“He’ll come back,” Zeke said as he ate the toast, looking not the slightest less lethal in his new black T-shirt that read AREA 51—DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED, the sentiment emblazoned beneath the words by a small green alien in army camos and aiming an M-16. “He will,” he reiterated with a confidence that couldn’t be shaken. “I know it.”

Because Leo had to come back. Because the four of us were family, belonged together, and Zeke couldn’t see it any other way.

“Maybe so, Kit.” I deposited my plate on the bed, kissed the top of his copper hair where he sat on the next bed, and headed for the bathroom. “I need fifteen minutes. Either of you gentlemen up to ‘borrowing’ a car?” I peered around the bathroom door. Two rooms shared one bathroom, but I’d lucked out. Whoever had rented the other room was out alien hunting or practicing his Klingon at the café. “But only from someone who deserves it.”

An hour later we were on the road, listening to static, which was more entertaining than country music, and riding in the saddest Winnebago I’d ever seen. But per Zeke, the owner had been the worst kid-slapping, wife-beating, cheating-on-his-taxes, drunken bastard in Rachel, Nevada. If he thought getting his Winnebago ripped off was just deserts, he had no idea whom he was screwing with. Within a week he’d be in prison—the bad kind where he’d learn what it was like to be a beaten wife himself.

“So this guy deserved it,” Griffin mused as he drove. “Who else has deserved it lately? You didn’t retire from being a trickster while looking for the Light, did you? That doesn’t seem like you.”

I slid down in the passenger seat and tried to look sheepish, but I couldn’t. I quirked my lips. “Well, there was the zoo.”

Zeke leaned forward. “The zoo? Where the wolves ate the perv? Really?”

I was amused by his excitement. “It wasn’t hard to get him over by the wolf habitat. Very secluded. He did seem pretty surprised that such a little girl could toss him over a fence that high and convince a wolf pack that they were hungrier than they thought they were. I left my signature: the red balloon tied to the bench.”

“That truck of red paint overturning on the road crew that did nothing for weeks in a row but sit on their asses.” Griffin shook his head. “You didn’t go ahead and tip it all the way over the overpass and crush them?”

I frowned. “They were lazy, not evil. The punishment matches the crime. I’m fair. Mostly.” I switched off the radio. “Then there was the guitarist. I electrocuted him, but gave the credit to Trinity and Heaven. That had that bastard’s eyes crossing in confusion.” I tapped my finger on the glass of the window. “That the guitar happened to be red was just the perfect touch. If I were a church-going woman”—which by now I thought was apparent was not the case—“I would’ve thought it a sign from the angel factory.” I stopped tapping and pointed up.

“You electrocuted him?” Griffin hissed, swerving around a desert tortoise in the road. “Why?”

“Was it a bad song?” Zeke added helpfully. “Did he suck?”

“No.” I groaned, reached, and pushed his face back. “He threw a toaster in his mother ’s bath for the insurance money. Probably paid for that guitar with it. He had it coming.”

“So you’re judge, jury, and executioner.”

Griffin . . . how he had become so damn good, I would never know. It was a miracle, if you believed in those things, but now he was irritating me with his Eagle Scout tone. I pinched his ribs. “Yes, I am. Just like the two of you were . . . the executioner part anyway.”

He shut up after that. There wasn’t much he could say to it. We all choose . . . for good or for bad, and we all pay the piper. There were simply a lot more of us pipers out there than he was able to remember. “What about Eligos?” he said quietly after several minutes. “If he knows you’re human, even if only for a couple of years . . .”

“I know,” I said, brooding. “It’s going to be a long few years if he hangs around.” Long for him, maybe not so much for me. Eligos would make me his personal project of pain and torture if he found out I wasn’t the same Trixa from the cave. God, trickster, demon . . . human. I’d tumbled a few ranks. I might still be trickster at heart, but the body was human for now.

“I have a feeling he will stay. Take over Vegas now that Solomon is dead.”

“I have a feeling you’re right,” I agreed with my Eagle Scout, and a very glum and disagreeable feeling it was too. “Vegas seems like Eli’s kind of town. So how about we not let him know about me being more or less human, although one with amazing taste and style. I really don’t want to end up a notch on his impaling post.”

That ended the conversation for a while as I reassured myself silently that I was a trickster. No one could outthink me, manipulate me, lie to me, fool me, and no one but no one could trip me up on a lie of my own. Eli would believe I could turn him into a Solomon PEZ dispenser if the mood struck me, because I wouldn’t let him think anything else.

An hour from Vegas, Zeke had sprawled in the back of the Winnebago and was snoring lightly. I slid in an old-style cassette tape and listened to ABBA. Yes, the wife beater listened to ABBA. I ejected it hurriedly and started digging in the floor for something a little less nauseating and much more current. “I’m curious,” I said to Griffin as I kicked the garbage around. “I’ve never measured you, but I think Zeke is taller. So does that make him the big spoon?”

He didn’t give me the cold shoulder or the frozen blue eyes, which rather worried me. He just kept driving, hands flexing on the steering wheel. “I’m a demon,” he said suddenly. “After all I’ve seen them do, and that’s what I turn out to be? A killer, a stealer of souls, a monster?”

“You’re not a demon.” I sat up. I was surprised it had taken him this long to crack. Griffin, always in control . . . calm, collected, ready, but no one was ready for this.

“Fine. I was a demon then. I was a murderer, a soul eater, a hell-spawn,” he said bitterly, keeping his voice low so as not to wake our napping ex-angel. The last thing he wanted Zeke doing was worrying about his partner’s mental health. Zeke’s security in his own mental health wasn’t that high.

“No. You are not a demon and you weren’t a demon. Glasya-Labolas is dead. You killed him and you killed every horrific deed he ever did. You’re Griffin Reese. You were born at the age of ten with a few false memories of parents who abandoned you and you were born human. A human with extra empathy, but lots of humans are born that way. They made you all human, or an angel would’ve known. Just as they made Zeke all human, or a demon would’ve known. Only a trickster like me or a god like Leo had known. Switching your body whenever you cared to taught you to see when a change had been made in others. The low can’t recognize the high-level, but a high-level can recognize any angel or demon of equal or lower rank.” I rested my hand on his tense leg. “You were and are human. Because you chose to be,” I finished quietly. “Then when Solomon pushed the demon back into you in the cave, you still chose to be human, you still chose to be a man, and you still chose to be good. And if that’s not the greatest accomplishment since the world appeared out of the darkness, I don’t know what is.”

I squeezed his leg and let go with a pat. “I don’t know that I could’ve done it. I honestly don’t. To give up all that power, to become something a demon has nothing but contempt for?”

“But you did.” His fingers relaxed on the steering wheel. “Not the contempt, but you gave up your power for your brother. Not for as long maybe, but you gave it up. Sometimes there are things . . . people worth giving it up for.” He automatically turned his head to check on a still-sleeping Zeke.

“Big spoon or little spoon?” I asked coyly.