I raised a balled-up fist to my mouth and coughed. I made it sound like the phoniest of coughs, as if I were playing at being human—playing very badly, as if barely trying. It was a cover for opening my swollen throat and pulling in more air. “Oh, so much better,” I answered before smiling even wider.
“Cronus never had a Rose.”
Chapter 10
It was true. Cronus never had a Rose; he hadn’t left one at the door either. He had left that ribbon, but I was the one who had tied it around a stem. I’d driven to the nearest florist, paid a ridiculous price for that one perfect rose—signature red, wrapped the ribbon around it and voilà . . . which would be French for “I made Hell my bitch.” With a flower, a simple flower. Did it get any better than that? True, surviving it would be nice, but between living and pulling the ultimate trick—“suicidal tendencies” isn’t just the name of a band. We can’t help ourselves. We don’t want to help ourselves. It wasn’t an addiction. It was a necessity. Tricking was as crucial as breathing to most of us.
We were hell-bent for leather, and let the devil take the hindmost. We were rarely the hindmost, but if we were? We kicked ass every second on our way out. We’d jump out of the plane without a parachute and shout, “Geronimo” all the way down.
Geronimo, Eligos, you son of a bitch. Watch me fall and watch me laugh right up until I hit the ground.
Eli’s eyes went from hazel to black to hazel again. Black copper full of fury, hazel full of reluctant admiration. He was a monster, a killer a thousand times over, and a sociopath who’d consider torture a mandatory appetizer. Yet he was like me too. He tricked, for a much more sinister reason, yes, but he couldn’t help admiring a brilliant con. “You . . . ? There never was a Rose?”
I did love fooling a demon, a true demon—high-level, Hell’s flip side to a trickster. It was a rush you never tired of. And while I was laughing all the way, if I could survive it, that would be a bonus. Dying for a trick was part and parcel of the job, but living to gloat about it afterward—that was good too. I hoped his admiration of the Roses and the truth would keep me alive long enough to be the smuggest girl in town.
“No. There was a Rose, but she wasn’t Cronus’s.” I didn’t try to sit up. There was no way I was close to that. Breathing was still an effort and keeping the appearance of it, ironically, effortless was more demanding. Instead of sitting, I linked my fingers across my stomach as if I were on a psychiatrist’s couch, spilling my deepest, darkest thoughts.
It was deep and dark, what I revealed. Failure always is.
“She came to me last week, but she called herself Anna, short for Rosanna. She was a sweet girl. Average. Normal. She wasn’t beautiful or an MIT-level genius. She was in art school. I don’t know if she was actually any good, but she had dreams and dreams are nice.” And they were. People without dreams die the same as people without a heart to pump their blood. To live a life without dreams is to be digging your own grave every single day.
“When she was a little girl she was in an accident and had half her face burned off—her ordinary, kind of cute, freckled face eaten away by flames.” I remembered those restored freckles with a clarity of a life brilliantly magnified by tears. “But when she turned twenty-one, one of you was nice enough to give it back to her. You do so love your charity work, your kind.” I tapped my thumbs together and let my smile fade. “I told her I couldn’t help her. She made a deal of her own free will and, sorry, so sorry, little fishy, but swim off and live with the consequences. Or, I guess I actually meant, wait until you die and then suffer the consequences . . . not live with them. She didn’t though . . . wait, that is. She walked out the door, stood for a few seconds on the curb with her bag and her pictures of Sir Pickles the Perilous, and then she stepped into the path of a bus. There was glass and blood and twisted metal. Part of her is still in the asphalt of the road. That darkened stain in front? You probably didn’t notice. Just one more stain in a world of stained things and stained people, but that—that is what’s left of Rosanna.” I’d heard the crash. I’d run to the door, and seen what had been glorious and whole turned into something pitiable and broken. The pictures were scattered with puzzled feline eyes staring blankly at nothing.
Nothing was all there was to see now. Anna was gone.
