by Rob Thurman
All of that made it an easy decision. Until Griffin was back in top fighting form, he and Zeke could stay with me. It wouldn’t be the first time the bar was a makeshift recovery room for them. After the last time, I’d learned my lesson and added a spare bedroom downstairs. Granted, you could only fit a single-sized bed in there and had to crawl up that bed from the foot as there was no room to walk beside it, but it was, as I told Griff and Zeke, all theirs—a home away from home.
“You told the doctor you had the best accommodations possible for me. Luxurious, you said. And when he still wouldn’t sign the discharge papers, you all but smuggled me out of the hospital, and for this?” Griffin asked, looking much more healthy, bright eyed and bushy tailed, than he had a right to, aside from the bruise on his face. Yes, they’d definitely given him the good pain pills.
“Considering you were hanging in a foyer like a side of beef in a butcher’s freezer yesterday, I think this is a step up, so don’t complain. It’s the only guest room I have and I fixed it up months ago especially for you two. Be grateful,” I ordered.
“Didn’t this used to be the storage closet?” Zeke stuck his head in and looked around. “Didn’t you keep the toilet paper and cleaning supplies for the customer bathrooms in here? And the vomit bucket and mop?”
Picky. Picky. Picky.
“It’s this or sleep in those bathrooms. You choose. And as those look like the ones in a men’s prison, I wouldn’t pick that option myself.”
“Speaking of prisons.” Griffin lifted his wrist and jangled metal. The cuff was off his ankle and now around his wrist which, in turn, was cuffed to Zeke’s. “I know I’ve been an idiot. I know I wasn’t honest and that’s the last thing I want to be with you . . . dishonest . . . but this feels like a kinky sex movie. Could you take them off now?”
“No.” Zeke didn’t bother to waste a second thinking about it as he made a face. “It smells like ammonia in here . . . and ass. Ammonia and sweaty ass.”
“Sorry, princess. I think you’ll survive.” This was what it was like to have ungrateful, spoiled children. I’d have to remember that in the future.
Griffin, not interested in the discussion of the smell of ass, sweaty or otherwise, tried again. “Zeke, I promise I’ll . . .”
“No.” Zeke didn’t wait for the rest of the promise. “Start crawling. I’m tired.”
Griffin exhaled, the guilt back in his face. It wasn’t the guilt of doing things he’d never done, being what he no longer was. This was a guilt he deserved and for behavior modification’s sake, I didn’t pat him sympathetically on the shoulder. There were no Lone Rangers in this bar and I wanted him to remember that. “I’ll bet you are,” he said. “I know you are.” Along with the guilt, you could see him picking up Zeke’s exhaustion like the empath he was and wearing it with his own emotions and sensations. “You didn’t sleep last night. You didn’t sleep this morning. You stole that scalpel from God knows where, keeping me safe, watching out for me.”
“It’s not easy to do,” he replied stolidly. “I’m supposed to be the stupid one. Not you.”
“Jesus Christ, you’re anything but stupid. Don’t say that. Don’t think it either or the verbal ass-kicking you’ve given me since yesterday, I’ll give you five times over,” Griffin warned. “If there’s a stupid one here, it’s me. Now let’s get some sleep.” He put a knee on the foot of the bed and started to crawl, pulling Zeke’s arm along with him. “But you’d better be ready with that cuff key if any demons do attack. I don’t want to die because you have a weird bondage thing.”
“It’s not a weird bondage thing,” Zeke protested, following after him in the crawl up the mattress. “It’s a perfectly natural bondage thing. The porn magazine said so.”
With that I closed the door on them and left them to their own devices, hopefully sleep, but guys will be guys and a porno magazine would never lie.
“Did you get around to telling them about Cronus and the impending Armageddon slash slavery of worlds or did that, like certain other things, escape your attention too?” Leo, beer already in hand, asked at the bar.
“I think they deserve one night relatively worry free and, again, I’m sorry about the shower thing. It was enormous, I swear to you. So large that I trembled in its shadow like a tiny mouse fearing it would be crushed. Attached to a body that defines perfection itself. Michelangelo would’ve taken a hammer to David and smashed it to pieces if he knew what he could’ve sculpted instead. Every poet living or dead couldn’t find a single word worthy to describe the beauty and majesty that is you.” I let the door support me and my aching ribs as I gave Leo my most contrite look. I was too . . . sincerely contrite. It was Leo. My Leo. “Forgive me?” I tucked my hair behind my ears, then touched one of his folded arms with a single fingertip. It rested next to a small mole he’d had since he had first become Leo. I saw it every day. There was a comfort in that, in an unchanging thing, although unchanging was a curse word among our kind. “You know I can’t let certain things catch my attention. Not yet. You and I . . .” I traced my finger along warm skin and smiled, a little wistfully, but the best things are worth waiting for. Our day would come and on that day, the attention I would give him would etch every molecule of him in my memory for the rest of my life. “We’re not there yet. We’re still too much alike in the wrong ways and not quite enough in the right ones.”
“You’re right. We’re both stubborn, both hold grudges. We both are staggering in our hotness,” he said with the gravity it warranted.
“But luckily vanity will never stand in our way.” I pinched his arm lightly, rubbed the pale red mark, and said, “Stay on the couch tonight? You’ll have to be up early in the morning for another trip to the airport.”
“Your bizarre leaping to other subjects is something we’ll have to work on. That, I’ll never match and the level of Tylenol I have to take to stop the headaches is beginning to become a danger to my liver,” he said, unfolding his arms and pretending to fish in his jeans pocket for a capsule or two. “Why the airport? Did you come up with something for Cronus? If you have, that will top even your Roses.”
“It would, wouldn’t it?” I started toward the kitchen to get a broom and dustpan for upstairs. I moved stiffly, the snowflake touched by a careless finger. Damaged. “Didn’t you say back in January that Thor was hanging out with the Swedish women’s volleyball team?”
“Last I heard.” A crease appeared in his forehead. Now he did actually have a headache. If anyone would give you a head-pounding one, it would be Thor. “In the past months I’ve been getting a lot of late-night drunken ‘Ha, ha. You’re not a god anymore, douche bag’ calls. A few ‘nyah-nyah-nyah mortal dickwad’ ones to add variety. Why?”
“I was thinking about something I saw on TV last year. It reminded me of Thor’s hammer.”
“Mjöllnir? It’s a serious weapon, but it wouldn’t stop Cronus.”
“No, but what made it might,” I said. “That and a trip to hell.” Little h, païen hell.
It all came down to what I’d quoted to Eligos before, “I think, therefore I am.” They were good words, those five. Words to live by for some. For others . . . maybe . . .
Words to die by.
Chapter 12
Tricksters are thieves, every last one of us. That was half of the job if you broke it down to the basics. You were either taking something a person wanted or giving them something they didn’t want at all. It was a simplistic look at what we did, but in your life, sooner or later, you were going to steal something—a possession . . . a life. But only the lazy tricksters went for the life off the bat. I was not lazy. Those I tricked had to truly deserve to lose their lives if I took them. I’d said my very first trick had been to steal an entire orchard to punish a greedy man. I’d stolen my bar too. That was more in the range of a good-deed trick. . . . An alcoholic who owns a bar is never going to stay sober, no matter how many meetings he goes to. Not that it was mere convenience that I happened to need an id
entity and occupation in Vegas at the time—no, that was good planning. Good deeds are nice, but when you can make them pay off doubly, what’s not to love? It was like getting a great dress and matching demon-stabbing stiletto heels, both on sale, only a hundred times the rush.
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 ki
ll 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 your 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.