The Grimrose Path

  While I was all races, two did rise to the top. That’s what people saw. Eyes I’d admired the last time I’d been on the Japanese Islands, the mouth that was a fond memory of the years I’d spent in Africa, and wildly cork-screwed black curls and skin that were a mixture of both places. I’d spent a lot of time rethinking that hair every morning when I fought the good fight with it and usually had my ass kicked and my brush broken. Ah, well, who the hell was I to say what it should do anyway?

  Did all of that make me a romance heroine who had men flinging themselves at my feet to protect my dainty foot from a puddle? Carrying all my groceries like I was a fairy princess with a wet manicure? Hell, no. It had them tilting their heads trying to figure me out. People liked to label things. I puzzled them, which was good. People needed to be puzzled, curious, unsure. That’s what kept you alive in this world. It was what made life interesting.

  No, I wasn’t beautiful. I chose this body. I made it. Why would I want to be beautiful? Fields of wildflowers were beautiful. Waterfalls were beautiful. Secluded beaches were beautiful. Size-zero vacant-eyed and vacant-stomached runway models were beautiful . . . at least that’s what society told us, but society had a vacant brain to match those vacant eyes. Not one of those things, vacant or otherwise, could put a pointed heel of a boot through a demon’s stomach and a bullet in his scaly forehead. I could. I was unique.

  I could not . . . would not be tagged, identified, labeled, or stamped.

  Unless it was by the fashion industry. I scowled at the sweatpants and T-shirt I was wearing as I came down the stairs that led to my apartment over my bar, Trixsta. The sign in the window was red neon to match everything else red in my life. Did that mean I wore a lot of red clothing? Maybe. But more than that, it meant I signed my work with the color—names changed; colors never did. I applied that signature to all my work, and I still did my work, my true work—human or not.

  And Las Vegas was the perfect place to do it—a city of deceit and sin. It was a wonderland for both tricksters and demons. We did have demons aplenty, but as far as I knew, there were only two tricksters here currently: me and the one fiddling with the television.

  Leo turned the TV on and wiped a film of beer off the screen. My bar was small; the brains of my clientele even smaller. It was the only excuse to waste good beer—or mediocre beer with good beer prices. If you couldn’t tell the difference, that was your lesson for the day. A trick a day kept boredom away, but the thought of making money off the drunken or idiotic couldn’t cheer me now, not with what I had to do.

  “Exercise,” I muttered, and then repeated it because it was simply that horrifying. “Exercise.” I glared at Leo as if it were his fault. It wasn’t, but he was the only one around to blame, so I took the opportunity. “I have to go run, lift weights, and do other things banned by the Geneva Convention. If your Internet steroids arrive, don’t go wild and take them all at once.”

  With his long black hair pulled into a tight braid, copper skin, and eyes as dark as his hair, he looked pure American Indian, and he would look that way for four or five more years—but for one exception. That exception showed itself right then. Leo disappeared in front of me and where he had stood flapped a raven who croaked, “Must be jelly. Jam don’t shake like that.” I thought about swinging at him, but I settled for retying the knot on my sweatpants. Lenny or, as we called him in raven form, Lenore—Poe, you couldn’t avoid it—landed on the bar. “Want fries with that shake?” he added as he preened a feather.

  “You’ll be the one who’s fried and served up with mashed potatoes and cornbread stuffing when I get back,” I promised, enjoying the vengeful mental image. “I’ll make you the early-Thanksgiving special.”

  If birds could snort, Lenny would have. At one time, three months ago, Leo might’ve been able to give me something to think about. After all, he’d been a god; I wasn’t. But both of us were human, more or less, now, at least for the next four or five years, thanks to my showing off and an artifact who thought the experience might do Leo some good. For me, there were no shape-shifting powers, no powers of any kind except a natural biological defense against telepathy and empathy and the ability to tell my own païen kind when I saw them no matter what shape they wore. Leo was one up on me. He was stuck in human or bird form, and it was my fault. I’d drained my batteries by overusing my powers to take down the killer of my brother in an extremely showy and vengeful way. I wasn’t sorry. The bastard had deserved it. He’d killed my family, my only sibling. For what I did to him, things dismemberment-loving demons themselves would’ve applauded . . . no, I wasn’t sorry. I would never be sorry for that. I’d only regret I couldn’t do it a few more times.

