Rob Thurman - The Grimrose Path

“That’s it. I need hair of the dog.” The drunken dog that was lying on the couch. Leo headed for the refrigerator.

“Since he is here, in all his glory.” I ducked as Zeke tossed Griffin a can of room deodorizer that was applied in earnest to the pile of Norse muscles, from big feet to bad dye job. He was pungent, there was no doubt. “Does that mean he’s going to help find the weapon mold, knows where it is, or is he here to laugh at you when Cronus squashes us like bugs on a windshield?” I asked. “Not that I can’t understand the entertainment value if I weren’t one of the bugs myself.”

Leo already had a beer open and half of it down. “He’s going to help. I humiliated myself and apologized . . . several times as he kept nodding off and missing parts of it. It’s all forgive and forget for now—unless he sobers up, but as I’ve not seen that happen since Leif the Lucky discovered America, pissed on a tree, and then left, I think we’re safe.” He drained the rest of the bottle. “We just need to get to LA. Hopefully by then our stand-in from a bad wrestling movie will be awake, but still not especially coherent. We can point, he can send one of us in, and we have the mold.”

“Which is where?” I stood and whispered the word “car” to Zeke. His face lit up with an enthusiasm that did not bode well for anyone who wasn’t us, in particular the neighbors who were such a good release valve for his anger management issues in the past.

Griffin watched him make for the back door. “What did you say to him? Car? Did . . . oh hell.” He followed after Zeke, but I imagined he’d be too late. Those unlucky neighbors were about to lose their temporary house on wheels.

“Which is where?” I repeated as the door slammed shut.

“The Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. Thor gave it to a pretty archeologist who worked there years ago and they put it in the Latin America exhibit recently.” He shrugged. “You know how Namaru tech works.”

I did. A strangely shifting race who built strangely shifting things. People saw what they wanted to see in what the Namaru had created, which is why archeologists had never found proof of the Namaru. They saw what they wanted to see and as they were unaware that the Namaru had existed, they never saw that. And as most of their work had been done in a material that resembled volcanic rock or black glass, Latin America wasn’t that far of a stretch. Mayans had used knives of volcanic glass, beautiful things for a less than beautiful purpose.

“The question is,” he continued, “did you get what we need to put in it? It’s pointless to have a weapon-making device if there’s nothing to put in it.”

“Ye of little faith. I would think hanging around demons and angels would change that. I have someone working on it.” I moved over to Thor’s feet. “You take the other end, the potentially vomit-spewing end. Let’s get him on the floor at least.”

“The things I do for you, not counting celibate showers,” he grumbled, and took his time wedging an arm behind Thor, securing his upper body and moving it to the coffee table, which took less than a second to collapse under the weight. “Well, he’s on the floor, more or less. So you have someone working on getting into Hades, finding the River Lethe, and getting back out, and they’re perfectly fine with this supernatural Mission: Impossible ?”

“I engender love and goodwill wherever I go. People, dead people included, jump at the chance to do me a favor.” I bent down and secured a hold of Thor’s feet. “Ready?”

“Ready, yes. Convinced, no.” But he bent down and we carried Thor out to the scrap of rock and sand front yard. It was a little after two p.m. and the afternoon sun did nothing for the god’s orange skin. The Norse gods were a pasty group, excluding shape-shifters who were also pale in their original form, and they didn’t tan unless they sprayed it on. This looked like another DIY job. Thor needed to start embracing outsourcing.

I waved a hand at the still-snoring, now-sandy god. “You bring this to the table and you have problems with whom I send into Greek Hell? I know you must be joking.”

“No, I have confidence in whomever you sent. You’re on a job. You’re a professional. It’s the love and goodwill issue that I was doubting,” he said, as dry as the sand beneath our feet. “You can’t blame me, with Cronus and Eligos showing up routinely. I know neither has love of any sort for you.”

“Neither does the Angel of Death. It’s an epidemic lack of taste around here.” To the left of us, a car started as I saw a man and a woman running away from us and down the block, which would be the type of reaction that Zeke tended to engender. Love and goodwill? He had Griffin, he has his guns—what in the world could he possibly need with goodwill? It wasn’t necessarily the worst attitude to have, not in his particular business or his life, for that matter. It made things much more simple and expedient, as in blowing up your neighbor’s house for being drug dealers and then “borrowing” the car they were subsequently living in.

“Okay. We have a car.” Zeke popped his head up through the moon roof. “I told them I’d bring it back. I said it’d be fine, more or less, and that neighbors share. They didn’t have a problem with it.” None at all, although they were pelting down the sidewalk as fast as they could run, which was fairly quick as meth-heads often weren’t in the best of physical shape. Love, goodwill, and enough speed to put you in the hundred-yard dash; it all came via the Zeke welcome wagon. “How many guns do we need? Or grenades?” He grinned happily. “I still have some grenades I swiped from Eden House.”

It took twenty minutes to clear the car out enough to fit us all in, and I didn’t want to know what was causing that bizarrely biologically slippery sensation under my boots, but we made it. Leo was driving, I was in the passenger seat, and an unconscious Thor was sandwiched between Griffin and Zeke in the back. It wasn’t the most pleasant experience for the two of them as Thor, room deodorizer aside, wasn’t growing any less pungent as time passed. They would simply have to survive as best they could. Suck it up. Cronus had caught the scent of Griffin’s wings back at the bar, and that meant that leaving him or Zeke behind wasn’t safe or particularly prudent. I was rarely accused of being prudent, but taking care of my boys brought out the cautious side in me . . . if one didn’t count the seven guns and four grenades in the trunk of the car. Although, considering our situation, that was cautious. Being prepared equaled firepower, since the only god in the car still with functioning god-like powers was in an alcoholic stupor.

“I miss shape-shifting like crazy, but right now, I miss your big badass self more,” I said to Leo.

“I still couldn’t do anything about Cronus, nothing entirely effective at any rate,” he said as he backed the car out.

“No, but you could take Eligos and Azrael and twist them into a nice pretzel. All we would need is the mustard.” I leaned back in the seat, the newspaper doubling as a liner rustling under and behind me. I didn’t want to know what was under my boots and I absolutely didn’t want to know what was under the paper. I had faith that the universe, infinite in its wisdom, had put it there for a reason and I left it at that.

“Heaven couldn’t leave it alone with Ishiah, eh? They had to play good cop, bad cop. Or rather, retired cop, homicidal cop.” Leo put the sun visor down and fished for sunglasses in his pocket. I thought again how lucky he was that the Light had let him keep complete shape-shifting ability in bird form, clothes included, or he would’ve been falling through the air naked over the Grand Canyon. That was a mental picture. I tucked it away for further contemplation. “If you want to let Ishiah know what you expect of Heaven, now might be a good time. You might want to reach out and touch Hell too.”