter,” I ordered, “if you’re going to talk trash like that, and because the two of you are about to take your first flight. The first one you’ll remember anyway.”
While Zeke cursed inside the copter trying to get the weapons locker open and cursed Leo while he was at it for not waiting to give us a ride, Griffin at my side said quietly, “I’m a demon.”
“No, you were a demon,” I corrected, cupping his face. “You’ve been human since you first came to Vegas to watch over Zeke for literally all of your human lives. That proves that you, Griffin, are one of the most hon orable and truly good men I know.” He opened his mouth, doubt written all over his face. “And,” I added, “you wanted to know how old I am? More than six thousand years old. Old enough to have known many good men. More bad men, but many good ones too. You rank at the top. I promise you that.”
“Hard to imagine how that happened,” he said, frowning at the sight of his own wings.
“You are how it happened. You were given a second chance. With that chance, you chose good, and you chose Zeke. Remember that.” If he didn’t, I’d remind him until it finally took. It might take a lot of work, but I was up for it.
It turned out Zeke and Griffin were up to it as well. Both took an arm and we flew, the wings of a falcon beating in perfect harmony with the wings of a dragon. At the base of the mountain Zeke was grinning, the grin of a happy five-year-old who’d flown his first kite. “This is going to be fun.” He looked at the Colt Anaconda in one hand and his wings and grinned wider. “Really fun.”
“No, no. With flight and massive firepower comes responsibility. The last thing we need is a guided missile with feathers. You’ll have to earn your license first.” I ignored his glare as I went on. “Put the wings away. It’s a fifteen-mile walk back to Rachel. We don’t want any roadside conversions on the way. No shrines, not unless they’re to Elvis. It’s the Nevada law.”
“How?” Zeke touched the feathers over his shoulder with a curious finger and said skeptically, “Seems pretty solid.”
“Just . . .” I hesitated as I thought of the last time I’d talked to a peri, pulling my sleeves down over my hands. Despite the bright winter sun, it wasn’t warm. “Think them away, I guess.” It seemed like that’s what the peri had said. “Tell them to go. They are yours. They should listen.”
It took a few minutes, but they were able to get the hang of it. Copper and gold flickered in and out of existence with glints of gold light until finally they disappeared altogether. Zeke reached over his shoulder and slapped his back. There was nothing but the meaty thump of flesh. “Will they come back? Where’d they go?”
“When you want them to, yes. As for the rest”—I shifted my shoulders in an unknowing shrug—“I’ve no idea. Next time you see a peri, ask him.”
“A peri?” Griffin bent down and picked up a stray red-gold feather of Zeke’s that had fallen to the ground and stayed when the wings had gone.
“Yes, a peri. Zeke is a peri now. I think.” I started walking down the dusty road. “Not that I’ve run into one like him before. All other peris have Heaven’s stamp of approval on their green cards. Mythology says peris are half angel, half demon. Remember this, guys,” I said firmly, “mythology is most often wrong. Sometimes it’s close, but in the end never completely right.” I hooked my arms through theirs and pulled them close for warmth. “Some angels who lived on Earth among humans for hundreds or thousands of years, watching, doing whatever it is they did, they tended to want to stay on Earth when it was their time to go home. They’d get a taste of free will and the native life. So they’d ask permission to ‘retire’ . . . to become expatriates of Heaven, if you will. I emphasize they
asked
permission; they didn’t give Heaven the metaphorical finger like Zeke did.”
Zeke didn’t look sorry. He actually looked rather pleased with himself. “What’s Griffin?”
“I don’t know. What the hell, for once we’ll close our eyes and buy into a little mythology. Griffin can be a peri too—the demon half instead of the angel one. He’d be the only one I’d ever heard of.” I pulled them closer, more body heat. “Which makes you as special as you always thought you were, at least from the way you dress. If Eden House doesn’t rebuild in Vegas, you’ll lose the bit paycheck and be shopping at Wal-Mart, Mr. Metrosexual, and then what will you do?”
Griffin started to stay something indignant but let it go as I leaned against his arm. “God, trickster, demon,” he said. “Trickster trumps a demon, eh?”
“Mmmm.” I rested my head on his shoulder and yawned.
“Especially a pissed-off trickster?” he continued.
“Especially,” I agreed wearily with another heavy yawn and a desire to eat the nearest buffet in its entirety. No sharing. I’d carb loaded at breakfast for all the changing I knew I’d do, all the energy I’d need. Now I was drained, had a fifteen-mile walk ahead of me, and couldn’t decide whether I’d rather sleep for days or eat for hours. Too bad I couldn’t do both at the same time.
By the time we made it back to Rachel, population less than a hundred, I gave up on the idea of “borrowing” a car and heading back to Vegas. We stopped at the Little A’Le’Inn. With Area 51 being so close, aliens were the only tourist attraction and business that kept this tiny town going. The inn’s restaurant didn’t have the buffet I’d been wanting to devour from beginning to end. I settled for five burgers, five sides of fries, and three milkshakes. I’d have to start watching it from now on. I couldn’t just melt the fat away anymore or turn it into more hair or height. I sighed and enjoyed my final burger to every last bite.
“So, your sanctuary—you called it the Hearth?” Griffin fiddled with his tuna on toast. He didn’t seem too enthralled with it. He was more into sushi or the expensive restaurants.
“The Hearth.” I nodded, and dipped a fry in ketchup. “I was for Haven myself and Sanctuary is far too clichéd, but we had a committee and voted. You never heard so much bitching over a name. And some of the members kept trying to eat the other—” I stopped at the look in Griffin’s eyes. It wasn’t panic. It wasn’t fear. It was the resignation of “Here comes yet one more nightmare in the world.” He didn’t need that, knowing the whole of what lived in the shadows of this world. He was dealing with enough.