The Grimrose Path t-2

by Rob Thurman

  One big fat no.

  Since Eligos was in his human body, it had the same human reaction as any human body. He paled slightly. I was impressed. A lesser demon/human would’ve probably vomited on the bar. “This had best not be some pathetic version of a trickster joke,” he said with a quiet as darkly malignant as a newborn cancer cell.

  “Trust me, sugar, even I don’t think this is funny.” I returned to the martini. “We all liked it much better when Cronus was stuck in Tartarus or had that bipolar happy moment and skipped around the Elysian Fields keeping things in order. But those days are over. He’s here in this world now. Has been for a few hundred years, but this is the first time he’s decided to have fun. But for the life of me, I can’t think why killing demons would be that entertaining for him. Like swatting a fly. A slow-moving, half-dead fly. Where’s the sport?”

  “There has to be a reason,” Leo added. “Cronus is mad as they come, but even if killing your kind were entertaining for him, he’d have still bored of it long before nine hundred.”

  Eli ignored the “reason” topic, which meant he knew the reason and had known it most likely when he’d had his chat with me at the car dealership. That made him more deceitful than I’d given him credit for and I’d given him very high credit in that department. It was too bad about him being a murdering sociopathic spawn of Hell. We tricksters did love deceit. If he were a peacock, his feathers would be brilliant, bright, and attracting every female in sight. But he wasn’t a vain bird. He was a killer and right now a stronger and quicker one than I was. I kept that in mind as I regarded him over a surface of rippling chocolate. I also kept in mind that I was smarter. False modesty could kiss my ass.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked, dropping it onto the bar.

  “It was left on the doorstep. I found it when I got up this morning.” I sipped.

  “And why did he leave it here . . . for you?”

  “Insane doesn’t always have to mean impolite, but to be honest,” I said, surprised the air didn’t sizzle on my tongue when I uttered that word, “it’s less for me than for Leo. Cronus was a ... a fan, I guess you’d say . . . of his work. He has a certain respect for him, rather like you would for a precocious three-year-old who drew you an especially pretty picture for the refrigerator.”

  Leo growled at me but confirmed, “If we stay out of his way, he won’t obliterate us. Maybe. But we know the same isn’t true for you. Too bad.” He gave a rumble of amusement. “Yes, too damn bad.” Leo didn’t out and out grin often, but he did now as he finished off his second beer.

  “You wouldn’t know why Cronus is into killing helpless little minnows like you, do you?” I gave Eli a second chance to tell us the why . . . although the why was only half of what I was interested in—the how I could use it to my benefit was something I was invariably interested in. “Don’twant to share? Sharing’sgood for the ...mmm ... whoops. Not the soul obviously. Psychological well-being?” I leaned over the bar and smelled the rose still in his hand. “Assuming you have a being to house that psyche in.” I looked into eyes that were distant, the bits of copper bright in churning thought. “And, Eli? Sweetie, that’s one assumption you can’t be making for too long, you hear?”

  He heard all right. Enough so that he was gone, bathrobe and all, but he left the rose behind on the stool. Off to Hell to tell his boss and up the food chain it would go . . . all the way to the top—or maybe bottom would be more appropriate. I walked around and replaced the flower in the vase before resting a hand on Leo’s shoulder to whisper in his ear, completing what I’d been telling him while making the martini.

  After nearly a minute, I stopped talking and went back to my chocolate elixir of the gods. You should never waste the good things in life. And where Eli had gone, there were no good things, not ever. “Flowers don’t always say, ‘I love you,’” I murmured to the empty stool as I picked up the rose.

  “You are a bad, bad girl,” Leo said with a reluctant admiration. Coming from such a bad boy, that meant something.

  “Yes, I am,” I said with a satisfaction that tasted sweeter than the chocolate. “I most definitely am.”

  “What do you mean we can’t kill demons?”

  Zeke sounded as outraged as an eighty-year-old meat-and-potatoes guy told he had to go vegan. “Relax, killer.” I pulled up my hair and then tied my sneakers. I hated sneakers, but you couldn’t run in boots. Or you could, but it wasn’t cardio-effective. How many blocks did a chocolate martini equal? I did know who killed Marilyn Monroe, thank you, Eligos, spawn of Hell, and I even knew where Jimmy Hoffa was, or what was left of him, but blocks versus chocolate calories, that I didn’t know. I only knew I had to run them off or outrunning demons was going to get more and more difficult. “It’s just for a while—until Cronus is out of Vegas. You don’t want to get between him and his nummy-num.” Or whatever a demon was for him.

