The Grimrose Path

  Someone would always come for Anna, one way or the other.

  You couldn’t save them all, and I wasn’t in the saving business per se, but if I could’ve saved anyone I’d seen sell their souls over the years, it would’ve been her. But I couldn’t, so I sent her away, her and her pictures with Sir Pickles. She went quietly. She stopped after a few steps, turned to thank me politely for my time, and then walked out the bar door into Hell.

  Whether you waited twenty years or twenty seconds, it was all the same eventually.

  Hell was Hell.

  Leo finally showed his face the next morning. I was already up. I’d opened the bar early to make up for yesterday’s lack of profit. And I’d called and texted everyone and anyone I knew in the païen world to see if anyone had heard about the demon slaughter. So far I’d gotten nothing but a bemused feeling at the thought of a seven-tailed trickster fox trotting around Japan with a BlackBerry in its jaws.

  Leo, on the other hand, looked like he’d gotten something. He could wear that stoic expression all he wanted, but I knew him. “Not a new one,” I groaned.

  “I’m a man with needs.” He shrugged as he put on one of the bar’s black aprons, wrapping the tie twice around his waist.

  “Which are oddly enough always met with silicone,” I retorted.

  He shrugged again, but this time quirked his lips, “It’s Vegas. You get a free boob job every time you fill up your car. How is that my fault?”

  Big breasts, small brains, and underwear tiny enough to have been knitted by Tinkerbell—he did it every time. I could’ve blamed it on him being worshipped as a Norse god, lots of buxom blondes frolicking in the snow, but I wasn’t sure that was it. I thought there was more to it than that. He did it for the same reason I slept with a black raven’s feather under my pillow. If we couldn’t have what we actually wanted, we went without or went for the exact opposite. I wasn’t exactly proud of some of my past dates.

  “Spots.” I sighed. Leo and I had ties . . . unbreakable ones . . . two leopards with the same spots. Too much the same in the past, too much the same for now, but maybe . . . maybe not always. I had the feather to remind me of that.

  “Spots,” the one who’d given me that feather agreed, the curve of his lips softer; then he continued with a wicked glint to his black eyes, “Her spots are called pasties, I believe. She’s a dancer.”

  “Stripper.” I threw a towel at him.

  “Who has goals in the theater.” He caught it and polished the bar with broad strokes.

  “She wants to be a porn star.” I looked for something else to throw, but there was nothing that wouldn’t come out of this month’s profit.

  “And she does charity work.” He tossed the towel across his shoulder and folded his arms.

  “She does you for free?” I smiled with caustic cheer.

  He frowned. “I do not pay for sex, little girl.”

  “You only get to call me that for four more years.” And five foot five was not that short. Maybe in comparison to the six-foot-plus American Indian body he’d chosen, I was somewhat smaller, but I was not little, most especially not when it came to temper, where it counted most. “So did you offer her free drinks here for the duration of your sexcapades or fix her refrigerator?”

  That got the towel thrown back at me. “No, thanks.” I folded it and put it aside. “I don’t have to stuff my bra. Unlike some, I don’t feel the need to be a double D or wax myself as bare as a honeydew melon. Barbie dolls are for little girls to play with, not grown, perverted men. Now, about our demon trouble.”

  That distracted him. “What demon trouble?”

  I told him. He grasped the implications as quickly as I had. “There aren’t many out there who could do that,” he said thoughtfully, before adding, “one less now that I’m grounded.”

  “Godzilla to the hundredth power is running around and you have to get your ego in the picture,” I said fondly. “Just remember, your biggest and baddest power now is dropping bird shit on people’s cars.” He kept reminding me how vulnerable I was now. I didn’t want him to forget he was as well.

  He ignored the insult—to his manhood and bird-hood. “And Eligos is back.” He turned and served a beer to one of our regulars—a walking handlebar mustache roosting on a skinny guy it was using for life support. The man was a person; he had a name. I knew it . . . first, middle, last, and nickname. I knew where he’d been born. I knew where he lived, who he lived with, how much money he made in Social Security checks. I made it my business to know these things about all my regulars, but one look at him and the mustache never failed to jump into the foreground—an entity all its own. It was like seeing someone with a giant if not friendly spider on his face. . . . It was difficult to ignore.

