The Grimrose Path

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.

“I’m a professional. This is my job,” she said firmly.

“And this”—Zeke jerked his thumb at Griffin in the bed—“is mine. Period. If anyone gives him a bath, it’s gonna be me.”

Griffin groaned. “How about I do it myself? Will that simplify things?”

“Fine.” The nurse’s aide deposited the basin on the bedside table and slapped the towels against Zeke’s chest. “He’s all yours. Maybe I can actually take my break tonight.”

Zeke didn’t move except to hold the towels until she was gone. He was a good warrior. He waited until any possible threat was either out of range or disabled, his attention fixed, stance ready. I started to imagine how he would’ve disabled her if she hadn’t given up without a fight, but that led to progressively worse and worse mental pictures, and I stopped at the one of Zeke trying to stuff the towel down the poor overworked woman’s throat.

Giving up the door frame’s support, I passed Zeke, patting him on the shoulder, and sat on the edge of the bed. “Griff, you look . . . worse.”

He snorted. “Thanks. I thought you were supposed to be an excellent liar.”

“When I want to be.” I took his Jell-O. Cherry. Yum. It really is about the small pleasures in life. I ate a spoonful. He did look worse. The bruise had darkened and spread on his face. It looked painful. I hoped they’d given him better painkillers than they’d given me. There were several pieces of paper on the table and I flipped through them. They were covered front and back with curse words. I spotted the German Arschloch Zeke had called me about the day before. In addition to that one, there was a hugely impressive number of English ones written down. If there was one he’d forgotten or that wasn’t applicable, I didn’t see it. “He’s still not talking to you?”

“Oh, he’s speaking volumes in his own way,” Griffin said wryly. “I’m lucky his pen ran out of ink. But I deserve it. He also took my car keys, not that I remember where my car is, and I heard him trying to talk a security guard out of his handcuffs in the hall at breakfast.”

“Trying?” That didn’t sound like the Zeke we knew.

Wriggling his foot out from under the sheet, Griffin lifted it to show where his ankle was cuffed to the rail at the foot of the bed. “Since they took the catheter out, bathroom breaks have been difficult.”

I was about to grin—Zeke learned his lessons differently than the rest of us, but he did learn them—until Leo said, “Handcuffs. Now that is the best idea I’ve heard today.” That was enough to have my momentary slice of happiness fading, but worse yet, it was enough to catch Zeke’s attention.

He accepted that the aide was gone, moved his gaze to Leo, who still stood just inside the door, and then turned to give me the same searching look, that expression he wore when he read someone’s thoughts. “You showered together? And you didn’t have sex? Why would you shower together and not have sex?”

“Oh God.” Griffin covered his eyes with one hand and pulled his foot back hard enough to rattle the cuffs, but there was no getting out of them . . . or the room, as much as he might want to. As loudly as Leo was growling, I knew he wanted to.

“Oh.” Zeke’s attention was back on Leo. “She didn’t notice?” His eyebrows knit, perplexed as his scrutiny dropped about three feet down Leo’s body in an attempt to puzzle out the situation. “Huh.”

“Oh God.” It was repetitive, but that was understandable. Griffin couldn’t get out of the bed, but he could turn on his side and shield his head with the pillow, which he did. I carefully put the spoon down on the table as he disappeared beneath white cotton.

“Spying, Kit? That’s rude. That is very rude.” But this was Zeke and while you did tell him when his behavior was not acceptable, you also made allowances for his differences . . . his uniqueness. That’s when you went to who was truly accountable in the situation. Leo. “You were thinking it loudly enough, he could hear it through your shield?” I charged. Normally no demon, angel, or peri could penetrate our shields unless we weren’t being careful or we were all but screaming in our heads. “Unbelievable. Do you want demons knowing things like, ‘Oh, I’m not quite a god anymore’ along with ‘And my penis is this big’? Do you want Eligos to kill you? Bagging Loki would make his eternity. Besides, it was almost three hours ago. I said I was sorry.” I hadn’t, but I made it a principle to never apologize when a lie will do. “Let it go already.”

