The Grimrose Path

by Rob Thurman

  And being a trickster and a thief meant that you always kept your eyes open. I wouldn’t steal, say, from a museum, but there were those who would. You steal from a museum, you steal from the world. If you did that, I would punish you, because that was naughty—depriving the world. Unless you were a trickster and you were stealing something to save the world.

  I hadn’t stolen from a museum yet, but I, bad girl that I was, kept hoping a justifiable reason would come up.

  It was while keeping my eyes open several months ago that I saw a special on an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. I’d been about to change the channel to sports for the customers—I mean, I was a living history and while I did embrace the entire keeping-an-eye-out philosophy, just hearing the words New York City still gave me a twinge of a hangover. I’d had the remote in hand when Zeke went to point like a hungry hound on a package of hot dogs. WEAPONS OF THE WORLD had been emblazoned across the screen. Zeke did love his weapons to, what I’d been beginning to suspect was, an unhealthy degree. I’d been relieved for more than one reason when he got a sex life that didn’t involve a trip to the gun shop.

  I’d ignored the phantom hangover pain, made popcorn, and we’d watched. An occupied Zeke was a nondestructive Zeke. In the exhibit, along with a varying degree of implements designed by man to kill man, was a representation of a something not designed by man. Or woman or any creature primate related at all. It was Namaru. There had been two races long ago, païen, that had never made it into human mythology or folklore, spoken or written. They had tended to keep to themselves although one of them had ties to the Rom. These races were the engineers of the païen population. They had a technology that would seem like magic to humans, who wouldn’t have had a hope of understanding it. I didn’t actually understand it myself. No one who hadn’t created it would. I’d seen the objects that they’d built though, the Bassa and the Namaru. I’d seen them work and that was good enough for me. The Bassa, a cold-blooded reptile race, had worked with metal most often. The Namaru, who’d lived in active lava fields like grounded phoenixes, had used what looked like stone, but did what stone couldn’t begin to do. They were gone now, extinct and remembered only by the païen, but they had left things behind.

  I’d recognized in that museum the result of the only weapon mold the Namaru had ever made—or an homage to that result rather. Mjöllnir, Thor’s hammer—a stone sculpture of it. It was ornate and there was something slightly odd about the short handle, the intricate carving. Whoever had crafted the replica long ago had seen the real thing. It was otherworldly, like the Namaru. They had lived in this world, but the way they thought, what they were, to a human would be alien, and, like Cronus, inexplicable.

  The first human swords had been Bronze Age and made using clay molds. After that, methods had been refined and humans came up with many ways to make all different types of weapons to kill one another. The Namaru, in their genius and simplicity, had only ever needed the one. It could shift itself to the shape of any weapon you wanted to make. Leo had chosen a hammer. I’d never seen the mold myself, but Leo as Loki had since he’d given Mjöllnir as a gift to Thor—there was a legend regarding that involving dwarven blacksmiths, betting his head, and turning into a fly, but basically it was all bullshit. Humans loved to weave elaborate tales around something as simple as, hey, dude, happy birthday. Storytellers and liars, I did respect them for that, and I absolutely loved a good story, no matter how fictional.

  But why, back in reality, had Loki, who at that time was bad to the bone and then some, done something nice for a relative he didn’t much care for? I had a feeling it was a softening-up move. Thor wasn’t bright. Hell, Thor wasn’t even dim. He’d need one of his own lightning bolts up his ass to get that kind of wattage going between his ears. It all ended up with Leo/Loki laughing while Thor wondered how he’d ended up in drag at a banquet. Wide shoulders, an Adam’s apple, and a drunken deep bass voice—it all ended in a vale of tears and one drunkenly confused Thor fighting off a bunch of pissed-off giants.

  Born dumb frat boy. Born victim of Loki.

  That might explain the drunken rants in the middle of the night, but Leo had said much later when he was on the straight and narrow, he’d given the weapon mold to Thor in a manly “Sorry, I was a dick and tricked you into dressing like a girl” apology. The sculpture in the museum reminded me of it. Sometimes the universe does give you a freebie, and I was hoping Thor still had Leo’s present. I was very much hoping. And since Thor made calls to Leo, but didn’t take them, Leo would have to go ask him in person. Leo had made up, mostly, with his family, Odin, and the whole crew, but there were a few holdouts and Thor was one of them.

