The Grimrose Path t-2

by Rob Thurman

  Out of the canyon mouth came a flashflood of demons. They ran on all fours. They had no choice. Their wings had already been cut off. Eligos and Lucifer, they took no chances. Eligos himself hadn’t risked that his might be taken. His demons were without a general, but that didn’t mean they were any less determined to bring down Cronus. Between the devil they knew and the devil they didn’t want to, they’d take the first. They had a home to save, the same as I did. I’d asked Eligos for Hell itself, and he had given it to me.

  The demons swarmed the Titan more quickly than I could blink, Komodo dragons with bleeding backs. He didn’t try to get away. What did he have to fear from these Fallen when he’d already killed a hair shy of a thousand of them? When he touched them, they screamed and unraveled the same as the ground had. Or he ripped them apart, pieces of them turning to a dark rain in the air.

  Yet behind them came the angels.

  Fighting with the brothers they’d long cast down, some were as they’d been created, glass with daggered wings, blinding under the sun, with swords of fire. Some were in human form with feathered wings. Azrael, all glass and the farthest thing from human you could be except for Cronus himself, led from behind. Far behind, hovering over the canyon. I wasn’t surprised. It was easy to kill when it wasn’t your own existence you were risking. When you could be cut out of reality like a paper doll, wadded up, and thrown away, it was amazing how quickly an asshole like him learned caution, restraint, and to shut his annoyingly arrogant mouth.

  For every demon who fell, an angel took his place. When that angel exploded, a stained glass window burst that filled the air; yet another demon was there to attack again. Cronus had multiple jaws fastened around each arm and leg. He had fiery swords plunged into him again and again until I could swear I could smell the stench of burned plastic. When the smallest area opened up, a shotgun blast came from behind me to put a slug into it. I heard Leo and Zeke both cursing behind me as the shotguns turned out to be as useless as everything else. Demons, angels, and man-made death, but the fake man who would be GodKingfuckingEmperor of All didn’t go down. He tossed more demons away, some with a mouthful of whatever cheap fabric of reality made him. Angels—archangels some—were broken like Christmas ornaments rather than the fiercely lethal fighters they were. I ducked as one demon was thrown over me and heard Zeke curse again as he was hit and fell under his weight.

  “Don’t kill him, Kit,” I said without turning. “He’s on our side for the moment.”

  As I watched, they kept coming, pouring out of the canyon with a single purpose. There was something almost glorious in that, two opposite sides in what should’ve been an unstoppable whole. Cronus, however, was stopping them left and right. How many angels could dance on the head of a pin? It didn’t matter. There might not be any left in Heaven to do the dancing when this was over, and if wings didn’t grow back, demons were going to be much less awe worthy in paintings and sculptures. It could make you wonder why Cronus was putting up with it. Why didn’t he simply move the world again—until he was virtually on top of Griffin to take that wing?

  I didn’t wonder. He was having fun. Killing was boring to a Titan, but this wasn’t simple killing. This was a non-païen Heaven and Hell at his fingertips to obliterate. Even to Cronus, that was a change of pace. What he’d planned for after consuming Lucifer and Hell, he had a taste of now, and he liked it. With every slow step he took toward me and the wings that were behind me, he was having a goddamn ball. With every step his attackers, soldiers through and through, died in droves.

  Then one could’ve wondered, where was the reason behind it? If every angel and demon fell and it did nothing but give Cronus a jolt of Irish in his coffee, why do it at all? What was the point? Where was the reason? I didn’t wonder. I knew.

  I was the point.

  This world was the reason.

  Anna—the Rose—had been the means.

  If you can save someone, do it. If you can save someone and in turn have them save everyone and everything, do that too.

  I walked through puddles of demon ichor so thick the ground couldn’t soak it up. Closing what space remained between the Titan and me, I held the sword in front of me now and put it through the shoulder of one demon and the chest of an angel. The blade of water pierced them as if they were less tangible than a thought. The two feet of blade left I buried in Cronus’s abdomen. He knew I was coming. He was facing me, he saw me—although he didn’t need to—and he didn’t try to stop me. What was one more dead on top of all the others, now oil and glass, that littered the sand? Only more entertainment. I’d been counting on that.

