Rob Thurman - The Grimrose Path

“He died because I suck at checkers.” I sighed, keeping my eyes hidden. “Eligos didn’t take the body, did he? The bastard.”

“No.” I heard Leo give a sigh of his own. “I’ll take him out to the desert tonight and bury him. I’d pick him a nice spot, but wherever he is now, he doesn’t care.”

It was true enough. Wherever he was now, better or worse, where his dead body was wouldn’t make a difference to him. “Thanks.” I straightened and rubbed my forehead. “While you do that I’ll try to figure out what to do when Eligos figures out I lied to him.”

“That will be more tricky than checkers,” Leo warned. “And while you’re at it, also try to figure out what we’re going to do about what Cronus really wants.”

It was hard to have a smart-ass comeback to that, because I hadn’t one damn clue. And the consequences to that were exponentially worse than lying to a demon, even when that demon was Eli. Catastrophic came to mind, then went off in search of a bigger and badder word to take its place. Plain and simple . . .

We were fucked.

“Griffin’s lost.” He said it just that way—Zeke, sounding exactly the same as that last word.

Lost.

My brother, Kimano, lost everything when we were kids. Tricksters didn’t hold on to things much. That wasn’t us, not our lifestyle. Born to roam, and roaming was easier when you weren’t dragging baggage along . . . of either kind, physical or mental. And that meant I should’ve let Kimano go when I avenged him. Unpacked him. Left him on the side of the road. At peace and firmly in the past. But I couldn’t. I knew it. I didn’t even try. Kimano was Kimano. Unique. I’d carry him with me forever.

But it didn’t change the fact he’d lost everything and probably would’ve lost his brain if he’d had one to begin with. That was my mama talking, not me, but that didn’t mean she was wrong. In fact, it meant she was right. Mama always was. Whether it was a shiny shell, a silver necklace, a wooden ball, a camel . . . How do you lose a camel?

The same way you lost your partner. You looked away for a minute or he outthought you. Kimano and Zeke weren’t anything alike, but the result was the same. Kimano’s attention span had been that of your average happy surfer dude and his camel had no trouble sneaking off. Zeke’s attention ranged wildly from one end to the other . . . from the “I don’t care, so it doesn’t exist in my world” to the “on you like glue for as long as it takes to obliterate your ass.” He wasn’t Inigo Montoya. No one had killed his father. But he was prepared to die, if that’s what it took to get the task at hand done. It wasn’t Zeke’s attention span that had him here. No, it was trust. He had trusted his partner and Griffin had done the same as that damn camel. Walked away.

Zeke hadn’t lost him. Griffin had lost himself.

“Griffin’s gone,” he said again. The word was slightly different, but the meaning was the same.

It had been a long day. I hadn’t opened the bar . . . again. Blood, dead tourists, dead demons, Titans. If there were such things as bad vibes, they were filling up the place today—another shot in the pocketbook, although money was the least of my worries. Cronus was my only worry right now, and while I thought on that, I went out. I shopped for some purely illegal guns, though nothing special caught my attention, grabbed a real nonmicrowaveable meal—if you can call a salad a meal and you can’t—and came home to clean. If I’m cleaning, I’m in a bad way. I like things neat, but I don’t necessarily like to make them neat personally. I’ll do it, but I will put it off and off and off some more. But with a Titan taking over Hell and Leo hauling a body out to the desert, there was no time like the present.

I was working on the black stain that had once been Armand. I was on my knees on the floor with a heavy-duty scrub brush and cursing the demon with every swipe when Zeke kicked down the front door. At first glance, I wasn’t that concerned; Zeke had a key. Sometimes he remembered to use it; sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes it was important . . . ten demons in the newest club reaping souls. Sometimes it wasn’t . . . I’m hungry. Feed me. This time it wasn’t either. It was vital—to Zeke the most crucial thing in the world.

“What do I do?” he asked numbly. “He’s gone. What the fuck do I do?” The glass in the door was supposed to be shatterproof. The pool of it around his feet as he stood in the doorway said I deserved a refund, but considering I’d all but stolen the bar, I couldn’t complain.

I could find out what was going on with Zeke though. I stood and peeled off my thick rubber gloves. “Lost, Kit? Gone? What do you mean?” He didn’t mean dead. If Griffin were dead, Zeke would know it and he wouldn’t be standing here talking about it. He’d go through as many demons as he had to to catch up to Griffin—on this side of life or the next, it was as simple as that. I would do my best to take care of the former angel if something did happen to Griffin, but Zeke wasn’t Zeke without Griffin and he knew it. Zeke was a ship, but Griffin wasn’t his anchor. Zeke’s ship had a hole in the hull and Griffin was the one bailing the ocean back out. He was the one who kept Zeke from plummeting to the darkest depths. For all that I was willing, only Griffin had that power.

“He went out this morning. He said he wanted to get some food, bring back breakfast. He’s been doing it a lot lately. Going out for food instead of cooking. He likes to cook.” He frowned. “He likes to cook. Why has he been going out so much when he likes to cook?”

Why indeed? “Kit,” I verbally prodded him. “Griffin went out to get breakfast, and then what?”

He looked around as if he’d forgotten where he was before shaking off his reverie. “He didn’t come back.” One piece of red hair hung loose from the yanked-back ponytail he wore for fighting. “I called him and his phone is turned off.” He hoped. Turned off was better than destroyed. “I looked, all the places we go.” “Go” meant where they hung around looking for demons and “looked” meant he’d stolen a car. The two of them had only one car. Zeke’s decision-making skills weren’t compatible with driving as a rule. Passing a driver’s test for a license could conceivably end up with him at the California agriculture checkpoint declaring an intent to smuggle a case of silicone breast implants and an Elvis impersonator in the trunk, not to mention a panicked test instructor in the passenger seat screaming for help.

“And no one had seen him?” I moved over to him and pulled him into the bar. Zeke would’ve asked too and asked hard. I took his hand and he was far gone enough to actually wrap his fingers around mine and hang on. Lost, damn it, was the worst word I knew.

“No,” he answered.

“You can’t hear him?” Zeke’s telepathy was usually limited to a few miles, but with Griffin, I didn’t know how far it reached. Maybe the city, maybe the country.

“No.” Each no was sounding more and more bleak.

“How far can you hear him?”

“The world.” Stark and simple. “I can hear him anywhere in the world.”

I didn’t think they’d tested that principle, unless it had been a mission while Eden House was still around in Vegas, but I didn’t question it. If Zeke said it was so, it was so. “Then he’s unconscious, which means he’s alive and that means we’ll find him. Stay here. I need my shotgun.” One of them. It wasn’t as if I named them. First, I wasn’t concerned about the size of my nonexistent penis. Second, guns were for killing . . . no matter what some amendment said. Guns were for killing, nothing more, nothing less. You appreciated what a great job a gun did performing its function, but that’s it. If you named something like that, something manufactured for the sole purpose of ending life, you had problems. You were sick.