Then suddenly closing time had come and the only progress we’d made was to have a good time reminiscing. But in my book, having a good time is the best progress you can make in almost any situation. Leo went home and I went upstairs to my apartment. I undressed, slipped into my favorite silk pajamas, brushed my teeth, and slept with all those memories swirling in bright colors. Wonderful dreams. Wonderful night.
All the better to make the morning even worse in comparison.
Chapter 4
Roses are red.
Sometimes.
The one was, and it was beautiful, starting at the bottom with the pure deep crimson that was almost black, the red of the setting sun disappearing into twilight. The petals then gradually lightened to a vivid deep red the exact color of freshly spilled blood. The flower wasn’t full-blown, but a curve of a fresh bud not yet realizing its potential. Curves were good. I liked curves, whether on myself, because a woman should have curves, or in the impossible-to-follow swerves and convolutions of what passed for the thought processes of the male species. Males trying to wrap their minds around a concept that didn’t involve a football or pulling a trigger. They were cute that way, like homicidal puppies. Curves of the body and curves of the mind.
As for color . . .
Red was my favorite. Red like fire, a little arson warmed a girl’s heart. But what was tied around the rose pulled away your attention too fast to dwell on the color.
I should’ve enjoyed the rose. Most women like flowers, right? I should’ve put it in a vase filled with water. After all, red was more than my favorite; it was my signature, how I signed my work as a trickster. What was wrapped around the rose was the same sort of thing . . . only a preemptive version.
Less of a “Gotcha” and more of a “Here I come, ready or not.”
We were in no way ready for this.
So it was at eight, for once not sleeping in, that I stood and stared at the rose lying on the scarred and stained surface of my bar. Help me, Earth, Sun, and Sky. What were we going to do now?
I continued to stare at the rose, was utterly ignored by the Earth, Sun, and Sky, and finally decided to put it in a vase after all. I filled one from beneath the sink and carefully picked up the flower by its green stem. That same stem was wrapped in that black silk ribbon with an absolutely perfect bow. I made sure the material didn’t touch the water. This was someone I did not want to insult, piss off, or even slightly annoy with the slightest hint of disrespect. One trailing black end of the glossy material was embossed with gold lettering. Only a few letters, a calling card if you will. It read KPONYΣ.
It almost looked as if it were English, if only with sharper angles than usual on the letters and the last symbol. It wasn’t though. It was Greek. I read a lot of languages and spoke even more. You picked up quite a bit when you wandered about like I did. But your average sorority girl or frat boy could’ve read this too. And if they couldn’t, they would’ve had to bong a beer for not memorizing the Greek alphabet, while standing on one foot, hopping up and down, and also, again, bonging a beer.
I’d taught some truly exceptionally entertaining lessons at colleges.
I studied the name with the same exquisite caution that I would use in studying how to defuse a live bomb. Really, the two weren’t that different. Cronus was either in town or was on his way. Neither was good. Considering the mutilated catatonic demon, I was guessing it was the first, which was far less than good. Leo and I had tried to figure out who could wipe out that many demons in so little time. Here was our answer.
The Greek legend, which for once was fairly close to the real thing, said Cronus was something other than a god. True enough. He was a Titan—he
birthed
gods, and was considered a creature of chaos and disorder. I, myself, rather approved of those two qualities, but he had taken it to an extreme. He was the only one in the world who could claim that he had reigned in Hell and ruled in Heaven—only Hell was Tartarus and Heaven was the Elysian Fields. One of the many pagan or
païen
versions of the final resting places of many religions, human and
païen
. Some human religions had one Heaven and Hell each and some religions had hundreds; we
païen
have thousands. Cronus had once dominated two of them. Two was enough.
Cronus was the seed to the Grim Reaper myth down to the sickle for harvesting souls instead of wheat and he’d been more than good at it.
Sickle. Galileo had been on the money, if not more articulate about it. Cronus and his sickle.
Then after years beyond the telling, Cronus left both Tartarus and the Fields and took to roaming the earth and it wasn’t to spread justice or show off martial arts skills. No, far from it. Too bad he’d missed that
Kung Fu
show from the seventies. It might have mellowed him—doubtful though. Raging psychos rarely saw the silver lining, the rainbows, enjoyed the purr of a basketful of happy kittens.
