The Grimrose Path

by Rob Thurman

  “He wanted proof that she could love him without knowing what he was and what he could give her and she ended up in Hell because of it—well, that and her human nature. I like that story. With the greed, lust, and pride, and being damned to Hell, it would make a nice combination of Edgar Allan Poe and O. Henry.” Eli looked back down, took the wineglass back from me, waved his hand over it, and refilled it. “Water to wine is easy. Air to wine is much more impressive. Now you’re telling me that Cronus is going to walk through Hell and go mano a mano or Titano a Demonio with Lucifer because some random demon took the soul of his lovely if shallow Rose.”

  “Demons are a dime a dozen and for a Titan to bother with an underling when he can take out the boss isn’t going to happen. A demon took his Rose, so Cronus will wipe all demons, their home, and their king from existence. That’s the Chicago way and it’s the Titan way as well.” I smiled. “And, with my curiosity taken care of, still not my problem. Now, if you could take the dead tourist with you when you go, I’ll consider that payment enough. That and, you know, the sheer enjoyment I get from seeing how screwed you are.” I crossed both feet on the spare chair and studied my new red boots with heels that could slash a throat. It was a brighter red than I normally chose, the color of a stripe in a candy cane. Red didn’t always have to be the color of blood. No, not always. It could be the color of a fast car, a sexy dress . . . or a rose.

  Eli dipped a finger into the wine and turned it to the blood I’d just been thinking of. “There’s a way to stop him. There’s always a way to stop anyone, a way to escape anywhere. We made it out of Disneyland, didn’t we? The most boring place in eternity. The singing, the praising, the showing humans the path of love and Almighty Glory. If we could escape that, we can escape destruction at the hands of one miserable païen.”

  I dropped my feet back to the floor and folded my hands, resting my elbows on the table. “Here’s the church.” I raised my index fingers to meet. “Here’s the steeple.” Then I moved my thumbs apart and flipped my hands over and waved my fingers. “Open the door and see all the people. All the never-to-be-damned people because you and yours will be gone. But I do wonder where the evil souls will go then. Many won’t be damned with you gone, but it doesn’t necessarily take your kind to make some people step off the path of the righteous. You’re good at it, but you’re not absolutely crucial to the process. They can do it themselves. Maybe some païen afterworlds will snap them up. They’ll be punished, if they deserve it, but at least we won’t eat them. Well, most of us won’t.”

  Eli drank the blood. I don’t think he noticed he hadn’t changed it back to wine, or maybe he liked the taste. Once you’ve eaten thousands of souls, you have to begin to wonder what the container tastes like. Demons had wondered that a long time ago. They murdered, they stole lives and souls, and occasionally they ate one or the other or both at the same time. “I’ll have to ask the boss about this first, but I think I might have a way to satisfy Cronus.” He drained the glass without any visible enjoyment. Giving in to a païen. For a demon, it was a big sacrifice and they didn’t like to be on the wrong end of the sacrificing. “What if we were to let all the Roses go? Every single one of them. He can find his and pop her in a freshly made body of his own design. That’s a gesture large enough for even a Titan to take notice, I’m confident.”

  “Digest your Bloody Mary and keep thinking that. This is a païen the rest of us don’t begin to understand and one who, for a while, became human. A god times ten became human and did not enjoy the experience. What he might take notice of I won’t guess at. But, hey, sugar, you give it your scaly best.” I paused, then pointed out the potential flaw in his plan. “And you are assuming she hasn’t been eaten yet.”

  “You have a better plan?” He scowled, his eyes going from green and copper to black and copper.

  “You think I’d tell you if I did?” I waved a hand at the tourist. “Remember, take him when you go. And, as I said, now that my curiosity is satisfied, y’all don’t come back, ya hear? Ever.”

  “If you are satisfied, then you’re not curious about the right things.” His eyes shifted back to human.

  “It’s not especially alluring when you say that with blood on your breath,” I said with a stone-still calm.

  “As if you’ve never had it on yours.” The copper flecks were brighter and his words . . .

  Hell, they were true.

