Rob Thurman: The Grimrose Path

For every demon who fell, an angel took his place. When that angel exploded, a stained glass window burst that filled the air; yet another demon was there to attack again. Cronus had multiple jaws fastened around each arm and leg. He had fiery swords plunged into him again and again until I could swear I could smell the stench of burned plastic. When the smallest area opened up, a shotgun blast came from behind me to put a slug into it. I heard Leo and Zeke both cursing behind me as the shotguns turned out to be as useless as everything else. Demons, angels, and man-made death, but the fake man who would be GodKingfuckingEmperor of All didn’t go down. He tossed more demons away, some with a mouthful of whatever cheap fabric of reality made him. Angels—archangels some—were broken like Christmas ornaments rather than the fiercely lethal fighters they were. I ducked as one demon was thrown over me and heard Zeke curse again as he was hit and fell under his weight.

“Don’t kill him, Kit,” I said without turning. “He’s on our side for the moment.”

As I watched, they kept coming, pouring out of the canyon with a single purpose. There was something almost glorious in that, two opposite sides in what should’ve been an unstoppable whole. Cronus, however, was stopping them left and right. How many angels could dance on the head of a pin? It didn’t matter. There might not be any left in Heaven to do the dancing when this was over, and if wings didn’t grow back, demons were going to be much less awe worthy in paintings and sculptures. It could make you wonder why Cronus was putting up with it. Why didn’t he simply move the world again—until he was virtually on top of Griffin to take that wing?

I didn’t wonder. He was having fun. Killing was boring to a Titan, but this wasn’t simple killing. This was a non- païen Heaven and Hell at his fingertips to obliterate. Even to Cronus, that was a change of pace. What he’d planned for after consuming Lucifer and Hell, he had a taste of now, and he liked it. With every slow step he took toward me and the wings that were behind me, he was having a goddamn ball. With every step his attackers, soldiers through and through, died in droves.

Then one could’ve wondered, where was the reason behind it? If every angel and demon fell and it did nothing but give Cronus a jolt of Irish in his coffee, why do it at all? What was the point? Where was the reason? I didn’t wonder. I knew.

I was the point.

This world was the reason.

Anna—the Rose—had been the means.

If you can save someone, do it. If you can save someone and in turn have them save everyone and everything, do that too.

I walked through puddles of demon ichor so thick the ground couldn’t soak it up. Closing what space remained between the Titan and me, I held the sword in front of me now and put it through the shoulder of one demon and the chest of an angel. The blade of water pierced them as if they were less tangible than a thought. The two feet of blade left I buried in Cronus’s abdomen. He knew I was coming. He was facing me, he saw me—although he didn’t need to—and he didn’t try to stop me. What was one more dead on top of all the others, now oil and glass, that littered the sand? Only more entertainment. I’d been counting on that.

I smiled into the eye sockets that ran black. I always smiled when I took down those who deserved it. “I think, therefore I am.”

Cronus reached down to touch the blade. The demon had torn free to tumble away and the angel had shattered. “What is . . . I know this. Don’t I know this?”

The Namaru had made the water solid, able to be held and able to cut, but that was the funny thing about water. It could be solid, but once it was inside you . . . it was inside you. Once the water of Lethe was inside you, swallowed or rammed into your gut, you were well and truly fucked.

“I know this,” he repeated, but the statement sounded vacant . . . each word void of meaning.

He knew it all right. He’d once been prisoner in Tartarus, below Hades, and then had ruled Hades and its Fields of Elysium for a time. He knew the River Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness—rather, he had known it. “Had”—it was such a good word.

“You think, therefore you are. But you’re a Titan. You created yourself from the Chaos, a single thought in the nothing. If you can’t remember who you are, what you are, how can you be anything at all?” Without that thought, that one “I am,” a Titan wasn’t a Titan. When you were your own creator and you forgot it all, even that single thought, how could you hold yourself together? How could you paste yourself onto the fabric of the universe?

You couldn’t.

The shadows began to roll backward from the ground up, back into his mouth and eyes. “I . . . I am. . . .” The words, thick and slow, were caught in the moving poisonous waste and washed away.

“No, you’re not.” With the demon and angel gone, I shoved the blade farther into him. It was for my own personal satisfaction. In him an inch or a mile, it didn’t matter. Lethe was inside him and part of him now, and he couldn’t remember enough to undo that. “You’re not anything at all. You’re nothing. Less than nothing. You don’t even exist .”

The eyes stretched wide, the fake lips gaped wider, the shadows a waterfall, filling him up until his face began to distort under the pressure. He threw back his head to stare blindly at a sky he couldn’t recognize, a sun he didn’t know. The scream that tried to escape became a whimper as it too was sucked back inside him. And then he was gone, an implosion of time and space that took a small slice of the world with him. I almost tumbled into that rip in reality. I’d stood so close that I felt the black-hole pull of what lay outside of everything there was. I couldn’t see it. I didn’t think anything but the dead Titans could see that, but I felt it and it was horrible. It wasn’t hungry or greedy; it was a complete lack of . . . life and death and everything between, before, after, and beyond. If I fell into it, that was fine. If I didn’t, that was all right as well. A lack doesn’t care—which made it somehow worse.

Then an arm went around my waist and I was yanked away and up into the air. The tear ate more of the world, several handfuls’ worth, and then sealed itself up. It too, like Cronus and the sword with them, was gone. I could do without the two and didn’t need the third anymore. I heard the beating of wings and grinned over my shoulder. “Those flying lessons paid off, didn’t they?”

Griffin grinned back, the wind from his wings blowing the hair in his eyes. He was a kid who’d gotten the best present ever . . . to fly like Superman. “I’ll have to practice carrying people more. Twelve feet up is all I can manage.”

“Or we can hopefully not be in this situation again.” He dropped lower until he could ease me to the ground, on which I sat down the second he let go. It wasn’t that my knees buckled or anything that trite; it was for the sheer need of touching what we had only just saved. Touching air was the same; reality was the whole damn kit and kaboodle—I had no idea what a kaboodle was, but it came to mind as I scooped up dirt in my hand and held it up for solemn contemplation. “Kaboodle,” I announced to Leo, who nodded.

“Damn fine kaboodle it is too,” he confirmed.

“That it is.” Legs crossed, I let myself fall backward to stare up at the sky. It was well worth staring at, and I did so happily until I heard two voices in unison say, “It’s you.” I propped myself up on my elbows to see Azrael and Eligos standing shoulder to shoulder and regarding each other with mutual disdain. Azrael had some disgust mixed into the pudding, but Eli seemed more glum, which was hardly like him.