  I smiled into the eye sockets that ran black. I always smiled when I took down those who deserved it. “I think, therefore I am.”

  Cronus reached down to touch the blade. The demon had torn free to tumble away and the angel had shattered. “What is . . . I know this. Don’t I know this?”

  The Namaru had made the water solid, able to be held and able to cut, but that was the funny thing about water. It could be solid, but once it was inside you . . . it was inside you. Once the water of Lethe was inside you, swallowed or rammed into your gut, you were well and truly fucked.

  “I know this,” he repeated, but the statement sounded vacant . . . each word void of meaning.

  He knew it all right. He’d once been prisoner in Tartarus, below Hades, and then had ruled Hades and its Fields of Elysium for a time. He knew the River Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness—rather, he had known it. “Had”—it was such a good word.

  “You think, therefore you are. But you’re a Titan. You created yourself from the Chaos, a single thought in the nothing. If you can’t remember who you are, what you are, how can you be anything at all?” Without that thought, that one “I am,” a Titan wasn’t a Titan. When you were your own creator and you forgot it all, even that single thought, how could you hold yourself together? How could you paste yourself onto the fabric of the universe?

  You couldn’t.

  The shadows began to roll backward from the ground up, back into his mouth and eyes. “I . . . I am. . . .” The words, thick and slow, were caught in the moving poisonous waste and washed away.

  “No, you’re not.” With the demon and angel gone, I shoved the blade farther into him. It was for my own personal satisfaction. In him an inch or a mile, it didn’t matter. Lethe was inside him and part of him now, and he couldn’t remember enough to undo that. “You’re not anything at all. You’re nothing. Less than nothing. You don’t even exist.”

  The eyes stretched wide, the fake lips gaped wider, the shadows a waterfall, filling him up until his face began to distort under the pressure. He threw back his head to stare blindly at a sky he couldn’t recognize, a sun he didn’t know. The scream that tried to escape became a whimper as it too was sucked back inside him. And then he was gone, an implosion of time and space that took a small slice of the world with him. I almost tumbled into that rip in reality. I’d stood so close that I felt the black-hole pull of what lay outside of everything there was. I couldn’t see it. I didn’t think anything but the dead Titans could see that, but I felt it and it was horrible. It wasn’t hungry or greedy; it was a complete lack of . . . life and death and everything between, before, after, and beyond. If I fell into it, that was fine. If I didn’t, that was all right as well. A lack doesn’t care—which made it somehow worse.

  Then an arm went around my waist and I was yanked away and up into the air. The tear ate more of the world, several handfuls’ worth, and then sealed itself up. It too, like Cronus and the sword with them, was gone. I could do without the two and didn’t need the third anymore. I heard the beating of wings and grinned over my shoulder. “Those flying lessons paid off, didn’t they?”

  Griffin grinned back, the wind from his wings blowing the hair in his eyes. He was a kid who’d gotten the best present ever . . . to fly like Superman. “I’ll have to practice carrying people more. Twelve feet up is all I can manage.”

 
“Or we can hopefully not be in this situation again.” He dropped lower until he could ease me to the ground, on which I sat down the second he let go. It wasn’t that my knees buckled or anything that trite; it was for the sheer need of touching what we had only just saved. Touching air was the same; reality was the whole damn kit and kaboodle—I had no idea what a kaboodle was, but it came to mind as I scooped up dirt in my hand and held it up for solemn contemplation. “Kaboodle,” I announced to Leo, who nodded.

  “Damn fine kaboodle it is too,” he confirmed.

  “That it is.” Legs crossed, I let myself fall backward to stare up at the sky. It was well worth staring at, and I did so happily until I heard two voices in unison say, “It’s you.” I propped myself up on my elbows to see Azrael and Eligos standing shoulder to shoulder and regarding each other with mutual disdain. Azrael had some disgust mixed into the pudding, but Eli seemed more glum, which was hardly like him.

  “I can’t believe I was replaced by you,” the demon said. “It’s embarrassing. They couldn’t have gotten a flamingo or a canary? Both would be less insulting. The Canary of Death. It has a much better ring to it.”

