The Grimrose Path (Trickster, #2)(68)
“Thinking about it, that’s a good idea,” I replied as I adjusted the seat, humming, tuning the radio, and checking the mirror to make sure my hair wasn’t an advertisement for electroshock. “You should think about lying too. It’s a good way to make sure Griffin can’t ever fool you that way again.”
Swiveling in the seat, Zeke glared into the back. “Lying is wrong.”
I grinned at Griffin’s plaintive. “Are you trying to kill me? Jesus, when I bought my car, he threatened to cut out the salesman’s tongue for lying.”
“Did he?” I asked, curious, as I zipped the car out of the parking lot. I didn’t mean “Did he” as in did he actually say that. I meant “did he” as in did he go ahead and cut out the man’s tongue. With Zeke, there really was no predicting how that had ended up.
“He settled for washing the guy’s mouth out with a urinal cake. It was not a pretty sight.” I heard the rattle of a pill bottle and the slosh of water. “Zeke, you are not washing out my mouth with any kind of soap, you understand?”
“I understand.” Zeke faced forward again, his voice placid. “I’m not putting anything in your mouth for a long time. Very long. Months. And vice versa.” He whispered an aside to me. “Is that an appropriate punishment?” Zeke didn’t often ask. He almost always knew exactly what punishment should be doled out . . . in his mind. Unfortunately, he hadn’t reached the fifty-fifty mark on being correct yet, but Griffin was different. If ever he was tempted to let someone off with a warning, it would be Griffin, but, in this case, Griffin needed more than a warning, considerably more. He had to learn.
“Perfectly.” I tossed a phone book onto his lap. “Stick by your guns on it too. If anything will teach Griffin or any man a lesson, no sex is it. Now look up mediums for me. There’re enough of them in Vegas—one has to be the real deal.”
We drove past address after address. I didn’t have to stop the car and check them out face-to-face. I was human, but I had enough of a tiny speck of trickster left in me to detect the genuine article—they pinged on my shield the same as telepaths and empaths. I drove past their places of business. Hovels of business. Séance/meth labs of business. Sometimes three combined into one. As we moved from one to another, Zeke had turned the tables on Griffin. I’d told him in the hospital it was his time to be the student, and I wasn’t wrong. Zeke was taking him to school and educating him old style.
“Okay, think another lie at me,” he demanded as he kept thumbing through the yellow pages. “Hurry up. I have to get this right.”
Griffin groaned. “We’ve been at this for almost an hour.”
“And I haven’t gotten it right yet. I have to be able to tell. I have to see through them. Lie to me again.” Licking thumb, turning page. “Trixa, West Sahara. Griffin, go on. Lie.”
“Isn’t it enough to promise I’ll never lie again?” Griffin sat up, the lines in his forehead now eased, his pain pills having kicked in. More than contrite, more than humbled, he affirmed, “Because I never will. Whether I think it’s for your own good or to prove myself, no matter what the reason, I will never lie to you again.”
Zeke’s gaze slid toward the back. “You mean it?”
“I mean it. I won’t do that again. If you want to punch me for doing it to begin with, I don’t blame you, and I won’t lift a hand to stop you.” Griffin was sincere, almost heartbreakingly so—his hair, smelling of my shampoo today, hanging forward, his face set and solemn. He had seen the error of his ways, and he was man enough not only to admit it, but to never repeat that mistake. He wouldn’t leave Zeke in the dark, accidentally or not, again. It was a moment of such truth that you could almost pluck it from the air like a lazily flying butterfly. Gloriously bright. Real enough to touch.
“Yeah, that’s sweet. You’re like a prom date, you’re so sweet.” Zeke was eyes forward again and back at the page turning. “Lie. Now.”
And I thought I was skeptical. I swung the car onto West Sahara as Griffin gave in and snapped, “Fine. You can cook. You help me with the laundry. You love thy neighbor. I’ve had better sex than with you.”
“You’re not trying at all, are you?” Zeke said with disdain.
I cut the lesson short, my audience part of it—which was too bad as it was distracting me from thinking about Cronus making Armageddon look like a toddler play-date. I pulled the car into one of three parking spots by a cracked-stucco one-story building with one profoundly dead dwarf palm planted by the door. “This is it. Only damn real medium in Vegas apparently.” I could feel him or her, bouncing off my radar. “A black thumb and can talk to the dead. It makes sense. You two can stay in the car. You’re having too much fun. I don’t want to break that up.”
At first Griffin looked as abandoned as a five-year-old his first day of school—not a good look for a grown man. Then he frowned darkly in a manner most certainly not prom-date sweet. He regretted what he’d done to Zeke and still did, but me? The regret was fading fast in the face of being the victim of the newly patented Zeke tutorial. I slammed the car door and tapped the back window just as you weren’t supposed to do on fish tanks. “Live and learn, sugar. Lie and learn too.” I heard the locks snick fast, trapping Griffin inside. Zeke’s grin was as dark as his partner’s frown. Ah, for the ability to be in two places at once.