  But mine were always with good reason. I was justice. Eli was only Hannibal Lecter crossed with a T. rex—a sociopathic carnivore. I killed the wicked, if necessary. He would kill anyone and anything. But he was gone before I could tell him so. Not that I would’ve bothered and not that he would’ve cared. No, I wouldn’t have bothered and he wouldn’t have cared, but I would’ve cared . . . a little.

  I shouldn’t have. I did what I was meant to, born to, raised to, and I loved my work. But there was the occasional moment I wondered what it would be to be like Leo, have tricking being only my hobby. That my existence wasn’t my occupation—and I could broaden my horizons. Take a vacation and let the stupid do what the stupid did. Let evil do what evil did.

  But everyone had a calling, and I could no more stand by and let the ignorant and the sinister bumble about than I could wear gold lamé. I dropped my head forward and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. “I save one only to lose another. That’s not good math even for a two-year-old.”

  “It’s not one for one. It’s one for thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands,” Leo responded quietly. “Unfortunate for him, but he didn’t die for nothing. He died for a reason, died a hero, despite not knowing it.”

  “He died because I suck at checkers.” I sighed, keeping my eyes hidden. “Eligos didn’t take the body, did he? The bastard.”

  “No.” I heard Leo give a sigh of his own. “I’ll take him out to the desert tonight and bury him. I’d pick him a nice spot, but wherever he is now, he doesn’t care.”

  It was true enough. Wherever he was now, better or worse, where his dead body was wouldn’t make a difference to him. “Thanks.” I straightened and rubbed my forehead. “While you do that I’ll try to figure out what to do when Eligos figures out I lied to him.”

  “That will be more tricky than checkers,” Leo warned. “And while you’re at it, also try to figure out what we’re going to do about what Cronus really wants.”

  It was hard to have a smart-ass comeback to that, because I hadn’t one damn clue. And the consequences to that were exponentially worse than lying to a demon, even when that demon was Eli. Catastrophic came to mind, then went off in search of a bigger and badder word to take its place. Plain and simple . . .

  We were fucked.

  “Griffin’s lost.” He said it just that way—Zeke, sounding exactly the same as that last word.

  Lost.

  My brother, Kimano, lost everything when we were kids. Tricksters didn’t hold on to things much. That wasn’t us, not our lifestyle. Born to roam, and roaming was easier when you weren’t dragging baggage along . . . of either kind, physical or mental. And that meant I should’ve let Kimano go when I avenged him. Unpacked him. Left him on the side of the road. At peace and firmly in the past. But I couldn’t. I knew it. I didn’t even try. Kimano was Kimano. Unique. I’d carry him with me forever.

  But it didn’t change the fact he’d lost everything and probably would’ve lost his brain if he’d had one to begin with. That was my mama talking, not me, but that didn’t mean she was wrong. In fact, it meant she was right. Mama always was. Whether it was a shiny shell, a silver necklace, a wooden ball, a camel . . . How do you lose a camel?

  The same way you lost your partner. You looked away for a minute or he outthought you. Kimano and Zeke weren’t anything alike, but the result was the same. Kimano’s attention span had been that of your average happy surfer dude and his camel had no trouble sneaking off. Zeke’s attention ranged wildly from one end to the other . . . from the “I don’t care, so it doesn’t exist in my worl
d” to the “on you like glue for as long as it takes to obliterate your ass.” He wasn’t Inigo Montoya. No one had killed his father. But he was prepared to die, if that’s what it took to get the task at hand done. It wasn’t Zeke’s attention span that had him here. No, it was trust. He had trusted his partner and Griffin had done the same as that damn camel. Walked away.

  Zeke hadn’t lost him. Griffin had lost himself.

  “Griffin’s gone,” he said again. The word was slightly different, but the meaning was the same.

  It had been a long day. I hadn’t opened the bar . . . again. Blood, dead tourists, dead demons, Titans. If there were such things as bad vibes, they were filling up the place today—another shot in the pocketbook, although money was the least of my worries. Cronus was my only worry right now, and while I thought on that, I went out. I shopped for some purely illegal guns, though nothing special caught my attention, grabbed a real nonmicrowaveable meal—if you can call a salad a meal and you can’t—and came home to clean. If I’m cleaning, I’m in a bad way. I like things neat, but I don’t necessarily like to make them neat personally. I’ll do it, but I will put it off and off and off some more. But with a Titan taking over Hell and Leo hauling a body out to the desert, there was no time like the present.

