The Grimrose Path

Chapter 16

We skipped lunch at the diner. While I would’ve liked to have my potential last meal there, it was too close to Trixsta, or what was left of it. I didn’t want the boys to see it, and I didn’t want to see it either. It was best to fight on an empty stomach anyway. When there’s a possibility someone plans on stringing you up by your own intestines, it’s much less messy. Or a more mundane penetrating wound to the abdomen . . . Did you honestly want someone looking at the ground at your feet and asking if that was biscuits and gravy pouring out of the gaping hole in your stomach? No, that sort of thing took you right off your game.

Before we got into yet another stolen car, I had to ask Griffin a question. It wasn’t one I wanted to ask, but it was part of the plan, the most important part. If he said no, I wouldn’t blame him, except I knew he wouldn’t say that. I also knew who would, and I respected him all the more for doing it.

“No fucking way,” Zeke said. I hadn’t seen him angry with me before. That made this the first time and it was memorable. He was doing it up right. Green eyes were always among the most beautiful, I thought, and yet they could turn hard in an instant, the deepest and coldest of ice, merciless as a riptide. “No fucking way you are putting a bull’s-eye on Griffin’s chest. You’re not singling him out to that goddamn freak. We can all face Cronus, but you’re not dangling Griffin like a piece of meat for an alligator.”

“Zeke, it’s not like that,” Griffin countered.

“Griffin, it is like that.” I had put the sword in the car and now stood, hip against the metallic blue of the SUV, a four-wheel-drive felony. “Don’t think it’s no different than Zeke playing demon bait when you’re on the hunt, because it is. If Cronus gets to you, you won’t be able to fight him off and we won’t be able to pull you back. He’s not a demon. If he touches you, it’s over.” For Griffin and for us all.

“But you won’t let him, will you?” he said with a certainty in his voice that was the best gift anyone could’ve given me, and few, because of what I was, did. Unwavering trust.

“No, I won’t.” I touched his face and the bruise that hadn’t had time to fade. “But don’t agree to this because you think you have something to make up for. If you do, I’ll know it, and we’ll go right back upstairs and let the Apocalypse come. I mean it.”

He shook his head. “I’ve seen the error of my ways there. Ex-demon is now politically correct in my book. It might be why Azrael finds me so disgusting. If I can rise up and change my ways, others could as well. I want to do this because it’s the right thing to do.” He bumped Zeke’s shoulder with his own. “It is, Zeke. You know it, and you would do it too.”

“I don’t care. You almost let demons kill you. Demons. That’s goddamn pathetic.” Zeke pushed him with enough force to shove him back a step. “How can I look after you if you won’t look after yourself, huh? How? I fucking can’t, can I?”

“Trixa won’t let Cronus kill me.” Griffin didn’t push back. Zeke had been pushed enough this week, emotionally. He would’ve tolerated physically better. “And if she can’t stop him, then I will. I promise, Zeke, and I’ve never broken a promise to you. Hell, I couldn’t. You know that.”

“Damn it. Damn it.” Zeke hung his head. “Just . . . shit. If you get yourself killed, I’m not speaking to you again, and this time I mean it.” He got into the back of the car and slammed the door hard.

“It’s not fair to him.” I was wearing the same clothes I’d worn yesterday to rob the museum. All black, but the fall while running from the museum guards had taken its toll. I had washed them this morning. There was something ignoble about showing up to a battle wearing muddy streaks on your shirt and gum on your knee. “But then again I guess it’s not fair to any of us.”

“I think you and Leo have had it easy for too long.” Griffin curled his lips. “Time to know what it is to fight with a baseball bat instead of an Uzi.” He opened the same door Zeke had shut. “Move over, you cranky bastard. Don’t make me PDA you in front of God and everybody.”

As the door closed again. Leo cracked his knuckles in the palm of his other hand. “An Uzi. I think that boy vastly underestimates who we are.”

