by Rob Thurman
“About the medium and talking to a dead person.” Griffin held up the bottle after pouring his own glass. “Care to fill us in on how that’s going to help the Cronus situation? It would be interesting—that’s a good word—interesting if you were to give us some information about the plan, this time, before Zeke and I find out this time that instead of being an angel and a demon that we’re actually Batman and Robin.”
That cheered me up more than the wine. My boy, trying to play rough with his big sister, trying to give me a verbal wedgie. It was cute enough that I wanted to pat him on the head and let him play an extra half hour in the sandbox. As an alternative, I embraced who I was and threw him to the sharks . . . for what I thought was the third time this week. “I’m full of information, sunshine. Like how you’re not supposed to mix alcohol and pain medication.”
Zeke promptly snatched the glass from Griffin’s hand and drank it himself. “You’re welcome,” he said pointedly as he put the glass in the sink.
“Yes, thank you so very much for throwing yourself on the grenade like that for me.” Griffin switched his annoyance to where it belonged—on me. “About the medium . . .”
I held up a finger to stop him and swiveled the stool to face the living room. “Shhh. Incoming.”
Païen could almost always recognize their own, whether we currently looked human or not—and, I’d found out, if we were more human than not. Sometimes you had to be face-to-face, sometimes not. Sometimes it was a whisper in the back of your brain and sometimes it was a scream. Oddly, I couldn’t feel Cronus at all. He could be standing inches away and I would feel nothing. I’d told Eligos that the Titan was outside a demon’s frame of reference. Truthfully, he was outside that of most païen as well. But Leo, I knew, and had known for so long, that when I sensed him, it was as if he were standing right behind me, close enough that I could feel his warm breath on my neck, the heat radiate through his skin as he leaned close . . . and swatted me on the back of my head with a newspaper. Romantic it was not, but that’s what it felt like. Leo was a god and the presence of a god packed a punch. They were brimming with power and although Leo’s power was now gone, I recognized him the same as I always had. Only this time it was double the jolt to the brain.
Griffin and Zeke’s house, while impeccably neat on the inside and full of toys like a huge plasma TV mounted on the wall, was a drab and cracked stucco on the outside and located in North Town. If you wanted to live in Vegas and not worry about your neighbors catching a glimpse of you loading up the car with guns, this was the place. The cops would go there, but when you have a house stashed with your own guns as well as drugs to worry about, who’s going to call them? And as the neighbors were more than familiar with Zeke, my boys were able to keep their toys. Their house hadn’t been robbed once—or blown up. The neighbors couldn’t claim the same.
Besides the plasma TV in the living room, there was also a leather couch Scotchgarded against gun oil and demon blood. When Thor appeared, he was already sprawled on it, his feet on the coffee table and the remote in his hand. “Dude. Nice TV. Is a game on?” he slurred, before his chin hit his chest, the remote hit the floor, and he was out. A split second of semicoherence followed by deep alcohol-fueled unconsciousness, and this was what I was pinning all of reality’s hopes on.
Leo, who had shown up in midair in raven form with wings flapping, changed back to human form. I hadn’t decided yet if I was happy or disappointed that the Light had let him keep his clothes as part of his raven-shifting ability. “Hail the Mighty Thor,” he snorted as Thor began a drunken snore that anyone who’d owned a bar before could recognize. It was thick, loud, and accompanied by just enough drool to make it intriguing. “This is our third attempt to make it here. Midair over the Grand Canyon was scenic.” That would explain the bird shape. There was never a designated nondrinking god around when you needed one. “I thought you’d come here since Cronus has marked the bar as his territory.”
He might have marked it, but he wasn’t keeping it. “Does he have the weapon mold?” I asked. It wouldn’t matter if Anna came through with what we needed from Hades—the place, not the dead god—if we didn’t have a way to construct a weapon out of it.
“Do you think I would have him come along if he did? I would’ve taken it and had him send me back . . . blessedly alone. Right now his company isn’t that enthralling. Hell, neither is his hygiene, and considering I clean the bar’s bathrooms, that’s saying something.” Leo studied his foster brother, which was as close an approximation I could come to how the Norse gods sketched out their family tree, although fostering had a much different connotation to the Norse gods and the Norse people. It built ties of loyalty among families where before there had been none. Leo lifted his upper lip with an emotion that appeared to be anything but familial or loyal, and brotherly love was completely out of the picture. “I try to destroy the world once and they give me holy hell about it forever, but golden boy spends his life staggering here and there, leaving vomit behind him like a trail of bread crumbs for Hansel and Gretel to follow out of the woods, and he’s raised on high. Worshipped above all others. Vikings named everything including their dicks after him. Unbelievable.”
