Rob Thurman - The Grimrose Path

Griffin, not interested in the discussion of the smell of ass, sweaty or otherwise, tried again. “Zeke, I promise I’ll . . .”

“No.” Zeke didn’t wait for the rest of the promise. “Start crawling. I’m tired.”

Griffin exhaled, the guilt back in his face. It wasn’t the guilt of doing things he’d never done, being what he no longer was. This was a guilt he deserved and for behavior modification’s sake, I didn’t pat him sympathetically on the shoulder. There were no Lone Rangers in this bar and I wanted him to remember that. “I’ll bet you are,” he said. “I know you are.” Along with the guilt, you could see him picking up Zeke’s exhaustion like the empath he was and wearing it with his own emotions and sensations. “You didn’t sleep last night. You didn’t sleep this morning. You stole that scalpel from God knows where, keeping me safe, watching out for me.”

“It’s not easy to do,” he replied stolidly. “I’m supposed to be the stupid one. Not you.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re anything but stupid. Don’t say that. Don’t think it either or the verbal ass-kicking you’ve given me since yesterday, I’ll give you five times over,” Griffin warned. “If there’s a stupid one here, it’s me. Now let’s get some sleep.” He put a knee on the foot of the bed and started to crawl, pulling Zeke’s arm along with him. “But you’d better be ready with that cuff key if any demons do attack. I don’t want to die because you have a weird bondage thing.”

“It’s not a weird bondage thing,” Zeke protested, following after him in the crawl up the mattress. “It’s a perfectly natural bondage thing. The porn magazine said so.”

With that I closed the door on them and left them to their own devices, hopefully sleep, but guys will be guys and a porno magazine would never lie.

“Did you get around to telling them about Cronus and the impending Armageddon slash slavery of worlds or did that, like certain other things, escape your attention too?” Leo, beer already in hand, asked at the bar.

“I think they deserve one night relatively worry free and, again, I’m sorry about the shower thing. It was enormous, I swear to you. So large that I trembled in its shadow like a tiny mouse fearing it would be crushed. Attached to a body that defines perfection itself. Michelangelo would’ve taken a hammer to David and smashed it to pieces if he knew what he could’ve sculpted instead. Every poet living or dead couldn’t find a single word worthy to describe the beauty and majesty that is you.” I let the door support me and my aching ribs as I gave Leo my most contrite look. I was too . . . sincerely contrite. It was Leo. My Leo. “Forgive me?” I tucked my hair behind my ears, then touched one of his folded arms with a single fingertip. It rested next to a small mole he’d had since he had first become Leo. I saw it every day. There was a comfort in that, in an unchanging thing, although unchanging was a curse word among our kind. “You know I can’t let certain things catch my attention. Not yet. You and I . . .” I traced my finger along warm skin and smiled, a little wistfully, but the best things are worth waiting for. Our day would come and on that day, the attention I would give him would etch every molecule of him in my memory for the rest of my life. “We’re not there yet. We’re still too much alike in the wrong ways and not quite enough in the right ones.”

“You’re right. We’re both stubborn, both hold grudges. We both are staggering in our hotness,” he said with the gravity it warranted.

“But luckily vanity will never stand in our way.” I pinched his arm lightly, rubbed the pale red mark, and said, “Stay on the couch tonight? You’ll have to be up early in the morning for another trip to the airport.”

“Your bizarre leaping to other subjects is something we’ll have to work on. That, I’ll never match and the level of Tylenol I have to take to stop the headaches is beginning to become a danger to my liver,” he said, unfolding his arms and pretending to fish in his jeans pocket for a capsule or two. “Why the airport? Did you come up with something for Cronus? If you have, that will top even your Roses.”

“It would, wouldn’t it?” I started toward the kitchen to get a broom and dustpan for upstairs. I moved stiffly, the snowflake touched by a careless finger. Damaged. “Didn’t you say back in January that Thor was hanging out with the Swedish women’s volleyball team?”

“Last I heard.” A crease appeared in his forehead. Now he did actually have a headache. If anyone would give you a head-pounding one, it would be Thor. “In the past months I’ve been getting a lot of late-night drunken ‘Ha, ha. You’re not a god anymore, douche bag’ calls. A few ‘nyah-nyah-nyah mortal dickwad’ ones to add variety. Why?”

“I was thinking about something I saw on TV last year. It reminded me of Thor’s hammer.”

“Mjöllnir? It’s a serious weapon, but it wouldn’t stop Cronus.”

“No, but what made it might,” I said. “That and a trip to hell.” Little h, païen hell.

It all came down to what I’d quoted to Eligos before, “I think, therefore I am.” They were good words, those five. Words to live by for some. For others . . . maybe . . .

Words to die by.

Tricksters are thieves, every last one of us. That was half of the job if you broke it down to the basics. You were either taking something a person wanted or giving them something they didn’t want at all. It was a simplistic look at what we did, but in your life, sooner or later, you were going to steal something—a possession . . . a life. But only the lazy tricksters went for the life off the bat. I was not lazy. Those I tricked had to truly deserve to lose their lives if I took them. I’d said my very first trick had been to steal an entire orchard to punish a greedy man. I’d stolen my bar too. That was more in the range of a good-deed trick. . . . An alcoholic who owns a bar is never going to stay sober, no matter how many meetings he goes to. Not that it was mere convenience that I happened to need an identity and occupation in Vegas at the time—no, that was good planning. Good deeds are nice, but when you can make them pay off doubly, what’s not to love? It was like getting a great dress and matching demon-stabbing stiletto heels, both on sale, only a hundred times the rush.

And being a trickster and a thief meant that you always kept your eyes open. I wouldn’t steal, say, from a museum, but there were those who would. You steal from a museum, you steal from the world. If you did that, I would punish you, because that was naughty—depriving the world. Unless you were a trickster and you were stealing something to save the world.

I hadn’t stolen from a museum yet, but I, bad girl that I was, kept hoping a justifiable reason would come up.

It was while keeping my eyes open several months ago that I saw a special on an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. I’d been about to change the channel to sports for the customers—I mean, I was a living history and while I did embrace the entire keeping-an-eye-out philosophy, just hearing the words New York City still gave me a twinge of a hangover. I’d had the remote in hand when Zeke went to point like a hungry hound on a package of hot dogs. WEAPONS OF THE WORLD had been emblazoned across the screen. Zeke did love his weapons to, what I’d been beginning to suspect was, an unhealthy degree. I’d been relieved for more than one reason when he got a sex life that didn’t involve a trip to the gun shop.

I’d ignored the phantom hangover pain, made popcorn, and we’d watched. An occupied Zeke was a nondestructive Zeke. In the exhibit, along with a varying degree of implements designed by man to kill man, was a representation of a something not designed by man. Or woman or any creature primate related at all. It was Namaru. There had been two races long ago, païen , that had never made it into human mythology or folklore, spoken or written. They had tended to keep to themselves although one of them had ties to the Rom. These races were the engineers of the païen population. They had a technology that would seem like magic to humans, who wouldn’t have had a hope of understanding it. I didn’t actually understand it myself. No one who hadn’t created it would. I’d seen the objects that they’d built though, the Bassa and the Namaru. I’d seen them work and that was good enough for me. The Bassa, a cold-blooded reptile race, had worked with metal most often. The Namaru, who’d lived in active lava fields like grounded phoenixes, had used what looked like stone, but did what stone couldn’t begin to do. They were gone now, extinct and remembered only by the païen , but they had left things behind.