The Grimrose Path

Chapter 5

I’d told Eli that a trickster’s first word was a lie. That, not so ironically, was a lie. I think mine was actually two words. Give me. Mama said she didn’t know if I was hungry or wanted something shiny. She gave me something shiny and I ate it. Either way, she’d pointed out, she knew I’d be satisfied. I was a helluva trickster, but I knew I’d never be half the one my mama was. I also knew I couldn’t fool her, not ever. Mamas are that way. I also knew there was one other person I couldn’t fool . . . and with our history, wouldn’t try to fool.

Although it might have been easier on my ears if I had.

“You are insane.” It wasn’t quite a shout, but it wasn’t anything close to a normal tone of voice. “Insane. If you were ever sane to begin with, which I’m beginning to highly doubt. Or bright, because if there is any intelligence behind this, I can’t fathom it. My last date was Einstein compared to what’s running wild and free in that skull of yours. There certainly doesn’t seem to be any gray matter slowing it down.”

Leo was manning the bar per usual when I came back from my run with a request that he give Cronus a call. And while “call” was not quite the right term for getting the attention of a Titan, neither was “manning” for Leo if he kept up that kind of talk. “Let me get this straight,” I said, before I acted on the “manning” issue, “I’m lacking sanity and fall below the minuscule IQ of your current bimbo du jour? Is that how you want to sum it up?” The one customer, another of our regulars, Bud, got up from his table and sidled hastily for the door. There was a man who knew his Darwin.

Leo opened his mouth as I picked up Bud’s abandoned table . . . and not one joint snapped, crackled, or popped. It was amazing what adrenaline could do. It was also amazing how much adrenaline could be generated by being out and out pissed off. “Why don’t you say that again for me, Lenore?” I lifted the table higher. “In case I didn’t hear you right the first time, because, damn if I didn’t think you little birdies were smarter than that. Maybe when I pop you in a cage and stuff a cracker in your beak, we’ll get some blissful silence around here.”

This time Leo closed his mouth and rammed both hands into his hair, completely destroying the black braid. He tossed the black cord that had held the plait together on the bar and tried again. “I apologize. You’re completely sane and frighteningly intelligent and I know what you’re trying to do. It’s a good thing, but you don’t actually have to talk to Cronus to pull it off. Lie. Manipulate. Do not throw yourself under the truck to make the blood on the bumper look more realistic. Use verbal red paint. Be a trickster. Be who we are.”

He had a point, but . . .

“Aren’t you just a little curious?” I asked, dropping the table.

“Odin, forgive all I have ever done.” Leo folded his arms on the bar and rested his forehead on them, his spill of hair hiding nearly all of it from sight. “I realize it is much more than I could name in a day and a night, but forgive. I see from your side now.”

“Actually looking to Daddy. I’m happy you and your family have made up. And, PS, Karma—isn’t it great?” I said with far too much enjoyment at his gloom, my annoyance disappearing instantly. I shook my hand and wrist as the adrenaline faded and a mild ache settled in. “Besides, Eli isn’t stupid. Somewhere nearby he’ll have a demon or two watching. And whether they report back to him or disappear because Cronus kills them, he’ll have his verification. He’ll know I actually did talk to Cronus.”

“Or Cronus will kill you as well and put me on a rhinestone leash like a poodle for the rest of eternity. Let us not ignore that possibility.” He straightened and pulled his hair back in a strict, martial ponytail. “Which is the least of what he could do if he’s irritated with our presumption.”

“Yes, but while I was born curious, you were born presumptuous. Plus wicked and more than mildly immoral.” In the bad days, Leo would’ve done this just for the hell of it, but I wouldn’t point that out. I was comfortable manipulating the majority of the world, but never Leo. I would ask—but I wouldn’t push. This was, like he’d said, our lives on the line, and while I was ready to risk mine for my calling, I wasn’t ready to risk his for him. I walked to the bar, framed his face, and kissed his forehead. “I would be perfectly happy with you inviting him here and then leaving. Fly far away on those raven wings of yours. I’ll talk to Cronus. I’ll do it alone and I’ll be fine.” Before he could protest, I asked firmly, “When have I ever not been fine in the line of duty?”

