Boy Scout—the very thing I’d thought about Griffin and the thing only I was allowed to think about him. Not this worthless wannabe. I dug the heel in again and he yelped, “He’s been hunting on his own for weeks, leaving his brain-dead partner home watching cartoons and acting as if he had something to prove. My side set up a way to prove something back.” The sneer twisted his thin lips. “No man can take on Hell. No man can take on demons alone and win. If he’s gone, and I guess he is or you wouldn’t be here, it’s because my kind took him. Set a trap and took him.” His grin showed yellow teeth with a gap between the front two teeth. “They’ll show the man what the demon can really do.”
Man. Demon. Like he had something to prove. I’d thought Griffin had seemed tired lately, distracted, and he did have something to prove . . . or he thought he did. He was a peri, the first of the ex-demon kind, and while he didn’t remember any of his demon days, he still knew. He had been a demon. He had done what demons did and worse than your average low-level demon. Griffin was intelligent and imaginative. He might not remember, but he could conjure up some likely scenarios in his mind’s eye. I’d only known Griffin as a human and he was the best human I’d come across in my long life. He wasn’t a Boy Scout. He was a Boy Scout to the power of a thousand. He protected the innocent; he helped Zeke and made him more than functional—he gave him a life. He’d saved more lives than he could keep count of, but it wasn’t enough. Once it had all come out three months ago . . . Leo’s and my trickster status, Zeke and Griffin being unknowing agents of Heaven and Hell. Angel and demon. Being an ex-angel annoyed Zeke, but he could deal with it precisely because he was Zeke. But Griffin finding out he was a demon, even if that status became ex-demon when he chose humanity over Hell . . . I should’ve known.
Griffin had been what he thought to be the worst of monsters, those he’d fought to the death after being recruited for Eden House. He had nothing to prove to any of us, but he had an enormous amount to prove to himself. Fighting demons with Zeke helped now that Eden House had fallen, but that wasn’t enough. He had to kill more of what he’d once been, save more people that in the past he would’ve killed. But Griffin was too good. Held himself to an impossible standard. I wasn’t sure he could save enough to save himself—to give him peace.
“Where?” I retrieved the knife, the rubber of the floor matting ripping. “I can put this in you anywhere you want. Pick one. Because if you don’t tell me where Griffin is right this damn minute, I’ll pick one and you won’t like it. And the next spot you’ll like even less.”
He said he didn’t know, that maybe there was this place they’d talked about, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure and I believed it. This useless brownnoser of all things demonic probably didn’t know anything in this life that was a hundred percent. If he did, he wouldn’t be kissing monster ass every minute he wasn’t working or sleeping. A hundred percent sure or not, though, it was all we had.
The last thing he said before we threw him off the bus was suddenly pitiful after his boasting of Hell’s might and how he’d be a part of it. “Don’t tell them I told you. Don’t tell them...” And then Zeke kicked him through the door, the last words swallowed up by the sound of his impact against the pavement, the scream as something in him snapped—an arm or leg. It didn’t matter. He had known about Griffin for weeks.
Of course I was going to tell them. The wannabe would find out what it was like to get what he wanted . . . to be noticed by demons. If we left any alive.
Chapter 8
A repossessed house isn’t the same as a possessed house and shouldn’t be frightening, especially in Vegas where it’s all stucco, everything looks the same, and you could drive to five different houses before you ever recognized your own. There was no stereotypical haunted house “look.” Besides, a repossessed house, scary qualities aside, didn’t make a good spot to hide. Right now there were hundreds of them and if you threw a rock at two real estate agents, chances were fifty-fifty you’d hit a demon, but usually houses still were not a good place to hole up for a demon. Normally if they didn’t want their bad behavior noticed, they’d take it out of town to the desert where only the burros and jackrabbits were there to see . . . or to hear.
Which made it odd that if they’d set a trap for Griffin, they would bring him to a house within yards of other houses . . . except the entire neighborhood was abandoned. Half built on the edge of town, those few who’d lived there at its conception had lost it all when the housing market crashed. Apparently the developer had too. Skeletons of houses were slowly falling apart, dead before they were even fully born. No one was left to hear the screaming . . . and demons did love to make their victims scream—and beg and plead, but mostly scream. Sometimes for someone to save them . . . anyone . . . God, Jesus, Allah, Mommy. Usually no one did.
Life was like that. If there was a master plan in place, fairness didn’t seem to enter into it. And as much as my kind and I tried to make up for that . . . vengeance is never as good as remaining innocent and whole.