by Rob Thurman
“It wasn’t good,” I corrected, vexed. “It was unparalleled. I saved thousands, maybe a hundred thousand souls.” I didn’t invent the big fish story, but I was sure it was a trickster who had. “I’d think I’d get a sainthood at the very least.”
“A hundred thousand souls saved, but did they all deserve to be saved?”
The voice of conscience. I was glad it lived in NYC and not here. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t thought some of the souls might not be rightfully damned. Abusers, murderers, but I knew, I’d seen that one Rose hadn’t deserved anything close to damnation. Leo had promised to pass along the word via his family. Our afterlives weren’t Heaven or Hell. There was more leeway, more flexibility between what was evil and what was only naughty. Most of the souls would find the home they were due. Justice would be served, and if some did escape to wander alone, unable to touch the real world or any world for the rest of eternity, that was a punishment all its own.
“Your rules aren’t necessarily our rules. I saved an innocent girl. I tricked Hell—that’s what I was born to do. Chirp away, Jiminy. It won’t do you any good.” He kept the chirping silent, but it was implicit in the way he held himself as we walked back to the bar. Stiff back, tight jaw, braced shoulders.
At Trixsta’s door—Leo had the glass fixed . . . nice of him—I stopped. “You didn’t ask what Cronus wanted. What he really wanted.”
“After what you did by conning Eligos, truthfully, I’m afraid to ask. You put yourself in Hell’s crosshairs. Made yourself the target of every demon alive. I don’t think you could survive that, trickster or not. That makes me think you took a huge risk because you know what Cronus wants and it’s something you aren’t going to walk away from . . . that chances are good that no one is walking away from. Plus, if you were going to tell me, you would have by now, and I know how impossible it is to pin down an uncooperative trickster. Heaven won’t like it, but I know better than to think I can do anything to change that. You’ll tell me when you want to and no sooner.”
He was right . . . about it all. I took his arm and turned him from the door after calling for Leo. “Leo will take you to the airport, Ish. Go back home to New York and sex up Goodfellow five ways to Sunday. Hold on to what you have now. There’s no guarantee the world will keep turning. That’s true of any day, but with Cronus here, it’s even more true . . . so go home. Give Robin my best.” As Leo stepped outside, I asked him if he would take Ish to the airport and he did his pissed-but-I-am-stoic-and-rise-above-it expression. I smiled, squeezed his arm, and urged the both of them toward the alley and Leo’s car. I’d called the restaurant this morning too. My car was long gone—to the tow yard or Mexico. “But whatever you do,” I called to Ishiah, “stay out of his pantry.”
Puzzlement and annoyed jealousy crossed the peri’s face before he shook his head in resignation. “Tricksters.” He asked one last time, “Are you positive you don’t want to tell me? Who knows? It might save your life.” Against Cronus? I wished Heaven had that kind of power. I wished anyone did. I shook my head and made a shooing gesture as if he were a particularly stubborn rooster and I was all out of corn. “Damn tricksters,” he embellished.
He was disappearing into the alley when I challenged after him. “So close to blasphemy. So close.”
The only thing he left behind was his growl to call him when I needed the help—not if, but when. It was irritating that he knew that I would. I almost hoped Goodfellow didn’t give him any.
A puck not give it up? That would never happen.
After they left in Leo’s car and I waved to them, I went into the bar, five . . . ten steps. Eligos came up through the floor as if it was nothing more than a hallucinatory mist instead of hardwood—the shattered hole about the size of a well’s mouth. His claws tangled in my shirt, and we kept going up. When we hit the ceiling, it was the same as the floor . . . to Eli. I was in a human body, however, not demon, and it hurt, even with Eli ahead of me—by a nose, like they said at the racetrack, by a nose.
By nearly a foot, a head, in his case. He was in full demon form—copper scales, thrashing wings, a narrow dragon’s jaw, broken glass teeth, a fury-filled black gaze with swirling specks as brilliant as coins weighing down a dead man’s eyes. I caught flashes of all that as wood splinters, paint chips, and plaster chunks and dust fell around us as we ended up in my bedroom. If Eli hadn’t been leading the way clearing a path, I would’ve broken my neck on the ceiling or crushed my skull or, hell, both.