“Who we were,” I reminded him. “Are you ready to be human?” I’d learned over the past few days that playing human was easy, but being human was a bitch. I’d lost a home I’d never thought I’d want, and I was a person I never thought I’d be. Still, I hadn’t once in my life let a lack of resources stop me from doing what had to be done. That wasn’t going to change now. Being human would only make the victory that much sweeter, life itself that much sweeter.

“We’re going to get our asses handed to us,” Leo said with grim humor.

“Oh, without a doubt.” I sighed as I started around the car. “Cronus will need a shopping cart to haul them around in.”

Because life . . . It wasn’t always sweet.

Arrow Canyon is about an hour northeast of Vegas. I’d hiked it before, on feet and paws. A narrow canyon that runs several miles long with petroglyphs painted on the walls and a dam at the end; it’s a good place to commune with nature or end it. Cronus wouldn’t care how picturesque the battlefield was, but during the week and work hours, the location would guarantee hopefully that no bystanders happened to wander into the middle of something they couldn’t imagine no matter how much acid they’d taken in their misspent youth. The hikers tended to stick to weekends . . . whether they had a history of wild drug-induced hallucinations or not.

Brown rock rose high around us as we walked about a mile from where we left the SUV at the municipal well. Leaving it was necessary as I didn’t want it thrown at us, and I was sure that if it was around, it would be. We ended up at the trailhead of the canyon. There were creosote bushes, Mojave yuccas with their green leaves like pointed daggers at their base, and a blue sky with tattered clouds so white they almost hurt your eyes. As you went on, the canyon would narrow considerably. In a tight spot and near the dam were not precisely where I would want to be facing Cronus. There was no reason to make things ridiculously easy for him. If he was going to kick our asses, at least I wanted him to work up a mild sweat over it.

I’d sacrificed my favorite shotgun to make Griffin’s “kidnapping” by demons look more convincing to the cops, but Leo had an early birthday present tucked away for me in his closet, a Benelli semiautomatic shotgun. It would blow the head off a demon easily, but against Cronus it would be less of the baseball bat Griffin had mentioned and more of a toothpick. I’d left it behind. The sword was what I carried. The great thing about a sword made of water, besides how it glittered brightly in the sun . . . very fancy . . . was that it was light. It weighed less than the pitcher of water had and much less than your conventional broadsword.

Griffin and Zeke both were carrying guns as well. They wouldn’t do any more good than Leo’s own shotgun, but it was hard to go into a fight without some sort of weapon—natural or manufactured. “This is it.” I scuffed the dirt under the black sneakers we’d stopped and bought on the way. Neither boots or bare feet were going to make it a mile over the Nevada desert, and Leo hadn’t happened to also purchase me footwear for that early birthday present. “Where we make our stand.” It wasn’t especially auspicious that the word “stand” was almost always accompanied by “last.”

Zeke shrugged. “Here or at the am/pm. Doesn’t matter, except at least I could get candy bars at the am/ pm.”

“I only wish someone were here to write down those poetic words for posterity,” Leo said. “They are epic in breadth and scope. Homer would be green with jealousy.”

Zeke pumped a round in his shotgun. “There’s not a whole lot poetic about dying,” he said matter-of-factly.

He was right. I took a deep breath, feeling my mortality acutely. I’d always been mortal, but I hadn’t been so vulnerably mortal. I hadn’t been human, hadn’t given them credit for staring into the face of death with nothing more to keep them going than hope, optimism, or ruthlessly channeled resignation to their fate. If we survived, I’d be tempted to give them a little slack in the future. “Griffin?”

As Leo and Zeke flanked him, Griffin showed his wings and spread them wide. Zeke had been right. They were the wings of a dragon, flown out of the heart of the sun to land impossibly on Earth. They were the same beautiful gold I’d seen before, untarnished and wholly undemonlike. Hopefully, Cronus wouldn’t know that. As I stepped in front of Griffin, my back to him and the sword down and behind my leg, the Titan proved he didn’t. He appeared twenty feet in front of me. Subtly this time, with no moving of the world, only a small ripple in the shadow of it. It was all the worse for that.

