It was dark by the time we reached John Wilbur's short, squat mobile home. There was a bright generator light flooding the place and the sand around it. In that sand someone had literally drawn the line. And it surrounded the trailer in a circle twice as brilliant as the generator light. My sungla.s.ses were in the glove compartment, although I wished I had them back as I shaded my eyes for a better look. Flakes-minute flakes of gla.s.s or crystal made up the circle, and the fact they glowed almost as bright as the sun said one thing and one thing only.

The Light. They came from the Light.

Leo mirrored my frown. "Someone knows something."

There was the faintest of sounds behind us. A whisper of sand. A rustle of cloth against cloth.

"Our Mr. Wilbur is clever . . . for a human." The tone was so bored. So very "have been there and had a stained-gla.s.s window designed in my image." So "Why oh why must I suffer the indignity of discoursing with the unfaithful and the sinning?" I turned and considered shooting the angel dead center in his chest. It wouldn't be the first time I'd shot one. But I knew if I did, he would bleed a ray of luminous white light for a few seconds; then he would be whole again. It would be all for nothing. While the angel I had once shot had deserved it, I wasn't sure this one did simply for being annoyingly superior and in the right place at the right time-when I wished he weren't.

"Look at this. Temptation in the desert, but it's not the devil this time-only a parakeet with delusions of grandeur." I kept the gun aimed at him. Truthfully, I wasn't sure you could kill an angel. Then again, maybe the same would hold for them as held for demons. If you could keep their bodies anch.o.r.ed on Earth and blow out their brains . . . After all, as Solomon had said, he was an angel too-simply a fallen one. Seemed what would work for one, destruction-wise, would work for the other. I'd never had the need to put it to the test. Yet. But if he got between me and the Light, that might change.

And where did angels and demons go when they "died"? Because it was death, at least for a demon. They didn't go back down to h.e.l.l for a little detention and pop up again later. At least, I'd never seen one that had. Once the brain was gone, it was gone for good. What then? Per their doctrine, there was no place higher to step up to for the angels and no lower for the demons, right?

Curious.

So was death really and truly death for them? The nothingness of nonexistence?

Maybe I'd ask this one. "Hey," I started, until a familiar elbow impacted my side. Leo. He knew exactly what I was thinking. He usually did.

"Sorry." I gave in, not graciously, but I did give in. A great woman had once said, The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. That did describe me down to the molecular level, but, sadly, there was a time and place. This was not it. I nudged my thoughts back to the more important matter at hand: the Light.

The angel that was here to fetch it was a man in the same way that demons are men. Although, to give credit, demons were women too. Same MO. Female demons were just as drop-dead gorgeous as the males, sweating unbelievable s.e.x appeal, the eye of a hurricane of pheromones-the whole nine yards. Demons were equal-opportunity salespeople. We'll take your soul, male, female; bring whatever you have and we'll be whatever you want. But now that I thought about it, the few angels I'd seen had always been male. It made me a little sorry that I hadn't shot this one after all. s.e.xist pigeon.

Instead, I asked, "What do you want here?" I knew very well what he wanted. "Never mind," I dismissed him. "Whatever it is, you're not getting it. Take a hike, or a flight, and don't look back. Turning into a pillar of salt would be the least of your concerns."

I hadn't seen his wings, but now I noticed a shimmer of dark purple-blue light hit a curve, almost as if the wings were there but made of gla.s.s. Solemn, promising eyes of the same twilight color peered through his white-blond bangs. "Trixa. Leo. We've been waiting for you." Then he smiled and I was in that twilight . . . a glorious spring one, warm and silken. Surrounded by it. Caressed.

I looked over to see a faint sweat over the cords of Leo's neck. "Really?" I said, surprised. "You go that way now and again? I had no idea."

"No, I don't. And you do have an attention span. Use it," he gritted, flushing lightly before turning his head to the right. "Well, s.h.i.t," he said in disgust.

Solomon, our Solomon, stepped out of the darkness there. I knew he was up to his neck in this-might've even killed Jeb himself. It hadn't looked like a demon kill-had lacked a certain level of violence and definitely didn't smell like demon-but it wasn't beyond him to fake it to look otherwise. I had no idea who had done Jeb in, Eden House or a demon. Either way, Solomon was in the game; that I'd known for some time. "Whatever this molting chicken has to tell you isn't worth hearing," he said, giving a dismissive nod at the angel.

