The Grimrose Path

Chapter 7

“Rose.”

It’s what I said as soon as Eli manifested in my bar. I’d called him since Armand wasn’t going to be making any calls ever again. Cronus had left after giving us our answer, losing interest in his pet Loki quickly or on the way to bag more demon wings—it didn’t matter. He had slowly spun out of existence, streamers of faux skin and the slickly spongy material beneath it disappearing like a dust devil settling slowly to die. He took the wings and the checkerboard with him. The dead man and puddle of Armand he left behind.

I’d told him the Titan was gone, but Eli was no fool. He waited a good two hours before he showed up. Two hours I’d spent mopping up Armand while Leo covered up the tourist with a sheet. We’d seemed to have lucked out and he was either alone, a regular Vegas gambler who made the pilgrimage several times a year, or he wasn’t alone, but whoever he was with had no idea where he’d gone. It was sad to say that if he were a lonely gambling addict with no one in his life to miss him, it would be a good thing for us. Sometimes to do good, you take the risk of others being hurt. It shouldn’t be that way, but there are a lot of things in life that shouldn’t be as they are.

The physicist I’d once hung over a volcano hadn’t explained that one. The nature of time was simple. Why all things weren’t fair and just—he hadn’t had a clue on that one. Mama would say it’s all about balance. There can be no good if there’s no evil. No right if there’s no wrong. No light if there’s no dark. Then again, there’s often no mac if there’s no cheese.

The last perked me up and I had less of a desire to impale Eli with the mop handle as he straightened his tie, although the mop was a loss anyway. You couldn’t get demon out of anything, not even cleaning utensils. I’d already leaned it against the doorway leading to the alley for disposal.

“I suppose I don’t have to watch my back against Amdusias any longer, although you can feel free to watch any part of me, front or back.”

He was wearing all black. Black suit, black silk shirt, black tie with a muted pattern in a different weave. Even a black rose, ironically. “I’m in mourning for my comrade killed in action.” He spread his arms and did a turn so we all could get a good look. “But I’ll still be sexy. It can’t be avoided.”

“I do believe it can.” I did the shot of whiskey sitting in front of me. I was sitting two tables over from the one holding up the dead man. “In so many ways. I don’t need Leo’s help either, not that he wouldn’t enjoy it.”

“Just like old times,” Leo offered from behind the bar, having his own whiskey. His mood was more positive than mine . . . because it was like old times for him—a faint reflection of them anyway. He might not be that way anymore, but memories were memories, and whether the world judged them differently didn’t matter. They were Leo’s to do with as he pleased. If he felt nostalgic versus guilty, as long as he didn’t reenact those days, it wasn’t my business how he felt about his mental echoes.

Still, Leo’s upbeat was Loki’s upbeat and Eli saw that plain as day. He came in smooth as oil on water, wary with the one whom he still thought a god. “I was always a fan of Vikings. Brawny men. Brawny women. Hard-drinking and hard-killing. And when they die—Valhalla. More hard drinking and hard killing. Destruction all the way around. What’s not to like?”

“The killing in Valhalla isn’t permanent. The next day the dead come back and that’s what’s not to like.” Leo swirled his whiskey. “I like my destruction very permanent, but that’s me, and not some worthless lizard who imagines he can comment on my playground, much less survive in it.” It might’ve been odd to someone else seeing an American Indian telling you the downside of Norse afterlife from personal experience. But Leo had made his body as I’d made mine. He could deal with the details of that confusion on his own.

But tiptoeing around a god versus his ego, Eli didn’t have a chance when he made that choice. “Ah, such a mouthy and aggressive god. Your playground, eh? Perhaps one day we’ll see . . . when I beat you to death with a large set of monkey bars.” Eli shifted his attention back to me. “‘Rose’ is what you’re telling me Cronus said. Rose and only rose. Nothing else. Pardon me if I find that both wildly mysterious and completely inadequate.” The emphasis on “inadequate” was as black as the suit.

He sat at the table with me, suddenly holding a glass of wine, which he raised to toast the dripping black mop leaning against the door frame. “Valeas, Amdusias. You were an almost satisfactory minion. Now, Trixa, my one true love, shower me with roses and explanations and we won’t have to find out who is the baddest and most toned of asses around.” He took a sip of wine. “Although the last, I think we both know, is obvious.” His lips curled with a smug satisfaction. Smugness and Eli almost always went hand in hand.