Now suddenly instead of one set of male eyes on me, I felt the heat of three, a highly unhappy heat. Griffin had given up the protection of his pillow to join forces with his comrades, and Zeke said disapprovingly, “That was not appropriate, Trixa. I’m disappointed in you.”

Zeke thought I was inappropriate. Zeke. And he was right. Insinuating that a man’s penis was no big deal, accidentally or not, wasn’t definable. The dictionaries held no words strong enough to label that mistake. Catastrophic fell miles short of covering that error. I hadn’t lived as long as I had without learning the massively sensitive issue all males, human, païen, or gods, shared. This simply wasn’t my day. I couldn’t lie well and I couldn’t avoid a mistake so basic a high school cheerleader could’ve taught me a course on it on this miserable day—who had a PhD compared to me when I couldn’t figure out how to open the door to the damn school. No doubt because the handle was phallic shaped.

I apologized, throwing my principles out the window. I did it quickly and hurriedly buried my attention back in the Jell-O. That was the best thing to do when you inadvertently or carelessly . . . semantics . . . didn’t show the mighty penis the respect it deserved. Get past the moment as expeditiously as possible so everyone could pretend it had never happened. Leo, of course, wouldn’t let it go. He’d gone on and on. This day wasn’t getting any better. When you’ve been beaten up by a demon in your own bedroom and that was the high point, it was one seriously bad day. Finally I’d told him to either kill me or wait for Eligos to do it; I couldn’t stand the guilt trip anymore.

“I’m going down to the chapel,” he said. It’s difficult to speak without moving your lips or unclenching your teeth, but he managed.

“And who are you going to pray to, Loki?” I snapped back. I was sorry, but I was getting less sorry all the time.

“Myself, and you’d better hope I’m not listening.” He slammed the door behind him.

I snorted. Men. Gods. Gods-on-hiatus. All the same.

“You’re in trouble.” Zeke was grinning.

Griffin looked amused as well until I threw him under the bus without a second thought when I asked Zeke with all innocence, “Aren’t you pissed at Griffin right now?”

“Oh yeah.” Zeke by now had supplanted me in my position on the edge of the bed, and had been automatically wetting and wringing a washcloth in the basin to pass back and forth to his partner. Griffin was working on getting all the dried blood out of the creases of his hands and the raw patches of scraped skin over his knuckles. It reminded me how fortunate we were he was still around. Taking on demons without backup wasn’t conducive to that. Zeke was as aware of that as I was. He had been momentarily distracted, but he was back on the scent now. “You are never getting out of the house again. Ever. Ever. If I can find a goddamn hamster ball big enough to put you in, I will. You’re an idiot. A selfish, clueless idiot. Eden House thought you could guide me? Thought you were smart enough to partner up with me? Hell, the demons probably didn’t even set a trap. I’ll bet you tripped and fell into one’s open fucking jaws. Maybe it wasn’t even demons. Maybe a pack of poodles mauled you.”

Tickling the bottom of his foot through the sheet, I said to Griffin’s betrayed expression, “He’s speaking to you again. That’s something, isn’t it? You can thank me later.”

That didn’t happen.

I wasn’t surprised. Those thrown under buses aren’t often grateful, but with those who jump under them of their own accord, that’s not always true. But I didn’t find that out until later—when Rosanna showed up.

