Downfall by Rob Thurman

inspires in a trickster if I guess wrong.”
    I tapped one finger against the bar. “Grimm and the Bae.” Caliban’s utterly insane half Auphe cousin and his offspring he’d created to replace the now extinct Auphe. He’d been out of sight for months now. He’d had time to heal from our last battle and was more than past due back to torture Cal some more. I was surprised he’d waited this long
    My second finger tapped down. “The Vigil, which by the way is where I obtained the rocket launcher.” I’d left the sniper rifle. It was garbage. The Mossad would’ve turned up their noses at it. “One of them was on the roof across the way about an hour ago waiting for Cal to leave.” Since Iahiah had sent him home early, the Vigil had missed him. Luck . . . ever a lady for me. I nudged the weapon with my foot. “Boys and their big bad toys. He had more than this and was, as they say, armed for bear.” I’d disposed of him. As big and bad as he’d thought he was with his portable armory, he wasn’t close to being as bad as I was. “Oddly, he was going commando.”
    “Carrying that, it isn’t a stretch to think he was in commando mode,” Ishiah replied, handing the weapon over the bar to one of his fellow peris to hide from sight.
    “Hm? Oh no. I meant he was going commando as in no briefs or boxers. Curious, that. If you’re going into battle, one would think you’d desire to keep your package of goods tightly secured and safe,” I contemplated.
    “You mean he was . . . Why did you even look?” Ishiah demanded, face flushing with embarrassment or anger. With an ex-angel, who knew which emotion it was?
    “Curiosity mainly.” What a bizarre question . . . to apuck at any rate. “Also I was searching for hidden ID. Did you know that I once smuggled over the border Gabriel’s Trumpet in my—” Ishiah’s hand slapped over my mouth. As if that wouldn’t be ludicrous if true. I did need to invest huge amounts more time toward developing his sense of humor.
    That was currently beside the point, however. As the man on the roof had been human, and the only humans who knew about
paien
or the Auphe were the Vigil and the Rom. The Rom, all of them now, were aware of Cal and Niko and thanks to a decimated Sarzo Clan. They knew to stay away from them. It was easy enough to guess, ID or no—that meant he was Vigil.
    Cal’s understandable, but very real, fuckup, of flashing an especially nasty piece of the supernatural world in broad daylight on a sidewalk of humans. And humans, aside from the rare exception, didn’t know about us. They couldn’t know. If they did, they would kill us. They would try to kill all of us, every last
paien
on this world. That was how man was. If you didn’t understand it, kill it. If they were more powerful than you, build even more horrible weapons and absolutely kill it. But the war would be bloody and the humans wouldn’t escape unscathed, not from us or from their shiny new instruments of hell.
    Unscathed or not, win they still would by sheer numbers alone.
    The Vigil existed to prevent all of that: discovery and the most likely ensuing war. Naturally, if it came down to war, they were an all-human thousand-year organization with more information, and actually accurate information, on
paien
than
paien
themselves probably had, which would not be in our best interest. Preventing a war
was
in everyone’s best interest, however, but ours most of all. They had not ever been happy with Cal, but he’d proveduseful in wiping out the Auphe and he kept under the radar, so they were satisfied.
    I wondered if they knew about Grimm and his Bae offspring. Unlikely. Grimm was clever. If he took over the world, it would be done before anyone knew it had happened.
    Cal wasn’t like Grimm. Nik had been in danger and if Cal had thought anything at all before gating in front of those people, it would’ve been “watch the light show and fuck you and the three-legged donkey you