I didn’t pay attention to the ass part since I did know the answer and I didn’t like it. “Since the big badass demon was too afraid to show up for two hours, we had time to hit the trickster network and linked up the word ‘rose’ with Cronus.” I waited and I made him ask. Any chance to stick it to the demon whose ass might be a little bit more toned than mine.

“And?” He tapped his fingers on the wood of the table. “I can’t believe you’re so petty. Wait, you’re a trickster, so yes, I do.”

“Yes, I am, and yes, I am.” I took the glass from his hand and a swallow of the wine myself. It was excellent. “Cronus, the Titan, a creature I wouldn’t believe could love, did fall in love with, of all imaginable things, a human. That’s why I was in the dark regarding any motivation for his psychotic behavior—not that he needs motivation. The few tricksters who heard the story passed it off as the very worst concocted of rumors, and we love rumors, even more than the truth. But a Titan falling in love? With a human? That was too ridiculous to repeat or toss into our gossip network. Yet the ridiculous and unthinkable turns out to be true or Cronus wouldn’t be waging war on Hell. He did fall in love . . . with a woman. Rose, Rosemary, Rosita—no one knows her exact name, only that she was his Rose.”

“Was,” Eli exhaled. “I sense a pattern here. Was. She was his Rose.” He let his head fall back to stare at the ceiling glumly. “Let me guess. His Rose was a naughty, naughty girl. Stupid, stupid human.”

“Maybe not that naughty. But she wanted fame, fortune, what most humans want, and Cronus, to test her love, loved her as a human. In a human body I’m guessing he was a damn sight more convincing than the one he showed up in here today.” I grimaced slightly. Bad work was bad work, whether it was lack of talent or just not giving a rat’s ass. “Emotions too. For some reason, maybe boredom, he did become human, if only temporarily. He felt as a human feels, he loved as a human loves, and Rose thought he was human. She didn’t know about païen or Titans. But she knew about demons when one came around and enlightened her, tempted her, and then she traded her soul for what Cronus could have given her for free.”

“He wanted proof that she could love him without knowing what he was and what he could give her and she ended up in Hell because of it—well, that and her human nature. I like that story. With the greed, lust, and pride, and being damned to Hell, it would make a nice combination of Edgar Allan Poe and O. Henry.” Eli looked back down, took the wineglass back from me, waved his hand over it, and refilled it. “Water to wine is easy. Air to wine is much more impressive. Now you’re telling me that Cronus is going to walk through Hell and go mano a mano or Titano a Demonio with Lucifer because some random demon took the soul of his lovely if shallow Rose.”

“Demons are a dime a dozen and for a Titan to bother with an underling when he can take out the boss isn’t going to happen. A demon took his Rose, so Cronus will wipe all demons, their home, and their king from existence. That’s the Chicago way and it’s the Titan way as well.” I smiled. “And, with my curiosity taken care of, still not my problem. Now, if you could take the dead tourist with you when you go, I’ll consider that payment enough. That and, you know, the sheer enjoyment I get from seeing how screwed you are.” I crossed both feet on the spare chair and studied my new red boots with heels that could slash a throat. It was a brighter red than I normally chose, the color of a stripe in a candy cane. Red didn’t always have to be the color of blood. No, not always. It could be the color of a fast car, a sexy dress . . . or a rose.

Eli dipped a finger into the wine and turned it to the blood I’d just been thinking of. “There’s a way to stop him. There’s always a way to stop anyone, a way to escape anywhere. We made it out of Disneyland, didn’t we? The most boring place in eternity. The singing, the praising, the showing humans the path of love and Almighty Glory. If we could escape that, we can escape destruction at the hands of one miserable païen.”

I dropped my feet back to the floor and folded my hands, resting my elbows on the table. “Here’s the church.” I raised my index fingers to meet. “Here’s the steeple.” Then I moved my thumbs apart and flipped my hands over and waved my fingers. “Open the door and see all the people. All the never-to-be-damned people because you and yours will be gone. But I do wonder where the evil souls will go then. Many won’t be damned with you gone, but it doesn’t necessarily take your kind to make some people step off the path of the righteous. You’re good at it, but you’re not absolutely crucial to the process. They can do it themselves. Maybe some païen afterworlds will snap them up. They’ll be punished, if they deserve it, but at least we won’t eat them. Well, most of us won’t.”