“And you, you with your infinite ego, thought maybe you could do something about your little Anna’s soul after all when Cronus showed up. What a damn lucky break for you. Well, rejoice, you did do something. Chances are your Rose is free and long gone from Hell.” Eli leaned his elbow on my bed, head against the palm of his hand, bemused as he ran the plan back and forth through his brain, savoring it—an envious twist to the corner of his mouth, before he finally gave in. “Okay, darling, I have to say I raise a glass to balls the likes of which I’ve never seen, except on myself. But I am going to have to kill you for this, and you are not going to enjoy the process at all. You keep me on my toes, and I do like that, but the boss isn’t happy. The boss and if it’s you or me—fuck, sweetheart, you know that isn’t even close.”
“As if you could kill me,” I scoffed, while thinking, oh, for the days when that was true. “I did tell you that Cronus rarely can be bothered to note humans exist. Why would he want to become one? Fall in love with one? You were so easy, sunshine; it’s rather embarrassing for you.” I gathered myself, made the effort, and managed to get part of me upright and resting on my elbows in a move I hoped looked easy and painless, although it was neither. “Besides,” I said, tempting—and demons knew all about that, “if you did kill me, how would you find out what Cronus told me he wants? Truth this time. No Run for the Roses. Because he did tell me. I only told you what I wanted instead. Now that I have that, I have no problem telling you what Cronus wants with Hell and Lucifer.”
“How very unlike you, telling the truth.” He reached with his other hand and ran a finger through the white dust on my face. “An angel made of spun sugar. In other words, worthless and lacking in flavor. All right, Trixa, savior of Roses, tell me. What does Cronus want?” Eli didn’t take back the death threat—death promise—and he knew very well I noticed that, but I told him anyway. Why not? There was nothing he could do with the information and it had a good chance of distracting him from me.
Armageddon ten thousand times over has a way of distracting nearly anyone.
I didn’t think he could settle on me more heavily, but he did. “What,” he asked, “does Cronus want?”
“All,” I answered. No deception this time. It wasn’t needed.
He narrowed his eyes as the dust he’d scattered from my face hung in the light around him, hundreds of microscopic snowflakes, because winter was coming. The end was coming and, like the obliviously playful grasshopper of the parable, we weren’t ready for it. I don’t know what happened to that grasshopper . . . if he died of hunger or the industrious ant who’d stored up food all summer took pity on him, but I did know Cronus, like winter, had no pity. We might not die, but there are so many worse things than dying, and if Cronus succeeded, death itself wouldn’t be an escape from him. Nothing would.
“All?” Eli straightened, dropping his hand from tracing patterns on my cheek and leaning back slightly as if it gave him room to think. “You asked him what he wanted and the only thing he said was ‘All’? Well? What does that mean? All. He’s ripped off the wings of nearly a thousand demons, only one wing per demon if you were wondering, that’s what it takes, and the most conversation the son of a bitch can muster up about his wholesale slaughter of my kind is ‘all.’ It’s meaningless.”
I gave him a look every teacher slips up at one time or another to bestow on her slowest student. “Eli, you can’t mean that. You don’t get it? You? I’m disappointed.” I leaned toward him as he had leaned away. “Don’t be Eli, wearing your fancy human suit. Be who you are. Be Eligos. You know of Cronus. He’s a Titan. He gave birth to gods, but no one gave birth to him. He birthed himself out of the universe . . . out of the sky and the eart
h. They were said to be his father and mother; that’s a myth. He created himself—the ultimate ‘I think, therefore I am.’ He was once locked in Tartarus, a païen hell, and he took it over. Then he took over the Elysian Fields, a païen heaven. And it wasn’t enough. One hell and one heaven weren’t enough to occupy him and he deserted them. He was bored. What do you think it would take to satisfy him? What could possibly do it?”
His jaw tightened. “All.”