  Oddly enough, even after that show, a sentient artifact that I’d been using as a bargaining chip against Heaven and Hell had thought at the time that I was a good influence on Leo/Loki. The Light of Life, the artifact, had decided he should stick around with me for those four years it would take me to recover my shape-shifting abilities. As it was more powerful than Leo and I combined, it didn’t ask us for permission either. It neutered him—on the god part at least. The rest of him, I assumed, was in working condition. Although as I had to exercise, it would’ve been nice for Leo to have suffered a slight bit more. We’d see how many funny quips about my weight he’d make while buying Internet steroids and Viagra.

  Not that my humiliation stopped there. My mama had laughed herself sick when I told her anyone or anything thought I was a good influence. Then again, Leo had been a very bad boy in his day. He had once wanted to end the world—Ragnarok, the Norse end of days—and that had just been for kicks and a way to waste a boring afternoon. But that had been when he was Loki, a long time and a lot of raging darkness ago. He was different now. So many say they want to change; he was one of the few I’d seen do it. He was one of the few with a will stronger than the shadows that had filled him up, shadows that were there still but leashed. Is it nobler to be born good or to be born on the farthest end of the bloody spectrum and have chosen to be good? When I looked at Leo, it was an easy question to answer.

  Ancient artifact or not, he would’ve stayed with me, to help if worse came to worst. He was that way. I would’ve done it for him if the situation were reversed. Friends . . . You didn’t take them for granted. But that didn’t mean I had to listen to his jokes about my ass. That was the great thing about being a shape-shifter. Calories? Fat grams? Whatever. Turn them into extra hair or an extra inch in height or shed them as pounds of water. Or in the other direction, if you wanted to be a two-hundred-pound coyote with the voice of an avalanche, take the extra you needed from the dirt, rock, or the moisture-soaked air around you.

  But now I was human, and had discovered living off diner food. . . . It was less than a block away; what could I do? I packed on five pounds in two weeks. She Who Would Not Be Labeled had become She Who Must Find the Nearest Gym. Leo, with his damn male metabolism, was still sucking down all that was fried with no signs of a potbelly as of yet.

  Men. I hated men sometimes.

  But I hated demons more. And as I ran down the sidewalk toward the grubby gym seven or eight blocks away, I got to prove it.

  I kept a slow and steady pace. It was February now and still not too bad. When it came to summer, I’d drive to the gym, seven blocks or not. If you ran in the Vegas summer heat, you were either insane, suicidal, or a fire elemental out for a stroll. I ran past porn stores, liquor stores, more porn stores, a tiny car lot . . . and that’s where I stopped. I saw the blinding flash of a grin and puppy dog brown eyes, man’s best friend, as a perfectly tanned hand patted the cloth top of a black convertible as the mouth moved a mile a minute, pouring like the best caramel syrup over a pudgy tourist. A car salesman. A used-car salesman. If you’re after someone’s soul, you should be a little more imaginative with your disguises than that.

  Not that this guy was after someone’s soul. I usually didn’t interfere there. That was between Heaven and Hell and that tug-of-war
known as humanity that lay between them. They had some reasonable enough rules set up. First, you had to be of age—mature mentally; no trading your soul for a Tonka Toy or a pony. These days that tended to mean you were old enough to drink, vote, and die. Second, you couldn’t trade your soul for a righteous and selfless act. You couldn’t trade it to save the polar bears or stop world poverty or even save your child. Hell and demons either weren’t allowed or simply couldn’t do good, no matter how many souls they received in exchange. Which made sense—evil did not beget good. Bad luck for the polar bears.

  No, Heaven and Hell could play all the games they wanted. As one puck had first said a long time ago, caveat emptor. Buyer beware. Grown-up boys and girls should know better and if they didn’t, well, Darwin had something to say about that too.

