“Oh, I’m good and I’ll find him, but I could find him more quickly if you’d be a little less of a bitch and a little more cooperative.” He said “bitch” the same way he would’ve said “sugar” or “honey” or “darling”—as if it were an endearment. He really was something.
“You’re a straight talker, I’ll give you that. And only that.” I retrieved the bourbon, poured him a shot in my glass, and slid it down the bar about four feet to him. “I’m not here to help you. You’re here to help me . . . that is, if you want the Light. If I make things too easy for you, Eligos, who’s to say you’ll wait for me to find the Light? Who’s to say you won’t try to take me from Trinity and put me on your own leash?”
“Who is to say?” he echoed blandly before he swallowed the shot quickly and smoothly, sitting down himself. “I might be transparent to your eye, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be easier and quicker for both of us.”
“Quick or easy—it doesn’t matter, because it’s not going to happen,” came a new voice, deep and rough.
Which was all we needed to make a party.
Solomon.
He stood by the door, not that he’d needed to use it. His gray eyes were slits. I’d been right when I’d guessed that Solomon wouldn’t care for Eli any more than Eli cared for him. “This is my territory, Eligos. This place is mine. She is mine. You can leave now, whole and intact, or you can leave it in a spray of blood and flesh. A pool of rotting fluid on the floor.” The gray blazed to silver, the first physical hint of demon I’d ever seen in Solomon—the first true loss of temper.
“He’s a cranky son of a bitch, isn’t he?” Eli turned over the shot glass and tapped it once, to all appearances bored. Certainly the farthest thing from intimidated without actually dozing off. “Tell me you never found him entertaining. No one’s taste could be that bad. The brooding. The smoldering. He’d fit in fine on the soap opera channel or a vampire movie, but real life?” He raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “Real sex? You’d be better off with a Ken doll. Same personality, and probably the same equipment.”
I’d felt differently when Solomon had paid me that uninvited visit several nights ago, straddling me in bed. And I do mean felt it. But true or not, it was enough to tip Solomon over the line from temper to rage. I’d never seen him angry; I’d only seen the imitation of it. Solomon didn’t care that much about his club and our arson of it. He played as if he had emotions, because that’s all Solomon had ever done with me—play. With Eli he was serious—the kind of serious that would end with demon blood and entrails on my floor, neither of which could be put right with your average household cleanser.
The fight wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was Solomon pulling a gun from under his jacket and nailing Eli with several shots midchest. The two that should’ve hit him in the head missed and for one reason only, because Eli could move that fast. It was a flicker of brown so quick that my eye only caught an afterimage of it. Caught it from the floor, by the way, where I was crouching below the bullet path. I was good, but I wasn’t a fool.
“Please. You’re kidding, right?” Eli brushed at the front of his shirt that had turned black with demonic blood. “A gun? Oh, I get it. You don’t want the girlfriend to see you for what you really are, warts and all. Or should I say scales and all?” He didn’t move from the stool. Instead he grinned, gloating and smug. “I have news for you, Solomon. She likes that. There’s a whole level to her you didn’t even suspect.” He looked back at me as I waited ready on one knee with my own gun drawn. “What do you say, Trixa? Want to see the real thing fighting over you? You want to see scales and fangs and everything we truly are as we rip each other to shreds?”
First, it wasn’t me they were fighting over. It was the Light. If I forgot that, I’d be another puddle on the floor that Leo would have to Clorox the hell out of. Second, it appeared my system of hell-spawn checks and balances might go all the way to balancing each other out altogether. That wouldn’t do me any good when it came to Kimano’s killer.
Third, Zeke wasn’t going to let any fight go down that he wasn’t part of. He came down the stairs in a rush, followed by Griffin. Both had shotguns, but only Griffin was polite enough to tell me to duck right before they fired. Both went for head shots, the surest way to put a demon down; both missed. And that, that was unheard of. If nothing else, it showed that all the demons we’d killed in Vegas, except for the black ones that had taken Zeke down, were nowhere near as powerful and inconceivably quick as the two that were in my bar now.
Eli swiveled on the stool to take in the two partners. The slugs that should’ve blown through his skull had instead blown through one of the wooden posts that went from counter to ceiling. “Pets, Trixa?” he drawled. “You should have them neutered. Makes them less likely to piss on your rug.”
I ignored him, ignored Zeke and Griffin who were reloading, and looked at Solomon. “What happened to the two guys in the car out front? The two who were watching me.” Why hadn’t they come running at the shots as Zeke and Griffin had?
The silver darkened back to gray and his eyes focused on Eli. “I imagine he killed them. That’s what he does, Trixa. I take the willing souls. He takes it all.”
Eli shrugged. “Right, as if you don’t. But if those two angel ass-wipers are dead out there, Solomon did it. He likes easy targets, the fish-in-the-barrel types. Lazy, lazy. I prefer a challenge.”
“Liar.” Solomon had let his gun fall to the floor. That he had even tried the weapon meant he hadn’t known Eli was equally as good as he was. He’d suspected maybe, but he hadn’t known. From the animosity between them, it couldn’t be their first battle, but it could be their first one in human form. Solomon could’ve thought he’d have the advantage there for some reason, or that he’d simply surprise Eli with something as outrageous as an actual human weapon. If that were the case, he’d been wrong.
“Of course I’m a liar. I’m a demon, just like you, Solomon. Or have you played human so long, you’ve forgotten what you really are? Pathetic.” He turned his gaze on me as I slowly stood from my crouched position. “If those men out there were sliced and diced by yours truly, I wouldn’t deny it. I’d brag on it. I might lie about most things, like all good demons, but I never lie about my body count or the notches on my bedpost. Some things are sacred. Right, darlin’?”
“I don’t notch my bedpost.” I put my gun away. It wouldn’t have done me any good anyway. “I cut off their tackle and hang it from my rearview mirror.”
“Damn, you must taste great,” Eli said with admiration. The trouble with that admiration was I didn’t know if he thought I would taste great sexually or in a culinary sense. Probably both.
“Go. Get out. The both of you. I’m tired and going to bed. Alone.” I stood up. “And one of you take the bodies and the car with you. I’ve had my fill of cops around here.”
“Bossy, bossy, bossy,” Eli sighed as he slid off the stool. “Rather fun being on the receiving end of it for once.” He passed a hand over his shirt and it was pristine again. “I’ll take the car. Like I said, the Chinese doesn’t stay with you. Not when you have an appetite like mine.” If anyone was going to have the last sexual innuendo, it was going to be Eli. He waved a hand and went to the door and through it, passing so close to Solomon that their shoulders brushed. Solomon briefly bared his teeth in a snarl; then his eyes met mine intently for several seconds before he silently disappeared.
“I should’ve opened a women’s shoe store. Demonic visitors don’t just drop into a women’s shoe store.” I went and locked up.
Zeke was studying his shotgun with a furrowed brow and an annoyed lift of his upper lip. It was his equivalent of a man finding his wife in bed with the mailman and the local Jehovah’s Witness before falling to the floor, shouting, “Betrayed!” to the skies. Griffin took in the expression and elbowed him. “Don’t be so melodramatic.” He looked at me. “We’ve never been up against anything like them before. I’ve never seen demons move like that.”