Leo gave a laugh that was far too amused at my expense, but I didn’t mind. It kept him occupied with thoughts other than gutting Griffin with a pair of car keys for the poofing disrespect. Not that he would have, but it had been a long, odoriferous ride. We could all use the distraction. “Trixa and electronics? She can’t program her TiVo. She can’t work her cell phone. It still chirps like a flock of birds when it rings. She’s set two, no . . . three microwaves on fire. Most couldn’t do it that many times on purpose.”
“I’m not technically gifted.” I shot Thor yet again. “I’m not ashamed. We all have our weaknesses. If you didn’t have a weakness, how could you hone your skills to work around it? Shape-shifting and the powers of persuasion are my skills. Those and the ability to drive a fast car in three-inch demon-gutting boots. I don’t need TiVo to trick, and I don’t need a microwave to kill, although it might be nicely ironic in some cases. Now let me do my job.” This time when I shot Thor, it worked. That was another thing that didn’t require technical skill: pulling a trigger . . . a rather sad commentary on weapons of the day.
Thor’s eyes were open and on me. The color wasn’t clear in the parking lot lights, but I could guarantee massively bloodshot was descriptive enough. I didn’t wait long enough for any emotion to register. I didn’t want to deal with a pissed-off, cranky, heading hard into hangover god. I wanted an amiable, still drunk but conscious one. “Give him a beer, Zeke,” I ordered before smiling at Thor. “Hey, doll, Loki said you’d give us a hand.” The same one that automatically grabbed for the beer Zeke dangled. Guns weren’t the only necessities we’d packed. When dealing with an alcoholic god, it was a good idea to not run out of what kept him happy.
By the time he drank four beers, asked to see my breasts—not that that was how he phrased it—I was inside the museum. It wasn’t an easy ride, far and away the worst I’d been on. I couldn’t poof . . . damn Griffin. I couldn’t appear or disappear at will—that wasn’t one of my skills I’d been talking up earlier. But I could compare Thor’s shortcut to the ones that Leo had taken me on a time or two in the old days. Those had been smooth sailing on a calm sea. Thor’s trip was a roller-coaster ride off the rails and into the screaming crowd below. That I fell only three feet to the floor was something I was grateful for. I could’ve ended up in a display case one-third my size or inside the floor instead of above it.
I landed on my bare feet—boots were great for fighting demons but not for robbing a museum—and caught my balance. Gym and yoga classes were paying off in some ways even if they were at the mercy of the diner’s biscuits and gravy. Leo had looked up the contents of the museum via their Web site on Thor’s computer, after fighting off all the porn-bots, and said there didn’t appear to be anything valuable enough to elicit the need of motion detectors throughout the building or around any specific exhibits. Most of what was here wasn’t half as valuable as what your average collector bought off eBay. This wasn’t the British Museum, full of gold and irreplaceable pieces of history. This was a nice, educational museum with the funding that went with that. That meant all the doors and windows had alarms. There would also be an alarm if you shattered a display case and there would be at least one security guard.
Easy damn peasy for any thief, including a nontechnologically gifted one such as I.
I’d appeared in a room full of dead, stuffed birds. While it was a teaching tool and the birds had died of natural causes, I didn’t like it. It was the pa?en in me. We were of nature. We were nature in a very real sense and everything born of nature should return to it, birds included—they shouldn’t be frozen behind glass. But humans were human and had long lost the connection to what raised them up and took them down.