The Grimrose Path

  Leo opened his mouth as I picked up Bud’s abandoned table . . . and not one joint snapped, crackled, or popped. It was amazing what adrenaline could do. It was also amazing how much adrenaline could be generated by being out and out pissed off. “Why don’t you say that again for me, Lenore?” I lifted the table higher. “In case I didn’t hear you right the first time, because, damn if I didn’t think you little birdies were smarter than that. Maybe when I pop you in a cage and stuff a cracker in your beak, we’ll get some blissful silence around here.”

  This time Leo closed his mouth and rammed both hands into his hair, completely destroying the black braid. He tossed the black cord that had held the plait together on the bar and tried again. “I apologize. You’re completely sane and frighteningly intelligent and I know what you’re trying to do. It’s a good thing, but you don’t actually have to talk to Cronus to pull it off. Lie. Manipulate. Do not throw yourself under the truck to make the blood on the bumper look more realistic. Use verbal red paint. Be a trickster. Be who we are.”

  He had a point, but . . .

  “Aren’t you just a little curious?” I asked, dropping the table.

  “Odin, forgive all I have ever done.” Leo folded his arms on the bar and rested his forehead on them, his spill of hair hiding nearly all of it from sight. “I realize it is much more than I could name in a day and a night, but forgive. I see from your side now.”

  “Actually looking to Daddy. I’m happy you and your family have made up. And, PS, Karma—isn’t it great?” I said with far too much enjoyment at his gloom, my annoyance disappearing instantly. I shook my hand and wrist as the adrenaline faded and a mild ache settled in. “Besides, Eli isn’t stupid. Somewhere nearby he’ll have a demon or two watching. And whether they report back to him or disappear because Cronus kills them, he’ll have his verification. He’ll know I actually did talk to Cronus.”

  “Or Cronus will kill you as well and put me on a rhinestone leash like a poodle for the rest of eternity. Let us not ignore that possibility.” He straightened and pulled his hair back in a strict, martial ponytail. “Which is the least of what he could do if he’s irritated with our presumption.”

  “Yes, but while I was born curious, you were born presumptuous. Plus wicked and more than mildly immoral.” In the bad days, Leo would’ve done this just for the hell of it, but I wouldn’t point that out. I was comfortable manipulating the majority of the world, but never Leo. I would ask—but I wouldn’t push. This was, like he’d said, our lives on the line, and while I was ready to risk mine for my calling, I wasn’t ready to risk his for him. I walked to the bar, framed his face, and kissed his forehead. “I would be perfectly happy with you inviting him here and then leaving. Fly far away on those raven wings of yours. I’ll talk to Cronus. I’ll do it alone and I’ll be fine.” Before he could protest, I asked firmly, “When have I ever not been fine in the line of duty?”

  He exhaled. “Only when you refuse to see how vulnerable you can be, even at your best, and, yes, I know how very good your best can be.” Pulling the sun necklace out from under my T-shirt, he arranged it in place to the right of my heart. “I’ll make some calls to those who can do more than use only Verizon now. Being human or a raven isn’t much help in finding a Titan, but I’ll see if I can get some assistance from those who happen to be getting a good laugh at my expense now. I hope you appreciate that. Risking death and derision all in one.”

  For the former Loki, risking death was a walk in the park; risking derision was a sacrifice for which there wasn’t enough gratitude in the world.

  “And,” he added, “we might be being presumptuous already. Just because Cronus has only gone after demons, wants a map to Lucifer, doesn’t mean this is all necessarily only about Hell. With Cronus, you can’t assume. He’s païen, but so am I. History knows what I tried to do, and on a smaller scale that all païen aren’t at peace and love with one another.”

  It didn’t get much truer than that. “Which is why we really do need to talk to him. If it’s only Hell and Lucifer he has a problem with, then I’ll join his cheering section. I’ll wave pom-poms, do the splits. Rah-rah-sis-boom-bah.”

  “And if he has a problem with some fellow païen, you think he’ll tell us?”