He exhaled. “Only when you refuse to see how vulnerable you can be, even at your best, and, yes, I know how very good your best can be.” Pulling the sun necklace out from under my T-shirt, he arranged it in place to the right of my heart. “I’ll make some calls to those who can do more than use only Verizon now. Being human or a raven isn’t much help in finding a Titan, but I’ll see if I can get some assistance from those who happen to be getting a good laugh at my expense now. I hope you appreciate that. Risking death and derision all in one.”

For the former Loki, risking death was a walk in the park; risking derision was a sacrifice for which there wasn’t enough gratitude in the world.

“And,” he added, “we might be being presumptuous already. Just because Cronus has only gone after demons, wants a map to Lucifer, doesn’t mean this is all necessarily only about Hell. With Cronus, you can’t assume. He’s païen, but so am I. History knows what I tried to do, and on a smaller scale that all païen aren’t at peace and love with one another.”

It didn’t get much truer than that. “Which is why we really do need to talk to him. If it’s only Hell and Lucifer he has a problem with, then I’ll join his cheering section. I’ll wave pom-poms, do the splits. Rah-rah-sis-boom-bah.”

“And if he has a problem with some fellow païen, you think he’ll tell us?”

“Why wouldn’t he? He would think there was nothing we could do about it and he would probably be right.”

“But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t try,” Leo exhaled. “Does being a born trickster make the suicidal behavior more prevalent? Because as it’s only my hobby, I don’t tend to want to happily rush into death quite as often or quickly as you. I don’t enjoy seeing you do it either, not in our current mortal situation.”

“It’s what I do.” I walked behind the bar and re-braided his hair from the ponytail for him, not as tightly or neatly as he would’ve done himself, but close. “It’s what you do too, although you won’t brag on it. You should. You deserve it. Don’t be ashamed. Being righteous and being wicked aren’t mutually exclusive.” I grinned and headed for the stairs. “I’ll shower and change and be right back. Maybe we’ll close up early tonight. Have dinner with Griffin and Zeke. They’ll be needing a distraction. Going demon-free cold turkey will be driving Zeke crazy.”

“And dinner will fix that?” He was back to skeptical again.

“You think too big sometimes, Leo. The little things in life can be just as much fun.”

After all, demons weren’t the only ones who gave Vegas a bad name.

“I thought we were going to eat?” Zeke complained.

“And we will, but we’re going to have some fun first.” I reached back and patted his knee. He was wedged in the back, using the two tiny seats as one. As his knees were rammed up close to his chin, I counted myself lucky he didn’t snap at my hand when I patted. Griffin, who had won the coin toss, was in the passenger seat, and Leo . . . Leo was currently driving out of the city in his own car with a rental U-Haul attached. That was for fun too, but a little later.

“This thing is so small it should run on triple-A batteries,” Griffin commented, on the part of Zeke since the car was not small. It was perfect. It simply wasn’t made for a full-sized man to be shoved into the back. But too bad for them both. It was new, I loved it, and I was going to drive it.

“It’s a Shelby Cobra. Have some respect. Triple-A batteries can’t get you to one hundred and eighty-five miles per hour and this baby can.” I pulled on my gloves—hunting gloves, silk for easier trigger pulling.

“It can go that fast?” Zeke, as always, was skeptical.

“When I’m driving it, Kit, it can fucking fly. Speaking of flying, while we’re on the way to the sports store, tell me if you guys have gone out to the desert to practice? If you whip out your wings in a battle, you need to be able to use them.”

“Why the sports store?” Griffin asked.

I smiled. “We’re going to try for a few homers. And I’m not telling you anything more, Griff. It’s a surprise. It’ll work off some energy for you two.”

Griffin gave in to the inevitable of that easily enough. He’d known me for ten years. He knew how much I loved my surprises and went on to answer my question. “We have been practicing. We’ve been out a few times. The last time went flawlessly until a female eagle took a liking to Zeke. She either wanted to do him or eat him. He does look like an overgrown robin with those copper brown feathers of his.”

“A falcon or a hawk,” Zeke growled. “Not a robin.”

“And you weren’t attacked by any horny birds?” I asked Griffin, laughing.

“No,” Zeke answered for him. “He’s not a bird. He’s a dragon. When the light hits his wings, it’s like”—he paused—“like the sun falling out of the sky.”