"That's probably true. It's probably true about you too." I met his gray eyes as I took a step toward the curve of light in the sand.

"If that's what you imagine it to be, do you think it will be that easy?" he asked with a shadow of amused arrogance underlying the question.

"You never know. Not until you ask nicely." I did ask-in my mind. I asked quite courteously if I might enter. I heard nothing, saw no mystical signs, but took a chance anyway and stepped over. I felt nothing more than a warm tingle that shimmered from my head to my toes-not to say that wasn't enjoyable and it definitely beat disintegration or slamming into an invisible wall, which the angel promptly did. "Look at that, Solomon," I said, giving the angel a sa.s.sy and unrepentant smile as he hauled his holy a.s.s back to his feet. "See where a little politeness will get you? A nice invitation-that's what." I tossed my gun to Leo. It was allowed through the same as I had been. "Stay out here and play duck shoot?"

"Be happy to," he said with a cold smile, and pointed the barrel at Solomon's head.

I rapped politely at the metal door and bent my head to climb in. John Wilbur was a tiny man sitting on an equally tiny orange and brown couch, his small hands clasped as he rocked back and forth. The desert had withered him to a raisin of a man. Small, dark, and wrinkled.

"I'm Buddhist, you know. Picked it up a few years ago," he said immediately, his voice four times bigger than he was. "They ain't right. I have my own ways. They ought to be leaving me alone. The two of them. Trying to talk me into coming out. Talking and talking and lying and giving me the smooth." The skin around his small eyes spiderwebbed as he gave me a snaggle toothed grin. "Tossed one of my Buddhas through the window at the one. Surfer boy." That would be our bleached-blond angel. "He had a dent in his head for a good minute." That was good to know. Things could leave our bubble of protection, but nothing could enter, not without permission. Although I didn't think it was Wilbur 's permission I had received, I thought that was via the tiny bit of the Light left here, and it was only a tiny bit. From what I'd heard of the Light, this display was a firecracker compared to the atomic bomb. Heaven, h.e.l.l, and Earth weren't moving against one another for the ability to protect a trailer.

I looked down at Wilbur, holding a cheerfully green ceramic Buddha in his hand. The place was littered with them. Fat, laughing Buddhas. Skinny, solemn Buddhas. One was even in a hula skirt. I liked that about Buddha. Throughout history he had never minded a laugh at his own expense. He had never minded any good-natured laughter at all. We should all be that happy.

"Good for you." I smiled. "Toss me one and let's see if I can get the dark guy in the high-roller suit."

I missed Solomon with the green Buddha, but only because he turned to dark mist and sank into the ground. "Cheater," I said under my breath as he immediately rose again.

"You don't throw like no girl." Mr. Wilbur tried for another grin, but it wobbled. "I'm not getting out of this, am I?" He shook his head. "The b.a.s.t.a.r.d should've warned me first, but ain't no way I'd take it then, right? Even with his talk of a better world. Making things right. Crazy old b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Couldn't understand a d.a.m.n word he said half the time." He sighed and wiped at an eye. "Twitches now and again," he mumbled. Straightening, he squared his small shoulders and said, "Jeb said after he had time to hide that d.a.m.n thing away, it'd be no problem. No reason for anyone to come looking for him and it would be safe. The Light would be safe. Well, it might've been gone, but he wasn't. Neither am I."

I didn't know how whoever found Jeb had done it. Whether it was through Wilder Hun, probably, or some other way. But I suspected they had found Wilbur precisely the same way Leo and I had. Demons and angels had been lurking out of sight at Jeb's wake, avoiding the warm lemonade, but getting the same information we had. And wings made better time than my car. Popping in and out of existence wherever you pleased was a quick commute too.

"Who came looking for Jeb?" I interrupted. "Who killed him?"

He shrugged listlessly and shook his head. "I dunno. Doesn't matter now anyway, 'cause here we are. I don't have it. Jeb showed it to me, shiny gewgaw that it was, but he didn't give it to me. Not really. They won't believe me though, those out there."