  “Cronus . . . He was a Titan, right?”

  I gave an approving pat to Griffin’s knee as he leaned against the back of my car parked in its usual spot in the alley. “Someone studied at Eden House.”

  “I studied,” Zeke complained as he gave the nearest tire a considering look and his foot twitched. I gave him a similar look and he rethought it, scuffing his shoe against the asphalt instead. Boys. Ex-angel, in reality probably older than I was, twenty-five human years genetically, but he was still a spoiled kid without his toys . . . dead demons. And that made him a strange spoiled boy, but weren’t we all a little strange now and again?

  Zeke would survive the vacation, I thought, although I was sympathetic. He could take up a new hobby. Golf. Tennis. Goddamn jogging, like me. Male metabolism—it was proof that God, the Christian one, was male. As I glanced at his flat stomach, my sympathy for Zeke decreased a tiny bit as Griffin spoke.

  “You studied how to kill demons and weapons. I’m fairly sure you napped during mythology, history, scripture, and so on.” Griffin folded his arms and looked up at a noontime blue sky, retrieving the memory from the sound of his semiexasperated exhalation . . . but only semi. It was Zeke. You rolled with the punches there. Zeke was Zeke. You had to love him or try to murder him in his sleep. There was no in-between. “Although the way you managed to sleep with your eyes open was impressive,” Griffin went on to drawl.

  It would’ve had to be. When it came to teaching I didn’t think Eden House rapped a slacker’s knuckles with a ruler. They were ridding the world of demons for the glory of Heaven after all, not putting together a bingo game and spaghetti dinner. There would be less rapping and more capping, one to the brain and bring in the new recruit. Bury the slacker in the rose garden. Good fertilizer wasn’t to be wasted.

  “I was not napping,” Zeke emphasized. “I was in my happy place.”

  I finished with my sneakers and straightened. “And where would that be, Kit?”

  “Someplace I can kill demons,” he said as if it were perfectly obvious, and if I’d given it a fraction of a second of thought, it would’ve been. “There was no Cronus there.”

  “Believe me, that seems to be Cronus’s happy place too right now. Griff’s right. He’s a Titan. He created gods. Gods, Zeke. I know you think you’re badass, kicking demon tail right and left, and precious as a fluffy bunny while you do it.” I bounced on my toes and began to stretch. I pretended I didn’t hear a joint pop. I didn’t ignore Zeke’s irritation though. Why poke him with a verbal stick if I wasn’t going to let myself enjoy it? I did love to tease my guys, but I also had to impress on them how serious this was or they would be squashed as quickly and easily as that fluffy bunny I’d compared Zeke to. “But Cronus has killed more than nine hundred demons in six months. He’s ruled one of our heavens. He was imprisoned in one of our hells but took it over. Think about it. He was thrown down into Tartarus and made everyone there the equivalent of his bitches in no time. The inmate became the warden. Makes you think, huh?”

  Apparently not. “You’re afraid of this guy?” Zeke asked skeptical
ly. “You?”

  “Hell, yes,” I admitted freely. Damn, there went another joint. My once-conditioned body seemed to be falling to pieces fast. The maintenance on a human body was unbelievable. If you slept wrong, you were crippled for the day. How could a species manage to sleep wrong? How had they survived to swarm the earth? A bad mattress to them was like an asteroid to the dinosaurs.

  Them.

  Me.

  Damn it.

  “He can hop from dimensional realm to realm,” I went on, “from place to place in this one, can kill nine hundred demons. . . . I hate to keep repeating myself, but, guys, seriously . . . nine hundred demons. Finds ruling a heaven and a hell not challenge enough, and when Leo almost destroyed the world, Cronus thought it was cute . . . like a puppy mauling your slipper. Or a kitten pouncing on a ball of yarn. You remember the Ark of the Covenant? Melting people’s faces? Disintegrating their bones? He probably uses that as a retro lava lamp. He’ll kill you and the worst thing is, he probably won’t even notice that he did.” I stopped stretching and checked that my T-shirt covered my gun. “And that’s it. If that doesn’t convince you, I give up.”