I would’ve patted his knee again. It sounded simple, was simple, but that was beyond poetry for someone like Zeke. It swelled your heart and broke it all in one. But although Griffin looked tired, his hand beat my own to Zeke, so I turned my full attention back to driving, my smile turning from cheerful to affectionate. I continued to smile to myself, smug as a cat with his own personal sushi chef, as I drove to the nearest sports store and with the guys’ help, discovered that you could fit fifteen baseball bats in the Cobra’s trunk. Louisville Sluggers, satiny smooth wooden works of art. When you taught those who needed it a lesson, you taught it with style.

Next I pointed the car toward Fifth Street. It was where the homeless had congregated in Vegas once they had been kicked out of the parks. Rows and rows of them lining the sidewalks, some even with tents. There they lived and there they sometimes died. I’d seen it in the news the past few weeks. Three men, bored with all the drinking, gambling, and strippers that Vegas had to offer, decided that beating up people down on their luck would be the next-best alternative. Monopoly . . . Grand Theft Auto—that wasn’t enough for these guys. And the homeless were easy targets. Some were hiding from things they’d done, things worse than beatings, but most were only people who’d lost their jobs and homes or those who were mentally ill. Then there were those that just didn’t understand life. Or maybe more accurately, life didn’t understand them. That was a hard road to walk and these people didn’t need homicidal asses making things any worse for them.

The police made an effort. They cruised Fifth Street, but bullies in baseball hats and sweats weren’t easy to pick out from the homeless who surrounded them, and there was plenty of crime elsewhere in Vegas to keep them busy. Even when one of the lost was killed, beaten to death by three baseball bats. The police came and went more frequently then. I watched from one of the stores in a strip mall that lined the street, but that lasted only about a week, and it was business as usual . . . except to the men and women who huddled on the sidewalk in the night. Waiting—for the next time, because, as they knew, there would be a next time.

They were right. There was going to be a next time, hopefully tonight. We tricksters had a sort of knack for choosing the right moment. A physicist had once tried to explain it to me . . . about how time wasn’t linear, that it was happening all at once, from beginning to end, but there was no beginning or end. There was only now, a billion nows, and that maybe tricksters could sense those other nows. That at some level we knew even if we couldn’t see, and that was our knack for showing up at just the right moment.

It was an interesting theory, especially as he told it to me as I dangled him over the edge of a volcano. It had been intriguing enough that I let him off with a warning about staying away from naïve virgins in the future instead of dropping him in lava like an ancient one himself.

Now though, the subject was still baseball and baseball bats. But this time, it was going to be just like real baseball. All-American fun—hot dogs, apple pie with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream, blue skies, and hitting one out of the park. The lost would only be lost for now, not lost forever.

I parked at the mortuary not far down from the strip mall where I’d done my surveillance. I filled in my boys on what we were there for and why. “You said you trick the unwary. You make people smarter,” Zeke said. “How’s this make them smarter?”

“No, I said I trick the unwary to make them wiser and I punish the ones who are beyond learning. Killing the helpless and the lost for entertainment is beyond education.” It was dark, almost eight, and the mortuary’s parking lot deserted; the living who took care of the dead were gone for the night. “School was over for these particular assholes before it ever began. No pizza days. No skipping class. No homecoming. No games. Well . . .” I opened the trunk and ran one finger along the polished wood inside. “A game, but one they won’t walk away from.”

“How long has it been since you just tricked, didn’t punish?” Griffin asked at my side. Always the ex-demon with the Boy Scout questions, he was good as gold and better by far than any angel. I’d never figure out where I’d gone wrong with him.

“Every day, sweetie. Every time I serve a watered-down drink or sell a tourist a map to an undiscovered gold mine.” I tugged at his earlobe and started loading him up with baseball bats. Which was true, but tricksters were also at times judge, jury, and executioner. Or in this particular case . . . a facilitator. Sometimes justice doesn’t feel right unless you snatch it with your own hand. Vigilante was only a bad word in my dictionary if you didn’t have your information straight. Then it might be your turn to be served up on the bloody platter of the wicked or the failed fact-checker. And there were no unemployment benefits on that platter, so it paid to make sure you were right in the first place.