Eli drank the blood. I don’t think he noticed he hadn’t changed it back to wine, or maybe he liked the taste. Once you’ve eaten thousands of souls, you have to begin to wonder what the container tastes like. Demons had wondered that a long time ago. They murdered, they stole lives and souls, and occasionally they ate one or the other or both at the same time. “I’ll have to ask the boss about this first, but I think I might have a way to satisfy Cronus.” He drained the glass without any visible enjoyment. Giving in to a païen. For a demon, it was a big sacrifice and they didn’t like to be on the wrong end of the sacrificing. “What if we were to let all the Roses go? Every single one of them. He can find his and pop her in a freshly made body of his own design. That’s a gesture large enough for even a Titan to take notice, I’m confident.”

“Digest your Bloody Mary and keep thinking that. This is a païen the rest of us don’t begin to understand and one who, for a while, became human. A god times ten became human and did not enjoy the experience. What he might take notice of I won’t guess at. But, hey, sugar, you give it your scaly best.” I paused, then pointed out the potential flaw in his plan. “And you are assuming she hasn’t been eaten yet.”

“You have a better plan?” He scowled, his eyes going from green and copper to black and copper.

“You think I’d tell you if I did?” I waved a hand at the tourist. “Remember, take him when you go. And, as I said, now that my curiosity is satisfied, y’all don’t come back, ya hear? Ever.”

“If you are satisfied, then you’re not curious about the right things.” His eyes shifted back to human.

“It’s not especially alluring when you say that with blood on your breath,” I said with a stone-still calm.

“As if you’ve never had it on yours.” The copper flecks were brighter and his words . . .

Hell, they were true.

But mine were always with good reason. I was justice. Eli was only Hannibal Lecter crossed with a T. rex—a sociopathic carnivore. I killed the wicked, if necessary. He would kill anyone and anything. But he was gone before I could tell him so. Not that I would’ve bothered and not that he would’ve cared. No, I wouldn’t have bothered and he wouldn’t have cared, but I would’ve cared . . . a little.

I shouldn’t have. I did what I was meant to, born to, raised to, and I loved my work. But there was the occasional moment I wondered what it would be to be like Leo, have tricking being only my hobby. That my existence wasn’t my occupation—and I could broaden my horizons. Take a vacation and let the stupid do what the stupid did. Let evil do what evil did.

But everyone had a calling, and I could no more stand by and let the ignorant and the sinister bumble about than I could wear gold lamé. I dropped my head forward and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. “I save one only to lose another. That’s not good math even for a two-year-old.”

“It’s not one for one. It’s one for thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands,” Leo responded quietly. “Unfortunate for him, but he didn’t die for nothing. He died for a reason, died a hero, despite not knowing it.”

“He died because I suck at checkers.” I sighed, keeping my eyes hidden. “Eligos didn’t take the body, did he? The bastard.”

“No.” I heard Leo give a sigh of his own. “I’ll take him out to the desert tonight and bury him. I’d pick him a nice spot, but wherever he is now, he doesn’t care.”

It was true enough. Wherever he was now, better or worse, where his dead body was wouldn’t make a difference to him. “Thanks.” I straightened and rubbed my forehead. “While you do that I’ll try to figure out what to do when Eligos figures out I lied to him.”

“That will be more tricky than checkers,” Leo warned. “And while you’re at it, also try to figure out what we’re going to do about what Cronus really wants.”

It was hard to have a smart-ass comeback to that, because I hadn’t one damn clue. And the consequences to that were exponentially worse than lying to a demon, even when that demon was Eli. Catastrophic came to mind, then went off in search of a bigger and badder word to take its place. Plain and simple . . .

We were fucked.

“Griffin’s lost.” He said it just that way—Zeke, sounding exactly the same as that last word.

Lost.

My brother, Kimano, lost everything when we were kids. Tricksters didn’t hold on to things much. That wasn’t us, not our lifestyle. Born to roam, and roaming was easier when you weren’t dragging baggage along . . . of either kind, physical or mental. And that meant I should’ve let Kimano go when I avenged him. Unpacked him. Left him on the side of the road. At peace and firmly in the past. But I couldn’t. I knew it. I didn’t even try. Kimano was Kimano. Unique. I’d carry him with me forever.

