The Grimrose Path

Chapter 4

Roses are red.

Sometimes.

The one was, and it was beautiful, starting at the bottom with the pure deep crimson that was almost black, the red of the setting sun disappearing into twilight. The petals then gradually lightened to a vivid deep red the exact color of freshly spilled blood. The flower wasn’t full-blown, but a curve of a fresh bud not yet realizing its potential. Curves were good. I liked curves, whether on myself, because a woman should have curves, or in the impossible-to-follow swerves and convolutions of what passed for the thought processes of the male species. Males trying to wrap their minds around a concept that didn’t involve a football or pulling a trigger. They were cute that way, like homicidal puppies. Curves of the body and curves of the mind.

As for color . . .

Red was my favorite. Red like fire, a little arson warmed a girl’s heart. But what was tied around the rose pulled away your attention too fast to dwell on the color.

I should’ve enjoyed the rose. Most women like flowers, right? I should’ve put it in a vase filled with water. After all, red was more than my favorite; it was my signature, how I signed my work as a trickster. What was wrapped around the rose was the same sort of thing . . . only a preemptive version.

Less of a “Gotcha” and more of a “Here I come, ready or not.”

We were in no way ready for this.

So it was at eight, for once not sleeping in, that I stood and stared at the rose lying on the scarred and stained surface of my bar. Help me, Earth, Sun, and Sky. What were we going to do now?

I continued to stare at the rose, was utterly ignored by the Earth, Sun, and Sky, and finally decided to put it in a vase after all. I filled one from beneath the sink and carefully picked up the flower by its green stem. That same stem was wrapped in that black silk ribbon with an absolutely perfect bow. I made sure the material didn’t touch the water. This was someone I did not want to insult, piss off, or even slightly annoy with the slightest hint of disrespect. One trailing black end of the glossy material was embossed with gold lettering. Only a few letters, a calling card if you will. It read KPONYΣ.

It almost looked as if it were English, if only with sharper angles than usual on the letters and the last symbol. It wasn’t though. It was Greek. I read a lot of languages and spoke even more. You picked up quite a bit when you wandered about like I did. But your average sorority girl or frat boy could’ve read this too. And if they couldn’t, they would’ve had to bong a beer for not memorizing the Greek alphabet, while standing on one foot, hopping up and down, and also, again, bonging a beer.

I’d taught some truly exceptionally entertaining lessons at colleges.

I studied the name with the same exquisite caution that I would use in studying how to defuse a live bomb. Really, the two weren’t that different. Cronus was either in town or was on his way. Neither was good. Considering the mutilated catatonic demon, I was guessing it was the first, which was far less than good. Leo and I had tried to figure out who could wipe out that many demons in so little time. Here was our answer.

The Greek legend, which for once was fairly close to the real thing, said Cronus was something other than a god. True enough. He was a Titan—he birthed gods, and was considered a creature of chaos and disorder. I, myself, rather approved of those two qualities, but he had taken it to an extreme. He was the only one in the world who could claim that he had reigned in Hell and ruled in Heaven—only Hell was Tartarus and Heaven was the Elysian Fields. One of the many pagan or païen versions of the final resting places of many religions, human and païen. Some human religions had one Heaven and Hell each and some religions had hundreds; we païen have thousands. Cronus had once dominated two of them. Two was enough.

Cronus was the seed to the Grim Reaper myth down to the sickle for harvesting souls instead of wheat and he’d been more than good at it.

Sickle. Galileo had been on the money, if not more articulate about it. Cronus and his sickle.

Then after years beyond the telling, Cronus left both Tartarus and the Fields and took to roaming the earth and it wasn’t to spread justice or show off martial arts skills. No, far from it. Too bad he’d missed that Kung Fu show from the seventies. It might have mellowed him—doubtful though. Raging psychos rarely saw the silver lining, the rainbows, enjoyed the purr of a basketful of happy kittens.

Raging psycho would be a step up for Cronus. No, it was better to be accurate in situations like this. More than a step. It would be a whole staircase of them. Raging psychos were in preschool learning what Cronus had several doctorate degrees in. He didn’t own the field, but it was safe to say he was MVP and then some.

“What’s that?”

