Rob Thurman - Grimrose path

No, Ishiah wasn't a bad guy.

"Swoop your feather-duster ass over here and give me a hug, sugar." I spread my arms and hugged him hard when he stepped up. The wings had been put away and I could feel the muscle of his back under his shirt. Leo snorted. He was either jealous or playing at being jealous. I did the same for him, both kinds. We were good for each other's ego that way. But, honestly, a peri and me? No. He might be an expatriate of Heaven, but I could still get a whiff of the holy off him and that wasn't the best of cologne for turning me on. But he wasn't bad for a peri and a friend to many paien kind, so I hugged him again before stepping back. "Do I look that different? I can't remember what I looked like during the Exodus." So many looks, so many outsides; it was what was inside that made you. It was the inside you had to remember.

"Your hair was black and straight, your skin was a darker brown, and your eyes were pale blue-green. The color of glacier lakes, you told me." He continued while raising an eyebrow, "Shameful that it is, you were still vain then too. And don't call it the Exodus. It's disrespectful."

I was not vain. I never chose cookie-cutter beauty. I chose to be different, exotic, wild, and everything most people saw every day on separate people but combined into one unforgettable whole. Why have a boring vanilla wafer when you can have a chocolate chip-peanut butter-coconut-caramel cookie? Vain. Hardly. But disrespectful, that I was and claimed with pleasure. "Why not? That's what it was. Why let a perfectly good word go unused because your kind used it once and capitalized it first?"

An Exodus it had been too-seventy years ago in New York City. Eden House New York had still existed and angels and demons were everywhere. Angels had been ordering their Eden House human soldiers to wipe the demons clean from the city, but that wasn't going to happen-they didn't have the numbers and angels rarely fought these days when they had their humans to do it for them. The demons were determined to take out Eden House and have one helluva good time in the process. No one knew what made each side take a stand there. There were hundreds of cities worldwide and they had a presence in all of them. Why was each side determined to make New York theirs and theirs only? I doubt they knew themselves. Sometimes there doesn't need to be a reason, only egos and idiocy.

Seventy years ago those egos and idiocy blew up. It became so blatant that people were starting to notice-even oblivious people living in their mundane, no-surprises-left-in-the-world existences. They began to question. They began to look-they saw miracles and horrors, and while it was written off to religious hysteria for a few weeks, someone else noticed too-noticed the danger.

We did. The paien.

There were plenty of us in New York. An aware human population was the last thing we needed. Our numbers were dropping as the years spooled out and if humans found out about angels and demons living among them, how long would it be until they found out about us? How long would we last if they did?

We hadn't waited to find out. I hooked an arm with Ishiah and led him over to Leo. "You damn sure missed out, Leo. They bussed in all the paien in the tristate area and some of us came from even farther to get in on the action. We steel-toed their asses out of the city like Adam and Eve out of paradise. Nearly every paien species alive came together. It was unprecedented." I smiled, warm and happy at the memory. "Every demon who dared poke his head aboveground to shake the sulfur off his scaly feet, we killed. We caught every Eden Houser alive, kept some of the badder of us from eating them, tied them up, and put them on those same buses we rode in on. Sent them out. And after they'd seen us, not a one came back." Only the head of each Eden House knew about the paien kind-vamps, weres, tricksters, revenants, on and on. The soldiers didn't know. Demons were enough for them to handle, their bosses thought, and thought right. They not only didn't return, but a few ended up seeking mental health care… of the inpatient-hospital kind. Pretty white coats that tied in the back. Demons they could take, but us? That drove them over the edge. Please. Crybaby candyasses.

And since then, neither angel nor demon has shown a molting feather or scaly ass in New York City.

"It was like Mardi Gras." I leaned against Ishiah's shoulder. By his expression, he had memories less fond of the experience. "Beads, bondage, and breasts. Wolves Gone Wild. And when those girls flash eight of those honeydews at the guys, they get a whole mess of beads."

Leo did look regretful on missing that, but he focused in on Ishiah instead of dwelling on what might have been. "And how did your ex-pigeon son of a bitch with allegiance to no one manage to stay in the city? Obviously he did or he'd be pissed off at you, not contemplating fornication. Isn't that what your type calls it?" Leo grinned darkly. "Fornication."

"I'm not contemplating fornication with Trixa," Ishiah said evenly-a little too evenly, a little too sure. I wasn't vain, but I wasn't dead either. Give a girl some validation. "I fornicate elsewhere." He folded his arms, already on the defense, and I was suddenly more curious than insulted. "The same elsewhere, the same someone, in fact, that convinced your kind to let me stay in New York. I don't call it fornication anymore." He presented the information as if it were a secret handshake or a cop's badge, and it was. We were brothers, comrades, or, damn, practically in-laws.

"You're sleeping with Robin?" I said in disbelief.

"Goodfellow? You're screwing a puck? Worse yet, that one?" Leo was even less disbelieving and did a good imitation of being disgusted-which would be solely because he couldn't keep up with a puck. Few could, verbally, criminally, or sexually, and no one in the world could keep up with Robin Goodfellow. Ishiah called me the vain one; he had his nerve. Robin was vanity walking… granted walking practically on three legs, rather than two, but vanity was vanity-well deserved or not.

Leo wasn't done. "He's a walking, talking dick…"

"Literally," I interjected on Goodfellow's behalf.

It was a good thing Leo's powers were temporarily on hiatus or I might have been nothing but a scorch mark on the floor. There was some history between Robin and me, but even I had my limits. That puck could talk the paint off the walls, the skirt off the waitress, and the pants off the doorman… and that had all been in less than thirty minutes. Shortest date of my life, but one that had put me off the mere thought of sex for months. The man had a mirrored ceiling in his pantry. His pantry. I didn't want to guess what he had in his bedroom. It was bad enough running for my millennia-gone virtue because I was nosing around the puck's pantry. It was a toss-up between chocolate and curiosity by the way-as to why I was nosing it to begin with.

It went without saying that Ishiah had reserves in him I'd never dreamed existed.

I put my hand across Leo's mouth so we could get this conversation over with and his butt cheeks unclenched. "Robin did talk the rest of us into leaving the peris be. You'd always left us alone once you retired. It seemed fair. I couldn't figure out why he did at the time, what with that hate-hate relationship you had going on." Now I knew.

Ishiah's eyes shifted sideways… a bare fraction, but I saw enough of it for confirmation. Not hate-hate after all, but love-hate. Oh, those two had their plates full now. "Anyway, for Leo's benefit, let's wrap this up.We won. Ish let some of us party at his bar to celebrate. I was drunk for three days, hungover for a week, and that's the last time I saw Ishiah. It was also the last time my brain tried to crawl out of my ears to escape alcohol poisoning. The last time I tried to pick up a werewolf only to find out it was actually a German shepherd. The last time I grew wings and flew naked over the heads of drunken paien saying that I was Tinkerbell and they needed to follow me to never-never land. The last time…" I uncovered Leo's mouth. "Never mind. It was more last times than I can or care to remember and we won't discuss it again. Right?" I pointed a finger at Leo's chest. "Right?"