Rob Thurman: The Grimrose Path

“Sugar, ordinary you are not. If you were, do you think I’d have spent so many years babying you?”

“Is that what that was? I thought you were whipping me into shape Spartan style. . . . Shit! Watch out!”

I jerked my attention from the mirror to what was in front of me, easily visible in the car’s headlights—too easily. It was the Apocalypse, wearing that same inside-out T-shirt, same new jeans, and with the same eyes that were abandoned wells littered with bones of the doomed and the damned. He was standing on the road fifty feet ahead of me. I had less than half a second to decide which would be worse: to swerve off the road and most likely flip the car or to hit him head-on. I chose head-on. That was the unknown. I might do some damage; I might not, but rolling the car was guaranteed injuries. This was an old car with no airbags and the seat belts were questionable at best. I had to make a choice, and I did.

I chose wrong.

Hitting Cronus was like hitting a brick wall. He didn’t move, bend, or break, but we did. I heard the shattering of the windshield and the scream of metal as the front of the car folded in like an accordion—felt the rear of the car come up off the ground. We weren’t going to roll over, but we were going to tip and land upside down. With the speed I was going and the lack of give when we hit, we were going to fall hard. I didn’t think the roof would hold, and I didn’t think any of us were going to end up as anything other than dead with crushed skulls and broken necks. I thought all of that in less time than it took to take a breath. The mind moves quickly when it sees an ugly death racing its way. If there was anything I was sure of in that one frozen moment, it was that our lives were over.

Then the car stopped up in the air at almost a ninety-degree angle before slamming back down on all four wheels, which all immediately blew. I could see Cronus, blurry now as warm liquid dripped into my eyes. He had one hand resting on the mangled remains of the hood, the glass of the windshield diamond pebbles across the metal. He had stopped us and I didn’t think it was out of the kindness and goodness of the black hole that was a Titan heart. “I smell the demons on you. Bring me one more demon out of Hell. One more or I don’t start with worlds. I start with you,” he said before switching to a subject with such abrupt illogic I nearly couldn’t understand the words. “You should go home.” He swiveled his head in the direction of our home, then completely around to face us again, the neck a twisted piece of inhuman taffy. “But you can’t.” The smile was as creepy and soul sucking as it had been before. “You can’t go home when there is no home. Bring me a demon.” He lifted his hand from the car and turned the world inside out. Gods moved themselves through the world. Cronus decided to move the world around him. It was indescribable, the feeling—worse than the free fall of an airplane falling from the sky. A thousand times worse.

I sucked in a breath and held it. I didn’t vomit. I wouldn’t. I refused. Zeke and Griffin weren’t so fortunate. What Cronus had done to reality was horrifying to me, unnatural, but not unknowable. I was païen . I’d seen similar things, not as perverse in its magnitude, but similar. But to Zeke and Griffin, what had been done was beyond obscene and so alien to their minds and bodies that it couldn’t be tolerated. I heard them push the doors open, crawl out onto the asphalt, and retch. If they could move and throw up, then chances were they weren’t dying, which was good. The Titan hadn’t detected Griffin’s wings either and taken him, even better. The fact that he needed only one more demon now fell into a classification of which good and better weren’t a part.

Prying both hands off the steering wheel, I wiped at the blood running into my eyes. I’d either been cut from flying glass or smacked my head on the steering wheel. “You can’t go home when there is no home,” Leo said beside me. He undid his seat belt before pulling off his shirt, folding it, and handing it to me. The tribal raven tattoo on his chest showed in flashes from the one working headlight and the lights of cars moving up behind us. This interstate was never empty, no matter what time of day.

“Thanks, Matthew McConaughey. I’ve gotten to see your bare chest twice this week. You’re a shirtless wonder. I’m swamped with happy horny hormones.” Despite the wit or dark attempt at it, I leaned against his shoulder as I held the cloth to my forehead.

“You can’t go home when there is no home.” He wasn’t giving up until I admitted it, was prepared for it. “You know what that means.”

I did. I knew. I shouldn’t have cared. It shouldn’t have mattered, not to me—not to who and what I was. But it did, and it hurt. It hurt so damn much. “I know,” I said, closing my eyes and letting him take more of my weight. “I do.”

And it broke my heart.

Trixsta was gone.

My home, the first I’d ever had, was gone. A pile of rubble was in its place. The only picture I had of my brother and me, the piece of amber my mama had given me, the whimsically painted headboard of my bed, its carved leopards and birds that greeted me every morning, the claw-foot tub I’d taken far too many bubble baths in, Zeke’s first headshot from the target range stuck to the refrigerator—an accumulation of ten years of Trixa Iktomi’s life, and it was all gone. Cronus had brought it down like the Tower of Babel.

We’d stolen another car—carjacked it from a less-than-Good Samaritan who’d tried to drive around our wreck and keep tooling it toward Vegas and the nickel slots. He’d made it to Vegas, but riding in the trunk of his own car. We’d dropped him off at Buffalo Bill’s Casino on the California-Nevada border. Nickel slots to his heart’s desire. We’d also torched our “borrowed” car before we left—couldn’t have the VIN number tracing it back to the neighbors, and it made a good distraction for the police and emergency response teams.

But that was a thought that came and went, because my home was gone and now I knew. Me and mine weren’t wanderers thanks to it being written in our genetic code. There was another reason we were nomads by nature. Some long-past ancestor had discovered that if you didn’t love something, you couldn’t lose it. If you didn’t take in strays, like I had Griffin and Zeke, you wouldn’t have to watch them die. If you refused to see that someone was more like you in the good ways and not the bad, you wouldn’t have to watch them leave someday. If you never had a home . . . but I had. I’d lost it and my confidence that I didn’t need it, all in one. I felt the loss of both like an ache straight through to my bones. Who I was and where I’d chosen to be that person had vanished in the remains of a squat and unique building. Unique being another way of saying ugly, but ugly with character and meaning. You didn’t have to be beautiful to have those things. Trixsta had had them in abundance.

I missed it. That son of a bitch Cronus might get by with tearing down Lucifer and Hell along with him, but he wasn’t getting away with what he’d done to my home .

“I have a copy of the picture of you, me, and Kimano,” Leo said quietly beside me.

My mama would say it was foolishness. That a picture of Kimano and me was a picture of empty Halloween costumes, because you couldn’t see who we truly were anywhere in the shapes we chose. They were temporary and forgotten as easily as an old shirt or pair of shoes you hadn’t worn in years. She was wrong. No matter what we looked like, I could always see my brother and he had always seen me. Leo always saw me, and he always knew me. He knew how much that old black-and-white photo meant. Memories faded, the most precious ones as well. Time washed everything out on the tide, every year taking it farther and farther from sight. I wanted that one memory sharp and bright. I needed it. I nodded, but said nothing as I felt the warmth of his hand wrap around mine.