I looked over my shoulder to see Leo coming out of the back office. He was up and at work early too. After he saw this he might turn around and go home. I wouldn’t blame him. Take that exotic dancer of his on a trip to Tahiti. Morocco in Tahiti, what could be more appropriate?

I nudged the vase with the rose down the bar toward him with one finger, my short nail eerily matching the petals above. “Bows don’t necessarily go on presents.”

“Cronus,” he said. “Shit. Holy fucking shit.”

While that was serious language for Leo, who had preferred ending worlds as opposed to cursing, it about summed it up. Cronus . . . he was all kinds of shit and then some.

“Yes. Cronus.” I folded my arms, one wide gold cuff filigree bracelet glittering in the light. Wonder Woman had nothing on me. And we . . . we had nothing on Cronus. We hadn’t even put him on our list, because it would’ve been ludicrous. Overkill. Like making a list of what could possibly ruin your camping trip. Rain. Cold. Bugs. Or an asteroid the size of the moon hitting your tent dead on. Cronus was the asteroid. It simply didn’t pop to mind. Unfortunately, there were no coincidences in life. It was Cronus behind all this, simply because anything else that could take on that many demons would still shag ass as far from Cronus as it could get. Where the Titan stepped, all the païen world fled his shadow.

There was a new sheriff in town. And he was the kind that when he accomplished his business and left town, the town itself tended not to be there anymore.

Crumbling ruin.

Scorched earth.

Burned bones.

And one rose to leave on the grave.

“At least it’s not the Auphe,” Leo said as we both stared at the ribbon wrapped around the rose. The Auphe had been the A scribbled on the back of my list.

“Shhh,” I hushed immediately. Just as back in the slightly older days when humans didn’t say the devil’s name for fear he would appear, we païen felt close to the same way about the Auphe. The less said about them, the better. The less thought about them, the better. The less everything about them, the better. Nature’s first and best predator. Nature’s first and best psychopathic murderers. Nature’s first really big fuckup. I knew exactly where I was on the badass scale and I was varsity all the way when I was at full trickster status, but the Auphe? No one fucked with the Auphe.

Subject was over.

“Have you talked to him lately?” I asked. Lately for Leo, a benched god, could’ve been yesterday or five thousand years ago. I hadn’t ever talked to him. I’d never seen him. I didn’t want to. When I’d talked about that ranking of gods, tricksters, and demons, I’d left a few rungs out. Cronus was above gods and that would most likely make me nothing more than an annoying chirpy cricket in his eyes.

“Lately?” Leo grimaced. “Try never. He did send me the . . . ah . . . equivalent of a thumbs-up when I was toying with the world-destroying hobby. And don’t ask what he sent. You don’t want to know, but they—or what was left of them—did have a ribbon on them just like this one. I think”—he touched the ribbon with a careful finger—“it’s his way of saying if we don’t bother him, he won’t bother us.”

“You mean you,” I pointed out. “He won’t bother you. He might accidentally step on me and scrape me off the bottom of his shoe when he found the nearest curb.”

“Not exactly eloquent, but not exactly wrong either.” Leo decided eight thirty in the a.m. was fine by him to break out the liquor, opening a beer for me and then himself. “He spawned the great Greek horndog god Zeus, who would rape anything living and hump anything not. And with Zeus being a vast improvement over his father, I don’t want to even guess what Cronus would do . . . to anyone, not now.”

“Now that he’s insane?” I prodded.

“He was always insane. Let’s say, over time, probably exponentially more insane.” Leo took a swallow of his beer.

“Well, we do know what he would do in one particular case. Demons.” I tasted my own beer before getting my cell phone and making the call. Voice mail. I’d only called Eligos twice now since he’d hit Vegas last year and both times I’d gotten voice mail. How he made his quota, I had no idea. My Avon lady had five times his work ethic. If you can’t reach a demon, you can’t sign over your soul, now can you?

“Why?” Leo had already finished his beer and started on his second, which he tapped against the phone.

“Because he knows the what and we now know the who. Put it together and maybe we’ll know the real why.” I gave up on the beer and decided bad news of this sort called for something a little more efficient in perking up your mood. Godiva dark chocolate liqueur. I kept it for me and me only. It made one helluva martini and dessert mixed in one. That was the great thing about being human. Instant chocolate, instant endorphins.