But it didn’t change the fact he’d lost everything and probably would’ve lost his brain if he’d had one to begin with. That was my mama talking, not me, but that didn’t mean she was wrong. In fact, it meant she was right. Mama always was. Whether it was a shiny shell, a silver necklace, a wooden ball, a camel . . . How do you lose a camel?

The same way you lost your partner. You looked away for a minute or he outthought you. Kimano and Zeke weren’t anything alike, but the result was the same. Kimano’s attention span had been that of your average happy surfer dude and his camel had no trouble sneaking off. Zeke’s attention ranged wildly from one end to the other . . . from the “I don’t care, so it doesn’t exist in my world” to the “on you like glue for as long as it takes to obliterate your ass.” He wasn’t Inigo Montoya. No one had killed his father. But he was prepared to die, if that’s what it took to get the task at hand done. It wasn’t Zeke’s attention span that had him here. No, it was trust. He had trusted his partner and Griffin had done the same as that damn camel. Walked away.

Zeke hadn’t lost him. Griffin had lost himself.

“Griffin’s gone,” he said again. The word was slightly different, but the meaning was the same.

It had been a long day. I hadn’t opened the bar . . . again. Blood, dead tourists, dead demons, Titans. If there were such things as bad vibes, they were filling up the place today—another shot in the pocketbook, although money was the least of my worries. Cronus was my only worry right now, and while I thought on that, I went out. I shopped for some purely illegal guns, though nothing special caught my attention, grabbed a real nonmicrowaveable meal—if you can call a salad a meal and you can’t—and came home to clean. If I’m cleaning, I’m in a bad way. I like things neat, but I don’t necessarily like to make them neat personally. I’ll do it, but I will put it off and off and off some more. But with a Titan taking over Hell and Leo hauling a body out to the desert, there was no time like the present.

I was working on the black stain that had once been Armand. I was on my knees on the floor with a heavy-duty scrub brush and cursing the demon with every swipe when Zeke kicked down the front door. At first glance, I wasn’t that concerned; Zeke had a key. Sometimes he remembered to use it; sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes it was important . . . ten demons in the newest club reaping souls. Sometimes it wasn’t . . . I’m hungry. Feed me. This time it wasn’t either. It was vital—to Zeke the most crucial thing in the world.

“What do I do?” he asked numbly. “He’s gone. What the fuck do I do?” The glass in the door was supposed to be shatterproof. The pool of it around his feet as he stood in the doorway said I deserved a refund, but considering I’d all but stolen the bar, I couldn’t complain.

I could find out what was going on with Zeke though. I stood and peeled off my thick rubber gloves. “Lost, Kit? Gone? What do you mean?” He didn’t mean dead. If Griffin were dead, Zeke would know it and he wouldn’t be standing here talking about it. He’d go through as many demons as he had to to catch up to Griffin—on this side of life or the next, it was as simple as that. I would do my best to take care of the former angel if something did happen to Griffin, but Zeke wasn’t Zeke without Griffin and he knew it. Zeke was a ship, but Griffin wasn’t his anchor. Zeke’s ship had a hole in the hull and Griffin was the one bailing the ocean back out. He was the one who kept Zeke from plummeting to the darkest depths. For all that I was willing, only Griffin had that power.

“He went out this morning. He said he wanted to get some food, bring back breakfast. He’s been doing it a lot lately. Going out for food instead of cooking. He likes to cook.” He frowned. “He likes to cook. Why has he been going out so much when he likes to cook?”

Why indeed? “Kit,” I verbally prodded him. “Griffin went out to get breakfast, and then what?”

He looked around as if he’d forgotten where he was before shaking off his reverie. “He didn’t come back.” One piece of red hair hung loose from the yanked-back ponytail he wore for fighting. “I called him and his phone is turned off.” He hoped. Turned off was better than destroyed. “I looked, all the places we go.” “Go” meant where they hung around looking for demons and “looked” meant he’d stolen a car. The two of them had only one car. Zeke’s decision-making skills weren’t compatible with driving as a rule. Passing a driver’s test for a license could conceivably end up with him at the California agriculture checkpoint declaring an intent to smuggle a case of silicone breast implants and an Elvis impersonator in the trunk, not to mention a panicked test instructor in the passenger seat screaming for help.