  “If he’s so indestructible, how are you going to stop him?” Griffin asked.

  “Stop him? How can we join up?” Zeke countered.

  “We can’t stop him, and you’ll stay away from him or I’ll paddle your behind, if he doesn’t rip a cheek off like he did that demon’s wing. So just go home, watch TV, get naughty, whatever, and be safe,” I ordered.

  Zeke looked disgruntled, but then again, he looked disgruntled ninety-nine percent of the time. If the demon-killing business ever lightened up, he could be a postal worker, no aptitude testing needed. Griffin, on the other hand, was the same sensible Griffin I’d always known him to be. He wore a more disappointed expression than I expected. . . . Griffin was a demon killer, but he didn’t go into withdrawal like Zeke did. It wasn’t the be-all and end-all of his existence. That was why I chalked up his glum look to there being less action lately, Eli having apparently warned his demons to steer clear of the four of us if they could.

  I should’ve chalked it up to my stupidity instead. I might’ve been smarter than Eli, and might even be half as smart as I thought I was, but it wasn’t smart enough to see what was coming. And I hated that. Screw my ego. I hated that one of my boys was in trouble, and I didn’t see it. I let him down.

  But that came later. For now, oblivious, I decided I’d rather run someplace more picturesque than the several blocks to the gym and drove to Sunset Park. Back to nature—at least as close as you could come in the midst of Vegas. There were ducks and geese and a pond. Unless you wanted your ankles pecked, you didn’t run there. I had the respect . . . more accurately, the suspicious wariness . . . of a good deal of the païen world. On top of that, at times in my life I’d been worshipped, respected, and feared by humans. And then there were demons . . . ppfff. Let’s just say that was the second bumper sticker on my car. SLAYER NOT LAYER and I DON’T BRAKE FOR DEMONS. Next to Cronus, I might be a gnat, but compared to everything else, I was content with my place in the world.

  Except for geese. Geese feared and respected no one. No ankle, human or otherwise, was safe. It could be even Titans like Cronus bowed to their pure, feathered evil. It was worth thinking about. And I did as I thought about other equally ridiculous things. I liked ridiculous things. I avoided the pond and jogged to the mesquite flats for a real run. Once there had been homeless people there, but the police had run them off some time ago and I often found the flats empty except for jackrabbits and ground squirrels. It was quiet company, although at least once during every run a chipmunk tried to commit suicide by diving under my feet. They weren’t bright, but they were pretty to look at . . . much like Leo’s dates, which made me curse the rodents a bit more as I avoided squashing their little furry heads as I ran. It was big of me to admit that to myself, about Leo’s women, and as a reward I decided to cut fifteen minutes off the run.

  There were also other animals on the flats, ones that didn’t throw themselves under me—cottontail, quail, trails of ants, a hunkered-down spider here and there, and tiny lizards darting along the cracked ground.

  There were also the big lizards.

  They appeared in a circle around me. I stopped in midstride, kicking up a spray of dirt. There were eight of them—demons in human form. Normally it would’ve been like a convention of lawyers, the ambulance-chasing kind. The ones with bright teeth and an even brighter magnetism . . . an irresistible appeal that can convince you to sue your own ninety-eight-year-old grandma when you trip on a crack in her sidewalk. But all that potential charisma, it was still a holstered weapon behind flat eyes. They stood motionless, arms at their sides. Every one of them a prince made of pure poison. Flawless but empty of anything except hunger and hate.

  And then there was Prince Charming himself—Eligos. With a brown leather jacket, dark bronze finely woven shirt and slacks, he forced me to say, “I’m way underdressed for this party.” I turned my head to take the entire nine of them in. “All this for me, Eli? You do know how to flatter a girl.”

  “I remember our last party. I wanted this one to end differently.” He smiled, but his nonexistent heart wasn’t in it. There was none of its usual carnivorously merry gloating. “Think of my colleagues as doormen. They’re to keep you around while I make my Tupperware pitch. I don’t want to end up like Solomon before you’ve heard me out.”