“Exactly.” When I was sure that one hand would support me, I ran a hand through the mess of my hair to shake at least a pound of dust free. “Your Hell, your Heaven, every païen hell and heaven and all the thousands of ethereal worlds in between. And, last but not least, this world. The one we live in now. There will be nowhere to go to escape him. If he consumes Lucifer and Hell, one in the same that they are, and adds that energy to his, he’ll have more power than anyone could possibly conceive. He will rule every place that there is a place. If you think your boss is tough now,” I said, my voice hardening, “you wait until you see your new one in action. Lucifer might be fallen, you might be fallen, but you’re sane. You do enormous evil, but you do it with logic and reason. You enjoy it. You need souls and you like to kill in your off-hours. It’s disgusting, but there is a twisted motivation behind it. Cronus is nothing like you. Cronus is outside your frame of reference. He could move past you and nothing would happen, and then a second later he could look at you and drive you and everyone in the hemisphere instantly insane. Worse,” I said with a sigh, “he very likely wouldn’t know he’d done it. He’s a giant and you’re a ‘tiny slow-moving caterpillar on the sidewalk’ demon. Fuzzy and cute, but powerless. There’s nothing you can do.”
“What about that artifact you stole?” he said abruptly. “The one that made your sanctuary for païen against God and Lucifer?”
“Heaven and Hell it can stop. Cronus would crumple our shield like tissue paper and toss it over his shoulder. Do you think we’d all still be hanging around if that weren’t the case?” I snorted. “We’d leave you all a nice sympathy card and be running for the hills.”
“Then why free the Roses at all? If they’re going to end up in places worse than Hell, places ruled by Cronus,” he demanded, “what’s the point?”
“In case I can stop him.” I lay back down and covered a yawn with the back of my hand. Long nights, crashing through ceilings; it was taking its toll. And the pain. Humans were the most gossamer of snowflakes. Touch one and you damaged it without the slightest intent at all. “I said you couldn’t do anything, gecko. I didn’t say I couldn’t.” I being Leo and me and any others who might come up with an idea, but I didn’t need to share glory when there was no glory to be had at the moment... and no glory sparkling anywhere in the distance. “It’s time for a nap now. Explaining it all to your tediously slow iguana brain exhausts a girl. I’ll bill you for the floor and ceiling. Oh, and the bedspread. That was my favorite.”
I closed my eyes and hoped for the best and readied myself to go for my gun if the worst came instead. His weight shifted on me as he said, “You are such an utter bitch.” Each word was a shadow given teeth and appetite.
“Say it with love, sugar. I’m your last hope after all.” I gave another yawn, but kept one hand free to go for my gun or the knife in my boot.
“Actually, for me, sweetheart, that was as close as it comes.” He laughed, almost startling me. “I do have to give it to you. I am going to kill you, sooner or later, and I don’t like being a mark. You can take that to the Vegas bank and break it, but the Roses? You led me right down that primrose path there, and I’ll never forget it. I’ll never live it down either, but you know I’m a demon of my word when I say”—he placed his lips at my ear—“neither will you.”
Then I was alone. His weight disappeared. The tingle of him in the air fizzled out, a lightbulb dying after one last spark and sputter. He had probably gone back to Hell to report or to find a few humans to eat to fortify him before giving that report. Me? What did I do? Exactly what I’d said.
I took a nap.
Chapter 11
I was surrounded by pissed-off people.
It was a feeling I was used to, and I didn’t take it personally, although one-third of it was very personal. “Leo,” I said for what I thought was the third time, but I could’ve been wrong, because he’d yet to take any of it to heart, “if you’re going to kill me, kill me. If it’s too much work for you, wait, and Eli will do it for you. Now stop glaring at me before you get eyestrain and the vein in your forehead explodes.”
Leo had found me when he’d driven back from dropping off Ishiah at the airport. It was a toss-up which was more terrifying—finding holes blown through the floor and ceiling of the bar or getting through the drop-off lane at the airport without having a power-inflamed, overgrown crossing guard scream at you for idling your car one second too long. Soon enough you wouldn’t be able to do more than pause as you booted your passenger face-first onto the curb and squealed off, damn the horses and to hell with the luggage.
He’d discovered me on the floor, covered in plaster dust and unmoving . . . an effigy at repose on an ancient British tomb. He shook me violently, lifted me up, and then wrapped his arms around me so tightly that I might have spit up a little down his back like a surprised, dyspeptic baby. Only might have—I didn’t look because I didn’t want to know for sure.