“And no one had seen him?” I moved over to him and pulled him into the bar. Zeke would’ve asked too and asked hard. I took his hand and he was far gone enough to actually wrap his fingers around mine and hang on. Lost, damn it, was the worst word I knew.

“No,” he answered.

“You can’t hear him?” Zeke’s telepathy was usually limited to a few miles, but with Griffin, I didn’t know how far it reached. Maybe the city, maybe the country.

“No.” Each no was sounding more and more bleak.

“How far can you hear him?”

“The world.” Stark and simple. “I can hear him anywhere in the world.”

I didn’t think they’d tested that principle, unless it had been a mission while Eden House was still around in Vegas, but I didn’t question it. If Zeke said it was so, it was so. “Then he’s unconscious, which means he’s alive and that means we’ll find him. Stay here. I need my shotgun.” One of them. It wasn’t as if I named them. First, I wasn’t concerned about the size of my nonexistent penis. Second, guns were for killing . . . no matter what some amendment said. Guns were for killing, nothing more, nothing less. You appreciated what a great job a gun did performing its function, but that’s it. If you named something like that, something manufactured for the sole purpose of ending life, you had problems. You were sick.

I chose my Browning Gold, a semiautomatic and autoloading shotgun and not called Goldy . . . as tempting as it might be. As I clattered back downstairs, Zeke’s gaze was so raw and naked that I wanted to look away, but then it focused on what I was carrying. “Goldy.”

All right. Not sick. Different. Never had a pet when he was young—human young. Didn’t have action figures or toys. Nothing to name in those foster-kid days. Zeke could call my shotgun whatever he wanted.

“Goldy.” I kissed his cheek. “Now, let’s get Griffin. Did you try Bubba?”

“Beelzebub.” There was enough of Zeke with me, barely, to wrinkle his lip at that. “What could he possibly know? Demon wannabe. Stupid shithead.”

“Exactly,” I said. “A wannabe follows the real things. He listens. He could know things precisely because they have the same opinion of him that we do. He’s a nut job. They wouldn’t pay attention to him.”

“Beelzebub” was a rare exception in the demonic sense. He was just a guy. He’d played around with a lot of things in his time, I’m sure. Rocker who couldn’t sing or play an instrument. Goth who didn’t have the ennui down quite right. Emo when emo was so very last year, A satanist who really wasn’t a satanist. After all, Those books are thick. Reading is hard. The Necronomicon isn’t even real. Who knew? Patterning yourself on a bad late-night TV movie is easier than doing actual research. And, to give credit where it was due, the real satanists, who are rare and far between . . . the genuine ones, the down-and-dirty ones—they get their desire sooner or later. Off to Hell they go. A Twinkie or bag of chips to be devoured whenever the torture becomes boring for the demons. I didn’t think that’s what they had planned when they were butchering Wilbur the pig or Foghorn Leghorn the rooster on their altar while trying to say the Lord’s Prayer backward . . . which would be the satanic DUI test. Instead of ZYXWVU, while touching your nose with a fingertip, you had to pull off “Amen. Ever and ever for glory the and, power ...” while chopping off a chicken’s head. They could chant and chop all they wanted. They still ended up as a TV dinner.

Bubba didn’t go that way though. He was such a thoroughly slobbering, pathetic, slimy wannabe that the demons did the absolute worst thing they could to him.

They ignored him.

When you ignore someone for so long you forget they’re even there, whether you’re a con artist demon or not. You say things you shouldn’t, and Bubba, although he couldn’t do jack shit with the information, heard it all. And now we would go find out if anything he’d picked up today had to do with Griffin. And while Zeke couldn’t find Griffin, I knew precisely where to find Bubba. . . . I had his pamphlet. Tours of Satanic Sin City . . . because when the sun goes down, it all goes down. He should’ve given up the satanism and become a copy-writer. There was slightly more money in it and a whole lot less demon-on-human mutilation.

“Fine. Let’s get the satanic shithead and ask him some questions. Only you’d better ask them.” He closed his eyes and ground the heel of his hand against his forehead—still trying to find Griffin, on the inside if not out. “Because right now, I want to hurt someone. I really, really want to hurt someone. Too much.”