“I thought Thor was a great warrior, per mythology anyway.” Griffin left the kitchen and went in for a closer look at mythology come to life. “Not to mention somewhat of a compadre of yours until you caused too much trouble for him to overlook.”
“We were ‘compadres’ until I outgrew the drinking, until I puked every day all day, which would’ve been a week after I started drinking. Every creature he killed, it was because he passed out on top of it and smothered the poor bastard. He was born with a horn of mead in one hand and a woman’s breast in the other. The hammer I gave him? The weapon of myth and mystery? He cracks walnuts with it.” Thor was bringing out the Loki in Leo in a big way.
At Leo’s last words, Thor’s snoring hitched. “Walnuts . . . good.” He drooled a tad more copiously and the snoring began again. As muscle-bound as artists of old had depicted him, he was dressed in a tank top—all the rage for Colorado in February—and a pair of sweatpants. One foot was covered with a black sneaker and the other one was bare. He did have shoulder-length blond hair, but from the dark roots and artificially even color, it was dyed. Worse, not only dyed, but it was a genuine at-home, from-a-box job. If you drank, that was your problem. If you drank too much to find a good hair salon, that was my problem, visually and aesthetically.
Being a god didn’t automatically mean you were a shape-shifter. It also could mean you were big, dumb, and just very, very difficult to kill. Thor fell into the latter category. In fact, he might have been the entire category, hogging it all to himself.
“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.”
“You have it figured out, do you? You’re so clever.” I normally hated it when someone saw through my plan before I revealed it in stunning, occasionally body-partsplattered wonder. Leo was my kind though, and it was difficult to out-trick a trickster of his caliber. It might be by choice instead of birthright, but he excelled at the art. I hadn’t made a genuinely serious attempt to hide anything from him in a long time. I hadn’t kept the Roses from him for a moment. If we were all going to die or worse at the hand of Cronus, I wanted Leo to have something to amuse him on the way out. And if Eli’s reaction of trying to strangle me had left him less than entertained, I had to admit that was my fault. I pulled out my cell phone and started dialing.
“The big plan.” Griffin leaned up. “I’m still waiting to hear about this Titan-conquering big plan, particularly as you say Titans are invincible. Fill me in.”
Both Leo and I spared him quick and intentionally frustrating silent grins before returning to the tasks of driving and me telling Ishiah what I wanted of Heaven. It was enough that Griffin did get a taste of the plan or a small part of it. From the “Oh shit” that floated forward, he found it not particularly reassuring. I didn’t blame him. My plans, cons, little tricks, they were all things diverting, but reassuring didn’t often fall into that category—not the way anyone but a trickster would define it.
As for Hell, I left Eligos a voice mail. It was only a matter of time, but there weren’t any towers that far yet, and Eli wasn’t going to be risking his wings or life up here for any longer than it took to attempt to kill me. There was the chance that Lucifer had lost patience with him. The Roses were more than enough reason for that, but Eli as El
i and Eli as Eligos had a way about him and a mouth that never stopped spinning things to put him on top. If any demon could talk his way out of Lucifer’s bad side, not a playground I would want to be in, it was Eli. Hopefully they’d both be in a cooperative mood. And like every fifth grader knew, “One if by land, and two if by sea, and I on the opposite shore will be”. . .
Waiting for Hell on Earth. It was our only chance now.
Chapter 15
It was past eight by the time we arrived at the museum. It was dark, the time of the more adventurous things in life—such as robbing that same museum we could see through the trees from where we were parked across the street in a lot off Menlo Avenue. “Let me get this again. Thor is going to poof one of us into the museum to grab the weapon mold and poof us back out. That’s your plan. I was going to ask why you didn’t have him simply go and get it himself, but I think I figured that out on my own,” Griffin said as he put his head out the open car window for well over the hundredth time. Taking a few breaths of fresh air, he pulled back in and asked, “I’m assuming there’s a backup plan? Although why not just poof the artifact itself?”
“First off, he doesn’t know precisely where it is in the museum, although if he were sober, he probably would. He does know where we are or I’m hoping he will.” Since we were right in the car with him, although in his shape, that was a big assumption. “Secondly, don’t call it poofing. Kids’ cartoon characters poof. Gods materialize in an awe-inspiring storm of fire, subtly form themselves out of the shadows, or inexplicably appear out of thin air. They don’t poof,” I said.
“Why is that?” Griffin gave in and leaned against Thor’s shoulder. With the Norse god’s size, there wasn’t room to do anything else.
“Because it sounds ridiculous,” Leo said, jingling the car keys, “and we don’t like it.” He jingled again, the clank of metal in a dungeon lock as they came to drag you to the executioner’s ax. “Not . . . at . . . all.”
