The Grimrose Path

by Rob Thurman

  I sent only the clients I thought tough enough to hear what they wanted to know to him. Not like little lost Anna. Her type I would never send to be gobbled up by Galileo Riogas. I smiled at him. “What a funny one you are. I like a man who makes me laugh.” Four thousand dollars my gym-aching ass. Let’s see how much of a shark he could be when he met the real thing. “And I do love to laugh.” I put my elbows on the table, rested my chin in cupped hands, and asked him to do something I never had before—not in the days when I’d been undercover. “Why don’t you see how I laugh, Galileo? In my eyes. Look. See how I laugh.” My smile widened. “See why I laugh.”

  And he did look . . . because he had no idea what he was looking into.

  Dark brown eyes widened to show the jaundiced yellow around them. His sausage fingers gripped the table hard. His voice struggled from a tight throat, and I think if he could’ve kept the words to himself he would have. But he wasn’t strong enough. “I see . . . forests. Mountains. Deserts. Seas. I see animals with your eyes. I see . . . What is that?” He tried to close his eyes, but it didn’t work out for him. “It floats. It floats like water come to life, with a thousand fireflies swimming in it, every color there is. It’s heading for the sky, an iridescent phoenix.” That was very poetic of him. Who knew he had that rattling around in his heartless lump of a body?

  No human, no one that wasn’t family, except for Leo, had ever seen me. The true me—as I’d been born. For tricksters it was our last line of defense—the ultimate truth beyond all our trickery. It was sacred, putting the face on all of our lies. Showing the man behind the curtain in the merry old land of Oz. I let this lump see mine because I wanted immediate and total cooperation . . . and because the image likely had fried that bit of his brain. He wouldn’t remember for more than a minute at most.

  He’d shut his eyes for a second time, succeeding for a moment, but they wouldn’t stay closed. He didn’t want to see, but at the same time he did. Curiosity, it didn’t just take out the cats. People were far worse when it came to being nosy. Galileo, no cat and as nosy as they came, swallowed and leaned back. “The colors are gone.” He swallowed again. “I see teeth and fangs and blood. I see . . . no . . . I hear you. I hear you laughing.”

  I tilted my head. “I told you I liked to laugh.” I did laugh, once in a while, over flowing blood, but there had never been anyone who hadn’t deserved to lose that blood. “Leo,” I called. “Why don’t you come here and visit for a second? Galileo has never looked deep into your gorgeous eyes either.” I grabbed the man’s arm as he started to get up. “Oh no. That’s bad manners, Galileo. Don’t be that way.” My smile faded. “Like you shouldn’t have been that way when I sent a Mr. Jake Stein to see you. I’ve told you before, I screen them, but some slip through and I don’t know what you’ll see in their future. I told you to let a fish go now and again if the truth might be too much for them to handle, but you didn’t. You say you saw colors? I never hid my true colors from you, but you didn’t listen. You told him the truth and whatever truth that was made him hang himself in his family’s garage. Now”—I tightened my grip on his sweat-slick arm—“let’s see what happens to you when you see Leo’s truth.”

  “But . . . that can’t be you.” He was still trying to pull away as Leo approached from behind the bar, but considering the most weight he lifted in a day would be an order of two double cheeseburgers to go, he didn’t have much success. “The blood. The fur and scales and your smile. God, that smile.” He was a psychic. He knew about vampires and werewolves and things that go bump in the night, but one little trickster, that he couldn’t believe?

  Then Leo was certainly going to be educational for him.

  Leo pulled up a chair beside me as I squeezed Galileo’s arm. “A smile is just a frown turned upside down. What do you think, Leo?”

  Galileo’s gaze moved to Leo’s black eyes and he froze. He stopped trying to pull away, he didn’t blink, and I was positive he gave up on breathing for a while. After almost a minute he sucked in a breath, whistling and weak, and moaned, “The end. You almost ended it. Ended us all. You tore down mountains, boiled oceans, nearly pulled down the sky. You were the Omega before there was an Alpha, and you did it for no reason. For no reason.”

  “Boredom is a reason.” Leo gave a shrug of acceptance. “And I’m in a program. I’m in recovery now. Ten thousand years Ragnarok free.”

