Then the car stopped up in the air at almost a ninety-degree angle before slamming back down on all four wheels, which all immediately blew. I could see Cronus, blurry now as warm liquid dripped into my eyes. He had one hand resting on the mangled remains of the hood, the glass of the windshield diamond pebbles across the metal. He had stopped us and I didn’t think it was out of the kindness and goodness of the black hole that was a Titan heart. “I smell the demons on you. Bring me one more demon out of Hell. One more or I don’t start with worlds. I start with you,” he said before switching to a subject with such abrupt illogic I nearly couldn’t understand the words. “You should go home.” He swiveled his head in the direction of our home, then completely around to face us again, the neck a twisted piece of inhuman taffy. “But you can’t.” The smile was as creepy and soul sucking as it had been before. “You can’t go home when there is no home. Bring me a demon.” He lifted his hand from the car and turned the world inside out. Gods moved themselves through the world. Cronus decided to move the world around him. It was indescribable, the feeling—worse than the free fall of an airplane falling from the sky. A thousand times worse.
I sucked in a breath and held it. I didn’t vomit. I wouldn’t. I refused. Zeke and Griffin weren’t so fortunate. What Cronus had done to reality was horrifying to me, unnatural, but not unknowable. I was
païen
. I’d seen similar things, not as perverse in its magnitude, but similar. But to Zeke and Griffin, what had been done was beyond obscene and so alien to their minds and bodies that it couldn’t be tolerated. I heard them push the doors open, crawl out onto the asphalt, and retch. If they could move and throw up, then chances were they weren’t dying, which was good. The Titan hadn’t detected Griffin’s wings either and taken him, even better. The fact that he needed only one more demon now fell into a classification of which good and better weren’t a part.
Prying both hands off the steering wheel, I wiped at the blood running into my eyes. I’d either been cut from flying glass or smacked my head on the steering wheel. “You can’t go home when there is no home,” Leo said beside me. He undid his seat belt before pulling off his shirt, folding it, and handing it to me. The tribal raven tattoo on his chest showed in flashes from the one working headlight and the lights of cars moving up behind us. This interstate was never empty, no matter what time of day.
“Thanks, Matthew McConaughey. I’ve gotten to see your bare chest twice this week. You’re a shirtless wonder. I’m swamped with happy horny hormones.” Despite the wit or dark attempt at it, I leaned against his shoulder as I held the cloth to my forehead.
“You can’t go home when there is no home.” He wasn’t giving up until I admitted it, was prepared for it. “You know what that means.”
I did. I knew. I shouldn’t have cared. It shouldn’t have mattered, not to me—not to who and what I was. But it did, and it hurt. It hurt so damn much. “I know,” I said, closing my eyes and letting him take more of my weight. “I do.”
And it broke my heart.
Trixsta was gone.
My home, the first I’d ever had, was gone. A pile of rubble was in its place. The only picture I had of my brother and me, the piece of amber my mama had given me, the whimsically painted headboard of my bed, its carved leopards and birds that greeted me every morning, the claw-foot tub I’d taken far too many bubble baths in, Zeke’s first headshot from the target range stuck to the refrigerator—an accumulation of ten years of Trixa Iktomi’s life, and it was all gone. Cronus had brought it down like the Tower of Babel.
We’d stolen another car—carjacked it from a less-than-Good Samaritan who’d tried to drive around our wreck and keep tooling it toward Vegas and the nickel slots. He’d made it to Vegas, but riding in the trunk of his own car. We’d dropped him off at Buffalo Bill’s Casino on the California-Nevada border. Nickel slots to his heart’s desire. We’d also torched our “borrowed” car before we left—couldn’t have the VIN number tracing it back to the neighbors, and it made a good distraction for the police and emergency response teams.
But that was a thought that came and went, because my home was gone and now I knew. Me and mine weren’t wanderers thanks to it being written in our genetic code. There was another reason we were nomads by nature. Some long-past ancestor had discovered that if you didn’t love something, you couldn’t lose it. If you didn’t take in strays, like I had Griffin and Zeke, you wouldn’t have to watch them die. If you refused to see that someone was more like you in the good ways and not the bad, you wouldn’t have to watch them leave someday. If you never had a home . . . but I had. I’d lost it and my confidence that I didn’t need it, all in one. I felt the loss of both like an ache straight through to my bones. Who I was and where I’d chosen to be that person had vanished in the remains of a squat and unique building. Unique being another way of saying ugly, but ugly with character and meaning. You didn’t have to be beautiful to have those things. Trixsta had had them in abundance.