When I finished with Griffin, I turned Zeke into my second pack mule. He’d given up on the grumbling . . . for the moment. He knew I took my job as seriously as he did his and sharing it with him to take his mind off his current unwilling vacation was me doing what I could for him. I was giving him his daily dose of violence . . . all in the name of what was just and true, of course, but like kiddies needed cartoon-shaped vitamins, Zeke needed some ass to kick.

Kick it. Shoot it. Blow it up. He wasn’t that particular. It was easy to please Zeke.

With the guys carrying the baseball bats, we walked down the sidewalk, cars on the street passing us. Not a one was a cop car and not a one slowed down at the sight of what was being carried. Someone had once said that all that was necessary for evil to triumph is for wise men to do nothing. These days wise men did nothing a hundred times faster than they had a few hundred years ago, but they were still as blind and useless as they’d ever been. That was why a trickster, an ex-angel, and an ex-demon were going to step up to the plate.

As we moved among the homeless, skirting carts, piles of clothes, and cardboard beds, I saw the sheen of cautious and confused eyes gleaming under the street-lights. I took a baseball bat from Griffin’s pile and parked it on my shoulder. “So? Any ex-baseball players here? Anyone want to grab a bat and show three murdering sons of bitches how to really hit one out of the park?”

It was a long moment before someone spoke up, but someone did. It only takes one push to get the ball rolling . . . only one person to get the mob ready to run.

“Girly, you know what you’re playing at?” a voice of gravel rolling in tobacco juice spoke at hip level. I looked down to see eyes neither cautious nor confused. They were hard, dark, and knew exactly how to play, if I could convince him that I could too. “They’re big men, did what they did. Steroid-popping, raisin-balled bastards who never did an honest day’s work, but they know how to hurt people. And they’re good at it. They ain’t had to dig for their last meal out of the Dumpster behind a 7-Eleven and been happy to have it. Not many of us can say the same.” He was about sixty-five with one leg ended in a stump at his knee. It could’ve been from war or diabetes. He had a beard, iron gray streaked with snow and half the teeth he’d once had at eighteen. But for tonight, he was a baseball player through and through.

I handed him the bat and then pulled my Smith as I sat beside him. “Sergeant, this girly knows how to level the playing field.”

“How’d you know I was a sergeant?” He looked at the gun with approval. “And why not just shoot the bastards dead if you’re carrying that in your panties?”

My panties were not where I was carrying it, but I let it go. “Because you, unlike the ones who are hurting you and yours, do know the value of an honest day’s work. As for shooting them dead, why should they get to go that easily? Your friend didn’t.”

“Jimmy Whitmore.” That was the name of the man the news said had been beaten to death. “The Whit. Always cutting up about foolish shit. He weren’t no friend.” A big hand clenched tightly on the wood. “Full of himself and I’ve seen brighter, but you’re right. He didn’t go easy.”

“And neither will the ones who did that to him.” I waved my free hand at Griffin and Zeke. “Go on, guys. Pass them out. Then find a spot while I sit a spell with the Sarge and talk a little trash.”

“You from the South, girly? Tennessee? Alabama?” The eyes softened a fraction. “You have a way about you.”

I smiled as I rested the gun on my knee. “Sugar, I’m from everywhere. There’s no place in this world big enough to hold me.” No yard with enough toys. No playground with enough swings. No amusement park with enough rides. No place I hadn’t been. No place I wouldn’t go. But that was the past and the future, intriguing physics theories aside. And right now the present was good enough for me.

An hour passed and I was telling the sarge about my favorite memory of Tennessee. “Honeysuckle,” I said in dreamy remembrance, propping my chin in my hand. “On those humid summer nights where you can stand outside and there’s no air, only honeysuckle. You can smell it; you can even taste it.” The last time I’d been there, it had been so strong and thick everywhere that I was surprised even now people didn’t smell it on my breath when I exhaled. No one could smell honeysuckle and not instantly become a kid again, tasting the nectar. There was nothing in the world that tasted quite like that. Not the best of wine or the sweetest fruit heavy on an orchard tree.

“That’s home, through and through.” He nodded. “Too damn cold in the winter and a tornado every day in the summer, but the honeysuckle nights I miss. I rightly do.”