  Galileo crossed himself, several times, and was turning a rather pretty if unhealthy shade of lavender. I honestly didn’t care. Fate was fate, after all. Maybe that man I sent to him, Stein, would’ve killed himself regardless of what Galileo told him, but if the son of a bitch had kept to our referral agreement, I wouldn’t have to be wondering about it now. I’d been meaning to take care of the situation for a few weeks now and this was an opportunity to both clarify and conduct a business arrangement. I’ve always been a great believer in time management.

  “Galileo,” I said patiently.

  Nothing.

  I sighed and snapped my fingers in front of his glazed eyes with a little less patience as he muttered the Lord’s Prayer under his breath, getting a good deal of it wrong. A very lapsed Catholic with an equally poor memory. “Galileo, before you have a heart attack or stroke, whichever you seem racing toward right now, I need to know what’s killing the demons? More than nine hundred in six months. What’s doing that?” I pulled a piece of folded paper from my jeans pocket and pushed it across the table to him, pulling one of his hands out of a praying position and slapping the wet palm on top of it. Within that doubled-up simple yellow piece of paper, a Post-it Note actually—so mundane and ordinary—was a scrap of demon ichor left from last night when Griffin and Zeke had brought in the one-winged, mentally absent demon. That hadn’t been mundane and ordinary at all.

  “Come on, Galileo,” I prodded. “It’s right there. Right under your hand, right in front of your eyes. What do you see?”

  I was hoping he wouldn’t shut down as Zeke had. Zeke was a telepath, but Galileo was a psychic. Zeke saw some things; Galileo saw everything, and no matter how worthless a creature, he excelled at it. Elvis might have been the King of Rock and Roll, but Galileo was the King of Psychics . . . at least in Vegas, probably in the entire Western Hemisphere. He was disgusting, perverted, greedy, and an entire dictionary full of more slimy adjectives, but he did know his business. He didn’t have talent. He had Talent with a capital T, and throw a little boldface on there while you’re at it. Zeke was good, but no better than your average angel . . . ex or otherwise. Galileo was an Einstein, and one with an excellent sense of survival. He might be able to see from a safer mental distance with that talent of his.

  If it didn’t burn out like a flickering lightbulb. Zeke had gone down. If Galileo went down, considering his physical health, he might not get back up. As long as he did it after giving over the information . . . what will be, will be. The psychics said it often enough—now one of them would have to live with it.

  Or not.

  If Galileo had ever done a selfless thing in his life, I might have cared. But I knew his type. I’d known those like him for a long, long time. They were born without that ability to care for anyone but themselves. Despite psychology textbooks, loving yourself doesn’t automatically mean others will love you. My hand might rest on the back of his, but I wasn’t feeling any love. “The demon blood, Galileo. What took the demon? What destroyed his mind? And hurry up,” I added, “because you’re looking a mite peaked there, sugar.”

  The pale violet color of his round moon-pie face was only darkening. Leo exhaled and heaved out of the chair. “I’ll call 911. If you get anything out of him before he hits the floor, dinner’s on me.”

  “Galileo,” I said sharply. “Now. Now. Tell me what you see.”

  His lips framed a word, but I didn’t hear it. He tried again. “Sic . . . kle.” He wheezed and repeated, “Sickle.”

  His forehead hit the table with a thunk, but he was still there . . . barely, but st
ill there, eyes rolled back—the yellow a dull shine. “Am . . . I . . . dying?”

  “Galileo, sweetie.” I patted his hand that rested beneath mine. “You’re the psychic. You tell me.”

  He’d live, the EMTs said, although their best guess was that he’d end up in open-heart surgery.

  If so, the surgeons would probably pull Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web plus his five piggy cousins out of the man’s heart, and he’d live to destroy someone else’s hopes prematurely. Take away their few days of blissful ignorance that they had left to them.

  What will be will be.