“Again, why? Whatever it is that Cronus wants or is doing, there’s nothing we can do but stay out of his way. And I’d have said the same thing last year before we were both temporarily demoted.” He watched as I whipped up the world’s fastest sugar-loaded orgasm, studying me intently before accusing, “But you’re curious, aren’t you?”

“Among other things.” I told him those other things as I coated the martini glass in a slow slide of chocolate, then admitted, “But curiosity is one of them. That’s why you’ll always be an amateur trickster, studly, never a pro.”

“Because I can suspend my curiosity and trickster-loving ways to not die a horrible death?” he said dryly.

“If you’re careful enough, you don’t have to die.” The chocolate was all I’d hoped, the alcohol a little less. “And the curiosity isn’t actually a choice. You’re born with it.”

“Like scaly sex appeal.” The air shimmered across the bar and then Eli was sitting on a stool. He was wearing a brown bathrobe, expensive naturally, and his normally sleek pelt of straight hair was rumpled from sleep. Demons actually slept. There was an interesting fact. Or maybe they only slept while transformed into their human costumes. Regardless, I was glad he’d bothered with the robe, because I knew there was nothing beneath it. Eli in pj’s—I just couldn’t see it. He yawned and went on. “I’m assuming whatever you found out is earth shattering . . . as in a ‘Kennedy killed Marilyn Monroe and her corpse rose from the grave to pull a zombie-revenge assassination’ category of earth shattering. Because it is that early in the morning. That goddamn early.” He cheered as he brushed a hand over his hair. “You want to know who really did kill them? If you’re as curious as you say you are, maybe we could arrange a trade. I know you don’t have a soul, not the kind I can take, but I have quite a few things I could think of that you could cough up that would make me a very happy demon.”

“Happy? Really?” I smiled, put down the martini glass, lifted the rose from the vase, and tossed it to him. He caught it effortlessly and with an inhuman speed I’d unfortunately had to give up for a while. Turning it in his hand, he saw the ribbon . . . and read the name on it. “Happy now?” I asked. I didn’t have to be curious about that, because I knew the answer.

One big fat no.

Since Eligos was in his human body, it had the same human reaction as any human body. He paled slightly. I was impressed. A lesser demon/human would’ve probably vomited on the bar. “This had best not be some pathetic version of a trickster joke,” he said with a quiet as darkly malignant as a newborn cancer cell.

“Trust me, sugar, even I don’t think this is funny.” I returned to the martini. “We all liked it much better when Cronus was stuck in Tartarus or had that bipolar happy moment and skipped around the Elysian Fields keeping things in order. But those days are over. He’s here in this world now. Has been for a few hundred years, but this is the first time he’s decided to have fun. But for the life of me, I can’t think why killing demons would be that entertaining for him. Like swatting a fly. A slow-moving, half-dead fly. Where’s the sport?”

“There has to be a reason,” Leo added. “Cronus is mad as they come, but even if killing your kind were entertaining for him, he’d have still bored of it long before nine hundred.”

Eli ignored the “reason” topic, which meant he knew the reason and had known it most likely when he’d had his chat with me at the car dealership. That made him more deceitful than I’d given him credit for and I’d given him very high credit in that department. It was too bad about him being a murdering sociopathic spawn of Hell. We tricksters did love deceit. If he were a peacock, his feathers would be brilliant, bright, and attracting every female in sight. But he wasn’t a vain bird. He was a killer and right now a stronger and quicker one than I was. I kept that in mind as I regarded him over a surface of rippling chocolate. I also kept in mind that I was smarter. False modesty could kiss my ass.

“Where did you get this?” he asked, dropping it onto the bar.

“It was left on the doorstep. I found it when I got up this morning.” I sipped.

“And why did he leave it here . . . for you?”

“Insane doesn’t always have to mean impolite, but to be honest,” I said, surprised the air didn’t sizzle on my tongue when I uttered that word, “it’s less for me than for Leo. Cronus was a ... a fan, I guess you’d say . . . of his work. He has a certain respect for him, rather like you would for a precocious three-year-old who drew you an especially pretty picture for the refrigerator.”

Leo growled at me but confirmed, “If we stay out of his way, he won’t obliterate us. Maybe. But we know the same isn’t true for you. Too bad.” He gave a rumble of amusement. “Yes, too damn bad.” Leo didn’t out and out grin often, but he did now as he finished off his second beer.