  But if we could get the weapon mold, it would make a weapon of your choice out of anything you poured into it . . . literally any substance you could conceive of, and I could conceive of only one that might have a chance against Cronus. The weapon’s shape itself didn’t matter much in this—as long as it pierced, but what it was made of did, no matter how difficult it would be to obtain. That was where my plan started. Ishiah and the angels were where it ended. Although without that piece of Namaru technology, the angels would be as useful as parsley on prime rib.

  That the Namaru tech wouldn’t work without a trip to a hell, not Eli’s Hell, but a hell hard to get in and out of all the same, was a challenge. But I already had an idea about that—who can get into any hell, païen or otherwise? The dead. It wasn’t the best idea, but it was all I had. For now we had to drop Leo off at the airport—the Swedish volleyball team was playing in Colorado today, and planes flew faster than ravens.

  I was buckling up in the passenger seat of Leo’s extended cab truck, large enough that it barely fit into the alley beside the bar—again with those shower issues—when from the seat behind me, Griffin said, “Now both of us are missing cars. That doesn’t bother you? You love your car and you’ve only had it for a month. You could let me at least call some of the towing yards and see if it ended up there.” As if my car mattered at all compared to saving his life. Sky and Earth loved his fluffy little demon-killing heart.

  “Sorry, sugar. I forgot to mention that Cronus wants to get to Hell, find Lucifer, devour him in an unspeakable fashion, and then using that power added to his, he’ll take control of every world, every heaven and hell, and every reality that exists. After that I’m thinking he’ll play games with all the inhabitants that we won’t much like. If that doesn’t put the car issue into perspective, then think of the old saying, ‘If you love something . . . meant to be . . . comes back.’ You know how it goes.”

  “If that’s true,” Leo said quietly, his hand moving from the key in the ignition to rest now on the steering wheel, “how much do you love Cronus?”

  Because he was here in the alley, standing in front of the truck.

  He looked the same as before, a creepy doll from an old black-and-white movie come to life to kill you in your sleep. A plastic hand to cover your nose and mouth. Shadowed eye sockets to suck your life from you, streamers of golden light flowing from your eyes to be swallowed up by the lack of his. You’d be left a dried husk, drained, destroyed, nothing but a desiccated imitation of a corpse.

  We should be that lucky.

  “Whatever you do, Zeke,” I cautioned as quickly as I could get out the words, “don’t try to read his thoughts. Your head could explode and I don’t mean that figuratively.” I reached for my gun. It was a useless instinct in this situation. Picking up the truck and swatting Cronus with it would’ve been just as useless.

  Cronus didn’t appear particularly interested. Sometimes that was worse than when the predators were extremely interested in you . . . because if they were interested, you mattered. They could want to kill you, but you did matter. If you mattered, you could communicate, in some way have a dialogue—and if you could have a dialogue either physically or mentally, you could fool, manipulate, and lie your ass off.

  If you didn’t matter, you had to fall back on yo
ur fighting skills. Normally that wasn’t a problem. Cronus, however, did not fall anywhere in the category of normal. He was looking idly to the right and then to the left. He moved slowly, as a crazy, possessed doll would, until it decided you were what it wanted, and then you wouldn’t see it move at all; it would be that unnaturally, unbelievably quick.

  Possessed dolls. I was watching way too much late-night television.

  This time when Cronus looked, it was upward, and that’s when an angel fell from the sky. It shattered into thousands of shards on the hood of Leo’s truck like a dropped champagne flute disintegrating on a marble floor. Angels weren’t that delicate, no matter that they appeared like glass in their original form, soldiers of sharp-edged crystal. The truck wasn’t responsible; Cronus was.

  “Looks like Heaven wasn’t putting all its money on Ishiah playing on your nostalgia,” Leo said. He turned on the windshield wipers as the truck idled and silver-veined, cloudy pieces of someone’s guardian angel were tossed aside.

