Supernatural: Bobby Singer's Guide to Hunting by David Reed

was that you can’t cut corners. In fact, that was Rufus’s #1 rule, but I’ll get to the rules later, if I can still remember them.
    When I pulled into the salvage yard, I went right inside to my library. I knew I’d read about tricksters in one of my lore books, but I also knew it was gonna be a long night of reading before I tracked the stats down. This was before the Internet, see, and we couldn’t just Google the name of the monster and get some occult nerd’s website detailing all the ways to gank it. Still had to do things the old-fashioned way, with sleepless nights and paper cuts and the smell of mildewy paper from the old books. Mighta taken longer, but I preferred it that way—which is probably why my house still looks the way it does. If Sam had his druthers, my whole library would be digitized and searchable by now, but that’ll happen just as soon as my ass grows wings and flies to Jupiter. I guess flying to Uranus woulda been a funnier joke, but I think there were enough asses in that sentence as it was.
    Anyway, I went inside, got right to research. If I ever had the bad luck to run into a trickster again, I was gonna be prepared. The next morning, I finally found the book I was looking for—a giant encyclopedia called Gods of the African Jungles & Plains , by a scholar named Michael Cowan who specialized in these things—I met the guy in person last year, found out he had a run-in with a trickster back in the seventies, while on an aid mission to a remote village in what was then Zaire. He took one too many jabs at the smell of the dung huts, offending the trickster. ’Course he didn’t know it was a trickster at the time. For all I know, it mighta been Anansi he offended, since there’s nothing stopping a demigod from flittin’ back and forth across continents whenever he pleases. Anyway, when Michael got back to the States, none of his family recognized him, and I mean not even a little. His son thought he was a home invader when he came in through the kitchen window (his keys didn’t seem to work anymore) and almost shot him with his own hunting rifle. Another man was living in his house, driving his car, sleeping with his wife . . . and everybody was acting like he was the crazy one. Eventually, his doppelgänger revealed himself to be the trickster, and demanded penance from Michael. In exchange for returning his life to normal, the trickster wanted Michael to live in a dung hut, like the ones he’d made wise cracks about in the village he’d visited in Zaire. Facing that or losing his entire life and everyone in it forever, Michael chose the hut. Still lives in it. For all his belly-aching about it, the hut smells better than you’d think. That’s what drove him to compile all of the trickster lore, to save others from the same fate. Inside the book, I discovered this:

     
    That’s Anansi in his native form—bit uglier than the old widower I’d met the day before, but in a way I could see the resemblance. What I read about him scared the piss outta me—according to lore, a trickster can only be killed with a wooden stake dipped in the blood of its victim, and I certainly hadn’t done that to Anansi. Made me wonder—if Michael Cowan researched everything there was to know about tricksters, why hadn’t he ever killed the one that’d sentenced him to life in a house made of shit bricks? Probably because of this next bit:
    If, by some terrible circumstance, one discovers him or herself caught in the vexing iron sights of a trickster (or demigod of similar capacity and deftness for matters of ill-repute), the remedy is not reprisal or violent ends, but rather capitulation. Though their deficiencies are well-documented in tribal stories (primary sources listed in Appendix C), the trickster is not to be trifled with by mankind. They are, by their very nature, impetuous and quick to anger, quick to judge, and quick to smite those whom they believe to be deserving. The justification