The Grimrose Path t-2

by Rob Thurman

  “Then you could eat me, and not in a way women usually care for.” I gave him a push hard enough to move him back a few inches.

  He grinned, unrepentant. “We all have our particular preferences, but we could have sex first and then I could eat you. I aim to please.”

  “You aim anywhere and everywhere and leave a trail of blood wherever you go,” I replied. Zeke was growling at my shoulder, but he knew better than to interfere. I knew demons and I knew how their brains worked . . . murderous mazes reflected in manic mirrors. They were twisted, but not insane. I’d faced worse than demons, far worse . . . and run away, but that’s another story. “And why are you so sure this is one of my kind?”

  “It’s not Heaven; it’s not Hell. There is no rhyme or reason to the levels of demons killed. No gain for an upper to take out a UPS-level demon. So that leaves only the païen. You and yours are always so full of surprises. It’s why I like you, and I do so so like you.” He saluted, his sword and fist banging his chest. “Hail, Trixa. To the end of our days. And they will end . . . for one of us.” Cocky smile still in place, he melted back into the crowd until he was gone.

  “Armand is his second in command, then,” Griffin said, moving up beside me.

  “Armand is a snack who’s currently picking up Eligos’s dry cleaning and having his car detailed,” I corrected. “Useful for a while, but still a snack when all’s said and done. Like Eli said, there’s no point in a higher demon eating a lower one, but sucking the energy from one close to your level, that’s worthwhile. And either Armand doesn’t get it or he’s hoping to turn the tables.”

  “He’s stupid, then,” Zeke offered as he rocked back and forth on his heels, already bored.

  “Not stupid, Kit, but not quite as bright as his boss.” He might be a duke in Hell, but he was no Eligos. The clock was ticking on him. My only regret was I wouldn’t be there to see it hit midnight. Looking from left to right at my boys, I changed the subject. “Who wants lunch? My treat.” Because when you didn’t pay, it really was a treat. “But snap snap.” I pulled out my phone and punched in a number. Why is it that the clairvoyant never call you first? I have a psychic to talk to.” And, depending on what he told me, the clock was ticking on him too. Only much faster.

  Tick.

  Tock.

  Chapter 3

  The buffet owner did have it coming. First he tried to turn Zeke away at the door. Zeke was right: “All you can eat” means all you can eat—not all you can eat if you have a reasonably expandable stomach. If you mean all you can eat, excluding metabolism freaks who can eat their own weight in steak and crab legs before even beginning to eye the dessert bar, then you should note that on the sign.

  Lesson one: Roaches in food? That’s simply embarrassing. Fingertips? . . . That only gets credit if you chop off your own finger for a free meal. For that I have to hoist the flag of respect and salute. That is true commitment and hard to find in a human—such infants in their conning ways. In the old days, before I was stripped of my trickster powers, I would’ve put a goat in the salad bar, where it would have complacently grazed away. But in the here and now, I had to deal with what I had to work with . . . my brain and a few hundred in cash. It was amazing. You could go to the pet store, buy an on-the-smaller-size boa constrictor, smuggle it into a buffet in your shoulder bag, turn it loose in the pasta bar, eat up while screaming patrons ran in all directions, leave, return the snake—because, say, it didn’t match your stripper wardrobe, get your money back, and the only downside was Griffin complaining there was a scale in his gelato.

  He was awfully fastidious for an ex-demon, but as I’d told him and completely believed, he was human now. Or a peri if one wanted to be specific. Peris in mythology were half demon, half angel. In reality, they were expatriate angels who found Earth more to their liking than Heaven and obtained permission to “go native.”

  I’d met a few peris of the ex-angel persuasion, but Griffin was the first demon one—the only demon one in existence. But I know he preferred thinking of himself as human rather than peri because of all the “ex” that went with the label, which was fine by me. All humans, any human, should be as good as my boy Griff. We parted ways at the buffet parking lot. I headed back to the pet shop and then home.

  The psychic I was meeting back at Trixsta wasn’t half as fastidious or one-tenth as good as my boy. I’d told that poor little girl Anna to stay away from psychics and I’d told her that with good reason. There were three kinds of psychics in this world. First, there was the fake. . . . Everyone has to make a living and if you’re that naïve, I could let a human do a trickster’s work and not lose any sleep over it.

  Second, there was the real thing. Usually human and connected to a plane of existence only they could see. To them, the world was one huge clock... every piece doing its part, every cog turning, and everything as it should be, no matter how horrible. They would never tell you ahead of time, but they’d smile sorrowfully as that bus finally ran your granny down and pat you on the back with a “There, there. What’s meant to be is meant to be. But cheer up. She’s one with the universe now.”

  Big comfort.

  Big asses . . . but technically I couldn’t punish them, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to.

  Third was also the real deal, but they didn’t give a damn about philosophy or fate, Granny or the bus. They only wanted cold hard cash, and I understood that. You paid for something and they gave it to you. Trouble was, the second kind of psychics were right—as much as you might want to hate them for it. Things couldn’t be changed. What will be . . . Well, everyone knows the rest of that saying. But these third kind of psychics would tell you. The second type wouldn’t mention Granny and the bus. You’d find out in the fullness of time and they’d give you your money back with a smile of pity. They dealt in the light and the way, and that way, the best they’d discovered so far, happened to be blissful ignorance. Number three had no such compunction. Not only would he or she tell you about Granny but they’d even tell you the number of the bus that was going to run her muumuuloving, orthopedic-shoe-wearing self down. Then they’d put your money away and shove you out the door to make room for the next client. The bastards wouldn’t even bother to give you a Kleenex on your way out. And they definitely didn’t leave you any money to soak up those tears either.

  That’s why I used only the third kind. They were sons of bitches, but they told you the truth, all of it. But I made absolutely sure that I wanted to know the truth before asking. Once it was out there, there was no taking it back, no matter how much you wanted to. That meant I didn’t use psychics often. They weren’t worth the pain or the money, and I usually could guess the future as clearly as they could see it. And the times that I couldn’t, when people died . . . family died, it would be too bad for the psychic I was with when I lost control because I couldn’t accept what they told me.

  Fate. If you can’t accept it, don’t tempt it.

  “You’re late,” came the complaint as soon as I walked into the bar.

  “Galileo,” I sighed, dumping my bag and taking him in as he finished off his—I counted the plates—seventh plate of potato skins and cheese sticks. “You’re looking . . . your handsome usual self.”

  Four hundred and fifty pounds if he was an ounce, he beamed over four double chins and patted greasy fingers on his Hawaiian shirt that sported hula girls and rather obscene monkeys peering up the grass skirts. “You know what they say at the Vatican, the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth. It revolves around me.”

  I sat down opposite him, wondering idly for a moment if I could actually feel the pull of a gravity well, then got down to the matter at hand, because, quite frankly, the less of Galileo I had to put up with, the better. He might come off cheerful as Santa on vacation, feeding the slots and catching a show, but he was a shark through and through for his forty-some years. Too bad for him that made him about six inches long with a teeny tiny dorsal fin and sitting across from Jaws. “I nee
d to ask you a question. I’d ask how much, but I believe you’ve already eaten your fee and then some.” I flicked a finger against one of the plates to make a ringing note hover in the air. “So I’m thinking we’ll make this an even trade.”

  He laughed and smoothed a plump hand over what few black strands he had left for a seven-inch comb-over. “Sassy Trixa. Always joking, but you send me a client now and then, although this is your first time asking for yourself. Interesting. Interesting. So, I’m thinking, how’s ’bout an even four grand? And maybe I get to see you in a hula skirt to match my shirt?”

  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 still 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.