Rob Thurman - The Grimrose Path

I’d recognized in that museum the result of the only weapon mold the Namaru had ever made—or an homage to that result rather. Mjöllnir, Thor’s hammer—a stone sculpture of it. It was ornate and there was something slightly odd about the short handle, the intricate carving. Whoever had crafted the replica long ago had seen the real thing. It was otherworldly, like the Namaru. They had lived in this world, but the way they thought, what they were, to a human would be alien, and, like Cronus, inexplicable.

The first human swords had been Bronze Age and made using clay molds. After that, methods had been refined and humans came up with many ways to make all different types of weapons to kill one another. The Namaru, in their genius and simplicity, had only ever needed the one. It could shift itself to the shape of any weapon you wanted to make. Leo had chosen a hammer. I’d never seen the mold myself, but Leo as Loki had since he’d given Mjöllnir as a gift to Thor—there was a legend regarding that involving dwarven blacksmiths, betting his head, and turning into a fly, but basically it was all bullshit. Humans loved to weave elaborate tales around something as simple as, hey, dude, happy birthday. Storytellers and liars, I did respect them for that, and I absolutely loved a good story, no matter how fictional.

But why, back in reality, had Loki, who at that time was bad to the bone and then some, done something nice for a relative he didn’t much care for? I had a feeling it was a softening-up move. Thor wasn’t bright. Hell, Thor wasn’t even dim. He’d need one of his own lightning bolts up his ass to get that kind of wattage going between his ears. It all ended up with Leo/Loki laughing while Thor wondered how he’d ended up in drag at a banquet. Wide shoulders, an Adam’s apple, and a drunken deep bass voice—it all ended in a vale of tears and one drunkenly confused Thor fighting off a bunch of pissed-off giants.

Born dumb frat boy. Born victim of Loki.

That might explain the drunken rants in the middle of the night, but Leo had said much later when he was on the straight and narrow, he’d given the weapon mold to Thor in a manly “Sorry, I was a dick and tricked you into dressing like a girl” apology. The sculpture in the museum reminded me of it. Sometimes the universe does give you a freebie, and I was hoping Thor still had Leo’s present. I was very much hoping. And since Thor made calls to Leo, but didn’t take them, Leo would have to go ask him in person. Leo had made up, mostly, with his family, Odin, and the whole crew, but there were a few holdouts and Thor was one of them.

But if we could get the weapon mold, it would make a weapon of your choice out of anything you poured into it . . . literally any substance you could conceive of, and I could conceive of only one that might have a chance against Cronus. The weapon’s shape itself didn’t matter much in this—as long as it pierced, but what it was made of did, no matter how difficult it would be to obtain. That was where my plan started. Ishiah and the angels were where it ended. Although without that piece of Namaru technology, the angels would be as useful as parsley on prime rib.

That the Namaru tech wouldn’t work without a trip to a hell, not Eli’s Hell, but a hell hard to get in and out of all the same, was a challenge. But I already had an idea about that—who can get into any hell, païen or otherwise? The dead. It wasn’t the best idea, but it was all I had. For now we had to drop Leo off at the airport—the Swedish volleyball team was playing in Colorado today, and planes flew faster than ravens.

I was buckling up in the passenger seat of Leo’s extended cab truck, large enough that it barely fit into the alley beside the bar—again with those shower issues—when from the seat behind me, Griffin said, “Now both of us are missing cars. That doesn’t bother you? You love your car and you’ve only had it for a month. You could let me at least call some of the towing yards and see if it ended up there.” As if my car mattered at all compared to saving his life. Sky and Earth loved his fluffy little demon-killing heart.

“Sorry, sugar. I forgot to mention that Cronus wants to get to Hell, find Lucifer, devour him in an unspeakable fashion, and then using that power added to his, he’ll take control of every world, every heaven and hell, and every reality that exists. After that I’m thinking he’ll play games with all the inhabitants that we won’t much like. If that doesn’t put the car issue into perspective, then think of the old saying, ‘If you love something . . . meant to be . . . comes back.’ You know how it goes.”

“If that’s true,” Leo said quietly, his hand moving from the key in the ignition to rest now on the steering wheel, “how much do you love Cronus?”

Because he was here in the alley, standing in front of the truck.

He looked the same as before, a creepy doll from an old black-and-white movie come to life to kill you in your sleep. A plastic hand to cover your nose and mouth. Shadowed eye sockets to suck your life from you, streamers of golden light flowing from your eyes to be swallowed up by the lack of his. You’d be left a dried husk, drained, destroyed, nothing but a desiccated imitation of a corpse.

We should be that lucky.

“Whatever you do, Zeke,” I cautioned as quickly as I could get out the words, “don’t try to read his thoughts. Your head could explode and I don’t mean that figuratively.” I reached for my gun. It was a useless instinct in this situation. Picking up the truck and swatting Cronus with it would’ve been just as useless.

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?