“You wouldn’t know why Cronus is into killing helpless little minnows like you, do you?” I gave Eli a second chance to tell us the why . . . although the why was only half of what I was interested in—the how I could use it to my benefit was something I was invariably interested in. “Don’twant to share? Sharing’sgood for the ...mmm ... whoops. Not the soul obviously. Psychological well-being?” I leaned over the bar and smelled the rose still in his hand. “Assuming you have a being to house that psyche in.” I looked into eyes that were distant, the bits of copper bright in churning thought. “And, Eli? Sweetie, that’s one assumption you can’t be making for too long, you hear?”

He heard all right. Enough so that he was gone, bathrobe and all, but he left the rose behind on the stool. Off to Hell to tell his boss and up the food chain it would go . . . all the way to the top—or maybe bottom would be more appropriate. I walked around and replaced the flower in the vase before resting a hand on Leo’s shoulder to whisper in his ear, completing what I’d been telling him while making the martini.

After nearly a minute, I stopped talking and went back to my chocolate elixir of the gods. You should never waste the good things in life. And where Eli had gone, there were no good things, not ever. “Flowers don’t always say, ‘I love you,’” I murmured to the empty stool as I picked up the rose.

“You are a bad, bad girl,” Leo said with a reluctant admiration. Coming from such a bad boy, that meant something.

“Yes, I am,” I said with a satisfaction that tasted sweeter than the chocolate. “I most definitely am.”

“What do you mean we can’t kill demons?”

Zeke sounded as outraged as an eighty-year-old meat-and-potatoes guy told he had to go vegan. “Relax, killer.” I pulled up my hair and then tied my sneakers. I hated sneakers, but you couldn’t run in boots. Or you could, but it wasn’t cardio-effective. How many blocks did a chocolate martini equal? I did know who killed Marilyn Monroe, thank you, Eligos, spawn of Hell, and I even knew where Jimmy Hoffa was, or what was left of him, but blocks versus chocolate calories, that I didn’t know. I only knew I had to run them off or outrunning demons was going to get more and more difficult. “It’s just for a while—until Cronus is out of Vegas. You don’t want to get between him and his nummy-num.” Or whatever a demon was for him.

“Cronus . . . He was a Titan, right?”

I gave an approving pat to Griffin’s knee as he leaned against the back of my car parked in its usual spot in the alley. “Someone studied at Eden House.”

“I studied,” Zeke complained as he gave the nearest tire a considering look and his foot twitched. I gave him a similar look and he rethought it, scuffing his shoe against the asphalt instead. Boys. Ex-angel, in reality probably older than I was, twenty-five human years genetically, but he was still a spoiled kid without his toys . . . dead demons. And that made him a strange spoiled boy, but weren’t we all a little strange now and again?

Zeke would survive the vacation, I thought, although I was sympathetic. He could take up a new hobby. Golf. Tennis. Goddamn jogging, like me. Male metabolism—it was proof that God, the Christian one, was male. As I glanced at his flat stomach, my sympathy for Zeke decreased a tiny bit as Griffin spoke.

“You studied how to kill demons and weapons. I’m fairly sure you napped during mythology, history, scripture, and so on.” Griffin folded his arms and looked up at a noontime blue sky, retrieving the memory from the sound of his semiexasperated exhalation . . . but only semi. It was Zeke. You rolled with the punches there. Zeke was Zeke. You had to love him or try to murder him in his sleep. There was no in-between. “Although the way you managed to sleep with your eyes open was impressive,” Griffin went on to drawl.

It would’ve had to be. When it came to teaching I didn’t think Eden House rapped a slacker’s knuckles with a ruler. They were ridding the world of demons for the glory of Heaven after all, not putting together a bingo game and spaghetti dinner. There would be less rapping and more capping, one to the brain and bring in the new recruit. Bury the slacker in the rose garden. Good fertilizer wasn’t to be wasted.

“I was not napping,” Zeke emphasized. “I was in my happy place.”

I finished with my sneakers and straightened. “And where would that be, Kit?”

“Someplace I can kill demons,” he said as if it were perfectly obvious, and if I’d given it a fraction of a second of thought, it would’ve been. “There was no Cronus there.”