  I could believe Cronus had killed it so easily. What I couldn’t believe was that we hadn’t known it was up there. One rare cloudy day in Vegas and an angel tagged us. Being human was getting harder, not easier. Practice wasn’t making perfect and if there was ever a time we needed to get things perfect, this was it.

  I lowered the window and leaned out. “If you scratched Leo’s paint job, he’s not going to be as cute and sweet to pet when you’re bored.” I’d assumed he wouldn’t pay attention to me, that he wouldn’t see me. I was wrong, and I wasn’t sure if I was happy about that or not.

  Cronus was seeing me and for the first time in my life, I had a huge chunk of doubt that I could trick my way out of something. “The demons are all hiding.” His voice was as empty as it was last time. Checkers all over again, only a dead angel instead of a dead tourist this time. “They can’t hide forever. They can’t hide long.” He was right. Demons could stay in Hell, hide there, and Cronus could go there and try to find them, but Hell . . . Lucifer . . . was vast, almost endless. Cronus wasn’t that patient and he didn’t have to be. The majority of demons weren’t that bright, as I’d thought in the hospital. They’d be back on Earth, fairly soon too, but Cronus wasn’t one who wanted to wait. How many wings did he need to make that map, how many were left? Twenty? Thirty? More or less?

  “Demon.” His attention was back to the right, toward the bar. “In this place. It has been everywhere in this place. I want it. Make it come here.” He rested his hand on the hood of the truck. It sank instantly and a moment later he lifted it back up as metal poured in a liquid stream from the plastic fingers. The same plastic lips smiled. I’d never seen a Titan truly smile, not a genuine smile. I never wanted to see it again. A blank-faced Titan bent on control of everything in existence was one thing; an enthusiastic, happy Titan bent on the same was . . . shit. Just holy shit. There’d once been a god, or what people had thought had been a god. Moloch. They made huge metal statues of him, built furnaces in his grinning mouth, and fed live babies into the fire. Feeding their god. Supposedly. The rumor went. I hadn’t been in that area at the time.

  But if those statues had existed, I think their smiles would have been identical to this one. Full of a heat to suck the air from your lungs, fire to cook flesh, the screams of infants. The screams of parents losing their children, sisters losing their baby brothers. Screams that never stopped, fear and pain that never ended. On and on until you were nothing but a scream yourself. Not a person, only a sound of terror that ripped the air until the end of time itself. And you could hear yourself—hear the scream that was you, the tearing and clawing of it in your mind so loud, so wrong you couldn’t imagine how it didn’t kill you.

  Wishing it would kill you just to escape it.

  “Soon.” Cronus vanished, taking a handful of Leo’s engine with him. That was fine. He could have that engine, as long as he took that smile and the screaming with him.

  “Trixa?”

  I kept my eyes front and center as I put off Zeke for a second. “Hold on, Kit. I’m doing my best not to pee my panties right now.”

  He waited for nearly five entire seconds. “I just wanted to know,” he started, sounding profoundly put upon, “are we there yet?”

  Bending over, I rested my forehead against the dashboard and laughed. I couldn’t do anything else. Here we sat in an alley, in a truck destroyed by one stroke of a Titan’s hand, we could’ve been destroyed ourselves, and Zeke was making jokes. If that wasn’t more frightening than a Titan, I didn’t know what was.

  Leo caught a cab to the airport, while I changed my panties. It was worth it, pantywise. When you can laugh that hard in the face of a horror like Cronus, it was more than worth it. It was beyond amazing, it was extraordinary, and, what the hell, that pair had been on sale at Victoria’s Secret anyway.

  From outside my closed bedroom door, I could hear Griffin and Zeke squabbling as they sat on the top step. It was nice, that touch of normality. I’d told them what was coming, and they’d seen Cronus for themselves, but if you weren’t a born païen, you couldn’t know. You couldn’t truly comprehend what a Titan was, not if it stood right in front of you and nearly screamed the sky down. You simply couldn’t grasp it. They say ignorance is bliss. About now I’d settle for a little plain stupid if ignorance was too much to ask for.

  Unfortunately, my boys weren’t as blissful in other areas as I wished they were. There was a polite knock at the door to get my attention before Griffin asked through the wood, “Was Cronus talking about Eligos? Is that what he meant by a demon being . . . what? . . . embedded in your bar? Tainting it?”