The emptiness inside him, the dark clots of nothing-ness that swallowed everything and anything, was pouring out. From his eyes and his mouth, it ran down the unnaturally smooth face... down the inside-out shirt and cardboard cutout of jeans, down the offensively careless costume of a human being, and began to eat away at the ground beneath his feet. The earth was being unmade beneath him, unraveling in tiny pockets as you could for the first time see what reality was formed from. It was glorious to see and then horrible to watch it die. Cronus took a step and the world cringed beneath it. His blackly bleeding eyes fixed on Griffin and the word passed out of his mouth through the shadows. “Finally.”

“Finally is right,” I said. “Finally your days are no more. You took my one home, you bastard, but you’re not taking the other.” He wasn’t taking Griffin either. Griffin had risked his life for my plan and Zeke had risked that much more. I wasn’t going to let Cronus pass through me to Griffin and his wings. Pure and simple. It wasn’t going to happen.

Cronus thought differently, proving it as he took another step toward us. He was at the end, so close to the culmination of what he’d started nine hundred and ninety-nine demons ago. He was within reach of tipping that first domino that would bring all the others down. He needed only one more wing to get the map to find Lucifer, to navigate Hell. But he didn’t have to worry about finding his way around Hell—Hell found him just fine.

Out of the canyon mouth came a flashflood of demons. They ran on all fours. They had no choice. Their wings had already been cut off. Eligos and Lucifer, they took no chances. Eligos himself hadn’t risked that his might be taken. His demons were without a general, but that didn’t mean they were any less determined to bring down Cronus. Between the devil they knew and the devil they didn’t want to, they’d take the first. They had a home to save, the same as I did. I’d asked Eligos for Hell itself, and he had given it to me.

The demons swarmed the Titan more quickly than I could blink, Komodo dragons with bleeding backs. He didn’t try to get away. What did he have to fear from these Fallen when he’d already killed a hair shy of a thousand of them? When he touched them, they screamed and unraveled the same as the ground had. Or he ripped them apart, pieces of them turning to a dark rain in the air.

Yet behind them came the angels.

Fighting with the brothers they’d long cast down, some were as they’d been created, glass with daggered wings, blinding under the sun, with swords of fire. Some were in human form with feathered wings. Azrael, all glass and the farthest thing from human you could be except for Cronus himself, led from behind. Far behind, hovering over the canyon. I wasn’t surprised. It was easy to kill when it wasn’t your own existence you were risking. When you could be cut out of reality like a paper doll, wadded up, and thrown away, it was amazing how quickly an asshole like him learned caution, restraint, and to shut his annoyingly arrogant mouth.

For every demon who fell, an angel took his place. When that angel exploded, a stained glass window burst that filled the air; yet another demon was there to attack again. Cronus had multiple jaws fastened around each arm and leg. He had fiery swords plunged into him again and again until I could swear I could smell the stench of burned plastic. When the smallest area opened up, a shotgun blast came from behind me to put a slug into it. I heard Leo and Zeke both cursing behind me as the shotguns turned out to be as useless as everything else. Demons, angels, and man-made death, but the fake man who would be GodKingfuckingEmperor of All didn’t go down. He tossed more demons away, some with a mouthful of whatever cheap fabric of reality made him. Angels—archangels some—were broken like Christmas ornaments rather than the fiercely lethal fighters they were. I ducked as one demon was thrown over me and heard Zeke curse again as he was hit and fell under his weight.

“Don’t kill him, Kit,” I said without turning. “He’s on our side for the moment.”

As I watched, they kept coming, pouring out of the canyon with a single purpose. There was something almost glorious in that, two opposite sides in what should’ve been an unstoppable whole. Cronus, however, was stopping them left and right. How many angels could dance on the head of a pin? It didn’t matter. There might not be any left in Heaven to do the dancing when this was over, and if wings didn’t grow back, demons were going to be much less awe worthy in paintings and sculptures. It could make you wonder why Cronus was putting up with it. Why didn’t he simply move the world again—until he was virtually on top of Griffin to take that wing?

