Rob Thurman - The Grimrose Path

“What...” He swallowed and the C in Cthulhu jumped spasmodically, but the words were somewhat braver. “I ain’t telling you anything, Iktomi. You’re Heaven’s whore, you bitch.”

“Sugar, sugar.” I let my smile widen. “You know my last name. Aren’t I the privileged one? Haven’t I made the big time? Did you hear that while scraping and crawling on the floor for any demonic crumbs? On your knees for a bunch of the Fallen? I think that makes you the whore, not me.”

“They’ll see I’m loyal. They’ll see I’m worthy,” he insisted. “They’ll take me to Hell, to the Lord Who Rules All Others, and he’ll make me like them. Divine.”

I hadn’t seen much of the divine, Above or Below, but deprogramming a self-brainwashed cluster of idiot cells that someone’s toilet had coughed up would take more time than I was willing to spend and more sympathy than I had. Griffin needed us now. This asshole . . . He didn’t need the truth about demons; he didn’t need me to hold his pathetic little hand. What he needed was to give me some useful information before Zeke decided to rip off his head bare-handed.

“And I’ll be sure to throw you a going-away party when that happens.” This time when I moved the knife it was to slice him across his upper thigh; although the black jeans—satanists did love their black—didn’t show the blood, it was safe to say Bubba felt the cut. He gave a low-pitched scream, the steering wheel wobbled under his hands, and the bus began to climb the curb.

The dangers of interrogation in a moving vehicle. Time to adapt.

“A challenge.That’s even more entertaining.” I grabbed his shirt and yanked all one hundred and twenty pounds of him backward. “Zeke, take the wheel, would you? And don’t run over anything.” As always with Zeke, I made the directions very clear. “No people, no dogs, no cars, no motorcycles, and stop when the light is red, pretty please.”

He slid into the seat and maneuvered the bus back onto the street. “Rules. How does everyone remember all these stupid rules,” he muttered.

I turned back to Bubba, trusting Zeke at least until it came to the moment that we would run over something the size of a Volkswagen. I had to. I trusted him far more with driving than with chatting up Bubba. Bubbas are considerably more fragile than Volkswagens. I’d pushed him on the aisle between the left and right rows of seats. Now I rested the heel of my boot, three inches easy, on his stomach. I’d grabbed them along with my shotgun. Every weapon helps. “Now, this is the part where you pay attention to me, every bit as much as you do the demons you follow around.” I leaned and the heel sank into his stomach until I almost imagined I felt his spine beneath it. “Because, Bubba, some boots are made for walking and some for impromptu colonoscopies.” I leaned harder. “You can turn over anytime. I charge so much less than your average proctologist.”

His pale face, pitted with old acne scars, was starting to turn lavender in the neon light spilling into the bus. “Bubba, you need to start breathing,” I reminded him. “I can’t kill you if you kill yourself first. Suck it up, sweetie. If you can’t be a man, you damn sure can’t be a demon. Breathe .”

He did, exhaling one sour-smelling huge gasp of air and sucking another one in. Demons were monsters, filth, undeserving of existence, but I had to admit, when it came to Bubba, I was on their side. I wouldn’t have eaten him either. He was wilted lettuce on chicken salad that had gone bad two weeks ago. Hopefully that would be the lizards’ downfall. “You follow them, Bubba,” I said, “from bar to bar, casino to casino. You watch as they buy souls. You probably even watch them kill innocents behind parked cars or in empty alleys. You’re a worthless piece of shit and there’s no getting around it, but if you tell me what I want to know, I won’t kill you.” Then I told the lie . . . setting the hook. “And if I kill you now, you know where you’ll end up—in Hell . . . with the damned . . . the tortured souls worth no more than maggots crushed under Lucifer’s heel. But if you tell me the truth”—I eased up the pressure slightly on his stomach—“I’ll let you live, give you time to prove to them you’re worthy of being a prince in Hell. You know they don’t believe that yet.” I flipped the knife, caught it, and then jammed it into the rubber matting a hairbreadth away from his head. “Well, Bubba? Do you want that time or not?”

He did. The deluded ones, the idiots, they always did. The ones who imagined death was the worst thing that could happen to them. They were oh so wrong.

But he talked and that was all I cared about.“What... what the fuck do you want to know?” His voice quavered and I smelled the alcohol on his breath. Yep, no way he was getting through the Lord’s Prayer backward.

“Griffin Reese, one of the last of Eden House. You know him, just like you know me. In the past few days while you were lurking, stalking, drooling over the local demons, did you hear anything about Griffin? My Griffin—which means you know I’ll make it hurt if you lie.” I jerked my head back toward Zeke. “ His Griffin—and you know he’ll kill you if you lie. Slowly. Painfully. Enough so that demons will give him a standing ovation. So, Bubba,” I said, leaning down until we were face-to-face, a bare inch apart, “tell me about Griffin before we’re tossing pieces of you out the windows like confetti at a parade.”

Talk he did, which was a good thing for him. I might have lied about him becoming a prince in Hell, but I wasn’t lying about what Zeke and I would do to him.

Beelzebub closed his eyes tightly. “Reese . . . one of Eden House Vegas’s last sycophants. One of their last canary lovers here. Wiping his ass with their feathers. Worthless fucking Boy Scout.”

Boy Scout—the very thing I’d thought about Griffin and the thing only I was allowed to think about him. Not this worthless wannabe. I dug the heel in again and he yelped, “He’s been hunting on his own for weeks, leaving his brain-dead partner home watching cartoons and acting as if he had something to prove. My side set up a way to prove something back.” The sneer twisted his thin lips. “No man can take on Hell. No man can take on demons alone and win. If he’s gone, and I guess he is or you wouldn’t be here, it’s because my kind took him. Set a trap and took him.” His grin showed yellow teeth with a gap between the front two teeth. “They’ll show the man what the demon can really do.”

Man. Demon. Like he had something to prove. I’d thought Griffin had seemed tired lately, distracted, and he did have something to prove . . . or he thought he did. He was a peri, the first of the ex-demon kind, and while he didn’t remember any of his demon days, he still knew. He had been a demon. He had done what demons did and worse than your average low-level demon. Griffin was intelligent and imaginative. He might not remember, but he could conjure up some likely scenarios in his mind’s eye. I’d only known Griffin as a human and he was the best human I’d come across in my long life. He wasn’t a Boy Scout. He was a Boy Scout to the power of a thousand. He protected the innocent; he helped Zeke and made him more than functional—he gave him a life. He’d saved more lives than he could keep count of, but it wasn’t enough. Once it had all come out three months ago . . . Leo’s and my trickster status, Zeke and Griffin being unknowing agents of Heaven and Hell. Angel and demon. Being an ex-angel annoyed Zeke, but he could deal with it precisely because he was Zeke. But Griffin finding out he was a demon, even if that status became ex-demon when he chose humanity over Hell . . . I should’ve known.