Rob Thurman - Grimrose path

Cronus didn't appear particularly interested. Sometimes that was worse than when the predators were extremely interested in you… because if they were interested, you mattered. They could want to kill you, but you did matter. If you mattered, you could communicate, in some way have a dialogue-and if you could have a dialogue either physically or mentally, you could fool, manipulate, and lie your ass off.

If you didn't matter, you had to fall back on your fighting skills. Normally that wasn't a problem. Cronus, however, did not fall anywhere in the category of normal. He was looking idly to the right and then to the left. He moved slowly, as a crazy, possessed doll would, until it decided you were what it wanted, and then you wouldn't see it move at all; it would be that unnaturally, unbelievably quick.

Possessed dolls. I was watching way too much late-night television.

This time when Cronus looked, it was upward, and that's when an angel fell from the sky. It shattered into thousands of shards on the hood of Leo's truck like a dropped champagne flute disintegrating on a marble floor. Angels weren't that delicate, no matter that they appeared like glass in their original form, soldiers of sharp-edged crystal. The truck wasn't responsible; Cronus was.

"Looks like Heaven wasn't putting all its money on Ishiah playing on your nostalgia," Leo said. He turned on the windshield wipers as the truck idled and silver-veined, cloudy pieces of someone's guardian angel were tossed aside.

I could believe Cronus had killed it so easily. What I couldn't believe was that we hadn't known it was up there. One rare cloudy day in Vegas and an angel tagged us. Being human was getting harder, not easier. Practice wasn't making perfect and if there was ever a time we needed to get things perfect, this was it.

I lowered the window and leaned out. "If you scratched Leo's paint job, he's not going to be as cute and sweet to pet when you're bored." I'd assumed he wouldn't pay attention to me, that he wouldn't see me. I was wrong, and I wasn't sure if I was happy about that or not.

Cronus was seeing me and for the first time in my life, I had a huge chunk of doubt that I could trick my way out of something. "The demons are all hiding." His voice was as empty as it was last time. Checkers all over again, only a dead angel instead of a dead tourist this time. "They can't hide forever. They can't hide long." He was right. Demons could stay in Hell, hide there, and Cronus could go there and try to find them, but Hell… Lucifer… was vast, almost endless. Cronus wasn't that patient and he didn't have to be. The majority of demons weren't that bright, as I'd thought in the hospital. They'd be back on Earth, fairly soon too, but Cronus wasn't one who wanted to wait. How many wings did he need to make that map, how many were left? Twenty? Thirty? More or less?

"Demon." His attention was back to the right, toward the bar. "In this place. It has been everywhere in this place. I want it. Make it come here." He rested his hand on the hood of the truck. It sank instantly and a moment later he lifted it back up as metal poured in a liquid stream from the plastic fingers. The same plastic lips smiled. I'd never seen a Titan truly smile, not a genuine smile. I never wanted to see it again. A blank-faced Titan bent on control of everything in existence was one thing; an enthusiastic, happy Titan bent on the same was… shit. Just holy shit. There'd once been a god, or what people had thought had been a god. Moloch. They made huge metal statues of him, built furnaces in his grinning mouth, and fed live babies into the fire. Feeding their god. Supposedly. The rumor went. I hadn't been in that area at the time.

But if those statues had existed, I think their smiles would have been identical to this one. Full of a heat to suck the air from your lungs, fire to cook flesh, the screams of infants. The screams of parents losing their children, sisters losing their baby brothers. Screams that never stopped, fear and pain that never ended. On and on until you were nothing but a scream yourself. Not a person, only a sound of terror that ripped the air until the end of time itself. And you could hear yourself-hear the scream that was you, the tearing and clawing of it in your mind so loud, so wrong you couldn't imagine how it didn't kill you.

Wishing it would kill you just to escape it.

"Soon." Cronus vanished, taking a handful of Leo's engine with him. That was fine. He could have that engine, as long as he took that smile and the screaming with him.

"Trixa?"

I kept my eyes front and center as I put off Zeke for a second. "Hold on, Kit. I'm doing my best not to pee my panties right now."

He waited for nearly five entire seconds. "I just wanted to know," he started, sounding profoundly put upon, "are we there yet?"

Bending over, I rested my forehead against the dashboard and laughed. I couldn't do anything else. Here we sat in an alley, in a truck destroyed by one stroke of a Titan's hand, we could've been destroyed ourselves, and Zeke was making jokes. If that wasn't more frightening than a Titan, I didn't know what was.

Leo caught a cab to the airport, while I changed my panties. It was worth it, pantywise. When you can laugh that hard in the face of a horror like Cronus, it was more than worth it. It was beyond amazing, it was extraordinary, and, what the hell, that pair had been on sale at Victoria's Secret anyway.

From outside my closed bedroom door, I could hear Griffin and Zeke squabbling as they sat on the top step. It was nice, that touch of normality. I'd told them what was coming, and they'd seen Cronus for themselves, but if you weren't a born paien, you couldn't know. You couldn't truly comprehend what a Titan was, not if it stood right in front of you and nearly screamed the sky down. You simply couldn't grasp it. They say ignorance is bliss. About now I'd settle for a little plain stupid if ignorance was too much to ask for.

Unfortunately, my boys weren't as blissful in other areas as I wished they were. There was a polite knock at the door to get my attention before Griffin asked through the wood, "Was Cronus talking about Eligos? Is that what he meant by a demon being… what?… embedded in your bar? Tainting it?"

Eligos had been in Trixsta only a few times-not nearly long enough to put a mark on it, much less taint it. And it wasn't tainted. What Cronus sensed wasn't demon-not anymore. "Yes," I lied in word, thought, and emotion, all the while buttoning my new pair of jeans. I was talented that way. "It's bad enough that his I-wanna-be-a-big-boy-in-big-demon-diapers Armand stained my floor, but now Eli has funked up my bar with demon BO. I don't think they make a room deodorizer for that."

It was Griffin who had wormed his way to the very heart of the bar. He'd spent several years growing up here, had been in the bar working every day and sleeping every night along with Zeke in what was now Leo's office. And after Eden House had recruited him and Zeke, he'd still come by almost every day. That was what family did. Years of Griffin were in every nook and cranny of the building; Griffin when he'd thought he was human… and, in his mind and his heart, had been human. But it wasn't his mind and heart that Cronus had picked up on. It was the physical that had lain under the human at the time. Now all that was left of that were wings. Beautiful, glorious wings-Hell-changed to glittering scales and exactly what Cronus needed.

That, however, was something Griffin didn't need to know and overprotective Zeke definitely didn't need to know. I knew. Leo knew too, I had no doubt. That was enough. We were lucky Cronus hadn't bothered to look past me as he was making his demand and smashing an angel to pieces. Another ignorance-is-bliss situation and I was grateful for it. Cronus saw Leo and he saw me, the ant who dared play a game with him. If we could keep his focus there and only there, it would be good. Very good.