“Trust me, Kit. I won’t be walking on any eggshells around him, but I’ll leave enough of him to do some talking.” If he knew anything. When you’ve pinned your first and last hope on a satanic school bus-driving demon wannabe, you knew it was going to be a bad night.

We caught up with him at Carluccio’s Tivoli Gardens. It was a restaurant next to the Liberace Museum and whether Liberace was a tricked-up demon, an angel of blinding light, or only an entertainer who thought rhinestones were the greatest invention of God and Man and wanted to outshine the sun itself, I didn’t know. I was always curious, yes, but at times it was best to let some things go. Keep a little mystery alive.

Keeping Bubba alive . . . Well, we’d see.

His old school bus, painted black, naturally, with wispy white ghosts and staring, bloody red eyes, was idling by the Gardens, hoping to pick up some tourist action. There were reputable ghost tours in Vegas. Fun in the absent sun pointing out the gangster Bugsy Siegel’s hotel, the Flamingo, the “Motel of Death” where many celebrities had died—I’d never caught exactly who those celebrities were—a haunted park with a “demon” child, and the Gardens, where Liberace’s ghost occasionally had a snit fit. A phantom rhinestone wedgie was nothing to mess with, I was sure.

Bubba’s tour, on the other hand, was not reputable, not licensed, not legal, and not especially hygienic—all of which kept him on the move, trying to pick up tourists on the go. The Gardens were his second fishing stop of the night and we caught him there just as he was leaving. I didn’t bother to look for a parking spot, pulling up on the sidewalk and ditching the Cobra. It would either be towed or stolen. I didn’t give a damn either way. If we could find Griffin, a lucky thief could keep the car.

I caught the bus door as it was closing, pushed it back open, and went up the two steps to stand just behind and right at Bubba’s ear. “You weren’t trying to leave without us, were you, Beelzebub?”

Zeke sat in the first seat, forming the point to our triangle. “Bastard.” He had one of his guns out, a sawed-off Remington, and a white-knuckled grip on it. He wasn’t worried about any threat from Beelzebub . . . a hundred Beelzebubs would barely get a yawn out of him. He was worried for Griffin, which might be Beelzebub’s fall after all, threat or no threat.

“Go on and drive, Bubba.” I leaned an elbow on his shoulder and smiled at our shared reflection in the long rearview mirror. “You don’t look happy to see me. You don’t look happy at all. But that’s all right. I have a theory about people. Happy people aren’t made; they’re born . . . like golden retrievers—bouncy and cheerful and full of love and play. And then, sugar”—I nipped his ear hard, enough to draw a single drop of blood—“there are the rest of us. We aren’t happy. We aren’t bouncy. But we do like to play. Only I’m not sure that you want to play the kind of games I do.” I tossed my Browning to Zeke and had a knife at Beelzebub’s neck in an instant.

Bubba—I could think of him as Beelzebub with a straight face for only so long—was a thin guy. He had the requisite long hair dyed so black that it looked like the world’s worst Halloween wig. He had multiple piercings, some of which I was sure were hidden and I didn’t want to see, and what he thought were satanic tattoos ringing his neck, but what I was almost positive said “I suck Cthulhu’s dick” in Latin. The tattoo artist had seen him coming a mile away. Bubba wasn’t solely a wannabe demon. He was a wannabe anything. He was almost worth feeling sorry for if I hadn’t thought he tortured animals as a kid, pulled wings off flies, killed birds with a BB gun. He had that look, that smell, that taste to the air around him. A trickster should’ve made him a pet project a long time ago, but like some projects, he wasn’t worth it. When a chemistry project went wrong, you poured it down the lab sink and started over. Bubba had “Do over” written all over him.

“Bubba,” I said softly, “some people say the fastest way to a man’s heart is a hollow point. One nice explosion and then a pile of mush that no one wants on a Valentine’s Day card. But I honestly don’t care about the fastest way myself. I like the fun way.” I moved the knife and suddenly the point sank into the flesh over his heart . . . not much. Only a fraction of an inch, but enough that he understood the seriousness of my play. “When a woman like me breaks a man’s heart, we like to do it slowly.” I smiled again at him in the mirror, wider, and showed my teeth in a flash of white. His dark brown eyes went a little more glassy. “Thoroughly. And keep it whole enough so that it looks pretty in a jar on my bedroom dresser.”