We took Griffin and Zeke back to the bar with us. AMA—against medical advice—but since medical advice hadn’t cured him, and Zeke had, it hadn’t been much of a deterrent. While Griffin had finished cleaning up, he’d also told us about his solo demon hunts, every detail. He’d found new hunting grounds we hadn’t known about—some bars, some hotels . . . and one in particular that hosted pageants for people who wanted to dress up their four-year-old like a ten-dollar hooker. The poor kids couldn’t sell their souls to get a normal childhood, but their mom could sell hers to ensure her little Savannah won that crown. I hadn’t thought of that one. Griffin had been clever, too clever, but now we’d know where to look for him if he did something this suicidal again. There had been five of them, the demon safaris . . . The sixth had been the trap. Five solo demon killings—he’d had every reason to look exhausted in the past week or so as it was catching up with him. He didn’t have every reason to be alive, however. He was good, but fate is capricious. If he’d been trolling alone and come across Armand before Armand had been turned into a demon-flavored milk shake on my floor or had run into another higher-level demon like Armand, there was every chance Griffin wouldn’t have been around long enough for the demons to bother with a trap. That Eli had saved Griffin might not classify as a miracle in the holy sense, but it was wholly unexpected and I didn’t want to depend on it again. As for assuming most of the demons would wise up and stay in Hell and out of Cronus’s reach . . . First, they couldn’t stay there forever. Eventually they’d run out of souls to eat. Second, lower-level demons weren’t that intelligent. They didn’t know when they were profoundly outclassed or they didn’t have the brain cells to believe it. They wouldn’t hide long.

All of that made it an easy decision. Until Griffin was back in top fighting form, he and Zeke could stay with me. It wouldn’t be the first time the bar was a makeshift recovery room for them. After the last time, I’d learned my lesson and added a spare bedroom downstairs. Granted, you could only fit a single-sized bed in there and had to crawl up that bed from the foot as there was no room to walk beside it, but it was, as I told Griff and Zeke, all theirs—a home away from home.

“You told the doctor you had the best accommodations possible for me. Luxurious, you said. And when he still wouldn’t sign the discharge papers, you all but smuggled me out of the hospital, and for this?” Griffin asked, looking much more healthy, bright eyed and bushy tailed, than he had a right to, aside from the bruise on his face. Yes, they’d definitely given him the good pain pills.

“Considering you were hanging in a foyer like a side of beef in a butcher’s freezer yesterday, I think this is a step up, so don’t complain. It’s the only guest room I have and I fixed it up months ago especially for you two. Be grateful,” I ordered.

“Didn’t this used to be the storage closet?” Zeke stuck his head in and looked around. “Didn’t you keep the toilet paper and cleaning supplies for the customer bathrooms in here? And the vomit bucket and mop?”

Picky. Picky. Picky.

“It’s this or sleep in those bathrooms. You choose. And as those look like the ones in a men’s prison, I wouldn’t pick that option myself.”

“Speaking of prisons.” Griffin lifted his wrist and jangled metal. The cuff was off his ankle and now around his wrist which, in turn, was cuffed to Zeke’s. “I know I’ve been an idiot. I know I wasn’t honest and that’s the last thing I want to be with you . . . dishonest . . . but this feels like a kinky sex movie. Could you take them off now?”

“No.” Zeke didn’t bother to waste a second thinking about it as he made a face. “It smells like ammonia in here . . . and ass. Ammonia and sweaty ass.”

“Sorry, princess. I think you’ll survive.” This was what it was like to have ungrateful, spoiled children. I’d have to remember that in the future.

Griffin, not interested in the discussion of the smell of ass, sweaty or otherwise, tried again. “Zeke, I promise I’ll . . .”

“No.” Zeke didn’t wait for the rest of the promise. “Start crawling. I’m tired.”

Griffin exhaled, the guilt back in his face. It wasn’t the guilt of doing things he’d never done, being what he no longer was. This was a guilt he deserved and for behavior modification’s sake, I didn’t pat him sympathetically on the shoulder. There were no Lone Rangers in this bar and I wanted him to remember that. “I’ll bet you are,” he said. “I know you are.” Along with the guilt, you could see him picking up Zeke’s exhaustion like the empath he was and wearing it with his own emotions and sensations. “You didn’t sleep last night. You didn’t sleep this morning. You stole that scalpel from God knows where, keeping me safe, watching out for me.”