We hovered in the air in my bedroom as I all but swallowed my tongue to keep from coughing at the dust or make a sound at the tearing pain in my shoulders that had scraped through Eli’s new “door.” A fully functioning shape-shifting trickster wouldn’t, so I couldn’t. “Lying bitch.” It was calmly said, but the movement that went with it was anything but restrained. I flew through the air and landed on the bed... almost. I never appreciated the difference “almost” could make until I hit the floor on my back. I’d fallen there like an autumn leaf . . . if an autumn leaf weighed a buck thirty.
Buck thirty-five.
Buck . . . no one’s goddamn business.
I had red and gold scarves on the ceiling, hanging like billowing sails or the canopy of the bed of a princess. I didn’t feel much like a princess right then, but I did feel as if I were sailing. On a smooth glassy surface . . . not a ripple—only me and the red-gold of a setting sun as I drifted silently. Then the falling sun was gone and the Fallen took its place—fallen leaves, fallen suns, fallen God’s own.
Everything fell, sooner or later.
“Lying, lying bitch. Useless païen filth. Not worth one-fifth the soul of a common whore.” The teeth touched the skin of my face. “Cronus is still taking wings. Giving up those souls accomplished nothing.”
I had told him this might be the case. A convincing lie cannot be told without some shred of truth to it. I blinked at the plaster dust in my eyes and took a shallow breath, the best I could do after most of the air had been forced from my lungs when I hit the floor. I gave Eligos the best imitation of a triumphant smile as I could, considering the pain and lack of air that, thanks to the reaction to my smile, didn’t get any better.
Eli hissed and wrapped his hands around my throat. They started out covered with scales and equipped with talons but in a short second turned human—as did the face inches from mine. “Thousands and thousands of souls gone and Cronus didn’t give one good goddamn. Or two or three goddamns.” The hands tightened. I didn’t struggle. If I did, he’d see I was still weak. I could go for the gun in the small of my back, but I wouldn’t make it with his weight on top of me. There was nothing I could successfully do to escape him. I was hurt, dazed, and I was being choked to death, and there was only one thing I could do that might save my life—use the weapon I’d been born with that required no shape-shifting at all.
I kept smiling.
I didn’t let my body buck against the lack of oxygen as it was so desperate to do. I didn’t rip at his hands. If I was turning blue, I did my best to make it look like a good color on me—this year’s must-have—and I smiled up at that impossibly handsome face. His impossible face, my impossible smile, an impossible thing not to struggle for air. But I was out of all choices except one. So I smiled as my lungs burned as if they were torched from the inside out. I even smiled as dark blotches began to slide across my vision . . . from sunsets to storm clouds.
Then another impossible thing happened. The pressure around my neck eased. I could breathe. I did, in slow and even breaths as if I hadn’t missed a one, much less many. They, mainly Buddhist monks, say you can control your body in more ways than you can imagine—slow your heart, your respiration, fly above the needs of your physical self. That was nice for them, but I still would’ve liked to have seen the Buddhist monk who wouldn’t have gasped for air and tried to claw Eli’s face off right then. The first at least . . . They were better about not seeking vengeance than I was. You don’t see many face-ripping Buddhist monks. Goo
d men, very good, very patient men.
I sincerely wished I had the strength for some face ripping myself, but I wasn’t necessarily very good. Patient? It depended on how you measured . . . by hours or years. I liked my karma immediate. Face ripping was very immediate.
“You drive me fucking insane!” He grabbed at the coverlet from my bed and tore it to pieces, silk raining down like dead butterflies. Glaring at me venomously, he spit, “You knew. You knew Cronus wouldn’t stop if we set his Rose free. Or did someone already eat his goddamn Rose?”
I raised a balled-up fist to my mouth and coughed. I made it sound like the phoniest of coughs, as if I were playing at being human—playing very badly, as if barely trying. It was a cover for opening my swollen throat and pulling in more air. “Oh, so much better,” I answered before smiling even wider.
“Cronus never had a Rose.”
