Silver and Salt(28)

“I’m a census taker!” came the repetition. I picked up a telepathic spike of angry and exasperated thoughts—an internal babbled “crazy, stupid son of a bitch”—beginning to override his fearful ones. Too bad. Fear kept you healthy. Exasperation just made your blood pressure higher and got your ass kicked…by me, who was not stupid, by the way. Crazy, I’d give him, although Griffin would punch him in the face for it if he could hear it, but I was not stupid. I smacked the side of the garbage can.

“Shut up. I’m done talking to you.” I reached over and took Griffin’s sunglasses out of his hands and put them on in the early morning light. Nice. They were new. I liked them. “Anyway, when I told him to shove it up his ass, it was none of his business, he said he needed to know for things like roads and schools and it was how the government used our tax dollars. I told him we didn’t pay taxes.” I pushed the sunglasses down a notch. Perfect. “And I guess we’re supposed to, because that’s when he started thinking.” And as a telepath, I had to listen to it. “Cops and the IRS and prison and garnishment of our wages. In case you didn’t know”—I did try to educate when I could—“that last one sounds good, like a side order of something awesome at that great steak place on Paradise, but it’s not. It’s when they take money away from us. Our money.” I gave the garbage can a kick and ignored the yelp. “Which is stealing, which is one of the Big Ten.” If I had genes as an ex-angel, the Ten Commandments were tattooed on them.

Griffin rubbed at his mouth as if he were trying to hide a smile or a frenzied twitch. But he was an ex-demon empath and I was an ex-angel telepath, which made the motion a waste of time. I knew exactly what he was thinking, but I pretended I didn’t, because if I blew this off now, he might not find it as funny in a few seconds, because he was going to ask…no way around it, ask and might not see eye to eye with me.

Sometimes, I overreacted. It was difficult for me to tell until after the fact whether I had or not. And it was impossible for me to tell unless Griffin told me first. That didn’t change the fact that was all Griffin ever called it…overreacting. Never anything else.

It sounded better than Eden House’s label on my agent chart that had read Antisocial Personality Disorder, Arrested Development, Paranoid Personality Disorder, Frontal Lobe Disinhibition NOS. There’d been pages and pages of entries in that chart…until I burned it. They should’ve had Pyromania Tendencies in that list. Too bad, so sad.

Now, I knew none of that was true. Well…sort of true, but it was a result of learning how to use free will without a manual. It was hard—hard on me and generally a catastrophic bitch on those around me. But somehow, finally knowing the reason made it a little better...for me. I wasn't sure it had helped those around me any.

“And after your master plan of throwing him in the trash, what did you think would happen?” Griffin asked.

Now I folded my arms in a mirror image of him and did my best to seem puzzled. I wasn’t going to lie—thou shall not lie. Some of the old, old ways I couldn’t shake and didn’t want to, as they were as much a part of me as my red hair. If that hadn’t been the case, I would never lie to Griffin anyway—it was Griff. On the other hand, I could look harmless and confused, just another puppy from Griffin’s “save the puppy or kill the demon” mental lessons. “Well….”

The grinding and groaning sound of the garbage truck turning onto our street answered that question for me. I shrugged. “It is trash day.”

His amusement took a nose dive. “You were going to let them throw him in the truck to be crushed? Zeke, you weren’t going to do that. Tell me you weren’t going to do that.”

He made it sound so simple, as if the garbagemen wouldn’t see the guy kicking or hear him yelling. I’d have to drop a fifty on them each to toss him in. That was pizza and beer money. That had been a difficult decision to make. I shrugged again. “I wasn’t going to do that.”

“You were. You lying son of a bitch.”

I scowled at him. “I was not lying. I don’t lie. You said tell you I wasn’t going to do that. So I told you. You really need to make up your mind about things like that if you don’t want me to say them. Yeah, I absolutely was going to do that, and it was going to cost me a hundred bucks, probably. No pizza for a week at least. A whole week.”

“You were going to kill me?” It was a pretty pathetic squeak from such a big man. “Kill me? Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”

I leaned closer so I could peer down into the garbage can and almost see his crumpled, fleshy face. “That’s not who you should be talking to. You cheat on your wife. You told your girlfriend if she didn’t get an abortion, you’d have her deported. You kicked your neighbor’s cat. And you broke your son’s arm and told your wife he fell down the stairs. God isn’t listening to you, *.” I wasn’t sure God was listening to anyone, but definitely not this guy. “You’ll be going south, burn in torment until some demon gets hungry and eats you, but, hey, no taxes there.” I paused. That was a good point. It might make him feel better. He was a bad guy. He shouldn’t feel better. “Then again, maybe there are.” Maybe wasn’t a lie. Maybe was maybe.

“Which is why you were going to, mmmm, punish him?” Griffin jumped on it with a small but relieved smile. He always wanted to think the best of me, since the beginning, and that was nice. But I wasn’t the best. I wasn’t even good…I was righteous. And righteous—Old Testament righteous—and good hardly ever go hand in hand. Angels were the Punishment of God. If you weren’t a pregnant virgin and you saw us, your ass was in trouble of the bloodiest kind.