  “You were an Angel of Death? Why does that not surprise me?” I snorted, sitting up and brushing the rest of the kaboodle from my hands. Cronus was gone, but suddenly the wingless demons remaining were more of a threat than they had been. Here was hoping we had a standoff between what was left of the angels and the demons. The cold war was over on Earth, but it was still thriving Above and Below.

  “Not an Angel of Death. The Angel of Death. If I’d been around for the Ten Plagues, darlin’, well”—he grinned, the curve of a sickle carved in the shape of a smile—“why stop with Egypt when it comes to firstborn? Show a little initiative and enthusiasm for your work. Santa Claus can visit the world in one night. So can I.”

  “You have changed none with God’s punishment, grown no wiser but only more arrogant. I am not surprised, but I am the Angel of Death now, fallen. We could take you and your pathetically neutered brethren at this very moment.” Azrael’s sword wasn’t of heavenly origin as he’d stubbornly claimed, but it worked all the same as it flared to life between them.

  Eli, dressed in that brown leather jacket he was so fond of and a new hat that was made for finding myth in the desert per movie legend, let his dark grin widen. He pointed at the other demons and then jerked his thumb downward. They vanished instantly. He ran a finger along the fedora, then tugged it low over his eyes. “All right then, Az. Here’s your big chance to take on your ex-boss. Let’s see what a pretender can do with the title.”

  Azrael hesitated, scanned the approximately twenty-five remaining angels, then flared his wings and silently took to the air before disappearing into it, leaving a fury so thick you could taste it. He thought he was hot shit and he was, but if Eligos had been the first Angel of Death, experience and seniority did tell. I knew it told me something as all the other angels followed their leader. Eli had once said that Hell had worse demons than he, demons who couldn’t leave, who would burn the earth beneath them with every step if they did. I didn’t want to meet one of those. More powerful than Eli?

  I didn’t want to see that.

  True or not, I didn’t let Eli see it. “Where’s your whip? You can’t rob a desert tomb without a whip.”

  The smile shaded into something almost affectionate, if death itself could be said to have that softer emotion. “You’re right. There is so much you can’t do properly without a whip, Trixa-of-my-heart, you couldn’t begin to believe it.” He laid a hand over my own heart as Zeke and Leo growled behind me, but stayed put. They knew if I needed help, I’d ask for it. “You took out a Titan. First Solomon and now this. You keep getting more and more entertaining. I haven’t had this much damn fun in centuries. I take my hat off to you.”

  He did. He disappeared, but the hat stayed behind, falling to the dirt beneath. I picked it up and put it on, giving the brim my own flick of my finger. “Here’s for staying entertaining.” He was still going to try and kill me someday; that was a given. That day wasn’t this day though. This day was good.

  My optimism was renewed. Life wasn’t always sweet or true, but it was now.

  Sweeter than sugar.

  Chapter 17

  Spilt milk, it couldn’t be undone. That’s what they said. They were wrong. Anna was proof of that. No good deed went unpunished. They said that too. That could be one they managed to get right.

  I was in Leo’s guest room, with my brother’s picture. Curled up in the covers, I watched the play of light on the wall. I had a lot to think about: arranging for Trixsta to be rebuilt, getting used to the fact I actually had a home, being human . . . a trickster, yes, but a human one for the time being. Those were big things, enormous in my life. Then there was Leo and my excuse that we were too much alike, but he was the same as a home—something I wasn’t supposed to want. I was told not to want. Shape-shifters were raised to change more than our appearances. Ours was a culture of the ephemeral. We moved from shape to shape, place to place, person to person.

  We were the wind. That’s the way the story went as long as any of us could remember. Who was I to change it?

  Me. I was me. When had I let anyone tell me what to do? Except for my mama. I groaned and yanked the covers higher. These, especially Mama, were all things I wasn’t going to solve overnight. It was going to take time, a few days, maybe a trip to Valhalla. There was time.