Chapter 10
It was true. Cronus never had a Rose; he hadn’t left one at the door either. He had left that ribbon, but I was the one who had tied it around a stem. I’d driven to the nearest florist, paid a ridiculous price for that one perfect rose—signature red, wrapped the ribbon around it and voilà . . . which would be French for “I made Hell my bitch.” With a flower, a simple flower. Did it get any better than that? True, surviving it would be nice, but between living and pulling the ultimate trick—“suicidal tendencies” isn’t just the name of a band. We can’t help ourselves. We don’t want to help ourselves. It wasn’t an addiction. It was a necessity. Tricking was as crucial as breathing to most of us.
We were hell-bent for leather, and let the devil take the hindmost. We were rarely the hindmost, but if we were? We kicked ass every second on our way out. We’d jump out of the plane without a parachute and shout, “Geronimo” all the way down.
Geronimo, Eligos, you son of a bitch. Watch me fall and watch me laugh right up until I hit the ground.
Eli’s eyes went from hazel to black to hazel again. Black copper full of fury, hazel full of reluctant admiration. He was a monster, a killer a thousand times over, and a sociopath who’d consider torture a mandatory appetizer. Yet he was like me too. He tricked, for a much more sinister reason, yes, but he couldn’t help admiring a brilliant con. “You . . . ? There never was a Rose?”
I did love fooling a demon, a true demon—high-level, Hell’s flip side to a trickster. It was a rush you never tired of. And while I was laughing all the way, if I could survive it, that would be a bonus. Dying for a trick was part and parcel of the job, but living to gloat about it afterward—that was good too. I hoped his admiration of the Roses and the truth would keep me alive long enough to be the smuggest girl in town.
“No. There was a Rose, but she wasn’t Cronus’s.” I didn’t try to sit up. There was no way I was close to that. Breathing was still an effort and keeping the appearance of it, ironically, effortless was more demanding. Instead of sitting, I linked my fingers across my stomach as if I were on a psychiatrist’s couch, spilling my deepest, darkest thoughts.
It was deep and dark, what I revealed. Failure always is.
“She came to me last week, but she called herself Anna, short for Rosanna. She was a sweet girl. Average. Normal. She wasn’t beautiful or an MIT-level genius. She was in art school. I don’t know if she was actually any good, but she had dreams and dreams are nice.” And they were. People without dreams die the same as people without a heart to pump their blood. To live a life without dreams is to be digging your own grave every single day.
“When she was a little girl she was in an accident and had half her face burned off—her ordinary, kind of cute, freckled face eaten away by flames.” I remembered those restored freckles with a clarity of a life brilliantly magnified by tears. “But when she turned twenty-one, one of you was nice enough to give it back to her. You do so love your charity work, your kind.” I tapped my thumbs together and let my smile fade. “I told her I couldn’t help her. She made a deal of her own free will and, sorry, so sorry, little fishy, but swim off and live with the consequences. Or, I guess I actually meant, wait until you die and then suffer the consequences . . . not live with them. She didn’t though . . . wait, that is. She walked out the door, stood for a few seconds on the curb with her bag and her pictures of Sir Pickles the Perilous, and then she stepped into the path of a bus. There was glass and blood and twisted metal. Part of her is still in the asphalt of the road. That darkened stain in front? You probably didn’t notice. Just one more stain in a world of stained things and stained people, but that—that is what’s left of Rosanna.” I’d heard the crash. I’d run to the door, and seen what had been glorious and whole turned into something pitiable and broken. The pictures were scattered with puzzled feline eyes staring blankly at nothing.
Nothing was all there was to see now. Anna was gone.
“And you, you with your infinite ego, thought maybe you could do something about your little Anna’s soul after all when Cronus showed up. What a damn lucky break for you. Well, rejoice, you did do something. Chances are your Rose is free and long gone from Hell.” Eli leaned his elbow on my bed, head against the palm of his hand, bemused as he ran the plan back and forth through his brain, savoring it—an envious twist to the corner of his mouth, before he finally gave in. “Okay, darling, I have to say I raise a glass to balls the likes of which I’ve never seen, except on myself. But I am going to have to kill you for this, and you are not going to enjoy the process at all. You keep me on my toes, and I do like that, but the boss isn’t happy. The boss and if it’s you or me—fuck, sweetheart, you know that isn’t even close.”