  Eligos had been in Trixsta only a few times—not nearly long enough to put a mark on it, much less taint it. And it wasn’t tainted. What Cronus sensed wasn’t demon—not anymore. “Yes,” I lied in word, thought, and emotion, all the while buttoning my new pair of jeans. I was talented that way. “It’s bad enough that his I-wanna-be-a-big-boy-in-big-demon-diapers Armand stained my floor, but now Eli has funked up my bar with demon BO. I don’t think they make a room deodorizer for that.”

  It was Griffin who had wormed his way to the very heart of the bar. He’d spent several years growing up here, had been in the bar working every day and sleeping every night along with Zeke in what was now Leo’s office. And after Eden House had recruited him and Zeke, he’d still come by almost every day. That was what family did. Years of Griffin were in every nook and cranny of the building; Griffin when he’d thought he was human . . . and, in his mind and his heart, had been human. But it wasn’t his mind and heart that Cronus had picked up on. It was the physical that had lain under the human at the time. Now all that was left of that were wings. Beautiful, glorious wings—Hell-changed to glittering scales and exactly what Cronus needed.

  That, however, was something Griffin didn’t need to know and overprotective Zeke definitely didn’t need to know. I knew. Leo knew too, I had no doubt. That was enough. We were lucky Cronus hadn’t bothered to look past me as he was making his demand and smashing an angel to pieces. Another ignorance-is-bliss situation and I was grateful for it. Cronus saw Leo and he saw me, the ant who dared play a game with him. If we could keep his focus there and only there, it would be good. Very good.

  “So when Leo comes back from Colorado, he might have something that will kill Cronus? That’s the plan?” Griffin didn’t knock politely this time, and he sounded rather skeptical. I couldn’t say I blamed him.

  “Colorado? We were going to the airport? I thought we were going to Disneyland,” Zeke grumped in turn. I heard a distinctly disappointed thump against the door. That would be him leaning and sulking.

  “I’m just wishing ravens could fly faster than a Boeing 727,” I said, sliding my shoes back on. “We’ll hit Disneyland next time. Or a gun range.” A gun range was Zeke’s Disneyland times ten. “And, no, Griff, sugar, that’s not the plan. That’s one-third of the plan. I’m the trickster and you’re the Boy Scout. Don’t forget that. If you don’t balanc
e out my devious ways, who will?”

  “We would be happy to fill that role or make it unnecessary altogether.” The voice was musical and flat all in one. Impossible? I would’ve thought so, but I was wrong.

  Another angel. Could this day get any more holy and, consequently, more crappy?

  He stood by the window, forming out of thin air as demons did. The gray light streamed through gauzy gold and red curtains. You would’ve thought that would add some color to him. It didn’t. “Where is Hadranyel?”

  I continued to slip my second shoe on and then straightened while reaching for the shotgun on my dresser. I didn’t bother to hurry or try to conceal the motion. Angels knew very well how tricksters felt about them. They also had a conceit that didn’t allow the realization we could be any kind of threat. “I didn’t get his name. But I think he’s in the alley. I have a broom and dustpan if you want to carry his remains home.”

  The angel stepped away from the window and from his natural crystal essence he changed into a more or less human body with short black hair. His wings were black too with a faint purple-blue barring at the bottom. His eyes were the same purple sheen; it was the shade that dappled a crow’s feather in a bright ray of summer sun. “That is unfortunate.” His wings were pulled in smooth and tight to his back as a hawk would do to its wings before diving on its prey. “Unfortunate for you. Hadranyel was somewhat more tolerant of your kind than I am.”

  He had short, sleek black hair, the black wings already in fighting position. His clothes were black as well. It seemed as if Heaven had sent down its SWAT team. But why? Ishiah said they knew about Cronus. Heaven, in all its glorious angelic ego, knew better than to take on Cronus, if it could avoid doing so. “And you are?” I knew what he was, but not specifically which one he was. I started backing up to lock the door before the guys could come in. That would only complicate things unnecessarily and they were already complicated enough.