Raging psycho would be a step up for Cronus. No, it was better to be accurate in situations like this. More than a step. It would be a whole staircase of them. Raging psychos were in preschool learning what Cronus had several doctorate degrees in. He didn’t own the field, but it was safe to say he was MVP and then some.
“What’s that?”
I looked over my shoulder to see Leo coming out of the back office. He was up and at work early too. After he saw this he might turn around and go home. I wouldn’t blame him. Take that exotic dancer of his on a trip to Tahiti. Morocco in Tahiti, what could be more appropriate?
I nudged the vase with the rose down the bar toward him with one finger, my short nail eerily matching the petals above. “Bows don’t necessarily go on presents.”
“Cronus,” he said. “Shit. Holy fucking shit.”
While that was serious language for Leo, who had preferred ending worlds as opposed to cursing, it about summed it up. Cronus . . . he was all kinds of shit and then some.
“Yes. Cronus.” I folded my arms, one wide gold cuff filigree bracelet glittering in the light. Wonder Woman had nothing on me. And we . . . we had nothing on Cronus. We hadn’t even put him on our list, because it would’ve been ludicrous. Overkill. Like making a list of what could possibly ruin your camping trip. Rain. Cold. Bugs. Or an asteroid the size of the moon hitting your tent dead on. Cronus was the asteroid. It simply didn’t pop to mind. Unfortunately, there were no coincidences in life. It was Cronus behind all this, simply because anything else that could take on that many demons would
still
shag ass as far from Cronus as it could get. Where the Titan stepped, all the
païen
world fled his shadow.
There was a new sheriff in town. And he was the kind that when he accomplished his business and left town, the town itself tended not to be there anymore.
Crumbling ruin.
Scorched earth.
Burned bones.
And one rose to leave on the grave.
“At least it’s not the Auphe,” Leo said as we both stared at the ribbon wrapped around the rose. The Auphe had been the
A
scribbled on the back of my list.
“Shhh,” I hushed immediately. Just as back in the slightly older days when humans didn’t say the devil’s name for fear he would appear, we
païen
felt close to the same way about the Auphe. The less said about them, the better. The less thought about them, the better. The less everything about them, the better. Nature’s first and best predator. Nature’s first and best psychopathic murderers. Nature’s first really big fuckup. I knew exactly where I was on the badass scale and I was varsity all the way when I was at full trickster status, but the Auphe? No one fucked with the Auphe.
Subject was over.
“Have you talked to him lately?” I asked. Lately for Leo, a benched god, could’ve been yesterday or five thousand years ago. I hadn’t ever talked to him. I’d never seen him. I didn’t want to. When I’d talked about that ranking of gods, tricksters, and demons, I’d left a few rungs out. Cronus was above gods and that would most likely make me nothing more than an annoying chirpy cricket in his eyes.
“Lately?” Leo grimaced. “Try never. He did send me the . . . ah . . . equivalent of a thumbs-up when I was toying with the world-destroying hobby. And don’t ask what he sent. You don’t want to know, but they—or what was left of them—did have a ribbon on them just like this one. I think”—he touched the ribbon with a careful finger—“it’s his way of saying if we don’t bother him, he won’t bother us.”
“You mean you,” I pointed out. “He won’t bother you. He might accidentally step on me and scrape me off the bottom of his shoe when he found the nearest curb.”
“Not exactly eloquent, but not exactly wrong either.” Leo decided eight thirty in the a.m. was fine by him to break out the liquor, opening a beer for me and then himself. “He spawned the great Greek horndog god Zeus, who would rape anything living and hump anything not. And with Zeus being a vast improvement over his father, I don’t want to even guess what Cronus would do . . . to anyone, not now.”
“Now that he’s insane?” I prodded.
“He was always insane. Let’s say, over time, probably exponentially more insane.” Leo took a swallow of his beer.
“Well, we do know what he would do in one particular case. Demons.” I tasted my own beer before getting my cell phone and making the call. Voice mail. I’d only called Eligos twice now since he’d hit Vegas last year and both times I’d gotten voice mail. How he made his quota, I had no idea. My Avon lady had five times his work ethic. If you can’t reach a demon, you can’t sign over your soul, now can you?
