The Grimrose Path

Chapter 6

Checkers.

It was true and I never would’ve guessed, but the world is strange like that. Cronus liked checkers.

He was waiting for me when I came downstairs that morning. Actually, not really. I gifted myself with an ocean full of flattery there. He was waiting for Leo. Leo had reached out and touched someone, as the commercials used to say, and that someone had in turn touched someone who in turn . . . Bottom line, Cronus was waiting for Leo to show up at work. Because this is where Leo had probably called from and to beings like Cronus, occupation versus a personal life . . . work versus your home, it was all anthills to them. And as powerful as Cronus was, in a way, that was a weakness too. An anthill was an anthill and so much trouble to tell the difference between them.

Waiting here would do.

I knew it was Cronus the moment I opened the door to the stairs and saw him. I had one hand still rubbing lotion on one arm when I froze—froze except for continuing to automatically rub in the lotion. When I’d figured out I was going to have to work to keep my weight at demon-kicking prime, I’d then discovered living in the desert when you can’t shape-shift for a while is unbelievably hard on the skin. At the rate I was going, I would need an entire staff of cosmetic, nutrition, and health professionals to keep me from disintegrating in the next brisk wind.

But I was here now and still relatively moist and mobile . . . when I wasn’t facing a Titan. Not that Cronus looked like a Titan. I had no idea what a Titan did look like and I was happy to keep it that way. I was a trickster. I bowed to no one, not ever, but I knew that seeing a Titan . . . That couldn’t be a good thing. They had given birth to gods, were a level above gods, and Leo, a god himself, was hard to look at in his natural form. Not because he was hideous—he wasn’t. He was glorious and terrifying, an infinite darkness and a blinding light, good and evil, the earth and the sky, exuberant life and the unending stillness of death—all in one. He was inconceivable and when you looked at him, even a trickster like me knew . . . his existence defied the universe itself. And that was a god. What would seeing a Titan be like?

Most likely similar to seeing a nuclear explosion at ground zero. Oh, hey, there were some lights and it was really hot and then I was less than ashes—all in a microsecond of a microsecond. And best avoided if at all possible.

Today, Cronus looked like a nineteen-year-old kid. He sat at one of the tables, hands folded on the wood with a checkerboard in front of them. He wore a simple short-sleeved black T-shirt, inside out and backward with the tag showing. It was nice and flat, not curled as tags tended to be after a few washings. He also had on jeans, but this time right side out and with the zipper in the correct place.

“Cronus?” I asked, letting the door close and taking several cautious—any more cautious and they would’ve been going backward—steps toward him.

He didn’t look at me or act as if he’d heard me at all—only stared ahead, over the checkerboard and at the wall. His hair was brown and not dark brown or light brown or any human color of brown at all. There was no depth to the color, no shadings, no bounce of light. Every single hair was the same precise shade of brown, from the root to the end, and the same as the one next to it. Mud. It was the color of mud, not the kind you’d want to play in as a mud pie-loving kid either. It was the color of toxic mud found around chemical waste plants . . . where frogs are born with six legs, the fish with two heads, and nothing else is ever born at all. As I moved closer, I could see his skin was poreless. If it had been shiny, it could’ve passed for plastic and he could’ve passed for a giant doll. But it wasn’t—it sucked in the light the same as the hair and when I set across from him and saw his eyes . . .

I was wrong. He was a doll, the most cheaply made imitation of a human being you could find on a thrift store shelf after some little girl’s brother had popped the toy’s eyes out to see if they would roll like marbles. Cronus had only oval-shaped holes that revealed the shadows inside his skull. Shadows of men strangling their wives over the grocery bill, the drift of darkness that was SIDS claiming an infant’s life between one breath and no next, the midnight cloud of poisonous gas mixed with volcanic ash that buried cities and killed every living thing for miles and miles and miles.

This was Cronus. This was the thing that had put on its casual clothes, a human suit it couldn’t be bothered to get correctly although it could create living human beings if it wanted, beautiful, intelligent, amazing human beings. When you could make gods, human beings were as easy as chocolate cake out of an Easy-Bake Oven. A lightbulb and some batter. What was difficult about that? But it . . . No, best think nice, the better to play nice. . . . He . . . He had put on the casual attire, because the real deal was too much of a boring chore, and was impassively waiting for Leo to show up and play checkers.

Gods, Titans, how they both got their rocks off, it was usually freaky. The kind of freaky that would have a cross-dressing Furry who put pickles where pickles weren’t meant to go giving it all up and deciding The Price Is Right with a microwave dinner was as far away from vanilla as he planned to ever get again.

Checkers though . . . That was a new one. Not chess, the supposed game of Death—just simple, childlike checkers.