"No." I met his eyes squarely. Wilbur wasn't completely correct about the Light. A minute amount of it had stayed here, but at least Jeb hadn't given him up. It wouldn't have been much comfort, so I kept the thought to myself. I also thought that whoever had killed Jeb could've had a telepath with him and it wouldn't have mattered. A little Light here, a little Light also in Jeb. I imagined it had left enough of itself in him to hide any information he had on its location. Pretty smart for a rock. Less smart on me as I still didn't know who'd killed Jeb.

"And once those out there find out I don't have it, they'll kill me," Wilbur said bitterly. Then he straightened to tell me earnestly, "But first they could find out." He touched his head. "The Light, I might not have it, but it leaves its voice, like an echo, you know? A trail of bread crumbs to follow, just like the fairy tale. To find where Jeb hid it. He told me he pa.s.sed the voice on and whoever has it will pa.s.s it on. I thought he was talking crazy until the Light talked to me too."

"You're a bread crumb?" I asked skeptically.

He tried for another grin and failed. "Yeah. Not the worst thing I've been in my life."

"So you know where Jeb hid it?"

"No." He shook his head. "Wouldn't be much point to leaving a trail of bread crumbs if I did. And I guess you're who I've been waiting for. The Light let you in. That makes you good people. Good enough anyway, because I'm out of time. Hope you paid attention to that Hansel and Gretel story when you were little. Here's your way to the second crumb." Before I could say anything, he slammed the palm of one hand against my forehead . . . and I felt it.

Felt the Light.

Felt the Life.

The inextricable twist and glitter of them both.

It didn't speak to me; there wasn't enough left of it there for that-not in Wilbur's mind and not in the faint castoff outside surrounding the trailer. There were just sensations. Warmth. Strength. A beckoning finger. And, lastly, the distinct feeling that I was the lesser of a few evils in the mix. Ah well, it wasn't the first time I'd been accused of that.

I rested on my sore back and rubbed my equally sore forehead from where the sheer energy of the Light had actually knocked me flat. As I rubbed, I looked up. The ceiling was interesting. Another Buddha poster with lotuses and a river, bright colors long faded and the serenity of a place far better than here.

"Now they'll hurt me like Jeb was hurt. You and your friend can try to stop them, but I think one way or another I won't be one of the winners." Still on the couch, he looked down and scrubbed at his face.

No. He wouldn't be. Leo and I could get away in my car with the weapons we'd brought, depending on how many angelic and demonic reinforcements they brought in, but protect Wilbur too? Probably not.

"Demons and angels. Watched out for 'em my whole life," he muttered. "One to toss me into the pit and one to catch me. Now what? They torture and kill me like Jeb, leastwise the demons will. And then they have my soul to torture all over again." He bowed his head and rested it against the largest Buddha in the place, the bra.s.s one on the coffee table in front of him. "Don't want the angels either, if they could even get hold of me. I've been a bad guy from time to time. There's a whole lot of no-good in me. I know that. And I want to make up, I do, but my way, not theirs."

It seemed Dream Angel out there hadn't made much of an impression on Wilbur. He hadn't made much of one on me either. I sat up, stood still until I stopped swaying, and then reached up and ripped the poster from the ceiling. Laying it on the table, I pointed to the blue river and said gently, "Then join the river, John. You're a Buddhist." I took his hand and placed it flat on water that almost seemed real. "Rebirth. You flow on. They'll never find you. There are many ways in this world. There's no reason you can't do it your way."

"My way."

As he contemplated the water with the sweep of his thumb, I kissed his bristly cheek. "You and I, John. We are of a kind. Until the day we die and beyond, we'll do it our way."

Five minutes later I was being chased out of a trailer, buckshot singing over my head. Wilbur was yelling and swearing, firing again, and slamming the door shut. It was wild and crazy and I needed Solomon and the angel to buy it for just a second. I pa.s.sed the first as he was pounding with both fists at air that sparked gold under the impact but didn't give way.

Then the swearing stopped, the buckshot ceased, and there was a long moment of quiet before the sound of one single shot ripped through the night. It sounded like small caliber. Didn't matter really. It just meant it would bounce around the inside of his skull, turning to pudding everything in its path. Wilbur was a mountain man. If he wanted something shot dead, it was shot dead. The glowing circle around the trailer instantly faded, the flakes of crystal crumbling to gray ash.