  “We knew he wasn’t leaving Vegas,” I said as the mustache shuffled off to its customary table in the corner. “I’m surprised he didn’t single-handedly found the place. This city is tailor-made for him.”

  “And I imagine he thinks the same about you. You caught his interest, and right now, being mortal, that is not a good thing,” he said disapprovingly, as if somehow it was my fault that I might be more entertaining to kill than whatever it was that Eli usually came across.

  “Don’t think it’s all about me. You’re as intriguing or at least he will think you still are.” I pinched his cheek. “He might even think you’re more ‘purty’ than I am, you never know. A hot babe like you who has to part lusting strippers like the Red Sea just to walk among the common people. He might want to take you out instead of killing you. Of course he’s not a blonde with breasts the same size and shape as the Hindenburg, but he won’t drop a pastie in your soup at dinner either.”

  “I think I’ll bring Morocco by the bar,” he contemplated. “Let you meet her. I think you two will bond.”

  “Playing hardball. Cranky, cranky. I would think you’d be in a better mood having your manly needs fulfilled and all.” I took my apron off and stuffed it under the bar. “Morocco. That’s beautiful,” I said solemnly. “Is that where her people are from? Lots of blue-eyed blondes there.”

  “I think she saw it on the Travel Channel,” he replied with equal gravity, “and thought it sounded exotic.”

  I thought about spearing his hand with a tiny paper drink umbrella, then gave it up as a lost cause and advised, “Hide all your singles when she’s around. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  “And you’re going where while I toil at your bar?” he demanded.

  “Out to play hooky with demons. You ditched yesterday, so I get to ditch today. Remember, this place keeps a roof over your head. Unless you want to take up stripping yourself.” I gave him a wave and went out through the back office to the alley entrance. That was one thing Leo didn’t have that a born trickster did. We were very aware of money . . . how much we had, how much someone else had, and how we planned on conning them out of it. We were magpies, and money—even in the day when money was shells, salt, or measures of grain—money was the bright shiny thing we loved. Some of us loved it more than others. There were tricksters who had an enormous amount of wealth socked away and some, like me, who kept enough just to be comfortably off when human. Leo didn’t have that same need, that drive. When he needed money, he would get it. But when you were born a trickster, you always needed it, whether you spent it or not.

  I did like to spend mine.

  In the alley, I opened the door to my car. It still had that wonderful new-car smell and like my last one, destroyed in November, it was red—my color and it had been since my very first trick.

  It had started with an apple.

  No, not that apple.

  Just an ordinary ripe red apple and a greedy farmer who wouldn’t share with a cute little girl with tangled black hair and dirty feet. He probably blamed it on not praying enough to the local fertility goddess when he woke up the next morning to find every branch of every tree bare of even a single piece of fruit, but it was just a baby trickster teaching her very
first lesson. Don’t be greedy, and don’t take anything for granted, because something could take it all away from you.

  More than nine hundred demons had apparently learned that lesson in the past six months, taking their lives for granted, or so Eli said. And I trusted Eli’s word. Oh, I so did not. Not even in the womb would I have been that naïve. If all those demons had been killed, more than Eli would know about it—other demons would as well. I only had to track one down and ask him . . . or her. Unlike angels, demons would wear a male or female body—whatever it took to get the job done. Angels, on the other hand . . . I shook my head and backed out of the alley into traffic on Boulder Highway, ignored the enraged honking, and sped off. I wasn’t going to ruin my good mood thinking about those chauvinistic pigeons.

  I met Griffin and Zeke at Caesars Palace. Zeke had been banned from the Venetian for trying to drown in one of the canals a demon disguised as a singing, then gurgling, gondolier. He’d also been blacklisted at the Luxor for excessive buffet use in one sitting. Zeke was not precisely a Renaissance man. When it came to killing demons and loyalty, he was at the top of his game. When it came to everything else—that’s why insurance existed. He either didn’t get it and didn’t want to get it. Or he wanted to get it and you’d better get your ass out of his way.

