Rob Thurman - Grimrose path

Life was like that. If there was a master plan in place, fairness didn't seem to enter into it. And as much as my kind and I tried to make up for that… vengeance is never as good as remaining innocent and whole.

"I can't hear him. I can't hear him. I can't hear him." Zeke was in the front seat, a.480 Ruger in his hand. He was rocking slightly, back and forth. The chanting and rocking made him look like a lost child. The gun and murderous rage that made his face as blank as an executioner's hood made him look anything but.

I'd taken over the driving. I wanted Griffin safe almost as much as Zeke did, but I didn't want to plow over the top of some granny's ecofriendly little hybrid to do it. Cute, save-the-planet green, and made for getting caught in the undercarriage of a bus driven by a hell-bent-for-leather man with tunnel vision for saving his partner. "If you don't hear him, then he's unconscious. He's not in any pain. That's good, right?" I stopped the bus on a road now covered with layers of dirt except for one clear set of tire tracks. Demons could pop in and out as they pleased, but they couldn't do it with people. Either they had to have permission, like the old completely false myth of the vampire needing an invitation, or the person wouldn't survive the trip. I didn't know which it was and I didn't care right now. All I cared about was Griffin and if they brought him here, they'd have to do it the mundane way-in a car. About two blocks away one house, a finished one that had once had landscaping that had since died, hosted a light-one light that flickered, in and out, like a campfire or like a tiny bit of Hell itself.

"I can't hear him. How can that be good? How can that be any fucking good?" Zeke bolted to his feet and was through the door into the night and running before I had a chance to snatch at his shirt, an arm, anything at all. Desperation-where human speed ended and more-than-human began.

"Shit." I was right behind him, or so I thought, as he began to pull away from me. Maybe Zeke always heard him, even when Griffin was asleep. There could be some internal hum all the time, ocean waves against a subconscious shore, a mental heartbeat. I'd thought Zeke would know if Griffin was alive or dead, but I might have been wrong. He could be running on nothing but hope or denial, and I couldn't know for sure, because I couldn't catch him to ask.

I pushed myself to go faster when I knew there was nothing left to give, but surprisingly I was wrong. Desperation worked for Zeke and it worked for me as well. I ran through the door of the house only seconds behind him to nearly crash into him. He was still, looking up, as stunned as someone watching the sky fall-the moon and stars, all coming down in an impossible crash and burn. The end of days. The end of life… the end of his life.

"Now, now, Tweetie. Don't look so sad. He's not dead. I keep my promises… well, almost never. But this time I made an exception."

I ignored Eli's voice as I followed Zeke's unwavering focus to Griffin hanging above us. His wrists were tied together and that rope wrapped several times to the wrought-iron rail of the second-floor loft. His feet hung just inches over our heads. In the low light, candlelight, I recognized without thought, I could see the purpling bruise that covered one side of his face, from temple to jaw. His shirt was ripped and bloody, but not saturated. The slashes were superficial, but the head wound, that wasn't. Eligos was telling the truth though. Griffin was still breathing. He was alive, but unconscious. That's why Zeke couldn't hear him now, but would hear him again.

Absolutely goddamn would.

Zeke was growling now. It wasn't the sound a human would make, nor an angel or demon. It was the sound of fury incarnate and Eli was a trigger pull away from being a puddle incarnate dripping off the chair he was currently sitting in. I'd looked away from Griffin and there was my least favorite demon in all his glory through the arched doorway to the right… having takeout on the dining room table by candlelight, which I knew he thought brought out the highlights in his hair. I was not in the mood for that or any other of his vanities.

"It's Thai." He tilted the chair back and waved a fork spearing a piece of chicken. I could smell the coconut curry. "I didn't think you were ever going to figure it out and get here. I would've eaten my compadres instead of wasting them to grout cleaner if I'd known you'd be so long." That's when I saw the pools of black on the tile floor surrounding the table-enough to have been at least ten demons.

"So who told you?" he added as he leaned back farther and forked the chicken into his mouth. I put a hand on Zeke's wrist before he could raise his hand and pull that trigger.

"Get Griffin down, Kit," I murmured. "We need to get him to a hospital. He's the important thing now, not Eligos." Zeke often couldn't see reason or rather, he saw a reason that escaped the rest of us, but he saw the truth in what I said and was gone instantly up one side of two sets of stairs in the foyer that led up to the second floor.

"Come on, Trixa. I saved your peri from some flunkies who thought they had enough brain cells to actually have ideas and plans of their own." He snorted. "Plans… Can you believe that? I told you I wouldn't make a move on your pets for a year, and I went wildly above and beyond that promise to save this one from demons other than myself. I think a little reward…"

"Beelzebub," I said, cutting him off. "We left him on Tropicana Avenue. He was mostly in one piece if you're interested in changing that."

"Ah." He made a face. "You made that far too easy. You're no fun at all," he grumbled, dropping the fork into the Styrofoam container. "I was ready to use my wiles, the pure sex appeal that comes off me in waves. Hell, it comes off me like a damn tsunami and you go and ruin it by just giving up that piece of fucking worthless shit."

I gave him a smile, but it wasn't for him or for me… It was for Griffin. There was only one reason I hadn't killed Beelzebub myself… because having a demon do it would be the worst death Beelzebub could suffer. His blackly pathetic hopes would die before his body did. Death of spirit, death of body, and it still wouldn't be enough to pay for having a part, no matter how passive, in what had been done to Griffin.

"Think you're clever, don't you?" Eli said, waving a hand through the flame of the several candles surrounding his dinner. The flames spread over his hand before he extinguished them with a snap of his fingers. "But I know what you want, his death to be the slightest edge more horrifying because it comes from his most eager hope. Perhaps his last hope. I like the way you think, Trixa. But guess what? I'm no one's subcontractor and I've done you favor enough today. Hanging around aboveground where Cronus could take my wings, all to save a former fellow rebel. I'd think you'd be grateful… not trying to shovel more work onto me." He pushed the container of Thai food away. "I remember him, you know. There isn't a demon in Hell I don't know, but your pet… Glasya-Labolas… he hung with the big boys. Not as big or bad as me, naturally, but neither was he a former Candygram pigeon. He had balls. He was on the front lines in the Fall-one of the willing, not the wandering. Justly damned, not drafted. A true soldier, a warrior of God and Lucifer. And after we set up shop Downstairs, he did things…" He grinned, happy to be spreading the news. "Let's just say he set the bar a little higher for those who someday might hope to be… well… me."

"He's not Glasya-Labolas. He's not a demon. He's something so different from you, you could never comprehend it." Before I could move to stab him with the fork he'd discarded, Zeke called my name. I stepped back out of the doorway and beneath Griffin's unconscious body.