“Believe me, that seems to be Cronus’s happy place too right now. Griff’s right. He’s a Titan. He created gods. Gods, Zeke. I know you think you’re badass, kicking demon tail right and left, and precious as a fluffy bunny while you do it.” I bounced on my toes and began to stretch. I pretended I didn’t hear a joint pop. I didn’t ignore Zeke’s irritation though. Why poke him with a verbal stick if I wasn’t going to let myself enjoy it? I did love to tease my guys, but I also had to impress on them how serious this was or they would be squashed as quickly and easily as that fluffy bunny I’d compared Zeke to. “But Cronus has killed more than nine hundred demons in six months. He’s ruled one of our heavens. He was imprisoned in one of our hells but took it over. Think about it. He was thrown down into Tartarus and made everyone there the equivalent of his bitches in no time. The inmate became the warden. Makes you think, huh?”

Apparently not. “You’re afraid of this guy?” Zeke asked skeptically. “You?”

“Hell, yes,” I admitted freely. Damn, there went another joint. My once-conditioned body seemed to be falling to pieces fast. The maintenance on a human body was unbelievable. If you slept wrong, you were crippled for the day. How could a species manage to sleep wrong? How had they survived to swarm the earth? A bad mattress to them was like an asteroid to the dinosaurs.

Them.

Me.

Damn it.

“He can hop from dimensional realm to realm,” I went on, “from place to place in this one, can kill nine hundred demons. . . . I hate to keep repeating myself, but, guys, seriously . . . nine hundred demons. Finds ruling a heaven and a hell not challenge enough, and when Leo almost destroyed the world, Cronus thought it was cute . . . like a puppy mauling your slipper. Or a kitten pouncing on a ball of yarn. You remember the Ark of the Covenant? Melting people’s faces? Disintegrating their bones? He probably uses that as a retro lava lamp. He’ll kill you and the worst thing is, he probably won’t even notice that he did.” I stopped stretching and checked that my T-shirt covered my gun. “And that’s it. If that doesn’t convince you, I give up.”

“If he’s so indestructible, how are you going to stop him?” Griffin asked.

“Stop him? How can we join up?” Zeke countered.

“We can’t stop him, and you’ll stay away from him or I’ll paddle your behind, if he doesn’t rip a cheek off like he did that demon’s wing. So just go home, watch TV, get naughty, whatever, and be safe,” I ordered.

Zeke looked disgruntled, but then again, he looked disgruntled ninety-nine percent of the time. If the demon-killing business ever lightened up, he could be a postal worker, no aptitude testing needed. Griffin, on the other hand, was the same sensible Griffin I’d always known him to be. He wore a more disappointed expression than I expected. . . . Griffin was a demon killer, but he didn’t go into withdrawal like Zeke did. It wasn’t the be-all and end-all of his existence. That was why I chalked up his glum look to there being less action lately, Eli having apparently warned his demons to steer clear of the four of us if they could.

I should’ve chalked it up to my stupidity instead. I might’ve been smarter than Eli, and might even be half as smart as I thought I was, but it wasn’t smart enough to see what was coming. And I hated that. Screw my ego. I hated that one of my boys was in trouble, and I didn’t see it. I let him down.

But that came later. For now, oblivious, I decided I’d rather run someplace more picturesque than the several blocks to the gym and drove to Sunset Park. Back to nature—at least as close as you could come in the midst of Vegas. There were ducks and geese and a pond. Unless you wanted your ankles pecked, you didn’t run there. I had the respect . . . more accurately, the suspicious wariness . . . of a good deal of the païen world. On top of that, at times in my life I’d been worshipped, respected, and feared by humans. And then there were demons . . . ppfff. Let’s just say that was the second bumper sticker on my car. SLAYER NOT LAYER and I DON’T BRAKE FOR DEMONS. Next to Cronus, I might be a gnat, but compared to everything else, I was content with my place in the world.