Zeke interrupted the nostalgia, calling from farther down the street, sitting to blend in as I was doing. Waiting for those three bastards to come play. Griffin had taken the other side of the street, buried in the homeless and street noise. “Trixa,” Zeke snapped, “some guy is exposing himself to me. Only Griffin gets to do that.”

Maybe we were lucky Griffin was on the other side of the street. He considered their personal life to be just that and not shouted down the street over people’s heads. I choked back a laugh, because Zeke was trying to be good since this was my show. Most times he wouldn’t mention the little annoyances of life and take care of them himself, which was rarely a pretty picture. “Did you tell him to stop?” I asked.

“Twice. Which are two more warnings than I normally give,” came the exasperated reply.

I shrugged to myself. Sometimes the Zeke way was the right way—once again, not pretty, but still occasionally right. “Sounds like someone needs a lesson. You can be a trickster intern for the night.”

After that I heard a grunt, a loud one to make it as far down as I was sitting. I didn’t hear a silencer’s muffled cough though, which was good, but better safe than sorry. . . . “You didn’t shoot him, did you?”

“No, I hit it with the butt of my gun.” Considering the size Zeke’s guns tended toward, that was one unfortunate flasher. “He’s curled up and I can’t see his dick anymore, but I heard a crunch. A nice, loud crunch. Is that enough of a lesson or should I go ahead and shoot him?”

He didn’t know, truly didn’t, and I could see why Griffin still tutored him in walking the line between the stark black and white of decision making. Who knew how long it would be before Zeke could actually see the gray instead of only guessing at it?

“What do you think?” I called back.

“That I should shoot him,” he said promptly.

“No,” I said with a loud sigh, and he heard it.

“Just a little?” he wheedled.

“No . . . unless the crunch wasn’t sufficient and he tries it again. Then maybe. Now quiet down, Kit. You’re making people a little nervous.”

Sarge looked at me, squinting his eyes as some of the homeless began to move their scant belongings and themselves farther up or down the sidewalk away from Zeke. “You think, girly? That boy’s not quite right in the head, now is he?”

“He’s right in every way there is to be right,” I said firmly. “And he’s lived through battles and a war you couldn’t imagine. You know the good men who do nothing and let evil thrive? He’s a good man who does something and, trust me, evil will never thrive if he’s in the area. He’s better than I am and better than you. Understand?”

The man held up his hands. “Hold your horses. You sure don’t look like brother and sister. He looking all Irish with that red hair and you looking, well, all kinds there is. Ain’t meaning to step on any toes regarding family.”

He was right. Zeke was my family, my brother, just as Griffin was. I’d lost my real brother, Kimano, years ago, and vengeance, while satisfying, couldn’t bring him back. But life had given me two more. Not my guys, not my boys, but my brothers. For a loner trickster who usually led the most wandering of lives, who made the most temporary passing through or ending of your life, I was picking up strays like crazy. They were anchors to my kind, Mama would be the first to say. I looked down the street to see Zeke swiveling his red head back and forth with a “Hey, what?” puzzled expression as people moved away from him.

No, not anchors, Mama. They were wings. They had wings when they cared to show them and they were my wings. I’d thought I’d been blessed to have one brother. Now I was blessed to have two.

“If you’re going to leave, then take the pervert with you,” I heard Zeke demand. “His dick touched my gun. Now I’ll have to take it to the free clinic to be tested. Do you know how hard that is to explain?”

Blessed was a strong word. Fortunate. I was fortunate to have two more.

“Especially when it’s the third time?”

All right, family. It was everyone’s burden to bear. And bear it I would . . . with the same grace and style with which I bore everything else.

“Does anyone have any goddamn hand sanitizer?”

My cell rang at just the moment I was considering taking the bat back from “Sarge” and using it on Zeke. Very good timing. Griffin was excellent at that. “What is Zeke doing?” he asked before I could say hello. “You’re zapping me with waves of irritation like a leaky microwave. Zeke feels the same as always—his usual nice Zen level of vexation with the world in general, and since I normally can only read what you want me to, I have to guess he’s also having a little fun with you.” He didn’t sound especially sympathetic. Amused was more like it. He dealt with Zeke’s quirks every day and he did it with the grace and style I was beginning to shed like a winter coat.