As I sat in the chair across from him . . . badass mother trickster—that’s one for you, TV censors—badass mother trickster, badass motherfucker, I reminded myself one last time. I opened my mouth to repeat his name, when the front door opened and a “customer” walked in. It didn’t matter who had unlocked the door, Cronus or the demon in a much better human and a familiar disguise; it was just one more thing to go wrong. I put it aside and went on as he took a seat across the room and pretended to read a shiny new copy of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Cute. I wondered which circle of Hell he was on. The silver hair and dark eyes—it was our friend Amdusias, better known as Armand from the casino. Eli had sent a minion he might actually miss. He truly did want the info on Cronus to offer up his future version of a fine cut of Kobe beef in the hopes of getting it.

Because, after all, I might lie to him.

Me? Never.

Or Cronus might erase me from reality as if I’d never existed, which would make passing on that info to Eli difficult. That Eli, so thoughtful, always thinking of others. Always thinking . . . period. Mother Teresa and Machiavelli had had nothing on him. But time to get back to the matters at hand—staying alive being part of that. For that I needed to be in top form, my attention focused.

“Cronus,” I tried again. I didn’t bother to introduce myself. I had a hundred names, not quite legion but more than a few, and Cronus wouldn’t give a damn about a single one of them. “Leo . . . Loki asked to speak with you on my behalf.”

Nothing.

“It’s about the demons you’ve been killing, their wings, the map to Lucifer. I was curious . . . just a little . . . as to what’s going on in that whole area. Anything the rest of us païen should be concerned about? Lucifer going to take a peek out of Hell like a groundhog? Checking for spring or Armageddon? Should we head to the Hearth?” The Hearth was païen sanctuary. The Light of Life shielded us there, from Heaven or Hell. It was our bomb shelter should the Penthouse or the Basement decide to take us or each other out. The Hearth was, ironically, the Noah’s Ark for pagankind. We were here first and we would be here last. End of story.

My questions to Cronus were good questions, I thought, païen pertinent definitely, and Titan or not, he was one of us . . . païen. Yet it was the same. Nothing.

“Okay,” I exhaled, pushing the shower-damp curls back. I’d tried playing nice. It hadn’t worked. Instead, I’d try playing a different way—I’d try playing first. “How about this?” Red was on my side . . . I took that as a sign. My color, my signature, my move. I pushed one of the round plastic circles forward on the board.

The head tilted downward, not as much taking in my move—Cronus didn’t need his empty eyes to be aware of that—as taking in my sheer audacity to make myself known to him. To stand up on my back legs, tiny ant that I was to him, and wave the others at him. Look at me! I exist! I exist right now, right here, the same as you!

Or he simply wanted to play the game. I was sincerely hoping it was the game, because ants who get noticed almost always get squashed. By a snotty little kindergartner’s foot or by the whim of a Titan. It didn’t matter which. Squashed was squashed, to ant or trickster.

A long pale finger extended and moved a black checker diagonally right.

I’d made it one second without being stomped flat. Good for me. I made my next move silently. We know how to talk, my kind, not as much as pucks—no one alive, dead, or in between could touch a puck for talking—but we know when to stay quiet as well, which is something no puck has ever known. I knew, very clearly, that if a Titan didn’t want to talk, I couldn’t make him. I would have to wait him out or wait until Leo showed up and see if it was a Boys’ Club. Guys and guys. Titans and gods. Too good to talk to down-to-earth fun-in-the-sun Trixa. I gritted my back teeth, then smiled victoriously ten minutes into the game as I jumped him and took his checker. Such a simple kids’ game and this is what he played. “So this is what you do for entertainment?” I asked more cheerfully as another customer, a tourist this time, came in and sat at yet another table to study the plastic laminate with four wide and wonderful choices of appetizers. Fried cheese. Fried chicken wings. Fried potatoes with ranch dressing. And all three combined on one plate and fried just a little bit more. “You play this for fun?” I went on.

The unnaturally smooth lips parted. “For keeps.” In the next moment with his turn, he took one of my checkers and the tourist immediately went limp, his face colliding with the table, his eyes nothing but red, blood trickling from his nose, ears, mouth. Gone . . . just like that.

For keeps. Cronus said it: He didn’t play for fun; he played for keeps.

I decided right then I liked it much better when he wasn’t aware of me or who was in my bar. A man had died because of me . . . and what I’d wrongly thought were some stellar checker skills. He’d died because of a stupid game—me and a stupid game that I hadn’t taken seriously. I took Cronus very seriously, so seriously that I thought he was beyond something as petty and throw-away spiteful as this. Killing more than nine hundred demons, yes, that I could see. Killing one polyester-clad tourist, who I sincerely hoped was right with whichever religion, philosophy, or lack thereof he nurtured in his soul, over a move in a game five-year-olds mastered—that was no better than pulling the wings off a butterfly. Who did that?