  Or maybe not. Maybe Galileo had learned his lesson when he was allowed a peek behind the curtain. He hadn’t seen the wizard, that was for sure. I didn’t pass out hearts, courage, and brains—I tested them. And Leo . . . Leo in the past would’ve taken them and kept them on a shelf as souvenirs. So perhaps Galileo would behave. As a matter of fact, he’d damn well better, I grumbled internally as I cleaned the table he’d collapsed onto. Leo had hauled away the dishes, but there was still an ample amount of drool and crumbs to take care of. The psychic wasn’t a neat eater by any stretch of the imagination. He ate like a fifteen-year-old toothless Saint Bernard, spreading morsels of food up to six feet away.

  Oh yes, he’d better behave. I would never forget Jake Stein, a hopeful man with even more hopeful eyes shortly followed by a noose. And I wouldn’t forget this outrageous mess either. Galileo didn’t need a lobster bib; he needed a tablecloth tied around what passed for his neck.

  “A sickle. That’s all you were able to get?”

  I looked over my shoulder with ill temper at Leo’s patronizing tone. “I could’ve gotten more if you’d held back a bit. I wanted you to give him a glimpse of the Loki trailer, not the whole movie, IMAX and all. You’re the one who all but stuffed a grenade into his heart and pulled the pin.”

  “Sometimes an artist needs recognition of his work. Past or not,” he said complacently as his hand moved in a brisk slapping motion toward my ass. The ill temper on my face darkened into something that would’ve blown Galileo’s heart to pieces just like that metaphorical hand grenade and destroyed everything else within a fifty-mile range.

  Leo let his hand drop casually as if it had been a joke all along and he would never possibly ever consider slapping me on the ass no matter how frisky he was feeling. Men. Gods. Or a mixture of the two. All the same. “Remembering the bad old days get you a little worked up there?” I lifted my eyebrows. “Just don’t forget why everyone who knows you or has heard of you or done a book report on you calls them the bad old days, all right?”

  He grunted and fetched another towel to help me. “I won’t forget. I won’t go back. You know that.”

  “I do,” I said, and smacked him on the butt instead. And I did know. I had more faith in Leo than anyone in the world except my mama. The two of them tied.

  “And I didn’t boil an ocean.” He used the towel to return the favor, locker-room style, before finishing up the crumbs on the floor. “It was a lake. A very large lake, granted, but just a lake. And despite my past lake-boiling abilities, I don’t know what we’re supposed to glean from “sickle.” Knowing Galileo, he most likely wanted a Popsicle to satisfy his sweet tooth before he shuffled off his mortal coil. Assuming there is anyone or anything large enough to shuffle that mass off anywhere.”

  “If he did mean death,” I groaned, and sat down in Galileo’s vacated chair. It was still warm. It was also still in one piece. Amazing. “That could be almost anyone or anything on my list. How many are on your list?”

  “Mmm. About ten. The same as are on your list, only I was capable of putting mine in alphabetical order.” He sat too as another of our regulars wandered in out of the afternoon light. Leo jerked his thumb at the bar. “Help yourself.” That was also fairly regular around here. Our customers didn’t cheat us, not our regulars. They didn’t have to be psychic like Galileo to know better; they just knew . . . like a rabbit knows to hold still in the grass when the hawk soars overhead. Bunnies liked to fuck, but bunnies did not like to be fucked up. Our regulars were as smart as those rabbits . . . almost. They paid their tabs promptly and never eavesdropped. Everyone had an agenda. They were perfectly happy with theirs: alcoholic oblivion.

  “Leave me alone,” I said crossly. “I don’t like A’s.” One time, the closest time that I was almost eaten, it was by an A. It was embarrassing. And not a little terrifying, as much as I hated to admit that anything could terrify me—me, Trixa, badass trickster. But if you don’t admit to the truth, then you end up as something’s lunch and that beat embarrassing every time.

  There were things bigger and badder than me out there. Even some demons, despite how I spelled out the ranking. Regular demons no, but there were demons in Hell so horrific they couldn’t come to Earth without destroying the ground beneath them and setting fire to the air they breathed. If Heaven had gotten one thing right, it was keeping them and Lucifer in Hell for eternity, because they were part of Hell itself. Embedded in it, one with their prison, there was no escape for their kind.