“What...” He swallowed and the C in Cthulhu jumped spasmodically, but the words were somewhat braver. “I ain’t telling you anything, Iktomi. You’re Heaven’s whore, you bitch.”

“Sugar, sugar.” I let my smile widen. “You know my last name. Aren’t I the privileged one? Haven’t I made the big time? Did you hear that while scraping and crawling on the floor for any demonic crumbs? On your knees for a bunch of the Fallen? I think that makes you the whore, not me.”

“They’ll see I’m loyal. They’ll see I’m worthy,” he insisted. “They’ll take me to Hell, to the Lord Who Rules All Others, and he’ll make me like them. Divine.”

I hadn’t seen much of the divine, Above or Below, but deprogramming a self-brainwashed cluster of idiot cells that someone’s toilet had coughed up would take more time than I was willing to spend and more sympathy than I had. Griffin needed us now. This asshole . . . He didn’t need the truth about demons; he didn’t need me to hold his pathetic little hand. What he needed was to give me some useful information before Zeke decided to rip off his head bare-handed.

“And I’ll be sure to throw you a going-away party when that happens.” This time when I moved the knife it was to slice him across his upper thigh; although the black jeans—satanists did love their black—didn’t show the blood, it was safe to say Bubba felt the cut. He gave a low-pitched scream, the steering wheel wobbled under his hands, and the bus began to climb the curb.

The dangers of interrogation in a moving vehicle. Time to adapt.

“A challenge.That’s even more entertaining.” I grabbed his shirt and yanked all one hundred and twenty pounds of him backward. “Zeke, take the wheel, would you? And don’t run over anything.” As always with Zeke, I made the directions very clear. “No people, no dogs, no cars, no motorcycles, and stop when the light is red, pretty please.”

He slid into the seat and maneuvered the bus back onto the street. “Rules. How does everyone remember all these stupid rules,” he muttered.

I turned back to Bubba, trusting Zeke at least until it came to the moment that we would run over something the size of a Volkswagen. I had to. I trusted him far more with driving than with chatting up Bubba. Bubbas are considerably more fragile than Volkswagens. I’d pushed him on the aisle between the left and right rows of seats. Now I rested the heel of my boot, three inches easy, on his stomach. I’d grabbed them along with my shotgun. Every weapon helps. “Now, this is the part where you pay attention to me, every bit as much as you do the demons you follow around.” I leaned and the heel sank into his stomach until I almost imagined I felt his spine beneath it. “Because, Bubba, some boots are made for walking and some for impromptu colonoscopies.” I leaned harder. “You can turn over anytime. I charge so much less than your average proctologist.”

His pale face, pitted with old acne scars, was starting to turn lavender in the neon light spilling into the bus. “Bubba, you need to start breathing,” I reminded him. “I can’t kill you if you kill yourself first. Suck it up, sweetie. If you can’t be a man, you damn sure can’t be a demon. Breathe.”

He did, exhaling one sour-smelling huge gasp of air and sucking another one in. Demons were monsters, filth, undeserving of existence, but I had to admit, when it came to Bubba, I was on their side. I wouldn’t have eaten him either. He was wilted lettuce on chicken salad that had gone bad two weeks ago. Hopefully that would be the lizards’ downfall. “You follow them, Bubba,” I said, “from bar to bar, casino to casino. You watch as they buy souls. You probably even watch them kill innocents behind parked cars or in empty alleys. You’re a worthless piece of shit and there’s no getting around it, but if you tell me what I want to know, I won’t kill you.” Then I told the lie . . . setting the hook. “And if I kill you now, you know where you’ll end up—in Hell . . . with the damned . . . the tortured souls worth no more than maggots crushed under Lucifer’s heel. But if you tell me the truth”—I eased up the pressure slightly on his stomach—“I’ll let you live, give you time to prove to them you’re worthy of being a prince in Hell. You know they don’t believe that yet.” I flipped the knife, caught it, and then jammed it into the rubber matting a hairbreadth away from his head. “Well, Bubba? Do you want that time or not?”

He did. The deluded ones, the idiots, they always did. The ones who imagined death was the worst thing that could happen to them. They were oh so wrong.