“Why?” Leo had already finished his beer and started on his second, which he tapped against the phone.
“Because he knows the what and we now know the who. Put it together and maybe we’ll know the real why.” I gave up on the beer and decided bad news of this sort called for something a little more efficient in perking up your mood. Godiva dark chocolate liqueur. I kept it for me and me only. It made one helluva martini and dessert mixed in one. That was the great thing about being human. Instant chocolate, instant endorphins.
“Again, why? Whatever it is that Cronus wants or is doing, there’s nothing we can do but stay out of his way. And I’d have said the same thing last year before we were both temporarily demoted.” He watched as I whipped up the world’s fastest sugar-loaded orgasm, studying me intently before accusing, “But you’re curious, aren’t you?”
“Among other things.” I told him those other things as I coated the martini glass in a slow slide of chocolate, then admitted, “But curiosity is one of them. That’s why you’ll always be an amateur trickster, studly, never a pro.”
“Because I can suspend my curiosity and trickster-loving ways to not die a horrible death?” he said dryly.
“If you’re careful enough, you don’t have to die.” The chocolate was all I’d hoped, the alcohol a little less. “And the curiosity isn’t actually a choice. You’re born with it.”
“Like scaly sex appeal.” The air shimmered across the bar and then Eli was sitting on a stool. He was wearing a brown bathrobe, expensive naturally, and his normally sleek pelt of straight hair was rumpled from sleep. Demons actually slept. There was an interesting fact. Or maybe they only slept while transformed into their human costumes. Regardless, I was glad he’d bothered with the robe, because I knew there was nothing beneath it. Eli in pj’s—I just couldn’t see it. He yawned and went on. “I’m assuming whatever you found out is earth shattering . . . as in a ‘Kennedy killed Marilyn Monroe and her corpse rose from the grave to pull a zombie-revenge assassination’ category of earth shattering. Because it is that early in the morning. That goddamn early.” He cheered as he brushed a hand over his hair. “You want to know who really
did
kill them? If you’re as curious as you say you are, maybe we could arrange a trade. I know you don’t have a soul, not the kind I can take, but I have quite a few things I could think of that you could cough up that would make me a very happy demon.”
“Happy? Really?” I smiled, put down the martini glass, lifted the rose from the vase, and tossed it to him. He caught it effortlessly and with an inhuman speed I’d unfortunately had to give up for a while. Turning it in his hand, he saw the ribbon . . . and read the name on it. “Happy now?” I asked. I didn’t have to be curious about that, because I knew the answer.
One big fat no.
Since Eligos was in his human body, it had the same human reaction as any human body. He paled slightly. I was impressed. A lesser demon/human would’ve probably vomited on the bar. “This had best not be some pathetic version of a trickster joke,” he said with a quiet as darkly malignant as a newborn cancer cell.
“Trust me, sugar, even I don’t think this is funny.” I returned to the martini. “We all liked it much better when Cronus was stuck in Tartarus or had that bipolar happy moment and skipped around the Elysian Fields keeping things in order. But those days are over. He’s here in this world now. Has been for a few hundred years, but this is the first time he’s decided to have fun. But for the life of me, I can’t think why killing demons would be that entertaining for him. Like swatting a fly. A slow-moving, half-dead fly. Where’s the sport?”
“There has to be a reason,” Leo added. “Cronus is mad as they come, but even if killing your kind were entertaining for him, he’d have still bored of it long before nine hundred.”
Eli ignored the “reason” topic, which meant he knew the reason and had known it most likely when he’d had his chat with me at the car dealership. That made him more deceitful than I’d given him credit for and I’d given him very high credit in that department. It was too bad about him being a murdering sociopathic spawn of Hell. We tricksters did love deceit. If he were a peacock, his feathers would be brilliant, bright, and attracting every female in sight. But he wasn’t a vain bird. He was a killer and right now a stronger and quicker one than I was. I kept that in mind as I regarded him over a surface of rippling chocolate. I also kept in mind that I was smarter. False modesty could kiss my ass.