  “Why wouldn’t he? He would think there was nothing we could do about it and he would probably be right.”

  “But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t try,” Leo exhaled. “Does being a born trickster make the suicidal behavior more prevalent? Because as it’s only my hobby, I don’t tend to want to happily rush into death quite as often or quickly as you. I don’t enjoy seeing you do it either, not in our current mortal situation.”

  “It’s what I do.” I walked behind the bar and re-braided his hair from the ponytail for him, not as tightly or neatly as he would’ve done himself, but close. “It’s what you do too, although you won’t brag on it. You should. You deserve it. Don’t be ashamed. Being righteous and being wicked aren’t mutually exclusive.” I grinned and headed for the stairs. “I’ll shower and change and be right back. Maybe we’ll close up early tonight. Have dinner with Griffin and Zeke. They’ll be needing a distraction. Going demon-free cold turkey will be driving Zeke crazy.”

  “And dinner will fix that?” He was back to skeptical again.

  “You think too big sometimes, Leo. The little things in life can be just as much fun.”

  After all, demons weren’t the only ones who gave Vegas a bad name.

  “I thought we were going to eat?” Zeke complained.

  “And we will, but we’re going to have some fun first.” I reached back and patted his knee. He was wedged in the back, using the two tiny seats as one. As his knees were rammed up close to his chin, I counted myself lucky he didn’t snap at my hand when I patted. Griffin, who had won the coin toss, was in the passenger seat, and Leo . . . Leo was currently driving out of the city in his own car with a rental U-Haul attached. That was for fun too, but a little later.

  “This thing is so small it should run on triple-A batteries,” Griffin commented, on the part of Zeke since the car was not small. It was perfect. It simply wasn’t made for a full-sized man to be shoved into the back. But too bad for them both. It was new, I loved it, and I was going to drive it.

  “It’s a Shelby Cobra. Have some respect. Triple-A batteries can’t get you to one hundred and eighty-five miles per hour and this baby can.” I pulled on my gloves—hunting gloves, silk for easier trigger pulling.

  “It can go that fast?” Zeke, as always, was skeptical.

  “When I’m driving it, Kit, it can fucking fly. Speaking of flying, while we’re on the way to the sports store, tell me if you guys have gone out to the desert to practice? If you whip out your wings in a battle, you need to be able to use them.”

  “Why the sports store?” Griffin asked.

  I smiled. “We’re going to try for a few homers. And I’m not telling you anything more, Griff. It’s a surprise. It’ll work off some energy for you two.”

  Griffin gave in to the inevitable of that easily enough. He’d known me for ten years. He knew how much I loved my surprises and went on to answer my question. “We have been practicing. We’ve been out a few times. The last time went flawlessly until a female eagle took a liking to Zeke. She either wanted to do him or eat him. He does look like an overgrown robin with those copper brown feathers of his.”

  “A falcon or a hawk,” Zeke growled. “Not a robin.”

  “And you weren’t attacked by any horny birds?” I asked Griffin, laughing.

  “No,” Zeke answered for him. “He’s not a bird. He’s a dragon. When the light hits his wings, it’s like”—he paused—“like the sun falling out of the sky.”

  I would’ve patted his knee again. It sounded simple, was simple, but that was beyond poetry for someone like Zeke. It swelled your heart and broke it all in one. But although Griffin looked tired, his hand beat my own to Zeke, so I turned my full attention back to driving, my smile turni
ng from cheerful to affectionate. I continued to smile to myself, smug as a cat with his own personal sushi chef, as I drove to the nearest sports store and with the guys’ help, discovered that you could fit fifteen baseball bats in the Cobra’s trunk. Louisville Sluggers, satiny smooth wooden works of art. When you taught those who needed it a lesson, you taught it with style.

