by Rob Thurman
“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 Eli 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.”
“Gods are many things, but they’re not ridiculous.” Thor, determined to be an embarrassing thorn in my side, blew a spit bubble and kept on snoring, as unconscious as he’d been since the beginning of our trip. “Okay. Rarely ridiculous. And, Griffin, you should know I have a backup plan. My backup plans have backup plans.” I turned around completely in the seat and shot Thor in the chest with my Smith. I muffled the sound with a pillow that had been left with the sleeping bag the guys were sitting on in the back. The pillowcase, not immaculate to begin with, blackened from the gunpowder. When I lifted it away, the tank top below showed a bullet hole, but there was nothing else. The flesh had already healed, and there wasn’t a single drop of blood, but Thor’s rhythmic snore did skip. That was something. I shot him again in the same spot.
“I’m sorry I doubted you. Houdini is banging his head sitting up in his coffin in wonder at the elaborate nature of this spectacular magic trick. A gun and a pillow. That beats a rabbit out of a hat any day.” Griffin wasn’t impressed, but Zeke was shifting in a way that said he was seconds away from asking for his turn. A silver lining in every gunshot, that was my Kit.
I regarded the skeptical one of the pair patiently. “You’ve been strung up by demons this week, sugar. Do you really want to be strung up by me too?”
“Sorry,” Griffin apologized. “I’m hungry, I haven’t lost my sense of smell as I’d hoped, and I was expecting some sort of complicated world-class jewel thief equipment. You know, with wires and complex laser-generating electronics.”
Leo gave a laugh that was far too amused at my expense, but I didn’t mind. It kept him occupied with thoughts other than gutting Griffin with a pair of car keys for the poofing disrespect. Not that he would have, but it had been a long, odoriferous ride. We could all use the distraction. “Trixa and electronics? She can’t program her TiVo. She can’t work her cell phone. It still chirps like a flock of birds when it rings. She’s set two, no . . . three microwaves on fire. Most couldn’t do it that many times on purpose.”
“I’m not technically gifted.” I shot Thor yet again. “I’m not ashamed. We all have our weaknesses. If you didn’t have a weakness, how could you hone your skills to work around it? Shape-shifting and the powers of persuasion are my skills. Those and the ability to drive a fast car in three-inch demon-gutting boots. I don’t need TiVo to trick, and I don’t need a microwave to kill, although it might be nicely ironic in some cases. Now let me do my job.” This time when I shot Thor, it worked. That was another thing that didn’t require technical skill: pulling a trigger . . . a rather sad commentary on weapons of the day.
Thor’s eyes were open and on me. The color wasn’t clear in the parking lot lights, but I could guarantee massively bloodshot was descriptive enough. I didn’t wait long enough for any emotion to register. I didn’t want to deal with a pissed-off, cranky, heading hard into hangover god. I wanted an amiable, still drunk but conscious one. “Give him a beer, Zeke,” I ordered before smiling at Thor. “Hey, doll, Loki said you’d give us a hand.” The same one that automatically grabbed for the beer Zeke dangled. Guns weren’t the only necessities we’d packed. When dealing with an alcoholic god, it was a good idea to not run out of what kept him happy.
By the time he drank four beers, asked to see my breasts—not that that was how he phrased it—I was inside the museum. It wasn’t an easy ride, far and away the worst I’d been on. I couldn’t poof . . . damn Griffin. I couldn’t appear or disappear at will—that wasn’t one of my skills I’d been talking up earlier. But I could compare Thor’s shortcut to the ones that Leo had taken me on a time or two in the old days. Those had been smooth sailing on a calm sea. Thor’s trip was a roller-coaster ride off the rails and into the screaming crowd below. That I fell only three feet to the floor was something I was grateful for. I could’ve ended up in a display case one-third my size or inside the floor instead of above it.
I landed on my bare feet—boots were great for fighting demons but not for robbing a museum—and caught my balance. Gym and yoga classes were paying off in some ways even if they were at the mercy of the diner’s biscuits and gravy. Leo had looked up the contents of the museum via their Web site on Thor’s computer, after fighting off all the porn-bots, and said there didn’t appear to be anything valuable enough to elicit the need of motion detectors throughout the building or around any specific exhibits. Most of what was here wasn’t half as valuable as what your average collector bought off eBay. This wasn’t the British Museum, full of gold and irreplaceable pieces of history. This was a nice, educational museum with the funding that went with that. That meant all the doors and windows had alarms. There would also be an alarm if you shattered a display case and there would be at least one security guard.