“Zeke is being Zeke,” I groaned. Since I was assuming his taking his gun to the free clinic was a joke, I added, “The more he develops a sense of humor, the more worried I get. It scares even my kind.”

I heard the grin in Griffin’s voice. “I wake up to it every morning. I’d think a big, bad trickster such as you could suck it up a little. Ouch. Fine. You want me to come over to that side and make Zeke play nice?” The “ouch” would be from my escalating annoyance.

The picture of Zeke playing nice made all the irritation instantly disappear. It was too ludicrous to imagine. Zeke being a good boy—I would’ve laughed, but in that moment I saw them . . . two men meandering down the sidewalk from Zeke’s end. They wore baseball hats and knee-length jackets bulky enough to hide a baseball bat. “Have to go, Griffin. I have two over here. Look for one on your side. It’s time to get off the bench and play for real.” I hoped that Zeke remembered we were here to help, but vengeance wasn’t ours this time. And it wasn’t Heaven’s. It belonged to these people.

I made a quick call, then put the cell phone away and waited. They kept coming, not trying to look inconspicuous by hunching their shoulders or keeping their heads down. They swaggered, predators on the prowl and proud as punch. Except they were more like poodles on the prowl, teacup ones, strolling into the open mouth of a lion. Pulling the hood of my raincoat over my hair, I did some hunching of my own. Hopeless, helpless, lost . . . victim. Put out what you want others to see and they’ll see it. Whether you’re a pretender to the throne or to the gutter, the ignorant rarely see the chameleon. And if the chameleon is actually less a tiny lizard and more of Godzilla waiting to swallow you whole . . . that truly was your bad luck. You should’ve looked closer. You should’ve paid attention.

They passed Zeke, still sitting with his gun now out of sight. They hesitated, but kept moving. Zeke would never a chameleon make. We all have different talents. Looking harmless wasn’t one of Zeke’s.

They might have swung a wide berth around Zeke, but the two of them came on, through shifting people, focusing . . . focusing. There . . . Look at that. There was a woman, hiding under her hood, so withdrawn from the world, so afraid, she’d balled herself up, hoping to disappear completely. Bullies loved fear. In seconds they stood in front of me, baseball bats now out and hanging by their legs, harsh grins showing as they gobbled up a fear that wasn’t there and saw a woman who didn’t exist.

“Hey, bitch.” A foot nudged my leg hard. “Look at me. I wanna see if you’re worth messing up or if you’re ugly as shit already.”

Ask and you shall receive.

I tilted my head back, hood falling, and gave them a flash of teeth far more predatory than anything Animal Planet had on it. “Boys, boys, boys. You wouldn’t know a ‘messing up’ . . . well . . . until I showed you one.” I put a bullet in the right kneecap of one of them. The other one I left to Zeke. Fair was fair. He put a round in the back of the second one’s thigh, throwing him face forward onto the concrete. They were both down, screaming in pain, and the cars on the street—they just kept moving. Just as they kept moving as I heard a muffled pop from across the street. Barely audible over the sound of the cars, but I’d been listening for it. Griffin had gotten the third. I didn’t expect that any mistaken Good Samaritan would stop driving and get out to investigate when justice stood up, and they did stand up, all around me—worn men and women with baseball bats and a chance to take back a bit of the peace that had been stolen from them.

“See you later, Sarge.” I squeezed his shoulder as he got to his feet with the help of a crutch on one side and a bat on the other. “Hit one out of the park for me.”

“I will, little missy. Damn straight I will,” he said grimly. “Thanks for this. It ain’t no honeysuckle nights, but it’s real damn close.”

By the time the bats were raised for a second time, Griffin, Zeke, and I were halfway to gone. Ghosts and shadows. In the distance I could hear the approaching sirens. By the time the cops arrived—thanks to my call to 911—justice would’ve already been served. Those men wouldn’t be dead, although they more than deserved it, but I doubt they’d see the outside of the hospital for a year—then straight to a cell for the murder of Jimmy Whitmore. Hopefully they’d get the death penalty, but even if they didn’t . . . no one lives forever, especially crippled murdering scum in a prison surrounded by predators who’d see in them what they had seen in the homeless. Then Hell could do the cleaning up. The demons had to get their groceries from somewhere. As God didn’t feed them his love and spirit anymore and Lucifer didn’t have it to give—at least not to hundreds of thousands of demons—they ate souls. Every soul in Hell was consumed sooner or later. For these bastards I hoped it was later. Let the demons play with their food first, as they usually did, only for much longer this time. It was the one time I did regret souls don’t have that eternity to suffer.