  “And you think they can do the job?” I asked scornfully, not bothering to go for my gun. The disdain aimed at Eli was pure bluff. I was good, but stuck in human form, unless my Smith turned into a machine gun—maybe a nice MAC-11—nine demons were too much for me to handle. Eight lower-level demons maybe—I was good with the Smith. But eight demons and Eli, no. I knew my limitations. Just as Eli seemed to know his.

  “Oh, they’re all Daffys to be sure, expendable ducks in a shooting gallery,” he dismissed, not that the Daffys protested. Better to be potentially expendable than to have Eli promptly expend you then and there with no hesitation. “But there are eight of them. And, yes, you are extraordinarily good at the shape-shifting. It’s a bear, it’s a wolf, it’s a shark. Great magic show. But as long as you don’t pull Godzilla out of your hat, I think there are enough demons here to slow you down sufficiently for me to make my move. And it will be an exceptionally nasty move, I promise you.”

  Eight demons, and I would’ve made my own move. Eight demons and Eli, and I had to swallow my pride, be practical, and pretend I wasn’t afraid, because everyone, unless you’re suicidal or crazy, is afraid of dying. . . . Tricksters are no exception.

  “Selling Tupperware, that is what you do, isn’t it, Eli? Selling plastic for people’s lives and souls. And you’re good at it—I’ve seen you in action. Making a pitch to a trickster, though, ever done that? Someone whose very first word is a lie?” I sat down on the ground, fingers tapping on my knees, legs crossed. “Let’s see your best, Eligos. Let’s see your gorgeous ass in action.”

  “You doubt me?” He peeled off his jacket and sat on the ground opposite me, sprawled like a catalogue model. All that was missing was the price tag. I didn’t know how many people found out Eli’s price was more than they could pay, but I was willing to guess it was a whole damn lot.

  “More like I don’t doubt myself,” I said, “but don’t let that stop you. Here I sit, with bated breath, as the poets say. All the Daffys around us too, I’m sure.” I knew Eli. He hadn’t let them in on what he was going to say to me. They would know about Cronus, all demons did by now, but they didn’t know about me. Daffys weren’t worth Eli’s time or secrets. I propped my chin on fisted hand and invited, “Sing your song, pretty canary. I’m listening . . . with every bit of my being. Think about that, sugar, every bit of a trickster’s being, all aimed at hearing your story—true, false, or what falls in between.”

  “You’re so positive you can tell the difference?” he asked, partially offended, partially prete
nding. “You can tell my lies? With all my practice, which is a damn sight longer than yours, doll.”

  “Sweetie, you might embrace the lie, love it, spread it, wear it as a second skin, but I’m a living lie. I was born one and you can’t compete with that.” I reached over and tapped him on his nose with utterly false affection. “But go on, lizard boy. Give it your best. I’ll still know the truth.”

  He did, and he was good, because it was the truth. Or the part of it that he told me. The rest he kept to himself. A sin of omission, the holy would say. Careful dancing and smart playing, I say. Some of the very best lies are the truth, only told for a sinister reason.

  “Truth. That’s so bizarre, so vanilla in the spectrum that it actually could turn a three sixty and become a kink. I’d marvel, but you’re in a hurry. Fine then, changeling bitch,” he said matter-of-factly. “Here’s your truth. I want you to contact Cronus for us. I want you to negotiate on our behalf.”

  “Negotiate? I don’t even know what he wants. Not yet.” I would find out, however. As much as Leo wanted to stay out of this, I knew better. It wasn’t going to happen that way, and that was my fault. But I didn’t feel guilty. I did what I did. I was who I was. There was no sense in second-guessing myself at this late date in my life.

  “No, you don’t know what Cronus wants, but I do. That’s enough. All you need to ask is what he’ll accept instead. What will satisfy him in its place?” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you like how I told you that without telling you anything at all? Does that impress you? Rev your trickster engines?”

  I took out my gun, slowly enough not to startle the lower-level demons ringing me. I balanced it on my knee. “If I do talk to Cronus,” I offered, “you don’t think he’ll reveal his big grand plan to a fellow païen?”

  “As you said, he’s mad. Who can say what the mad will do?” One of the flats’ small lizards crawled onto Eli’s hand and he lifted it to look into its tiny eyes. “Whatever the outcome, we’ll deal with it then.” The tiny lizard hissed at him. It seemed to strike a chord of brotherhood in him and he let it loose in the dirt.