"Gone," the angel said flatly.

"Gone," Solomon said with a little more dark emotion.

Both were right. Wilbur was gone by now. Riding the river along to his next life. No Heaven, no h.e.l.l . . . only the constant stream. His choice. I only hoped he did better next time. That he wasn't so bad. Didn't need so much to atone for. Was a little taller maybe, if that made him happy.

Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

I kept running-toward the car. Leo was right behind me. The angel looked up, eyes no longer violet dusk but as bright as tropical water under a high sun . . . waiting. Like a good little GI Joe, Boy Scout, soldier of G.o.d . . . or so he thought. Lower management all the way. A GI can't take a p.i.s.s without the paperwork, and an angel of this caliber wouldn't take a single step without orders from the higher-ups. That meant middle management, angels with free will and what they thought was a license to use it, would be here any second. Lucifer was apparently a little more lax in that entire employee protocol/rules and regulations area because Solomon was already heading in our direction, showing the boss that he had some serious initiative. Running. Not flying. He had never shown me his demon side and I thought he probably never would unless he had to kill me. So no swooping-he ran. That's not to say he couldn't run fast. d.a.m.n fast.

I dived behind the wheel and had the car moving before Leo was quite in it. "d.a.m.n it." He wanted to say I could've waited half a second, but he didn't because he was male, and a guy wouldn't say that if you were taking off in the shuttle while he ran alongside.

"I had faith," I said to his unvoiced b.i.t.c.hing.

"Yeah, and it warms my heart," he grunted as he got the shotgun up and nailed Solomon-barely. The demon probably would've disappeared, but Leo had reached out and grabbed his arm before discharging the shotgun. That was the thing about demons and probably angels. They could disappear, back to Heaven or h.e.l.l I guess, as long as they weren't anch.o.r.ed to this world. The best thing for anchoring them here was a tight hand and a cranky att.i.tude. Iron or steel seemed to work too, but it was one slow-a.s.s demon that would let even me wriggle him into some cuffs . . . at least without whipping out the leather, teddy, braided whip, and holding back the bile. As for an angel . . . I wanted one of those in chains even less than a demon, although for different reasons. Demons occasionally came alone. Angels almost always had backup.

As Solomon writhed around the end of the shotgun, black blood flew around his neck as the car slid in a circle. Leo let go of him, ready to take a shot at his head, but I grabbed his arm to give Solomon that split second he needed to disappear. I ignored Leo's frown. Solomon would be back-to join his brothers. Sure, demons occasionally came alone, but not this time. What I thought was b.u.mpy terrain beneath was shown to be dozens of brown demons springing from the earth.

And as that happened, the night sky turned to van Gogh's Starry Night. There were swirls of scarlet and green and blue and amethyst, but most of all . . . silver and gold. The nearly invisible curves became wings of gla.s.s. Red and gold. Green and silver and all variations. The angels floated in the air in their true form . . . their oddly alien faces were narrow with eyes large, almond shaped, and as full of light as the outer edges of their wings. You could see the stars through the gla.s.s of those wings, although they rippled because every "feather" was a sharply transparent dagger edged in gemstone color. Their skin was filled with light as well, only slightly cooler than the eyes. It was definitely a different look than surfer angel had been sporting not too long ago. Nothing like their human costumes at all.

I blinked against it all, not sure whether I was seeing angels or an impressionist masterpiece come to life, roiling the night sky-even the stars and moon seemed part of it all.

It was beautiful and it was terrible, all in one.

"You won't have them," Solomon said to the angels, having returned from wherever he'd gone, his face twisted as the car rocketed by.

"Neither will you."

I expected that angelic retort to be the music of battle, the symphony of a storm. What I got was a familiar voice through a bullhorn. Griffin. There was the also the rapid chop of rotor blades behind his voice. Lots of rotor blades. The demons kept coming. Angels and Eden House weren't enough to have them giving up-not when they thought they might have a link to the Light so close. They weren't believing Wilbur's act of running me off as thoroughly as I'd hoped.