“It’s not easy to do,” he replied stolidly. “I’m supposed to be the stupid one. Not you.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re anything but stupid. Don’t say that. Don’t think it either or the verbal ass-kicking you’ve given me since yesterday, I’ll give you five times over,” Griffin warned. “If there’s a stupid one here, it’s me. Now let’s get some sleep.” He put a knee on the foot of the bed and started to crawl, pulling Zeke’s arm along with him. “But you’d better be ready with that cuff key if any demons do attack. I don’t want to die because you have a weird bondage thing.”

“It’s not a weird bondage thing,” Zeke protested, following after him in the crawl up the mattress. “It’s a perfectly natural bondage thing. The porn magazine said so.”

With that I closed the door on them and left them to their own devices, hopefully sleep, but guys will be guys and a porno magazine would never lie.

“Did you get around to telling them about Cronus and the impending Armageddon slash slavery of worlds or did that, like certain other things, escape your attention too?” Leo, beer already in hand, asked at the bar.

“I think they deserve one night relatively worry free and, again, I’m sorry about the shower thing. It was enormous, I swear to you. So large that I trembled in its shadow like a tiny mouse fearing it would be crushed. Attached to a body that defines perfection itself. Michelangelo would’ve taken a hammer to David and smashed it to pieces if he knew what he could’ve sculpted instead. Every poet living or dead couldn’t find a single word worthy to describe the beauty and majesty that is you.” I let the door support me and my aching ribs as I gave Leo my most contrite look. I was too . . . sincerely contrite. It was Leo. My Leo. “Forgive me?” I tucked my hair behind my ears, then touched one of his folded arms with a single fingertip. It rested next to a small mole he’d had since he had first become Leo. I saw it every day. There was a comfort in that, in an unchanging thing, although unchanging was a curse word among our kind. “You know I can’t let certain things catch my attention. Not yet. You and I . . .” I traced my finger along warm skin and smiled, a little wistfully, but the best things are worth waiting for. Our day would come and on that day, the attention I would give him would etch every molecule of him in my memory for the rest of my life. “We’re not there yet. We’re still too much alike in the wrong ways and not quite enough in the right ones.”

“You’re right. We’re both stubborn, both hold grudges. We both are staggering in our hotness,” he said with the gravity it warranted.

“But luckily vanity will never stand in our way.” I pinched his arm lightly, rubbed the pale red mark, and said, “Stay on the couch tonight? You’ll have to be up early in the morning for another trip to the airport.”

“Your bizarre leaping to other subjects is something we’ll have to work on. That, I’ll never match and the level of Tylenol I have to take to stop the headaches is beginning to become a danger to my liver,” he said, unfolding his arms and pretending to fish in his jeans pocket for a capsule or two. “Why the airport? Did you come up with something for Cronus? If you have, that will top even your Roses.”

“It would, wouldn’t it?” I started toward the kitchen to get a broom and dustpan for upstairs. I moved stiffly, the snowflake touched by a careless finger. Damaged. “Didn’t you say back in January that Thor was hanging out with the Swedish women’s volleyball team?”

“Last I heard.” A crease appeared in his forehead. Now he did actually have a headache. If anyone would give you a head-pounding one, it would be Thor. “In the past months I’ve been getting a lot of late-night drunken ‘Ha, ha. You’re not a god anymore, douche bag’ calls. A few ‘nyah-nyah-nyah mortal dickwad’ ones to add variety. Why?”

“I was thinking about something I saw on TV last year. It reminded me of Thor’s hammer.”

“Mjöllnir? It’s a serious weapon, but it wouldn’t stop Cronus.”

“No, but what made it might,” I said. “That and a trip to hell.” Little h, païen hell.

It all came down to what I’d quoted to Eligos before, “I think, therefore I am.” They were good words, those five. Words to live by for some. For others . . . maybe . . .

Words to die by.