  But this sleazy guy—demons and pucks both loved the used-car-salesman front—wasn’t after a soul. I could tell by the especially bright glint in his gaze. He was after some old-fashioned fun. Ripping, shredding, tearing a man to pieces and if his soul whizzed upward like a sky-rocket, I doubt the demon much cared. Maybe he wasn’t hungry. Demons ate souls. God no longer sustained them with his light and love and Lucifer was fallen himself. He couldn’t. Demons had to feed themselves and Hell was nothing but one big pantry. But demons enjoyed other things than a light snack. They had hobbies the same as anyone else. Theirs simply happened to be killing. To a one, killing was their one true passion. Trading for souls was entertaining and good nutrition, but killing someone . . .

  Souls were a McDonald’s hamburger, but killing for sheer butchery alone was an all-day ride at the amusement park. This demon was going for the loop-to-loop roller coaster all the way. It was Sunday and the lot was closed, but he had lured some dumb-ass tourist lost from the main strip into the lot. The road to Hell is paved with a lot of things . . . some of them Hyundais. I sighed and hopped the rope that acted as an imaginary barrier between sidewalk and lot to follow the two men inside the tiny two-cubicle office. The shades were down. In Vegas, winter or summer, the shades were always down or that purple couch you bought six months ago would now be lavender, and a pale lavender at that.

  Rather the same shade as the face of the tourist who was panicked and struggling to escape the one hand that held him by the neck. He was bent backward over a desk, his flailing arms knocking papers and salesman of the year awards onto the floor, and sometimes . . . just once in a while, you did get annoyed with the gullible. But you were more annoyed with one damn stupid demon who had set up shop literally six blocks from your territory. A human had been running this place three days ago, a potbellied pig-shaped man with a comb-over and enough nose hair to trim into bonsai trees. That alone marked him as nondemon, but he was gone now and a demon had moved into his place.

  Demons were so easy to spot it wasn’t even close to a challenge. This one had shiny blond hair, soulful brown eyes, not one but two dimples, and he threw off sex appeal by the bucketfuls—plus a manly I-could-be-your-best-bro, bro. He would appeal to men, women, and little old ladies. His charisma covered the spectrum. As I had made this body, so did demons make theirs. And they always liked theirs bright and shiny as a new penny. It was bait after all, part of the lure.

  “Six blocks.” I pulled my gun, a Smith & Wesson 500, from the holster in the small of my back. That’s why I kept my T-shirt loose. To cover the toys. “You set up your perch here”—I waved my other hand at the room around us—“sniffing for the innocent, the unwary, and the idiotic like this poor schmuck, and you do it six blocks from my place. My home. My territory.” He gaped at me. While I hadn’t bothered to find out about him before now, neither had he bothered to do the same regarding me—a little sloppy on my part, a little fatal on his. The sloppiness stopped now. I blew his head off before he had time to blink his eyes or blink back to Hell.

  He shimmered for a second into a man-sized brownish-green lizard with dragon wings, dirty glass teeth, a once-narrow but now-shattered reptilian head, and oozing eye sockets. The Smith had taken care of that. I doubt his eyes had been that same soft and soulful brown anyway. Then he was a pool of black goo on the worn carpet of the office, and while I felt for the cleaning lady, I had security tapes to wipe, a tourist to toss out on the street, and a gym to get to before all the elliptical trainers were taken. The tourist rolled to the floor, gurgled, and passed out either from lack of oxygen or lack of intestinal fortitude (balls for the more succinct of us). I wasn’t disappointed. A little judgmental, but not disappointed. It would actually make things easier on me.

  “Good old what’s-his-name. I’m surprised he lived to this millennium.” The voice came from behind me. A familiar one, not in a good way either. I looked over my shoulder to see Eligos—“Call-me-Eli,” he would always say with a grin that would suck the oxygen out of a room and half the brain cells out of your head. If you were human. Truly human, not just temporarily human. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t tell he was something to see all the same. Damned and damn hot, what a combo. He was also very probably the smartest demon I’d come across—what Hollywood likes to call a triple threat. Demons themselves were afraid of Hollywood, the only place where humans were more frightening than any Hell-spawn.

  “You can’t even remember his name?” I kept the gun loose and easy in my grip and blew a curl that had escaped my ponytail holder out of my eyes. “Some brotherly love there.”