Two managed to grab on to the back of the car as I drove over them. They climbed up, hissing like an entire nest of rattlesnakes-p.i.s.sed and hungry. I could see the mottled, moist inner flesh of their mouths in the rearview mirror. Leo unloaded the other barrel of the shotgun into the face of the one on the right, dropped the empty gun, then pulled a sword from under the blanket covering the back floorboards and turned the second demon into a less than politically correct alligator bag. The head bounced into the front pa.s.senger seat, gla.s.s teeth still gnashing. Separating the brain from the body worked as well as liquefying the organ.

"A sword?" I swerved the car, smacked a few demons with the side, and shot one in the head as it climbed over the front windshield. Blood and scales sprayed in a fine mist over us. I was going to have to rethink the whole convertible situation. "You and a sword. I am boggled."

"Sometimes you really do have to embrace your roots, just like your lemonade man said." Luckily there were no tourists around to explain that to as Leo gave an unaccustomed grin and swung again as a demon launched itself into the backseat. Another head bounced up front. Now I had two heads with teeth still slowly chomping away. Would they just hurry up and die already? The last thing I wanted was them stripping flesh from my ankle and calf all the way down to the bone like piranha in an old Tar zan movie .

"It's getting crowded up here. Swing the other way, Babe Ruth," I called as I turned the car into another high-speed spin with one hand and used the other to toss the heads out, getting one nice slice across the back of my hand out of it. b.a.s.t.a.r.d. The dead should be dead . . . immediately. No hanging around snapping like ill-tempered, satanic Chihuahuas. I fired again, this time upward as a demon dropped from the sky. My Smith & Wesson 500 was no shotgun, but it knocked him off course. He missed the car. The car did not, however, miss him. There was a very satisfying ka-thump as I careened over the top of him. It wouldn't kill him, but it'd slow him down for a few minutes and make him respect a good American-made car. Or j.a.panese. Or maybe it was German. I kept forgetting which. I liked pretty things, but I also liked moving on to the next pretty thing fairly quickly. It made it hard to keep track.

Unless the pretty thing was riding on your hood.

"What did he tell you, Trixa?" Solomon said over the rush of the wind from the speeding car. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. I heard him as clearly as if he were at my ear . . . which he suddenly was. He sat in the demon-bloodstained pa.s.senger seat and repeated it calmly. "What did he tell you?"

"He didn't tell me a thing." And Wilbur hadn't-not really. It was the Light that had told me.

"Then what did it tell you?" he asked, catching on quickly. "Where is it?"

"It told me I was a naughty girl, but the lesser of evils." I smiled brightly. "And while a girl does love hearing a compliment, I have no idea where it is." Sadly, that was true enough.

But I did know how to find it.

Before Solomon could ask any more questions, a helicopter swooped down and hovered right in front of us. I slammed on the brakes. I was wearing a seat belt. Leo, who knew how I drove, was also wearing one, even in the back. Solomon was not. But he disappeared to black smoke as he went through the windshield, cracking it into a spiderweb mansion. "Wonderful," I sighed. "My insurance company already hates me." Then I tried for a look on the bright side. "It might be a sign. Time for a new car."

Leo leaned over the seat as the helicopter landed and the rest of the demons finally gave up and disappeared when men with machine guns jumped out. "So, what did the Light tell you?"

I told him. I had no secrets from Leo. Not about Kimano. Not about the Light. "The lesser of evils," he snorted. "That doesn't say much for the company we keep, does it?"

"Come on," I protested on my behalf at least . . . but, honestly . . .

It was true.

Chapter 7.

The helicopter had brought us to Eden House. They, like everyone else, definitely had a finger in this pie. So here I finally was, and this time it wasn't just hearing Griffin describe its elegant glory of antiques, the library of secret books and doc.u.ments that historians would give ten years of their lives to see, and the magnificent showcase of ancient demon-fighting weapons.

Or Zeke saying, "Yeah, it's big. Hard to find the bathrooms. Now can I have another beer?" I was here to see it with my own eyes. Unfortunately, the higher-ups knew it. They now knew about Leo and me, and knew that we knew about them . . . worse yet, about the Light. And you can bet they didn't like it-all that knowing. They were probably discussing it right now, their complete and utter dislike of it all.

The h.e.l.l with it. There was nothing I could do about it now, and I had something far more important right in front of me.

