I tilted my head. “I told you I liked to laugh.” I did laugh, once in a while, over flowing blood, but there had never been anyone who hadn’t deserved to lose that blood. “Leo,” I called. “Why don’t you come here and visit for a second? Galileo has never looked deep into your gorgeous eyes either.” I grabbed the man’s arm as he started to get up. “Oh no. That’s bad manners, Galileo. Don’t be that way.” My smile faded. “Like you shouldn’t have been that way when I sent a Mr. Jake Stein to see you. I’ve told you before, I screen them, but some slip through and I don’t know what you’ll see in their future. I told you to let a fish go now and again if the truth might be too much for them to handle, but you didn’t. You say you saw colors? I never hid my true colors from you, but you didn’t listen. You told him the truth and whatever truth that was made him hang himself in his family’s garage. Now”—I tightened my grip on his sweat-slick arm—“let’s see what happens to you when you see Leo’s truth.”
“But . . . that can’t be you.” He was still trying to pull away as Leo approached from behind the bar, but considering the most weight he lifted in a day would be an order of two double cheeseburgers to go, he didn’t have much success. “The blood. The fur and scales and your smile. God, that smile.” He was a psychic. He knew about vampires and werewolves and things that go bump in the night, but one little trickster, that he couldn’t believe?
Then Leo was certainly going to be educational for him.
Leo pulled up a chair beside me as I squeezed Galileo’s arm. “A smile is just a frown turned upside down. What do you think, Leo?”
Galileo’s gaze moved to Leo’s black eyes and he froze. He stopped trying to pull away, he didn’t blink, and I was positive he gave up on breathing for a while. After almost a minute he sucked in a breath, whistling and weak, and moaned, “The end. You almost ended it. Ended us all. You tore down mountains, boiled oceans, nearly pulled down the sky. You were the Omega before there was an Alpha, and you did it for no reason. For no reason.”
“Boredom is a reason.” Leo gave a shrug of acceptance. “And I’m in a program. I’m in recovery now. Ten thousand years Ragnarok free.”
Galileo crossed himself, several times, and was turning a rather pretty if unhealthy shade of lavender. I honestly didn’t care. Fate was fate, after all. Maybe that man I sent to him, Stein, would’ve killed himself regardless of what Galileo told him, but if the son of a bitch had kept to our referral agreement, I wouldn’t have to be wondering about it now. I’d been meaning to take care of the situation for a few weeks now and this was an opportunity to both clarify and conduct a business arrangement. I’ve always been a great believer in time management.
“Galileo,” I said patiently.
Nothing.
I sighed and snapped my fingers in front of his glazed eyes with a little less patience as he muttered the Lord’s Prayer under his breath, getting a good deal of it wrong. A very lapsed Catholic with an equally poor memory. “Galileo, before you have a heart attack or stroke, whichever you seem racing toward right now, I need to know what’s killing the demons? More than nine hundred in six months. What’s doing that?” I pulled a piece of folded paper from my jeans pocket and pushed it across the table to him, pulling one of his hands out of a praying position and slapping the wet palm on top of it. Within that doubled-up simple yellow piece of paper, a Post-it Note actually—so mundane and ordinary—was a scrap of demon ichor left from last night when Griffin and Zeke had brought in the one-winged, mentally absent demon. That hadn’t been mundane and ordinary at all.
“Come on, Galileo,” I prodded. “It’s right there. Right under your hand, right in front of your eyes. What do you see?”
I was hoping he wouldn’t shut down as Zeke had. Zeke was a telepath, but Galileo was a psychic. Zeke saw some things; Galileo saw everything, and no matter how worthless a creature, he excelled at it. Elvis might have been the King of Rock and Roll, but Galileo was the King of Psychics . . . at least in Vegas, probably in the entire Western Hemisphere. He was disgusting, perverted, greedy, and an entire dictionary full of more slimy adjectives, but he did know his business. He didn’t have talent. He had Talent with a capital T, and throw a little boldface on there while you’re at it. Zeke was good, but no better than your average angel . . . ex or otherwise. Galileo was an Einstein, and one with an excellent sense of survival. He might be able to see from a safer mental distance with that talent of his.
If it didn’t burn out like a flickering lightbulb. Zeke had gone down. If Galileo went down, considering his physical health, he might not get back up. As long as he did it after giving over the information . . . what will be, will be. The psychics said it often enough—now one of them would have to live with it.
Or not.
If Galileo had ever done a selfless thing in his life, I might have cared. But I knew his type. I’d known those like him for a long, long time. They were born without that ability to care for anyone but themselves. Despite psychology textbooks, loving yourself doesn’t automatically mean others will love you. My hand might rest on the back of his, but I wasn’t feeling any love. “The demon blood, Galileo. What took the demon? What destroyed his mind? And hurry up,” I added, “because you’re looking a mite peaked there, sugar.”
The pale violet color of his round moon-pie face was only darkening. Leo exhaled and heaved out of the chair. “I’ll call 911. If you get anything out of him before he hits the floor, dinner’s on me.”
“Galileo,” I said sharply. “Now. Now. Tell me what you see.”
His lips framed a word, but I didn’t hear it. He tried again. “Sic . . . kle.” He wheezed and repeated, “Sickle.”
His forehead hit the table with a thunk, but he was still there . . . barely, but still there, eyes rolled back—the yellow a dull shine. “Am . . . I . . . dying?”
“Galileo, sweetie.” I patted his hand that rested beneath mine. “You’re the psychic. You tell me.”
He’d live, the EMTs said, although their best guess was that he’d end up in open-heart surgery.
If so, the surgeons would probably pull Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web plus his five piggy cousins out of the man’s heart, and he’d live to destroy someone else’s hopes prematurely. Take away their few days of blissful ignorance that they had left to them.
What will be will be.
Or maybe not. Maybe Galileo had learned his lesson when he was allowed a peek behind the curtain. He hadn’t seen the wizard, that was for sure. I didn’t pass out hearts, courage, and brains—I tested them. And Leo . . . Leo in the past would’ve taken them and kept them on a shelf as souvenirs. So perhaps Galileo would behave. As a matter of fact, he’d damn well better, I grumbled internally as I cleaned the table he’d collapsed onto. Leo had hauled away the dishes, but there was still an ample amount of drool and crumbs to take care of. The psychic wasn’t a neat eater by any stretch of the imagination. He ate like a fifteen-year-old toothless Saint Bernard, spreading morsels of food up to six feet away.
Oh yes, he’d better behave. I would never forget Jake Stein, a hopeful man with even more hopeful eyes shortly followed by a noose. And I wouldn’t forget this outrageous mess either. Galileo didn’t need a lobster bib; he needed a tablecloth tied around what passed for his neck.
“A sickle. That’s all you were able to get?”
I looked over my shoulder with ill temper at Leo’s patronizing tone. “I could’ve gotten more if you’d held back a bit. I wanted you to give him a glimpse of the Loki trailer, not the whole movie, IMAX and all. You’re the one who all but stuffed a grenade into his heart and pulled the pin.”