Except for geese. Geese feared and respected no one. No ankle, human or otherwise, was safe. It could be even Titans like Cronus bowed to their pure, feathered evil. It was worth thinking about. And I did as I thought about other equally ridiculous things. I liked ridiculous things. I avoided the pond and jogged to the mesquite flats for a real run. Once there had been homeless people there, but the police had run them off some time ago and I often found the flats empty except for jackrabbits and ground squirrels. It was quiet company, although at least once during every run a chipmunk tried to commit suicide by diving under my feet. They weren’t bright, but they were pretty to look at . . . much like Leo’s dates, which made me curse the rodents a bit more as I avoided squashing their little furry heads as I ran. It was big of me to admit that to myself, about Leo’s women, and as a reward I decided to cut fifteen minutes off the run.

There were also other animals on the flats, ones that didn’t throw themselves under me—cottontail, quail, trails of ants, a hunkered-down spider here and there, and tiny lizards darting along the cracked ground.

There were also the big lizards.

They appeared in a circle around me. I stopped in midstride, kicking up a spray of dirt. There were eight of them—demons in human form. Normally it would’ve been like a convention of lawyers, the ambulance-chasing kind. The ones with bright teeth and an even brighter magnetism . . . an irresistible appeal that can convince you to sue your own ninety-eight-year-old grandma when you trip on a crack in her sidewalk. But all that potential charisma, it was still a holstered weapon behind flat eyes. They stood motionless, arms at their sides. Every one of them a prince made of pure poison. Flawless but empty of anything except hunger and hate.

And then there was Prince Charming himself—Eligos. With a brown leather jacket, dark bronze finely woven shirt and slacks, he forced me to say, “I’m way underdressed for this party.” I turned my head to take the entire nine of them in. “All this for me, Eli? You do know how to flatter a girl.”

“I remember our last party. I wanted this one to end differently.” He smiled, but his nonexistent heart wasn’t in it. There was none of its usual carnivorously merry gloating. “Think of my colleagues as doormen. They’re to keep you around while I make my Tupperware pitch. I don’t want to end up like Solomon before you’ve heard me out.”

“And you think they can do the job?” I asked scornfully, not bothering to go for my gun. The disdain aimed at Eli was pure bluff. I was good, but stuck in human form, unless my Smith turned into a machine gun—maybe a nice MAC-11—nine demons were too much for me to handle. Eight lower-level demons maybe—I was good with the Smith. But eight demons and Eli, no. I knew my limitations. Just as Eli seemed to know his.

“Oh, they’re all Daffys to be sure, expendable ducks in a shooting gallery,” he dismissed, not that the Daffys protested. Better to be potentially expendable than to have Eli promptly expend you then and there with no hesitation. “But there are eight of them. And, yes, you are extraordinarily good at the shape-shifting. It’s a bear, it’s a wolf, it’s a shark. Great magic show. But as long as you don’t pull Godzilla out of your hat, I think there are enough demons here to slow you down sufficiently for me to make my move. And it will be an exceptionally nasty move, I promise you.”

Eight demons, and I would’ve made my own move. Eight demons and Eli, and I had to swallow my pride, be practical, and pretend I wasn’t afraid, because everyone, unless you’re suicidal or crazy, is afraid of dying. . . . Tricksters are no exception.

“Selling Tupperware, that is what you do, isn’t it, Eli? Selling plastic for people’s lives and souls. And you’re good at it—I’ve seen you in action. Making a pitch to a trickster, though, ever done that? Someone whose very first word is a lie?” I sat down on the ground, fingers tapping on my knees, legs crossed. “Let’s see your best, Eligos. Let’s see your gorgeous ass in action.”

“You doubt me?” He peeled off his jacket and sat on the ground opposite me, sprawled like a catalogue model. All that was missing was the price tag. I didn’t know how many people found out Eli’s price was more than they could pay, but I was willing to guess it was a whole damn lot.

“More like I don’t doubt myself,” I said, “but don’t let that stop you. Here I sit, with bated breath, as the poets say. All the Daffys around us too, I’m sure.” I knew Eli. He hadn’t let them in on what he was going to say to me. They would know about Cronus, all demons did by now, but they didn’t know about me. Daffys weren’t worth Eli’s time or secrets. I propped my chin on fisted hand and invited, “Sing your song, pretty canary. I’m listening . . . with every bit of my being. Think about that, sugar, every bit of a trickster’s being, all aimed at hearing your story—true, false, or what falls in between.”

“You’re so positive you can tell the difference?” he asked, partially offended, partially pretending. “You can tell my lies? With all my practice, which is a damn sight longer than yours, doll.”