“I thought you were dead. Odin, hang me—I thought you were dead,” he’d said fiercely. It was warm . . . warm and comforting to be held that close, to be that cherished, to know you would’ve been that missed, all while I was still on the edge of sleep. It was I think the most reassuring, safe, and yet anything but safe feeling all wrapped into one. Cradled on the edge of a precipice, knowing you couldn’t fall alone, but you could fall together . . . a feeling that anyone would’ve sold their soul for.
Naturally Leo had gone on to promptly ruin the moment.
“I thought you were dead,” he’d repeated or, more accurately, accused, pushing me back away far enough to get a good look at me.
“I was napping.” I’d tried to make it sound perfectly normal, which, considering the situation, it had been. I’d been too tired and in too much pain to drag myself up to the bed.
“What the fuck are you doing lying on the floor taking a goddamn nap and making me think you’re dead? Are you that idiotic? Are you? I am mostly human now. You could’ve stopped my heart in my chest, but I’m guessing you didn’t once think of that.”
You’d have thought that if there were a diva in the room it would be me. Wrong. Hair had come loose from his ponytail and it fell in my face as he was yelling at me. I’d batted it aside, took a breath that hurt every rib I had, and had replied with what I thought was a valid argument. “You were a killer. You are a killer.” Not that I was saying the killing wasn’t for the side of all that was right and just. It was. “I’d think you’d know dead when you saw it.”
Valid, yes. Polite and conciliatory, perhaps no.
“And, honestly? A heart attack. In your shape? Even your last girlfriend’s IQ wasn’t low enough to believe that old urban legend.”
That hadn’t improved the situation any. In my defense, at the time I’d still been a little fuzzy, and had had my ass kicked by a demon—which had never happened before. Never. I’d been somewhat out of it with my ego off crying in a mental corner. I had pulled off the Roses. I had talked Eli, more or less, out of killing me . . . for a while, but a demon had still taken me down. That had been hard to swallow and harder to admit when Leo had demanded to know what had turned my bar and apartment into a Habitrail for the world’s largest hamster, with holes and tunnels everywhere.
The termite explanation wasn’t my best lie ever. It hadn’t gone over well and while he’d stripped me down, followed suit, gotten in the claw-foot tub, and turned on the shower to wash me clean of dust, dirt, and the occasional streak of dried blood, I’d told him the truth. I always told Leo the truth eventually. This time
it was more painful than the scrapes and bruises that covered my arms from shoulder to elbow and blotched my ribs. Damn it, it was worse than painful. It was mortifying and beyond, so much so that it wasn’t until I was sitting on the edge of my bed while wrapped in a robe, that I realized I’d missed something.
“We were naked.” I’d stopped finger-combing the sopping wet tangle of my hair. “We were naked in the shower . . . together. You and me.”
“Yes, we were and you were so busy telling me how you are the best damn trickster on the planet despite Eligos beating you nearly unconscious that it escaped you until this second.” Impatient hands had dumped a towel on my head and briskly dried my hair from soaked to just damp. “All hail the queen. You can trick, fool, and fleece anyone, but notice when we’re both nude and slippery from soap, inches away from each other? Now that you miss.” The towel had dropped into my lap as I’d been summarily informed, “We’re going to the hospital, Your Majesty. Put some clothes on. Or walk around nude. It apparently makes no difference to you either way.”
That was how I ended up surrounded by pissed-off people. After a less than quick visit to the ER—bumps and contusions, nothing broken, take some Tylenol and suck it up, said the good doctor—Leo and I had ended up in Griffin’s room. He’d been upgraded during the night from an ER curtained cubicle to an actual room with a view. The view was of another wall of the hospital, but it was a private room, which was good. A roommate wouldn’t have appreciated the show that was going on. If I thought Leo was irritated—massively, volcanically irritated, then Zeke was a nuclear bomb.
“I said I’ll do it.”
I leaned in the doorway, gratefully—Tylenol wasn’t the miracle cure-all that the doctor had assured me it was—and watched as Zeke faced down a nurse’s aide who held a plastic basin full of soapy water and wore a stubborn expression that said if anyone was going to see Griffin in his birthday suit, it was going to be her. Considering she no doubt had seen more than her share of shriveled eighty-year-old penises in this place, enough to last her a lifetime, I didn’t blame her for standing her ground to get a peek at something more aesthetic.