But he talked and that was all I cared about.“What... what the fuck do you want to know?” His voice quavered and I smelled the alcohol on his breath. Yep, no way he was getting through the Lord’s Prayer backward.

“Griffin Reese, one of the last of Eden House. You know him, just like you know me. In the past few days while you were lurking, stalking, drooling over the local demons, did you hear anything about Griffin? My Griffin—which means you know I’ll make it hurt if you lie.” I jerked my head back toward Zeke. “His Griffin—and you know he’ll kill you if you lie. Slowly. Painfully. Enough so that demons will give him a standing ovation. So, Bubba,” I said, leaning down until we were face-to-face, a bare inch apart, “tell me about Griffin before we’re tossing pieces of you out the windows like confetti at a parade.”

Talk he did, which was a good thing for him. I might have lied about him becoming a prince in Hell, but I wasn’t lying about what Zeke and I would do to him.

Beelzebub closed his eyes tightly. “Reese . . . one of Eden House Vegas’s last sycophants. One of their last canary lovers here. Wiping his ass with their feathers. Worthless fucking Boy Scout.”

Boy Scout—the very thing I’d thought about Griffin and the thing only I was allowed to think about him. Not this worthless wannabe. I dug the heel in again and he yelped, “He’s been hunting on his own for weeks, leaving his brain-dead partner home watching cartoons and acting as if he had something to prove. My side set up a way to prove something back.” The sneer twisted his thin lips. “No man can take on Hell. No man can take on demons alone and win. If he’s gone, and I guess he is or you wouldn’t be here, it’s because my kind took him. Set a trap and took him.” His grin showed yellow teeth with a gap between the front two teeth. “They’ll show the man what the demon can really do.”

Man. Demon. Like he had something to prove. I’d thought Griffin had seemed tired lately, distracted, and he did have something to prove . . . or he thought he did. He was a peri, the first of the ex-demon kind, and while he didn’t remember any of his demon days, he still knew. He had been a demon. He had done what demons did and worse than your average low-level demon. Griffin was intelligent and imaginative. He might not remember, but he could conjure up some likely scenarios in his mind’s eye. I’d only known Griffin as a human and he was the best human I’d come across in my long life. He wasn’t a Boy Scout. He was a Boy Scout to the power of a thousand. He protected the innocent; he helped Zeke and made him more than functional—he gave him a life. He’d saved more lives than he could keep count of, but it wasn’t enough. Once it had all come out three months ago . . . Leo’s and my trickster status, Zeke and Griffin being unknowing agents of Heaven and Hell. Angel and demon. Being an ex-angel annoyed Zeke, but he could deal with it precisely because he was Zeke. But Griffin finding out he was a demon, even if that status became ex-demon when he chose humanity over Hell . . . I should’ve known.

Griffin had been what he thought to be the worst of monsters, those he’d fought to the death after being recruited for Eden House. He had nothing to prove to any of us, but he had an enormous amount to prove to himself. Fighting demons with Zeke helped now that Eden House had fallen, but that wasn’t enough. He had to kill more of what he’d once been, save more people that in the past he would’ve killed. But Griffin was too good. Held himself to an impossible standard. I wasn’t sure he could save enough to save himself—to give him peace.

“Where?” I retrieved the knife, the rubber of the floor matting ripping. “I can put this in you anywhere you want. Pick one. Because if you don’t tell me where Griffin is right this damn minute, I’ll pick one and you won’t like it. And the next spot you’ll like even less.”

He said he didn’t know, that maybe there was this place they’d talked about, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure and I believed it. This useless brownnoser of all things demonic probably didn’t know anything in this life that was a hundred percent. If he did, he wouldn’t be kissing monster ass every minute he wasn’t working or sleeping. A hundred percent sure or not, though, it was all we had.

The last thing he said before we threw him off the bus was suddenly pitiful after his boasting of Hell’s might and how he’d be a part of it. “Don’t tell them I told you. Don’t tell them...” And then Zeke kicked him through the door, the last words swallowed up by the sound of his impact against the pavement, the scream as something in him snapped—an arm or leg. It didn’t matter. He had known about Griffin for weeks.

Of course I was going to tell them. The wannabe would find out what it was like to get what he wanted . . . to be noticed by demons. If we left any alive.