  Technically that made me correct in my ranking . . . tricksters outranked demons; reading the fine print wasn’t necessary. But there were creatures on Earth, païen creatures, creatures that began with an A, that could put an end to me, a very unpleasant end—to me and nine hundred demons. Unlike demons, however, they were completely mad, and while there weren’t as many as there had been, it didn’t matter. As long as there was one left and that one came for you, you ran until you couldn’t run any farther. I wasn’t saying I wouldn’t go out without a fight, but some fights you can’t win . . . and that’s why you run and why you don’t put your list in Leo’s anal-retentive alphabetic order because A’s were a bad letter. They deserved to be on the bottom of the list or, better yet, on the back of the list where you didn’t have to look at the name.

  I wrapped my finger in the gold chain of my necklace. “In fact, let’s just assume it’s not the A one, because if it is, there’s nothing we can do about it and if they want to eat demons, better demons than us.”

  Leo took my other hand, rubbed his thumb across the back of it, and said with absolute belief, “It’s not them.”

  I nodded. “No, it’s not.” I clasped his hand hard. “So let’s take a look at the other nasties.”

  “And none of them tried to eat you?” Leo asked with an affectionate humor that had me pinching the nerve in his hand instead of just holding it. “With your sparkling personality and gentle easygoing nature? You’re sure?”

  “I didn’t say that. And one does have a scar in an area he might have been fond of at one time, but him I can handle. And I do sparkle. Shine like the sun, the moon, the stars, and every silver or gold coin I stole in the good old days.” I smiled, good mood restored, because it still was the good old days for me. Leo had changed his ways, but mine didn’t need changing.

  We ended up laughing about long-past adventures as we made our way down that list. It made it easier. It balanced it out. Bad guy, good memory. Very bad guy, very good memory. Even worse guy, memories with huge gaping holes thanks to the massive amounts of wine we’d drunk that particular time.

  Then suddenly closing time had come and the only progress we’d made was to have a good time reminiscing. But in my book, having a good time is the best progress you can make in almost any situation. Leo went home and I went upstairs to my apartment. I undressed, slipped into my favorite silk pajamas, brushed my teeth, and slept with all those memories swirling in bright colors. Wonderful dreams. Wonderful night.

  All the better to make the morning even worse in comparison.

  Chapter 4

  Roses are red.

  Sometimes.

  The one was, and it was beautiful, starting at the bottom with the pure deep crimson that was almost black, the red of the setting sun disappearing into twilight. The petals then gradually lightened to a vivid deep red the exact color of freshly spilled blood. The flower wasn’t full-b
lown, but a curve of a fresh bud not yet realizing its potential. Curves were good. I liked curves, whether on myself, because a woman should have curves, or in the impossible-to-follow swerves and convolutions of what passed for the thought processes of the male species. Males trying to wrap their minds around a concept that didn’t involve a football or pulling a trigger. They were cute that way, like homicidal puppies. Curves of the body and curves of the mind.

  As for color . . .

  Red was my favorite. Red like fire, a little arson warmed a girl’s heart. But what was tied around the rose pulled away your attention too fast to dwell on the color.

  I should’ve enjoyed the rose. Most women like flowers, right? I should’ve put it in a vase filled with water. After all, red was more than my favorite; it was my signature, how I signed my work as a trickster. What was wrapped around the rose was the same sort of thing . . . only a preemptive version.

  Less of a “Gotcha” and more of a “Here I come, ready or not.”

  We were in no way ready for this.

  So it was at eight, for once not sleeping in, that I stood and stared at the rose lying on the scarred and stained surface of my bar. Help me, Earth, Sun, and Sky. What were we going to do now?

  I continued to stare at the rose, was utterly ignored by the Earth, Sun, and Sky, and finally decided to put it in a vase after all. I filled one from beneath the sink and carefully picked up the flower by its green stem. That same stem was wrapped in that black silk ribbon with an absolutely perfect bow. I made sure the material didn’t touch the water. This was someone I did not want to insult, piss off, or even slightly annoy with the slightest hint of disrespect. One trailing black end of the glossy material was embossed with gold lettering. Only a few letters, a calling card if you will. It read KPONYΣ.