I missed it. That son of a bitch Cronus might get by with tearing down Lucifer and Hell along with him, but he wasn’t getting away with what he’d done to my home
.
“I have a copy of the picture of you, me, and Kimano,” Leo said quietly beside me.
My mama would say it was foolishness. That a picture of Kimano and me was a picture of empty Halloween costumes, because you couldn’t see who we truly were anywhere in the shapes we chose. They were temporary and forgotten as easily as an old shirt or pair of shoes you hadn’t worn in years. She was wrong. No matter what we looked like, I could always see my brother and he had always seen me. Leo always saw me, and he always knew me. He knew how much that old black-and-white photo meant. Memories faded, the most precious ones as well. Time washed everything out on the tide, every year taking it farther and farther from sight. I wanted that one memory sharp and bright. I needed it. I nodded, but said nothing as I felt the warmth of his hand wrap around mine.
Boulder Highway was blocked off as fire trucks and an investigative crew looked over the wreckage. It was four a.m., but Vegas never sleeps and the traffic pileup was enormous, which is where we sat—one in a long line of cars. But I could still see. The buildings on either side were completely undamaged. It was as if a minute yet hugely violent earthquake had hit Trixsta and only Trixsta
.
A natural disaster, that was Cronus . . . one massive natural disaster, without mercy or remorse.
Zeke and Griffin were both asleep this time in the back. Considering they were bruised and battered from the wreck, I didn’t wake them up to see the bones of Trixsta laid bare. It would be painful for them too. It had been their home for several years, more than Eden House had ever been. They would mourn, the same as I did, but they didn’t need to do it now. They’d been through enough this week, and with Griffin having the only thing close to demon wings on Earth at the moment, they had other things to worry about.
We spent what was left of the night at Leo’s condo, two hours later, after finally passing through the backed-up traffic. His place was in Green Valley, older but neat and well kept up. This was actually the first time I’d been inside. He tended to bring his bimbo du jour here these days instead of the bar as I’d produced a doctor’s note that I was horrifically allergic to silicone. The fact that I’d filled the car of one of the overly enhanced actress/ singer wannabes with tarantulas during their mating season also might’ve had something to do with it as well. I say, if you’re not an animal lover, you can’t be trusted anyway . . . and horny spiders are fuzzy and cute. I was merely pointing out her character flaws to Leo as an act of charity on my part. He, unreasonable bastard that he was, didn’t see it that way.
We roused the guys and headed them for the stairs. “What happened to Trixsta?” Zeke asked, yawning, then wincing as his bruised jaw cracked loudly.
“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” I replied lightly.
Leo, carrying the Namaru weapon mold, spared me a dubious glance. “Nothing that can’t be fixed,” this time stubbornly determined. He knew better than to argue with that mood.
“Better than before,” he confirmed, in my corner whether he truly believed it or not.
When we reached the second floor, a long walk for those who have been in a car wreck, Tasered, and recently comatose, we leaned on the mauve stucco wall beside the door as Leo unlocked it. Inside was cultural pride as far as one could see. “Did you buy out IKEA,” I inquired, feeling the first sliver of humor in hours, “or do they have one or two futons left in their store?”
Griffin looked around, his eyes settling on a bookshelf divided into so many spaces that it could have held fifty knickknacks easily. It only held one. “Do you have to make a pilgrimage to their headquarters once a year? Do you face Sweden and pray every day?”
Leo growled, “Do you want to continue to mock my taste in reasonably priced furniture or sleep in the car? It’s your choice.”
Griffin held up his hands in surrender and fell onto the couch, followed by his partner. I had gone to that ridiculously arty yet functional bookshelf and taken the one object there—a framed picture of Kimano, Leo, and me. Kimano looked as he most often looked, with straight black hair, dark skin, a puka shell necklace, and white teeth flashing in a laugh. The tides weren’t carrying away this memory. I held the frame to my chest, silently daring anyone to bring it up, and asked, “Where do I sleep?”