Easy damn peasy for any thief, including a nontechnologically gifted one such as I.
I’d appeared in a room full of dead, stuffed birds. While it was a teaching tool and the birds had died of natural causes, I didn’t like it. It was the païen in me. We were of nature. We were nature in a very real sense and everything born of nature should return to it, birds included—they shouldn’t be frozen behind glass. But humans were human and had long lost the connection to what raised them up and took them down.
The Latin American exhibit was to the left of the bird mortuary, both on the second floor, which was where Thor had put me, miracle of miracles. I kept close to the walls and in the shadows. The lights were turned low but not completely off. If anyone was watching a bank of video screens in the security office, I wasn’t going to make it that simple for them.
Many of the ancient discoveries were, like the birds, set in a recess in the wall and behind glass. The weapon mold wasn’t. It was halfway through the exhibit in a display case in the middle of the floor. It was set atop a square black marble pillar. The mold itself was colored black as well, inaccurately described as Mayan, age indeterminate. It wasn’t their fault. Even if carbon dating could be used for dating an obsidian artifact, instead of relying on the layers of earth it was found within, it would be worthless against a Namaru one. Their devices were immeasurable and inviolable. They would fool any modern technology into thinking they were brand-new, older than wrinkly-assed Methuselah, or didn’t exist at all except for the fact you could see it with your own eyes. As I was seeing this one. I could see why it stood separate. The museum might not think it was worth any more than the other Mayan artifacts, but it drew the eye as nothing else around it did. It would catch a visitor’s attention immediately and draw them into the room. It was a showstopper, a shout formed of stone. They might not know why or how, but people on a subconscious level would know it didn’t belong. It hadn’t come from a human hand and it wasn’t meant for humans. People being people, of course they’d immediately want a look at that. The old saying was wrong. It wasn’t a cat that curiosity killed.
I moved closer. It was almost as black as the pillar beneath it except for a shimmer of silver gray that floated just under the surface. It looked like a block of volcanic glass twelve inches by twelve inches. There was carving along all the edges, looping and swirling. It was intricately deceptive, that design. If you thought it was Mayan, then the design would appear Mayan. If you thought Egyptian, then you would get Egyptian. If you thought Namaru, it would squirm like a living thing until it gave you a heada
che. Thor’s archeologist must have been an expert in all things Mayan, because that’s what she’d seen, that’s what it had been labeled, and to most of the world, that’s what it would be.
To me it looked like a nuclear bomb, and if the Namaru were alive today, you’d be able to make one with one of their new weapon molds. Fortunately, they’d lived in a time when weapons didn’t have moving parts and there were no new molds, but that didn’t lessen what that block could do. A nuclear bomb wouldn’t work on Cronus anyway—what I could hopefully pull out of this chunk of dark rock just might.
My cell phone vibrated in my jeans pocket. Knowing that couldn’t be good, I slipped it out, opened it, and held it to my ear. I couldn’t answer, not with my knowledge of the security system being based on guesses. I could only listen and hope it was the diner wondering where I was as I rarely missed turkey meat loaf night. It wasn’t. It was Leo’s voice, quiet and brusque. As fond as I was of Leo, I would much rather it had been that fetal-aged nineteen-year-old cook from the diner, worried I’d fallen and broken my hip.
“Thor’s out cold again,” Leo said. “Useless steroid-popping frat boy. There’s no waking him up and Zeke ever so generously emptied a clip into him, ruining his silencer in the attempt. We can’t get you out of there. We’re going to cause a distraction, and you’ll have to run for it.”
Run for it. I was going to have to run for it carrying a piece of Namaru tech that not only was close to the size of a concrete block, but would weigh as much if not more. The Namaru had been able to create seemingly miraculous things, but those miraculous things invariably weighed a ton. If you wanted miraculous, there was always a price to be paid. Sometimes that price was blood and sometimes it was a herniated disc. Considering how long this run was going to be, I would rather have forked over a pint.
