Rob Thurman - Grimrose path

"Catch him."

I looked up to see Zeke's face, pale and set, as he began to saw through the rope with one of his many knives. "I won't let him fall," I promised. No, no matter what Glasya-Labolas had done, Griffin would never fall.

The rope snapped. Zeke caught it and fed it hand over hand until I caught Griffin around the waist-a tumbling mass of limp legs, arms, and flopping blond hair. Either the hair or his soap smelled strongly of strawberries and I had an instant flash of who'd last done the shopping. Ninety-nine-cent shampoo. In the basket it goes. Pink? So what if it's pink? It's ninety-nine cents. Zeke, so very Zeke, and so very Griffin to have used it anyway, although on the weeks he shopped I knew he'd drop fifty dollars on shampoo alone.

It was a warm moment that vanished quickly when I realized that holding up one hundred and seventy pounds of unconscious male when I now had a completely human body wasn't precisely easy. I'd have to start lifting weights along with the running.

With Cronus in my life? I should live so long.

I eased Griffin to the floor, made it look simple, and pulled my phone to call 911. It was a triumph over protesting muscles, the second part of it, but I did it… because Eli was watching. In the midst of it all… Cronus and Griffin… Eli was still watching and if I forgot that, I wouldn't be around to worry about living with a Titan on the warpath. A demon would take me out instead. "Do me a favor, Eli," I said as I put a thumb on Griffin's right eyelid and lifted it and then followed with the left. His pupils were equal and reactive to the light. That was good, very good.

"Do you a favor?" He sounded interested and, worse yet, sounded as if he were right at my shoulder… ghosting up without me hearing a single scuff of his shoe. "You would owe me a genuine debt? One you would actually pay this time instead of being the liar and thief you were last time?" He said liar and thief with an oddly possessive affection. He'd said it before-fooling and cheating him while killing Solomon was as intriguing as it got to a demon bored with eternity.

"One I would pay," I replied after I finished with the 911 operator. Zeke was beside us now, his hand cupping Griffin's jaw and then his forehead resting against the slowly rising and falling chest. Listening… and not for a heartbeat. As much as he hated Eligos and Eligos being that close to any of us, he could see only one thing now.

"And how could I possibly take your word on that?" came a rightfully skeptical question.

Like Zeke, I had eyes for only one person and that wasn't Eli. I had one aim, one goal, and I'd do anything to accomplish it. "In Kimano's name. In my brother's name, I'll return the favor. Now take the car the demons drove out here with Griffin or the bus and drive away. I want something I can build a story on for the cops."

"A small favor, then. Mine won't be." His hand was on my shoulder, but with a far different emotion than was passing from Zeke to Griffin. "You didn't ask about the Roses."

"Those Roses are your plan. Your scheme to stop Cronus. That is not my problem and has nothing to do with me, apologies to the Roses," I dismissed. It was the best way to sell a concept to a mark. Make them believe the idea was theirs and theirs alone and they'd do all they could to make it happen.

"My plan. Exactly. And the boss liked it." Eli's hand tapped a finger on my shoulder. "He did simultaneously explode a few of his top advisers and it sounded as if he'd destroyed a small chunk of Hell, but that is the best part of not knowing precisely where your boss is"-and why Cronus wanted to-"since you don't have to see the expression on his face when things aren't running as smoothly as he'd care for."

I could hear a siren in the distance. "That sounds wonderful for you, Eli. Your work ethic astounds me. Now take the car and go."

This time the clamp of his hand was painful, but I didn't let him see it. "We set the Roses free an hour ago. Find out if that satisfies Cronus. Find out soon." Then he was gone to drive off one of the vehicles to create more of an evidence mishmash for the cops. As for the freedom of the Roses satisfying Cronus, unfortunately for Eli and Hell, that wasn't going to happen.

But it certainly satisfied me.

The hospital was as most hospitals are or I was guessing. This was only my second time in one. But they were similar. Busy, sharp with the smell of alcohol, and staff who positively wouldn't consider letting nonfamily members stay with a patient… unless you were the patient's power of attorney-that would be me. Eden House demon slayers weren't the only ones with a library of fake IDs to hand out. When it came to kicking Zeke out… there was absolutely no admittance, and then there were the absolute exceptions. The doctor and the nurses each had a quick look at Zeke and that was the end of that. No calling security. No urging him out. Zeke, at the moment, was why people in the Bible feared to look upon angels.

They were scary sons of bitches, some of them. It hadn't been a demon or Lucifer who'd killed the firstborn of Egypt. It had been an angel. The staff in the ER saw, unknowingly, in Zeke what people had cast their eyes away from in ancient times-the inexplicable or a reckoning. Trying to toss Zeke back out to the waiting room was a reckoning waiting to happen. Wisely, no one took him up on it.

The police had come and gone and I'd given them a story about being kidnapped by two men with guns-we sacrificed my favorite shotgun and Zeke's Ruger for verisimilitude-very pasty white men who beat up our friend, robbed us, and then left us-not to die, but probably because they were late for the latest World of Warcraft campaign or a slot machine appointment with their grandma. They were, after all, incredibly, unbelievably practically glow-in-the-dark white… with socks… and sandals.

About time that slice of the population had the blame dumped on them for some fake crime. I was happy to even the score a bit, although good luck narrowing down "two pasty white men" in Vegas where the tourists primarily came in two colors-alabaster and fake-tan orange.

Zeke went with Griffin for the CAT scan and I waited, pacing-no hard plastic chair for me, no standing still when my boys might need me. I called Leo and filled him in. "Goddamn kid." He sighed at Griffin's one-man quest to make up for a past that wasn't his anymore. I'd reminded him Griffin might be older than Leo was; you couldn't be sure. Correction, I couldn't be sure. Leo could. "Older than you, little girl, maybe, but he's not older than I am."

"Because you're forever, 'Grandpa,'" I mocked, an argument we'd long thrown back and forth between each other.

"Damn close." He sounded smug. He sounded less so when I told him Hell had set the Roses free. "That's nice for the Roses, escaping torture and being a demon's supper, but it doesn't help us with the Cronus situation or the Eligos situation when he finds out what you've done. You managed to kick Hell's ass and fuck up intentionally all in one. That is quite a trick."

"But it's a good one, isn't it?" I asked, an excitement no trickster could deny sparking through me… distant fireworks on a passing Fourth of July. What I'd done was more than good. It was, for one, nearly impossible to pull off. Second, it saved thousands of souls from horror, then nonexistence. Third, and best of all, it screwed Hell itself. You couldn't ask for a better hat trick than that.

"Yes," Leo admitted with a mixture of reluctance and an echo of the same excitement in his voice. "You are now legend with this one." As if I weren't legendary before this, ass, I thought, somewhat disgruntled. "I'll be at the hospital as soon as I can. The tourist doesn't want to go down. Hard digging out this way. I picked a bad spot. But I'll be there in at least two hours. Griffin will live, won't he?" He didn't sound worried, but he was. Griffin and Zeke had been his strays as well as mine when they'd shown up at the bar as teenagers on the run.