  Twenty minutes later I was walking past centurions with much better teeth than the genuine ones had had, breathed in air touched with smoke, adrenaline, and despair, and tracked down Griffin and Zeke in one of the bars on the floor of the casino. They were in a small booth in a gloom-filled corner. That was Vegas—all blinding sun outside but always twilight inside—no matter what time of the day. Illusions were kept whole by those shadows and Vegas itself was one big illusion. Inside that illusion, Zeke was nursing a beer and his partner an untouched whiskey from the smell of it when I sat beside him. The alcohol was camouflage or at least it was supposed to be. “Someone having a bad day?” I nodded at the half-empty beer.

  “We came by the pool and Zeke had to walk past the buffet.” Griffin gave his partner a shoulder bump. “Like Romeo and Juliet. Star-crossed lovers destined to forever be apart.” Zeke didn’t respond beyond sliding down a few inches and having another swallow of beer.

  “Don’t worry, Romeo.” I patted his hand resting on the table. “The Luxor can’t have e-mailed your picture to every buffet in town and new ones are opening almost every day.”

  “I hate people,” he grumbled. “‘All you can eat’ means all you can eat. Lying bastards.”

  I patted him again. “I know. They’re very bad and I’ll punish them for you, I promise.” After all, it wasn’t that different from the farmer and his apple, and my punishment wouldn’t involve gunfire. I couldn’t say the same about Zeke in action. “But let’s concentrate on finding a demon to chat with right now.”

  “Chat.” He perked up and moved his hand inside his jacket to rest on one of the guns he always carried in a shoulder holster. His Colt Anaconda wasn’t one of those. I wasn’t sure they made shoulder holsters big enough for a weapon of that size. “Chatting is good.”

  “Not that kind of chatting,” Griffin corrected. “We don’t kill demons....”

  “In front of people. We don’t kill demons in front of cameras—video or digital,” Zeke recited with a bored expression, before adding, “And we don’t kill demons in front of puppies.” He let go of his gun and used his hand to tilt the beer bottle at me. “I made up that rule myself. Apparently puppies are easily mentally scarred. Griffin brings them up in my tutoring often enough, so it’s gotta be true.”

  Griffin had “tutored” Zeke in his decision-making skills for so long and with every scenario he could possibly bring to mind—be it saving kids versus killing demons to saving a politician versus killing demons, which was a tough one regardless of how slippery your grip on free will—that I wasn’t surprised to see Zeke giving him a hard time about it. I enjoyed it, in fact. Zeke had come a long way on a very treacherous path. He deserved to dish out a little mockery.

  “So I hear,” I agreed solemnly. “Now, spread out and let’s reel in a fish.”

  Griffin had his empathy to feel a demon’s emotions; Zeke had his telepathy to hear their thoughts. I didn’t envy either of them those abilities. The things that demons thought, the things they felt—none of it could be pleasant. As for me, I had the eyes my mama gave me, which was all I needed. I made my way through tourists who had money pouring through their fingers like sand, I studied blackjack dealers who might promise to turn Lady Luck around if given the proper incentive, but it turned out Zeke was the first to snare one. It trailed behind him like one of those puppies Griffin was so concerned about in his lesson plans. That it was Zeke that the demon had honed in on told me something immediately. This wasn’t one of the lower-level demons. They liked the easy marks. Get in, get the IOU on the soul, and get out. They didn’t like the difficult prey when Vegas was so full of ones they could hook in two seconds. This demon obviously liked a challenge, because no one put off “I don’t care” and “Get the hell away from me” like Zeke did. And while Griffin had taught him the basics of hiding his emotions just as Zeke had taught his partner the same about concealing thoughts, Zeke rarely could manage to completely hide his hostility toward demons.

  This one was definitely bored and thought Zeke was his Mount Everest. That made him higher level, but hopefully not as high as Eli was. We were in a public place and there was only so much we could do there. But that also meant there was only so much he could do as well. Griffin and I made our way out of the wandering gamblers and walked back into the bar as we saw Zeke make his move. By the time we joined him, he was staring at the demon sitting beside him in the booth with the same expression he would’ve used for regarding dog shit on the bottom of his shoe. It didn’t bother the demon, obviously, as he continued to talk smoothly.

