“You ungrateful, pushy little bitch. Crazy too—ought to be locked up in the nuthouse with your talk of rivers in Hell. No crazy is killing or robbing me—you’ll see that right here and now.” I’d let go of her hands, and she was scooping up the bullets on the table. Her fingers were as nimble as those of a blackjack dealer, which was why I took her gun with me.
“I’ll leave it outside the door. Don’t shoot your mail-man.” I was passing through the doorway when I felt something hit the back of my head hard. A bullet fell to my feet and rolled across the floor. The hell with the gun, she’d started throwing bullets at me. I rubbed the stinging on my scalp and closed the door behind me in time to hear another one clink against the glass. With that arm she should’ve been pitching in the World Series. I put the .357 down on the concrete. She took very good care of her dogs. If I killed her, who would feed and love them?
I massaged my head again. Leo liked dogs. Tempting, tempting, but no. If being a bitch merited death, I’d be notching my gun belt every day. If I had a gun belt. Damn it, that stung. Human pain, yet another thing I could do without in the whole being-human realm. Their nervous system was far too fine-tuned, ridiculously sensitive. In other forms I’d had my limbs broken, my abdomen clawed open, and, on one memorable occasion, had a lung ripped completely out of my body and none of it equaled one menstrual period of the new and human Trixa Iktomi. That might be a small exaggeration, but it wasn’t that far from the truth.
I knocked on the window of the stolen car and the locks snicked open. Sliding into the driver’s seat, I took in the scenario. Griffin had his arm around Zeke’s neck from behind in a classic choke hold. “Did the lesson take a turn for the worse?”
Zeke was tuning the radio. “He won’t go through with it,” he said without the hoarseness or lack of consciousness the arm across his throat should’ve produced. “He couldn’t choke out a Christmas elf with this hold.”
“But I want to. I very much want to,” Griffin countered. The hard line of his arm, the clenched teeth, the face flushed with aggravation; it all said it was true, but . . .
“Ha,” his partner gloated, “now that’s a lie. I can feel it. I can see it. It’s purple. When you lie, I see purple.” Closing his eyes to concentrate on the color, he then opened them again and focused back to the radio. “Okay. You can nap now. You won’t ever be able to lie to me again, not even for my own good.” Griffin’s jaw, if anything, went tighter, but he let Zeke go, then lay back down in the seat. Being Zeke’s student would give anyone a headache, concussion or not.
In a way, it was too bad. Griffin had chosen the wrong thing to lie to Zeke about, but at the end of the day you sometimes needed someone to lie to you, because some days the truth was too unpleasant, too depressing to hear. A good example would be Eli, carrying the heat of Hell with him, materializing beside the car, tearing the door off to throw into the street, and snarling, “He needs four more wings. Four, and then playing Where’s Waldo is goddamn over. He’ll have an X marks the spot to Lucifer. Your plan, if you have one, better be in fucking motion, because the world is about to come to an end.
“All of them.”
Chapter 14
Three months ago when I’d lost my shape-shifting ability, I knew there’d come a time, sooner or later, when I would encounter a situation where a fast gun wasn’t going to be enough. It wouldn’t be because of any low-level demon, but Eligos had taken over Vegas when I’d killed Solomon. He would’ve taken it if I hadn’t killed Solomon. Eli had said Solomon wasn’t in his league and I didn’t doubt him. He also thought I was the best toy he’d been gifted with in ages. He thought he was playing with fire when he played with me, and I had to keep him thinking that. If he knew what I was now, he would do to me what I’d done to Solomon. I had no desire to be in so many pieces that I had to be cleaned up with a sponge and buried in a bucket.