I didn’t wonder. He was having fun. Killing was boring to a Titan, but this wasn’t simple killing. This was a non-païen Heaven and Hell at his fingertips to obliterate. Even to Cronus, that was a change of pace. What he’d planned for after consuming Lucifer and Hell, he had a taste of now, and he liked it. With every slow step he took toward me and the wings that were behind me, he was having a goddamn ball. With every step his attackers, soldiers through and through, died in droves.

Then one could’ve wondered, where was the reason behind it? If every angel and demon fell and it did nothing but give Cronus a jolt of Irish in his coffee, why do it at all? What was the point? Where was the reason? I didn’t wonder. I knew.

I was the point.

This world was the reason.

Anna—the Rose—had been the means.

If you can save someone, do it. If you can save someone and in turn have them save everyone and everything, do that too.

I walked through puddles of demon ichor so thick the ground couldn’t soak it up. Closing what space remained between the Titan and me, I held the sword in front of me now and put it through the shoulder of one demon and the chest of an angel. The blade of water pierced them as if they were less tangible than a thought. The two feet of blade left I buried in Cronus’s abdomen. He knew I was coming. He was facing me, he saw me—although he didn’t need to—and he didn’t try to stop me. What was one more dead on top of all the others, now oil and glass, that littered the sand? Only more entertainment. I’d been counting on that.

I smiled into the eye sockets that ran black. I always smiled when I took down those who deserved it. “I think, therefore I am.”

Cronus reached down to touch the blade. The demon had torn free to tumble away and the angel had shattered. “What is . . . I know this. Don’t I know this?”

The Namaru had made the water solid, able to be held and able to cut, but that was the funny thing about water. It could be solid, but once it was inside you . . . it was inside you. Once the water of Lethe was inside you, swallowed or rammed into your gut, you were well and truly fucked.

“I know this,” he repeated, but the statement sounded vacant . . . each word void of meaning.

He knew it all right. He’d once been prisoner in Tartarus, below Hades, and then had ruled Hades and its Fields of Elysium for a time. He knew the River Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness—rather, he had known it. “Had”—it was such a good word.

“You think, therefore you are. But you’re a Titan. You created yourself from the Chaos, a single thought in the nothing. If you can’t remember who you are, what you are, how can you be anything at all?” Without that thought, that one “I am,” a Titan wasn’t a Titan. When you were your own creator and you forgot it all, even that single thought, how could you hold yourself together? How could you paste yourself onto the fabric of the universe?

You couldn’t.

The shadows began to roll backward from the ground up, back into his mouth and eyes. “I . . . I am. . . .” The words, thick and slow, were caught in the moving poisonous waste and washed away.

“No, you’re not.” With the demon and angel gone, I shoved the blade farther into him. It was for my own personal satisfaction. In him an inch or a mile, it didn’t matter. Lethe was inside him and part of him now, and he couldn’t remember enough to undo that. “You’re not anything at all. You’re nothing. Less than nothing. You don’t even exist.”

The eyes stretched wide, the fake lips gaped wider, the shadows a waterfall, filling him up until his face began to distort under the pressure. He threw back his head to stare blindly at a sky he couldn’t recognize, a sun he didn’t know. The scream that tried to escape became a whimper as it too was sucked back inside him. And then he was gone, an implosion of time and space that took a small slice of the world with him. I almost tumbled into that rip in reality. I’d stood so close that I felt the black-hole pull of what lay outside of everything there was. I couldn’t see it. I didn’t think anything but the dead Titans could see that, but I felt it and it was horrible. It wasn’t hungry or greedy; it was a complete lack of . . . life and death and everything between, before, after, and beyond. If I fell into it, that was fine. If I didn’t, that was all right as well. A lack doesn’t care—which made it somehow worse.

Then an arm went around my waist and I was yanked away and up into the air. The tear ate more of the world, several handfuls’ worth, and then sealed itself up. It too, like Cronus and the sword with them, was gone. I could do without the two and didn’t need the third anymore. I heard the beating of wings and grinned over my shoulder. “Those flying lessons paid off, didn’t they?”