  I was working on the black stain that had once been Armand. I was on my knees on the floor with a heavy-duty scrub brush and cursing the demon with every swipe when Zeke kicked down the front door. At first glance, I wasn’t that concerned; Zeke had a key. Sometimes he remembered to use it; sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes it was important . . . ten demons in the newest club reaping souls. Sometimes it wasn’t . . . I’m hungry. Feed me. This time it wasn’t either. It was vital—to Zeke the most crucial thing in the world.

  “What do I do?” he asked numbly. “He’s gone. What the fuck do I do?” The glass in the door was supposed to be shatterproof. The pool of it around his feet as he stood in the doorway said I deserved a refund, but considering I’d all but stolen the bar, I couldn’t complain.

  I could find out what was going on with Zeke though. I stood and peeled off my thick rubber gloves. “Lost, Kit? Gone? What do you mean?” He didn’t mean dead. If Griffin were dead, Zeke would know it and he wouldn’t be standing here talking about it. He’d go through as many demons as he had to to catch up to Griffin—on this side of life or the next, it was as simple as that. I would do my best to take care of the former angel if something did happen to Griffin, but Zeke wasn’t Zeke without Griffin and he knew it. Zeke was a ship, but Griffin wasn’t his anchor. Zeke’s ship had a hole in the hull and Griffin was the one bailing the ocean back out. He was the one who kept Zeke from plummeting to the darkest depths. For all that I was willing, only Griffin had that power.

  “He went out this morning. He said he wanted to get some food, bring back breakfast. He’s been doing it a lot lately. Going out for food instead of cooking. He likes to cook.” He frowned. “He likes to cook. Why has he been going out so much when he likes to cook?”

  Why indeed? “Kit,” I verbally prodded him. “Griffin went out to get breakfast, and then what?”

  He looked around as if he’d forgotten where he was before shaking off his reverie. “He didn’t come back.” One piece of red hair hung loose from the yanked-back ponytail he wore for fighting. “I called him and his phone is turned off.” He hoped. Turned off was better than destroyed. “I looked, all the places we go.” “Go” meant where they hung around looking for demons and “looked” meant he’d stolen a car. The two of them had only one car. Zeke’s decision-making skills weren’t compatible with driving as a rule. Passing a driver’s test for a license could conceivably end up with him at the California agriculture checkpoint declaring an intent to smuggle a case of silicone breast implants and an Elvis impersonator in the trunk, not to mention a panicked test instructor in the passenger seat screaming for help.

  “And no one had seen him?” I moved over to him and pulled him into the bar. Zeke would’ve asked too and asked hard. I took his hand and he was far gone enough to actually wrap his fingers around mine and hang on. Lost, damn it, was the worst word I knew.

  “No,” he answered.

  “You can’t hear him?” Zeke’s telepathy was usually limited to a few miles, but with Griffin, I didn’t know how far it reached. Maybe the city, maybe the country.

  “No.” Each no was sounding more and more bleak.

  “How far can you hear him?”

  “The world.” Stark and simple. “I can hear him anywhere in the world.”

  I didn’t think they’d tested that principle, unless it had been a mission while Eden House was still around in Vegas, but I didn’t question it. If Zeke said it was so, it was so. “Then he’s unconscious, which means he’s alive and that means we’ll find him. Stay here. I need my shotgun.” One of them. It wasn’t as if I named them. First, I wasn’t concerned about the size of my nonexistent penis. Second, guns were for killing . . . no matter what some amendment said. Guns were for killing, nothing more, nothing less. You appreciated what a great job a gun did performing its function, but that’s it. If you named something like that, something manufactured for the sole purpose of ending life, you had problems. You were sick.

  I chose my Browning Gold, a semiautomatic and autoloading shotgun and not called Goldy . . . as tempting as it might be. As I clattered back downstairs, Zeke’s gaze was so raw and naked that I wanted to look away, but then it focused on what I was carrying. “Goldy.”