“Sweetie, you might embrace the lie, love it, spread it, wear it as a second skin, but I’m a living lie. I was born one and you can’t compete with that.” I reached over and tapped him on his nose with utterly false affection. “But go on, lizard boy. Give it your best. I’ll still know the truth.”

He did, and he was good, because it was the truth. Or the part of it that he told me. The rest he kept to himself. A sin of omission, the holy would say. Careful dancing and smart playing, I say. Some of the very best lies are the truth, only told for a sinister reason.

“Truth. That’s so bizarre, so vanilla in the spectrum that it actually could turn a three sixty and become a kink. I’d marvel, but you’re in a hurry. Fine then, changeling bitch,” he said matter-of-factly. “Here’s your truth. I want you to contact Cronus for us. I want you to negotiate on our behalf.”

“Negotiate? I don’t even know what he wants. Not yet.” I would find out, however. As much as Leo wanted to stay out of this, I knew better. It wasn’t going to happen that way, and that was my fault. But I didn’t feel guilty. I did what I did. I was who I was. There was no sense in second-guessing myself at this late date in my life.

“No, you don’t know what Cronus wants, but I do. That’s enough. All you need to ask is what he’ll accept instead. What will satisfy him in its place?” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you like how I told you that without telling you anything at all? Does that impress you? Rev your trickster engines?”

I took out my gun, slowly enough not to startle the lower-level demons ringing me. I balanced it on my knee. “If I do talk to Cronus,” I offered, “you don’t think he’ll reveal his big grand plan to a fellow païen?”

“As you said, he’s mad. Who can say what the mad will do?” One of the flats’ small lizards crawled onto Eli’s hand and he lifted it to look into its tiny eyes. “Whatever the outcome, we’ll deal with it then.” The tiny lizard hissed at him. It seemed to strike a chord of brotherhood in him and he let it loose in the dirt.

More truth. I was actually getting tired of it. It wasn’t challenging at all. “Why don’t you tell me first, Eligos? If I face Cronus, and I don’t see why I should, I want to be fully armed with all the information I need. Like precisely why he’s killing so many of you.” I swiveled and waggled the fingers of my free hand at the eight silent demons. “And doesn’t that make you think? That if one was a païen Titan, crazy as a bedbug, who loved to kill masses of demons and was looking to get in some ‘fishing’ today, where would he look right now?” The mannequins continued to look blankly ahead, like soldiers. I sighed, trying again. “Maybe for a bunch of not-that-bright demons all in one place? Picking on a poor little trickster like me?” I tilted my head at the nearest nameless cannon fodder, my gold hoop earrings chiming cheerfully. “Shame on you.”

This time six of them got the message, self-survival flaring in the formerly empty eyes as they disappeared. Two of them were more loyal . . . or more stupid. The first I shot before he had a chance to move. I wasn’t as quick as Eli anymore, but I could still take a bottom-feeder demon. I could be in a ninety-year-old body and have done that, beaten it to death with my walker.

The second leaped at me, transforming to scales, bat wings, and a narrow, killing crocodile jaw. I rolled, shooting it in the eye right before it hit me. Without their brains and part of their heads, they both dissolved quickly to blackness and sank into the dirt. “Four is a crowd,” Eli commented, unconcerned. Daffys come and Daffys go, and it didn’t matter a damn to him . . . unless it was more than nine hundred.

I sat back up and returned the gun to my knee. “And where was that nasty move you were going to make?”

He curled his lips in a smug smile. “I made a different one.” Hooking one finger, he tugged at empty air with it. “I caught you, Trixa. Whether Cronus is fishing or not, I caught my own fish. You’re too curious for your own good. That’s your flaw and a fatal one.” The smile turned darker. “My favorite kind.”

He was wrong and he was right, and I didn’t call him on either one. I simply got down to business. “I’ll talk to Cronus. Or I’ll try. But you have to give me something to work with. He has to know that I know; otherwise he has no reason to meet. He’s not a trickster. His curiosity doesn’t rule him. Whatever he’s truly after, what you know, I doubt it’ll make much difference to me. I can’t do what Cronus can do. Telling me the truth won’t hurt your cause. It’ll only help it.”