I held Zeke's limp hand and rubbed the pad of my thumb softly across the back of it. He was still out of it, drugged to the gills, but he was off the ventilator and on an oxygen mask. I took that as a good sign. He was in a hospital bed, and for all intents and purposes was in his own hospital ICU. It was in Eden House's bas.e.m.e.nt. He was hooked up to a heart monitor, oxygen, a pulse oximeter to read the level of oxygen in his blood, IVs . . . too many things to count.

A sheet was pulled up to his hospital gown-clad chest. Next to all that white and green, he was gray. The ashy skin next to the color of his gown wasn't a good combination and it made me feel . . . I looked over my shoulder and let Griffin feel that mood. I didn't bury it or hide it as I usually did. I let him feel it because it let him feel it himself-something I didn't think he'd allowed himself. Not until then.

He stood by my side as I sat. "He'll be all right." He was telling himself the same as he was telling me. "The doctors said that he's recovering faster than they antic.i.p.ated." He reached down and lightly knuckled the top of the unconscious, reddish bronze head. It was the same move a kid would make to another kid-a younger one. It wasn't surprising. They'd been in the same foster home since they were ten and twelve, at least until they came to me five years later. When something had gone drastically wrong. Griffin had always said it was Zeke's story to tell.

He changed his mind.

Why? Could've been any number of reasons. He could've known that Zeke would never tell. It might have been he was still so angry over what had happened back then that he had to tell someone and that someone wasn't going to be a member of Eden House. They valued Zeke for his strong psychic skills, but without Griffin around to keep him in check, Eden House wouldn't have anything to do with Zeke. And I think Griffin had just now realized that. He'd seen them virtually kidnap Leo and me and for a thing his boss refused to elaborate on. He would name it, but he wouldn't explain it.

Kidnapping and secrets. That wasn't the milk of human kindness. That wasn't someone you could rely on to take care of a psychosocially damaged man. If something happened to Griffin, as far as the House was concerned Zeke would be on his own, or worse. A rogue psychic whose sense of judgment didn't allow for shades of gray, who saw the action that needed taking, but not always the consequences of that action . . . a man whose actions might be traced back to them. They wouldn't allow it. Remember Lot's wife? And she'd just looked in the wrong direction.

And that was why Griffin told me, the true reason. He wasn't a stupid man. To the contrary, he was extremely sharp at sizing up people. Now he was sizing up his own people and they were falling short. Should a demon get the better of him, he wanted Zeke taken care of, and Leo and I were the only ones who could do it.

"It was a baby, but he didn't mean to." He bowed his head and rubbed the back of his neck with enough force that I winced for him. "You don't think he'd still hold on to that enough to not come back, do you?"

"He's not leaving us," I said with determination. "That's a promise. And you know I keep my promises, Griffin."

I waited as he straightened and folded his arms to watch the methodical beep beep of Zeke's heart monitor. "His throat." He looked away from the monitor, from Zeke, from everything, and stared at the closed door that led out of the room to the hall. "After he realized what had happened. After he knew." He looked back at me and I saw the eyes of a traumatized seventeen-year-old. Not a twenty-seven-year-old man, but a boy-a boy who'd seen too much death long before he ever knew demons existed. That monsters were real. "He walked into the kitchen. Just walked. Everyone was screaming. Our foster father"-his lip curled-"was so helpfully kicking in the TV screen. I was calling 911 and Zeke just walked past me and went to the drawer by the sink, took out a butcher knife, and tried to cut his throat."

The ugly three-inch furrow across the otherwise-smooth skin had been half healed when they'd shown up at my place. "You stopped him," I said without doubt because Zeke wouldn't have stopped himself. He never did. When he started something, he finished it . . . if he knew what the end was. It was a lucky thing that Zeke had been so young, or he would've cut deep enough to have bled to death even from those few inches. But at fifteen, his killing skills weren't what they were today.

I stood and pushed Griffin into the chair. As much as my back burned, he needed the rest more than I did. "There was a baby and Zeke tried to cut his own throat. Help me out a little, Griffin. I'm lost."

And tired, hungry, and more than a little concerned that Leo and I'd been outed to Eden House by those d.a.m.n nosy angels at Wilbur the Buddhist's place in the desert. I was a.s.suming that's why the helicopters had shown up so conveniently.