  “Would you have me sing ‘Danny Boy’?” He was sitting on the other desk, one knee up, chin propped in his hand, his hazel eyes cheerful—if bright copper and green could be called hazel. “I have an amazing singing voice. I could’ve been Elvis. But I did eat him, so six of one, half a dozen of the other. You always have to be specific with the trades. Famous singer . . . good. Famous singer who doesn’t swell to the size of Shamu on fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches . . . better. But humans aren’t very detail oriented. Short attention span. They’re ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ Yadda yadda yadda.” He switched from leaning forward to leaning back and locked his hands across his stomach. “But all beside the point. I want to talk to you, Trixa.”

  “Your attention span isn’t all that great either, Eli, or do you remember what happened to the last demon I ‘talked’ to?” I wasn’t talking about the one I’d just blown away. He’d barely been worth breaking stride for. I was talking about Solomon, my brother’s murderer.

  He smiled, so flawless and white that an orthodontist would’ve fallen to the floor and genuflected before him and then no doubt offered him a blow job. Male or female, it wouldn’t matter. Humans are slaves to their hormones and no one manipulated hormones like demons. “Oh, I remember. I’ll remember that for all eternity. A: You made me piss a pair of Armani jeans that I was quite fond of. And B: You gave me the challenge that will occupy me to the end of time. Or the end of you, whichever comes first. It was worth losing the Light to you païen for that. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been challenged? Not since the Fall.” He shrugged and waffled a hand. “And even then, eh, we knew it was coming. Truthfully, I didn’t care if we ruled in Heaven or not. I just wanted to mix it up. Make a little trouble.” The smile was even brighter. “Because, Trixa, sweetheart, trouble is the only thing that makes existence bearable.”

  I’d promised the Light, an artifact from even before païen time, to Eli if he verified that the demon I’d suspected killed my brother was the real deal. He delivered. I didn’t. I lied. Sue me. I’m a trickster. I lie, cheat, steal. . . . It all comes with the name. Although I did it typically to show a few humans the error of their wicked ways, make them a little better, and hopefully a whole lot smarter. But Eli hadn’t known that at the time. The same as everyone else, he’d thought me human. But when it all went down—the taking of the Light, an unbreakable shield that would protect païen from Heaven and Hell, neither of which much cared for us, and the passing of Solomon—Eli had seen little Trixa in a brand-new way. When I’d finished with Solomon, before he melted to the black of liquid sin
, he’d been in so many pieces, it looked like it had been raining demon parts. I’d shape-changed my heart out on that one—not that I had a heart in regard to Kimano’s killer. But I had been something to see and be. Bear. Wolf. Fox. Spider. Crow. Dragon. Shark. All in one. And as I’d told Solomon then, when ranked, it went something like this: gods, then tricksters, and then a damn sight lower . . . demons. I’d told him and I’d proved it.

  And Eli had been part of the audience.

  As far as he knew, I was still trickster, shape-shifter, all that had made Solomon look as if he’d fallen into a wood chipper. I had my shielding against empathic and telepathic probes to keep Eli thinking I remained all that I’d been. I might be semihuman, but I’d die before I lost that last defense. I’d lost my offensive abilities for a while, but nature makes sure every creature keeps their defensive ones until there’s nothing left to defend. It was a fortunate thing too. While angels had telepathy, and a host of other annoying habits, demons had empathy. It made it so much easier to trade for a soul when you could feel exactly what a person desired.

  I needed to keep Eli believing I was a trickster at the top of her form, because while the ranking went gods, tricksters, demons . . . humans were far enough below a high-level demon like Eli that you’d need binoculars to see them. I still had my trickster mind, but I had a vulnerable ninety-nine percent human body and that made things more difficult.

  “Fine. If you want trouble”—I checked my watch—“I can spare five minutes. That should give me time to kill you, wipe the tapes, and maybe browse for a new car while I’m at it.” I smiled. I doubted I was too impressive a sight right then. I was an explosion of messy waves and curls anchored at the crown of my head with a ponytail holder. No makeup. The shirt that snarky Leo had had made for me that said SLAYER NOT LAYER on the front in the same bright red as my sweatpants, and a pair of beat-up sneakers. But Eli wasn’t seeing me now; he was seeing me then, and I had that going for me for a few months at least.