That was how to tell a lie. The truth wouldn’t hurt his cause, because if Cronus was involved, I was sure Eli’s cause was lost anyway, but my cause? The truth would help that. “And,” I had to ask because Eli would be highly suspicious if I didn’t, “by the way, what exactly is in this for me, cutie? I don’t remember that coming up as we play like kids in a sandbox.” I let the dirt trickle through the fingers of my other hand, the one without the gun. “The bunnies and squirrels are sweet and all, the company entertaining, but . . .”

He had me pinned flat to the ground almost before I saw him move. The difference between almost seeing and not seeing was the barrel of my gun jammed into his gut, just as something hard jammed my hip. Deceit and tricksters, violence and demons. Instant aphrodisiac for both. But neither of us was ruled by our hormones. We were both too smart, not to mention that I’d sooner shoot myself than ever do a demon.

“For six months. Do this for me and I won’t kill your pet peris for that long,” Eli said, his mouth a bare inch from mine and his hand around my throat, “and you know that I can. They’re no more threat to me now than usual Eden House humans, which is to say not at fucking all.”

My guys. My boys. He was threatening my boys. I pulled the trigger without hesitation. He was thrown off me with a gaping hole in his stomach, not that it did much good. To a demon like Eligos, that was the equivalent of a hangnail. He sat up as the wound closed. “A year,” I countered. A skilled negotiator can experience emotion, but she can’t let it affect how she makes the deal. The deal is all, especially when her family is depending on her.

He grinned, not taking it personally. That was another thing negotiators didn’t do. “You would’ve made such a good demon, Trixa. You have that instinct—the go-for-the-heart-and-balls-all-in-one instinct. It is the waste of an eternity. All right. A year for your pets.”

He stood. “Cronus needs a thousand demon wings. Together they will form a map of Hell. It’s a map to Lucifer, part and parcel of Hell’s whole. Lucifer is Hell—think of him as a tree, appropriately dark and terrifying, with a root system that travels almost forever. Lucifer is the tree and we demons and the souls inhabit the roots, which is actually more horrifying yet fashionable than it sounds. Black and twisted and souls screaming under a sky that never stops burning. Location. Location. Location. But I have no idea why Cronus wants to find Lucifer himself. As you said, Cronus already has had a hell and heaven, so why would he want another? We demons don’t even want to know where Lucifer is. As we fell, we saw his true self. What he truly was—pure raving asshole. If I want to see that, I can look in the mirror.” He felt his jawline. “A handsome one in my case, but all the same.”

“You don’t actually see Lucifer?” I said with a generous dose of skepticism—the only dose I carried.

“Nope. We can take his orders without having to see him. But while we don’t have to see, we can’t avoid listening. Great intercom system. And he’s not happy now. Bitch, bitch, bitch. So find Cronus’s price as promised.” He lifted a black bloodied hand from his stomach to his lips, then leaned to leave that black kiss on my cheek as I sat up. Sealed with a kiss. So dramatic.

As if any seal could guarantee my word or promise.

“A thousand demon wings creates a map to Hell. Who came up with that? Wasn’t MapQuest available? No Internet service Downstairs?” My skepticism was thicker as I wiped his blood away.

“God.” He looked up at the sky and waggled a few fingers hello. “It was his last gift to the pigeons. If a second war comes and angels actually make it into Hell, it won’t do them much good if they can’t find the boss. If they can’t find him, they can’t destroy him, and if they can’t destroy him, they can’t destroy Hell. And, yes, we have the Internet, but it’s dial-up. Wouldn’t be Hell otherwise.” He bent down and retrieved that expensive jacket.

“Do what you do, Trixa, and if Cronus doesn’t rip you apart and remove all traces of your existence from space and time, you have my number. Let me know how it goes.” He put his hand, thumb, and finger in the universal “Call me” gesture, and he was gone.

I had his number all right. I only hoped he didn’t have mine.

Standing, I started running again. My legs shook a little and I didn’t holster my gun. The squirrels didn’t give me any grief over it. Eli had shown me something from his past, something I didn’t like, and I didn’t have to accept.

Pride goeth before a fall. Great big smug pride goeth before one damn long, hard fall. That went for everyone. Angels, demons, humans . . .

But not tricksters. Not the careful ones.

The Holier Than Thou didn’t always get it right.