Rob Thurman - Grimrose path

"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 paien. 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 paien, 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.