That checked off the first lesson of the night. It was time to see how the second was going.

Leo, as it turned out, accomplished his trickery as quickly as we had and didn’t need our help. It was too bad. I’d been looking forward to seeing that one in action. Some evolving serial killer or just plain psychopathic ass had been killing pets in a certain gated neighborhood that encompassed several streets. He would kill them, in horrible ways that were no pleasure to think about again, so I didn’t, and then would hang them in trees or, if no desert-loving tree was available, on mailboxes, the antennae of cars, whatever he could find. The majority of his victims were cats. Dogs tended to bark when approached in the middle of the night, but cats were quiet.

So was he. No one had caught so much as a glimpse of who’d killed their pets, their companions, sometimes, to the very lonely, their only friends.

Tonight though . . . Tonight the timing was right. I’d felt it for this psycho the same as I’d felt it for the ones Griffin, Zeke, and I had been waiting for. Tonight what was good for the goose was good for the gander. Or, better, what was good for the kitty killer was what was good for the kitty.

Leo had rented a U-Haul trailer and headed out of town on U.S. 95 to the Sheep Range that sits outside of Vegas. It makes up the eastern boundary of the Nellis Bombing Range adjacent to the Nevada Test Site with a wildlife preserve at the base of the mountains. Do you know a common fact about mountains and sheep? They attract those who like to live in the mountains and eat the sheep. Like a mountain lion or a cougar, whichever name you preferred.

One big pussycat was good enough for me.

Even though we were in our human bodies and had lost our trickster powers, animals still knew us by the lingering telepathic-empathic defense. They knew what people, and sometimes gods, didn’t know. To a wolf, a trickster would be an alpha. To a lone ranging mountain lion, we’d be its mommy, no matter how old it was. They knew us, and they obeyed us . . . most of the time. This time had turned out to be one of those times. Leo found a full-grown cougar who would’ve nursed on Leo’s leg if Leo had let it. But it was happy to ride in the well-ventilated U-Haul too, and then wait in the lovingly watered large silver-green sage bush of one house while Leo turned into Lenny, who could croak one very convincing imitation of a pet cat’s meow. And as the meows became more smug—because no one did smug as convincingly as Leo, someone decided to put another notch on the handle of his bloodstained knife.

Here’s another common fact—cats? The thing I love most about them . . . next to their curiosity? There is no such thing as a tame cat. You see the survival-challenged tourists in Africa at the rehabilitation preserves where young abandoned lions are being educated to be reintroduced into the wild. You see them sitting next to that “tame” lion to have their picture taken, all smiles, and the next thing they know they’re wondering how their neck managed to get in that good-natured lion’s mouth. How had that five-dollar souvenir photo gone so wrong?

As any granny knows, five-pound Marshmallow with the poofy white fur, the slightly crossed eyes, the adorable purr, and who loves you dearly would eat you within ten minutes if he suddenly grew to the size of a Great Dane. It doesn’t mean Marshmallow doesn’t wuv you; it just means Marshmallow loves eating creatures smaller than he is more than he wuvs you. That’s what being a cat is all about.

When our pet killer crept through the yard, softly calling, “Kitty kitty,” until he came to a particularly large bush that a raven perched atop, he probably thought he wasn’t tame either, but a carnivore out to kill, torture, and maim, if not devour. That’s when a brown and tan head with happy-to-see-you, come-in-for-dinner anticipation in its yellow eyes came out of that greenery and proved him wrong.

It’s amazing how fast you can go from “I taut I taw a puddy tat” to choking on your own blood.

One more lesson learned.

Our friend the cougar ended up back in the mountains with a full belly and some leftovers courtesy of another ride in the U-Haul, and Leo had called to give me the story on his way back. That left time for Griffin, Zeke, and me to catch a very late dinner. I was sorry I had missed the fun, but there was always more to be had.

As I went to bed that night, I did some wondering of my own. What did someone . . . something like Cronus, who’d thought it hilarious to eat his own children, according to legend and truth—what did he do for fun?