  “Okay, I got one first,” Zeke said as I, and then Griffin, sat to one side of the demon, boxing him between us and fellow demon bait. “What do I win?”

  The demon, a man with prematurely bright silver hair, ferociously intelligent eyes, a killer tan, and an absolutely amazing accent that made you think you were back on Fantasy Island, let his salesman smile flicker. He knew something was up. He was a smart one all right and that made him only more dangerous. “What is happening? I was but speaking with my new friend. Zeke, you said your name was, yes, my friend? I am Armand.”

  Zeke went back to his beer bottle with his left hand.... His right was ready and waiting for a go at his gun. “We always want the ones who don’t want us. Don’t take it personally,” I told the demon, resting a faux friendly hand on his shoulder . . . holding him here. No quick trip back to Hell for him.

  “Eden House,” he said flatly, the accent disappearing and the charisma going with it. The eyes went from fierce to carnivorous. He knew his potential deal had gone bad from that very moment. I was surprised that Eli let another demon almost as quick-witted as he operate in what he now considered his city. “You’re supposed to all be dead.”

  “You shouldn’t listen to gossip. Look what happened to Eve,” I tsked. Eli hadn’t told the other demons about my trickster status . . . as he knew it anyway. That was pure demon and pure Eli. When it was nine hundred of his colleagues dead, he was concerned, but if I took out ten or twenty, that only cleared out the playing field for him a little—lessened the competition.

  And if this particular competitor wanted to think I was Eden House, I didn’t mind being their mascot for this conversation. “But speaking of gossip, your co-worker Eligos mentioned that someone was taking you out, knoshing on you by the hundreds like marshmallow Peeps. Those are good, aren’t they?” I mused. “Pink or yellow, I’ve never had a preference,” I said with nostalgia for last year’s Easter, giving a quick thank-you to the German fertility goddess, Ēostre, and her candy-loving hares. Credit where credit is due. Then I forgot about sticky sweetness and got down to business. “So, sugar, have you heard anything about tha
t?”

  “Eligos talked to you?” he said with disbelief. “An Eden House lackey, spitting feathers with every word. I sincerely doubt that.”

  “The last standing of our House and we talk to Eligos and walk away,” Griffin said coldly. In anyone’s eyes, Above or Below, that made us pretty damn tough. “We are not to be fucked with.” That too.

  “Something to think about, Peep,” I said, my hand dropping to his leg and still anchoring him as I used my other hand to pull my Smith that I’d shoved down behind the leather cushion we were sitting on before we’d gone hunting. It was a good place to raise it, hidden in the shadows moving up behind his shoulder to bury its muzzle against the base of his spine. “And exactly what is he thinking, Zeke?” Demons didn’t have to talk for us to hear. We only had to get close to one and bring up the subject.

  Eli might want to have a conversation that was in our mutual . . . possibly . . . best interests, but no matter how bright another demon was, it wouldn’t be Eligos. Intelligence had nothing to do with sharing information with a bitter enemy who might, in one wildly improbable circumstance, be able to help you. Intelligence could let you see that picture, but only guts or an enormous ego would let you draw it. All demons had ego, but not all of them had the spine to match. Our friend here could, but it didn’t matter if he did or not. I wasn’t relying on chance, not when I could rely on Zeke instead.

  Zeke’s focus on the demon went unblinking. Armand—what a name for a demon to appropriate—didn’t care for that. He hissed and bared still-human teeth. We were in public and that mattered to him as much as it did to us. The last thing Hell wanted was for people to not only truly believe in it, but to believe that it wasn’t waiting patiently, that it was actively knocking at your door to do everything it could to drag you down. Heaven wasn’t the only one with recruiters. And if you were too pious and pure, then tearing you apart was a very viable second option. No, Hell didn’t want that getting around any more than the late Colonel Sanders wanted his recipe for extra crispy hitting the Internet.