  All right. Not sick. Different. Never had a pet when he was young—human young. Didn’t have action figures or toys. Nothing to name in those foster-kid days. Zeke could call my shotgun whatever he wanted.

  “Goldy.” I kissed his cheek. “Now, let’s get Griffin. Did you try Bubba?”

  “Beelzebub.” There was enough of Zeke with me, barely, to wrinkle his lip at that. “What could he possibly know? Demon wannabe. Stupid shithead.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “A wannabe follows the real things. He listens. He could know things precisely because they have the same opinion of him that we do. He’s a nut job. They wouldn’t pay attention to him.”

  “Beelzebub” was a rare exception in the demonic sense. He was just a guy. He’d played around with a lot of things in his time, I’m sure. Rocker who couldn’t sing or play an instrument. Goth who didn’t have the ennui down quite right. Emo when emo was so very last year, A satanist who really wasn’t a satanist. After all, Those books are thick. Reading is hard. The Necronomicon isn’t even real. Who knew? Patterning yourself on a bad late-night TV movie is easier than doing actual research. And, to give credit where it was due, the real satanists, who are rare and far between . . . the genuine ones, the down-and-dirty ones—they get their desire sooner or later. Off to Hell they go. A Twinkie or bag of chips to be devoured whenever the torture becomes boring for the demons. I didn’t think that’s what they had planned when they were butchering Wilbur the pig or Foghorn Leghorn the rooster on their altar while trying to say the Lord’s Prayer backward . . . which would be the satanic DUI test. Instead of ZYXWVU, while touching your nose with a fingertip, you had to pull off “Amen. Ever and ever for glory the and, power ...” while chopping off a chicken’s head. They could chant and chop all they wanted. They still ended up as a TV dinner.

  Bubba didn’t go that way though. He was such a thoroughly slobbering, pathetic, slimy wannabe that the demons did the absolute worst thing they could to him.

  They ignored him.

  When you ignore someone for so long you forget they’re even there, whether you’re a con artist demon or not. You say things you shouldn’t, and Bubba, although he couldn’t do jack shit with the information, heard it all. And now we would go find out if anything he’d picked up today had to do with Griffin. And while Zeke couldn’t find Griffin, I knew precisely where to find Bubba. . . . I had his pamphlet. Tours of Satanic Sin City . . . because when the sun goes down, it all goes down. He should’ve given up the satanism and bec
ome a copy-writer. There was slightly more money in it and a whole lot less demon-on-human mutilation.

  “Fine. Let’s get the satanic shithead and ask him some questions. Only you’d better ask them.” He closed his eyes and ground the heel of his hand against his forehead—still trying to find Griffin, on the inside if not out. “Because right now, I want to hurt someone. I really, really want to hurt someone. Too much.”

  “Trust me, Kit. I won’t be walking on any eggshells around him, but I’ll leave enough of him to do some talking.” If he knew anything. When you’ve pinned your first and last hope on a satanic school bus-driving demon wannabe, you knew it was going to be a bad night.

  We caught up with him at Carluccio’s Tivoli Gardens. It was a restaurant next to the Liberace Museum and whether Liberace was a tricked-up demon, an angel of blinding light, or only an entertainer who thought rhinestones were the greatest invention of God and Man and wanted to outshine the sun itself, I didn’t know. I was always curious, yes, but at times it was best to let some things go. Keep a little mystery alive.

  Keeping Bubba alive . . . Well, we’d see.

  His old school bus, painted black, naturally, with wispy white ghosts and staring, bloody red eyes, was idling by the Gardens, hoping to pick up some tourist action. There were reputable ghost tours in Vegas. Fun in the absent sun pointing out the gangster Bugsy Siegel’s hotel, the Flamingo, the “Motel of Death” where many celebrities had died—I’d never caught exactly who those celebrities were—a haunted park with a “demon” child, and the Gardens, where Liberace’s ghost occasionally had a snit fit. A phantom rhinestone wedgie was nothing to mess with, I was sure.