A Titan asshole apparently.

Armand shimmered. He might work for Eli and aspire to someday get lucky enough to stab his boss in the back to take his place, but I didn’t think he liked what he was seeing. I didn’t think he knew what he was seeing. Demons thought they were killers and they were. They thought they were monsters and they were. They thought they were evil and, yes, they were. They thought they were the first evil.

They weren’t.

They thought they’d invented evil.They hadn’t.Thought they were the very epitome of evil—they were only a shadow. I wasn’t proud of it, but the first evil had been païen. Cronus wasn’t the first evil, but he wasn’t a shadow of it either. He was the genuine article and Armand was only another ant, the same as me, and running for his anthill, which was better known as Hell, as fast as he could go. It wasn’t fast enough.

Cronus was gone from his chair and holding Armand up off the ground before pinning him against the wall, a butterfly soon to lose its wings. Armand, physically bound to earth, did what he thought would be his best chance of escaping. He changed to his true form: the scales, the snapping alligator j aws, the thrashing tail, jagged talons. They didn’t help him. Cronus didn’t bother to move as claws passed through the fake flesh that instantly repaired itself behind them. The only thing that helped Armand/Amdusias escape was his wings. If he considered death an escape and if I’d been the one facing a Titan who did not care for me at all, I would’ve happily considered it so. A vacation. A party.

I didn’t think Amdusias agreed with me. He screamed as one wing was torn off in Cronus’s hand. And then he was gone, a black puddle. His wing stayed, which was apparently a Titan trick, as normally it would’ve melted along with Amdusias.

I’d gotten to my feet to run. Not to help the demon. That was way beyond my capabilities and Amdusias wasn’t my problem. Locking the door and preventing someone else from walking in on a scene of dead tourist, demonic puddle, and Titan holding a demon’s wing like a cheap Vegas souvenir, that was my immediate concern. Large black puddles were easy to explain. . . . If cleanliness was your thing, then this wasn’t the bar for you. A bizarre eyeless fake human, a red and ebony dragon wing, and an expired tourist soaked in blood, that was more difficult than what looked like a very bad bathroom leak.

I was about to lock the door when Leo walked in. He took in Cronus, the wing, the dead man, and he shook his head. “I don’t know why I ever listen to you,” he said to me. I closed the door and gave the lock an annoyed twist shut. I didn’t worry about the blinds. They were closed. This was Nevada and this was a bar; there was no reason for them to be open.

“I feel bad enough about the guy,” I said, folding my arms. Did I look defensive? Probably. I sure as hell felt that way. I hadn’t planned on any collateral damage during all this unless it was demons. “I didn’t know Titans took checkers so seriously—that anyone took checkers that seriously.”

“Titans take all games seriously. I’m more of a free spirit. Make up the rules as I go along and then smash them into tiny pieces—along with the rest of the world,” Leo remarked as he leaned back against the door, as casual as they came. “Rules never were worth my respect, not even my own. What’s the point of creating something if you don’t destroy it? What goes up must always come down. What we make, well, damn, we have to break.”

It was said with a dark acid humor I hadn’t heard in a long time from him. From the bad old days when world destroying was as easy and as natural for him as reaching for the remote. He’d been a bad boy before the concept of bad boy had been spawned. That’s what Cronus would remember about him and that’s who Leo would be for the trick at hand. Who he’d be for me.

Pretend to be for me. Only pretend. No trick, no information was worth Leo going back to what he’d once been.

Loki. Lie-Smith, the Sly God, the Sky Traveler. And one of the few that Cronus might actually give a real answer to—dark and chaotic enough to be at least worth a pat on the head like a clever little doggy. I could feel it coming from Leo as I stood beside him, ripples in a midnight black lake—the darkness of space where the earth would have once been before he incited a war to blow it apart. Only a might-have-been, but a very close might-have-been.

And Cronus remembered it.

“Sly one.” This time when he opened his mouth, I saw what I hadn’t seen before; there was nothing behind his lips, the same as his eyes. Only shadows of things no one should have to see. “What game play you now?”

“None that would take a thousand wings to find that fallen pigeon Lucifer. What use would you have for a failed pretender to the throne in a hell literally of his own making? What could he give you who’ve had that and a heaven too?” The disdain was automatic for Loki or Leo. Lucifer might have the power of all the demons in Hell combined, but to us païen, he was and would always be another pigeon with scales. We were stubborn that way. Lucifer was one of them; whether lording it above or hiding below, he didn’t count.

At least he didn’t until Cronus gave Leo the answer he wouldn’t give me. It was one word. It didn’t need to be any more than that.

One word to tell us why a Titan would devour Lucifer and make that Hell his own.