  Next I pointed the car toward Fifth Street. It was where the homeless had congregated in Vegas once they had been kicked out of the parks. Rows and rows of them lining the sidewalks, some even with tents. There they lived and there they sometimes died. I’d seen it in the news the past few weeks. Three men, bored with all the drinking, gambling, and strippers that Vegas had to offer, decided that beating up people down on their luck would be the next-best alternative. Monopoly . . . Grand Theft Auto—that wasn’t enough for these guys. And the homeless were easy targets. Some were hiding from things they’d done, things worse than beatings, but most were only people who’d lost their jobs and homes or those who were mentally ill. Then there were those that just didn’t understand life. Or maybe more accurately, life didn’t understand them. That was a hard road to walk and these people didn’t need homicidal asses making things any worse for them.

  The police made an effort. They cruised Fifth Street, but bullies in baseball hats and sweats weren’t easy to pick out from the homeless who surrounded them, and there was plenty of crime elsewhere in Vegas to keep them busy. Even when one of the lost was killed, beaten to death by three baseball bats. The police came and went more frequently then. I watched from one of the stores in a strip mall that lined the street, but that lasted only about a week, and it was business as usual . . . except to the men and women who huddled on the sidewalk in the night. Waiting—for the next time, because, as they knew, there would be a next time.

  They were right. There was going to be a next time, hopefully tonight. We tricksters had a sort of knack for choosing the right moment. A physicist had once tried to explain it to me . . . about how time wasn’t linear, that it was happening all at once, from beginning to end, but there was no beginning or end. There was only now, a billion nows, and that maybe tricksters could sense those other nows. That at some level we knew even if we couldn’t see, and that was our knack for showing up at just the right moment.

  It was an interesting theory, especially as he told it to me as I dangled him over the edge of a volcano. It had been intriguing enough that I let him off with a warning about staying away from naïve virgins in the future instead of dropping him in lava like an ancient one himself.

  Now though, the subject was still baseball and baseball bats. But this time, it was going to be just like real baseball. All-American fun—hot dogs, apple pie with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream, blue skies, and hitting one out of the park. The lost would only be lost for now, not lost forever.

  I parked at the mortuary not far down from the strip mall where I’d done my surveillance. I filled in my boys on what we were there for and why. “You said you trick the unwary. You make people smarter,” Zeke said. “How’s this make them smarter?”

  “No, I said I trick the unwary to make them wiser and I punish the ones who are beyond learning. Killing the helpless and the lost for entertainment is beyond education.” It was dark, almost eight, and the mortuary’s parking lot deserted; the living who took care of the dead were gone for the night. “School was over for these particular assholes before it ever began. No pizza days. No skipping class. No homecoming. No games. Well . . .” I opened the trunk and ran one finger along the polished wood inside. “A game, but one they won’t walk away from.”

  “How long has it been since you just tricked, didn’t punish?” Griffin asked at my side. Always the ex-demon with the Boy Scout questions, he was good as gold and better by far than any angel. I’d never figure out where I’d gone wrong with him.

  “Every day, sweetie. Every time I serve a watered-down drink or sell a tourist a map to an undiscovered gold mine.” I tugged at his earlobe and started loading him up with baseball bats. Which was true, but tricksters were also at times judge, jury, and executioner. Or in this particular case . . . a facilitator. Sometimes justice doesn’t feel right unless you snatch it with your own hand. Vigilante was only a bad word in my dictionary if you didn’t have your information straight. Then it might be your turn to be served up on the bloody platter of the wicked or the failed fact-checker. And there were no unemployment benefits on that platter, so it paid to make sure you were right in the first place.

  When I finished with Griffin, I turned Zeke into my second pack mule. He’d given up on the grumbling . . . for the moment. He knew I took my job as seriously as he did his and sharing it with him to take his mind off his current unwilling vacation was me doing what I could for him. I was giving him his daily dose of violence . . . all in the name of what was just and true, of course, but like kiddies needed cartoon-shaped vitamins, Zeke needed some ass to kick.

  Kick it. Shoot it. Blow it up. He wasn’t that particular. It was easy to please Zeke.