  Once I got something wrapped up. That good deed coming back to bite me in the ass. I’d known Azrael would hold a grudge against me, Zeke, and Griffin. I’d known it from our first meeting. He couldn’t bear that we lived; he couldn’t tolerate our existence. He couldn’t tolerate Zeke for rejecting Heaven and Griffin and me for who we were. Griffin, an abomination. Me, a mouthy abomination who consorted with his former superior. I did think the mouthy part was what had gotten to him most. I knew he’d start with me. It was only a matter of time. I had thought he’d wait at least a few nights, but patience and pride often trip up each other. He’d only waited hours. I believed Eligos was a better Angel of Death, the finest predators had infinite patience. Azrael had none.

  “I see you, Azrael,” I said quietly, staying on my side with the covers pulled up beneath my chin. Every little boy and girl believed their sheets and blanket could be armor against the monsters in the dark. Wouldn’t it be nice if that were true? “You think death has never come for me in the night before? That I wouldn’t recognize it?”

  He stepped out of the corner, although his wings and his hair stayed part of the darkness. His eyes I could see. They didn’t look any different than a demon’s. “Your kind did this, nearly destroyed us all. Who are you to think you can walk away from that? Who are you to think you do not deserve punishment?”

  Cronus had been païen, but that didn’t make him my kind. He hadn’t been anyone’s kind in the whole of reality. Azrael knew that, but it was a good excuse to do to me what the Angel of Death was meant to do. If Cronus hadn’t been païen, Heaven’s own would’ve found another justification for what curled dark within him. Demons killed with a hot passion and Azrael killed with a cold satisfaction. Hot or cold, they both enjoyed their work far too much not to let it spread. Work, hobby, life. They lived to kill. Azrael wasn’t Eligos, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t good at what he did, only that he wasn’t the best. Now that I was human, it didn’t take the best to kill me. It didn’t take much at all, I’d discovered.

  “Are you going to hide under the covers like a child?” Azrael stepped closer. “It wouldn’t make a difference if you were. I have pity for no one, least of all you.”

  No, he had pity for no one, certainly not for me. It made it easy to have no pity for him in return.

  “Eligos was right. You can’t begin to fill his shoes,” I said with a dose of contempt Azrael would find difficult to swallow and impossible not to react to. Releasing my hold on the covers, I shifted onto my back. As Griffin had risen, I thoug
ht it was time for an angel to fall. “And you’re not half as smart as you think you are. You’re certainly not half as smart as I am.”

  He was on me then, without a word. It was the same when he impaled himself on the sword I pulled from beneath the sheets. Not the Lethe sword, as that was gone, but Leo had let me borrow a nice steel one. Heavy and brutal in battle, those Norse roots couldn’t be denied. “Heaven must be so disappointed in you.” I looked up into the cold, sculpted face that hung above me and found nothing worth saving. “I know I am, and I know they are too.”

  They were the other angels who appeared out of the corner. Four more archangels, and they’d brought Ishiah with them, the only one still right with Heaven that I trusted. I’d told him Azrael would be coming, and he’d told others. Azrael had helped to save Heaven, but he’d done it without risking his own life—only the lives of his brothers. It was his way, self-serving, which I didn’t think had gone unnoticed in the past. I thought his was a reckoning that was a long time coming, the battle the final straw. It helped as well that Ishiah had dropped a word in the right ears, pointed out that while Azrael had helped to sacrifice others in the service of Heaven, in the end I was the one who had destroyed Cronus. Killing me, that lowered Azrael to païen behavior . . . or worse, the demonic kind. Azrael had rank, but he had no friends among his fellow archangels, ones with the most will on high. With that will, they could make decisions Azrael wasn’t going to like.

  “You don’t deserve to live,” he hissed. “Life is wasted on the filth that is you.”

  “Is that any way to be?” I tsked. “You deserve to live, Azrael, for all time, but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

  The hands of the other archangels fastened onto his arms as he reached for my throat. They pulled him up and off the sword. I dropped the weapon to the floor; I waggled my fingers at him in a mocking good-bye. “Send me a postcard from Down Under, that is if Eligos doesn’t eat you.” It didn’t take the best to kill me anymore, but you at least had to be good. Azrael didn’t meet either definition of the word.