Griffin grinned back, the wind from his wings blowing the hair in his eyes. He was a kid who’d gotten the best present ever . . . to fly like Superman. “I’ll have to practice carrying people more. Twelve feet up is all I can manage.”

“Or we can hopefully not be in this situation again.” He dropped lower until he could ease me to the ground, on which I sat down the second he let go. It wasn’t that my knees buckled or anything that trite; it was for the sheer need of touching what we had only just saved. Touching air was the same; reality was the whole damn kit and kaboodle—I had no idea what a kaboodle was, but it came to mind as I scooped up dirt in my hand and held it up for solemn contemplation. “Kaboodle,” I announced to Leo, who nodded.

“Damn fine kaboodle it is too,” he confirmed.

“That it is.” Legs crossed, I let myself fall backward to stare up at the sky. It was well worth staring at, and I did so happily until I heard two voices in unison say, “It’s you.” I propped myself up on my elbows to see Azrael and Eligos standing shoulder to shoulder and regarding each other with mutual disdain. Azrael had some disgust mixed into the pudding, but Eli seemed more glum, which was hardly like him.

“I can’t believe I was replaced by you,” the demon said. “It’s embarrassing. They couldn’t have gotten a flamingo or a canary? Both would be less insulting. The Canary of Death. It has a much better ring to it.”

“You were an Angel of Death? Why does that not surprise me?” I snorted, sitting up and brushing the rest of the kaboodle from my hands. Cronus was gone, but suddenly the wingless demons remaining were more of a threat than they had been. Here was hoping we had a standoff between what was left of the angels and the demons. The cold war was over on Earth, but it was still thriving Above and Below.

“Not an Angel of Death. The Angel of Death. If I’d been around for the Ten Plagues, darlin’, well”—he grinned, the curve of a sickle carved in the shape of a smile—“why stop with Egypt when it comes to firstborn? Show a little initiative and enthusiasm for your work. Santa Claus can visit the world in one night. So can I.”

“You have changed none with God’s punishment, grown no wiser but only more arrogant. I am not surprised, but I am the Angel of Death now, fallen. We could take you and your pathetically neutered brethren at this very moment.” Azrael’s sword wasn’t of heavenly origin as he’d stubbornly claimed, but it worked all the same as it flared to life between them.

Eli, dressed in that brown leather jacket he was so fond of and a new hat that was made for finding myth in the desert per movie legend, let his dark grin widen. He pointed at the other demons and then jerked his thumb downward. They vanished instantly. He ran a finger along the fedora, then tugged it low over his eyes. “All right then, Az. Here’s your big chance to take on your ex-boss. Let’s see what a pretender can do with the title.”

Azrael hesitated, scanned the approximately twenty-five remaining angels, then flared his wings and silently took to the air before disappearing into it, leaving a fury so thick you could taste it. He thought he was hot shit and he was, but if Eligos had been the first Angel of Death, experience and seniority did tell. I knew it told me something as all the other angels followed their leader. Eli had once said that Hell had worse demons than he, demons who couldn’t leave, who would burn the earth beneath them with every step if they did. I didn’t want to meet one of those. More powerful than Eli?

I didn’t want to see that.

True or not, I didn’t let Eli see it. “Where’s your whip? You can’t rob a desert tomb without a whip.”

The smile shaded into something almost affectionate, if death itself could be said to have that softer emotion. “You’re right. There is so much you can’t do properly without a whip, Trixa-of-my-heart, you couldn’t begin to believe it.” He laid a hand over my own heart as Zeke and Leo growled behind me, but stayed put. They knew if I needed help, I’d ask for it. “You took out a Titan. First Solomon and now this. You keep getting more and more entertaining. I haven’t had this much damn fun in centuries. I take my hat off to you.”

He did. He disappeared, but the hat stayed behind, falling to the dirt beneath. I picked it up and put it on, giving the brim my own flick of my finger. “Here’s for staying entertaining.” He was still going to try and kill me someday; that was a given. That day wasn’t this day though. This day was good.

My optimism was renewed. Life wasn’t always sweet or true, but it was now.

Sweeter than sugar.