  With the guys carrying the baseball bats, we walked down the sidewalk, cars on the street passing us. Not a one was a cop car and not a one slowed down at the sight of what was being carried. Someone had once said that all that was necessary for evil to triumph is for wise men to do nothing. These days wise men did nothing a hundred times faster than they had a few hundred years ago, but they were still as blind and useless as they’d ever been. That was why a trickster, an ex-angel, and an ex-demon were going to step up to the plate.

  As we moved among the homeless, skirting carts, piles of clothes, and cardboard beds, I saw the sheen of cautious and confused eyes gleaming under the street-lights. I took a baseball bat from Griffin’s pile and parked it on my shoulder. “So? Any ex-baseball players here? Anyone want to grab a bat and show three murdering sons of bitches how to really hit one out of the park?”

  It was a long moment before someone spoke up, but someone did. It only takes one push to get the ball rolling . . . only one person to get the mob ready to run.

  “Girly, you know what you’re playing at?” a voice of gravel rolling in tobacco juice spoke at hip level. I looked down to see eyes neither cautious nor confused. They were hard, dark, and knew exactly how to play, if I could convince him that I could too. “They’re big men, did what they did. Steroid-popping, raisin-balled bastards who never did an honest day’s work, but they know how to hurt people. And they’re good at it. They ain’t had to dig for their last meal out of the Dumpster behind a 7-Eleven and been happy to have it. Not many of us can say the same.” He was about sixty-five with one leg ended in a stump at his knee. It could’ve been from war or diabetes. He had a beard, iron gray streaked with snow and half the teeth he’d once had at eighteen. But for tonight, he was a baseball player through and through.

  I handed him the bat and then pulled my Smith as I sat beside him. “Sergeant, this girly knows how to level the playing field.”

  “How’d you know I was a sergeant?” He looked at the gun with approval. “And why not just shoot the bastards dead if you’re carrying that in your panties?”

  My panties were not where I was carrying it, but I let it go. “Because you, unlike the ones who are hurting you and yours, do know the value of an honest day’s work. As for shooting them dead, why should they get to go that easily? Your friend didn’t.”

  “Jimmy Whitmore.” That was the name of the man the news said had been beaten to death. “The Whit. Always cutting up about foolish shit. He weren’t no friend.” A big hand clenched tightly on the wood. “Full of himself and I’ve seen brighter, but you’re right. He didn’t go easy.”

  “And neither will the ones who did that to him.” I waved my free hand at Griffin and Zeke. “Go on, guys. Pass them out. Then find a spot while I sit a spell with the Sarge and talk a little trash.”

  “You from the South, girly? Tennessee? Alabama?” The eyes softened a fraction. “You have a way about you.”

 
I smiled as I rested the gun on my knee. “Sugar, I’m from everywhere. There’s no place in this world big enough to hold me.” No yard with enough toys. No playground with enough swings. No amusement park with enough rides. No place I hadn’t been. No place I wouldn’t go. But that was the past and the future, intriguing physics theories aside. And right now the present was good enough for me.

  An hour passed and I was telling the sarge about my favorite memory of Tennessee. “Honeysuckle,” I said in dreamy remembrance, propping my chin in my hand. “On those humid summer nights where you can stand outside and there’s no air, only honeysuckle. You can smell it; you can even taste it.” The last time I’d been there, it had been so strong and thick everywhere that I was surprised even now people didn’t smell it on my breath when I exhaled. No one could smell honeysuckle and not instantly become a kid again, tasting the nectar. There was nothing in the world that tasted quite like that. Not the best of wine or the sweetest fruit heavy on an orchard tree.

  “That’s home, through and through.” He nodded. “Too damn cold in the winter and a tornado every day in the summer, but the honeysuckle nights I miss. I rightly do.”

  Zeke interrupted the nostalgia, calling from farther down the street, sitting to blend in as I was doing. Waiting for those three bastards to come play. Griffin had taken the other side of the street, buried in the homeless and street noise. “Trixa,” Zeke snapped, “some guy is exposing himself to me. Only Griffin gets to do that.”