“As if you could kill me,” I scoffed, while thinking, oh, for the days when that was true. “I did tell you that Cronus rarely can be bothered to note humans exist. Why would he want to become one? Fall in love with one? You were so easy, sunshine; it’s rather embarrassing for you.” I gathered myself, made the effort, and managed to get part of me upright and resting on my elbows in a move I hoped looked easy and painless, although it was neither. “Besides,” I said, tempting—and demons knew all about that, “if you did kill me, how would you find out what Cronus told me he wants? Truth this time. No Run for the Roses. Because he did tell me. I only told you what I wanted instead. Now that I have that, I have no problem telling you what Cronus wants with Hell and Lucifer.”
“How very unlike you, telling the truth.” He reached with his other hand and ran a finger through the white dust on my face. “An angel made of spun sugar. In other words, worthless and lacking in flavor. All right, Trixa, savior of Roses, tell me. What does Cronus want?” Eli didn’t take back the death threat—death promise—and he knew very well I noticed that, but I told him anyway. Why not? There was nothing he could do with the information and it had a good chance of distracting him from me.
Armageddon ten thousand times over has a way of distracting nearly anyone.
I didn’t think he could settle on me more heavily, but he did. “What,” he asked, “does Cronus want?”
“All,” I answered. No deception this time. It wasn’t needed.
He narrowed his eyes as the dust he’d scattered from my face hung in the light around him, hundreds of microscopic snowflakes, because winter was coming. The end was coming and, like the obliviously playful grasshopper of the parable, we weren’t ready for it. I don’t know what happened to that grasshopper . . . if he died of hunger or the industrious ant who’d stored up food all summer took pity on him, but I did know Cronus, like winter, had no pity. We might not die, but there are so many worse things than dying, and if Cronus succeeded, death itself wouldn’t be an escape from him. Nothing would.
“All?” Eli straightened, dropping his hand from tracing patterns on my cheek and leaning back slightly as if it gave him room to think. “You asked him what he wanted and the only thing he said was ‘All’? Well? What does that mean? All. He’s ripped off the wings of nearly a thousand demons, only one wing per demon if you were wondering, that’s what it takes, and the most conv
ersation the son of a bitch can muster up about his wholesale slaughter of my kind is ‘all.’ It’s meaningless.”
I gave him a look every teacher slips up at one time or another to bestow on her slowest student. “Eli, you can’t mean that. You don’t get it? You? I’m disappointed.” I leaned toward him as he had leaned away. “Don’t be Eli, wearing your fancy human suit. Be who you are. Be Eligos. You know of Cronus. He’s a Titan. He gave birth to gods, but no one gave birth to him. He birthed himself out of the universe . . . out of the sky and the earth. They were said to be his father and mother; that’s a myth. He created himself—the ultimate ‘I think, therefore I am.’ He was once locked in Tartarus, a païen hell, and he took it over. Then he took over the Elysian Fields, a païen heaven. And it wasn’t enough. One hell and one heaven weren’t enough to occupy him and he deserted them. He was bored. What do you think it would take to satisfy him? What could possibly do it?”
His jaw tightened. “All.”
“Exactly.” When I was sure that one hand would support me, I ran a hand through the mess of my hair to shake at least a pound of dust free. “Your Hell, your Heaven, every païen hell and heaven and all the thousands of ethereal worlds in between. And, last but not least, this world. The one we live in now. There will be nowhere to go to escape him. If he consumes Lucifer and Hell, one in the same that they are, and adds that energy to his, he’ll have more power than anyone could possibly conceive. He will rule every place that there is a place. If you think your boss is tough now,” I said, my voice hardening, “you wait until you see your new one in action. Lucifer might be fallen, you might be fallen, but you’re sane. You do enormous evil, but you do it with logic and reason. You enjoy it. You need souls and you like to kill in your off-hours. It’s disgusting, but there is a twisted motivation behind it. Cronus is nothing like you. Cronus is outside your frame of reference. He could move past you and nothing would happen, and then a second later he could look at you and drive you and everyone in the hemisphere instantly insane. Worse,” I said with a sigh, “he very likely wouldn’t know he’d done it. He’s a giant and you’re a ‘tiny slow-moving caterpillar on the sidewalk’ demon. Fuzzy and cute, but powerless. There’s nothing you can do.”