Leo had a spare bedroom, but he put me in his room and the guys in the extra. I cleaned the dried blood out of my hair and off my forehead. The cut was an inch back from my hairline and had stopped bleeding. It would be fine and I’d be better than fine as my hair would cover it up and Eli wouldn’t wonder why a shape-shifter was walking around with an easily healed wound. Borrowing a T-shirt from Leo, I slid under the covers of his bed, putting the picture on the bedside table facing me. “You coming?” I asked.
He’d stripped off his dirty and bloody shirt, the one I’d given back when I’d stopped bleeding. He also skimmed off his jeans and replaced them with a pair of loose black thin cotton pajama pants. They looked like what a ninja would wear to bed—or a dark god. He considered my offer. “I guess that depends on you.”
I eased down gently, careful of my head and my torn skin, and pulled the covers up to my chest. I was exhausted enough to almost have double vision. I hoped it was the exhaustion as opposed to a concussion. “Unless you’re into sexing up unconscious women, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”
“No, that’s not quite my thing.” He turned off the light and lifted the covers to slide in beside me. The spread over us was a silver gray, almost icelike in color, and although it was forty-five degrees outside, the heat couldn’t have been on higher than fifty-five inside. The furniture, the colors, the cold—Leo was missing Valhalla.
He moved closer and wrapped his arm around me as I turned on my side to keep Kimano in sight even in the dark. It wasn’t the first time we’d slept together platonically. Sometimes you just needed someone who cared about you, understood what no one else could, knew you like no one else could. I couldn’t promise the next time or the time after could stay platonic or if the thoughts themselves had ever been platonic to begin with . . . but if we lived, there was time enough to worry about that. Exhaustion dragging me into sleep, I murmured, “You should go home. When this is all over, you should go home for a visit.”
He tightened his grip on me, and I felt his breath rustle my hair. “I might. Maybe you should go with me. Odin loves you. It might get me some brownie points, especially since Thor isn’t going to be telling any great stories about me after this incident.”
“Maybe I will.” I closed my eyes. “While they’re rebuilding Trixsta.” While I figured out exactly who I was, which wasn’t who I’d been raised to be. Maybe one trip would solve all that. I exhaled, long and slow. Maybes didn’t get much bigger than that. I opened my eyes for one last look at Kimano, his Cheshire cat smile the only thing visible, and then I fell hard and fast into sleep. I dreamed of gold wings ripped from Griffin and of being in Trixsta when it crumbled and crushed me. I dreamed of Valhalla, talking to Odin over a mug of mead, his one good eye glittering in good cheer and laughing through a long white beard, right before Cronus appeared behind him and ripped his head from his broad shoulders.
Finally I dreamed of Anna, with her soft unassuming smile, her average and wonderfully whole face, her freckles. I dreamed she said, dimpling, “Easy as pie.” And then . . .
“Good-bye, Trixa. Every Rose says thank you, me most of all.”
Good-bye. . . .
Good . . .
There were no dreams after that.
It was eleven in the morning when I stumbled out of Leo’s bedroom. It wasn’t quite five hours of sleep, but close, and if only one-third of what I needed to function, I’d have to make do. The morning light was too bright, the smell of food nauseating, the furniture too Lovecraftian in its bizarrely geometric shapes unknowable to any but the Swedes and Cthulhu’s fourth cousin. I kept moving to the kitchen where Zeke was cooking something in the skillet. It looked as if it had all the four basic food groups, but it smelled as if they’d all been gathered or caught in a swamp. “Someone left a present for you,” he said, one elbow indicating a countertop as he continued to earnestly scramble whatever he was cooking down to their separate molecular parts.
There it was, resting on the black granite countertop—a glass pitcher filled to the brim with crystal clear water. The pitcher itself was frosted with condensation and a heart had been drawn on it. Inside the heart, the name
Anna
was written in loops and swirls with a flourish at the end. The dream had been real. She’d done it, what most Greek heroes couldn’t pull off, Anna had done. I’d had faith in her with good reason.