Grimrose Path (6 page)

“That’s a pretty necklace,” she said, shuffling the photos faster.

I touched it. It was a pretty necklace, one Leo had given me . . . a gold sun with a red garnet. Red for me, and the sun to banish the cloudy days of my past, the days of finding revenge for my brother, for Kimano. And that was all beside the point. She was postponing the difficult, the painful. We all do.

I dropped my hand. “Show me the pictures, Anna. It’s like taking off a Band-Aid. The quicker the better. Let’s fix you up, guppy. Let you sleep again.”

“Guppy?” She rubbed self-consciously at the dark smudges under her eyes and curled her lips in a sad smile. “Little fish in a big scary ocean. Are you sure you’re not psychic?” Not waiting for an answer, she laid out the first photo as if it were a card in a tarot deck . . . as if she were laying out her life. Past, present, and future.

She was.

The first photograph rested on the table and I turned it with my finger to make it right side up for me. It was a girl, about ten. She wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t necessarily pretty either. But she had a sweet smile, freckles scattered over her nose and her dark brown hair drifting in a long-gone breeze. She clutched a kitten next to her cheek. It didn’t look happy, nose scrunched, tail poofed, but it put up with the hug. It was your typical little-kid picture. Cute, but nothing out of the ordinary. “What was the cat’s name?”

She blinked and smiled again. “Pickles. Actually Sir Pickles the Perilous. We both had delusions of grandeur.”

Then she laid out the next one and the smile vanished so thoroughly I couldn’t imagine she knew how to smile, much less just had been. This one was of a girl in a hospital bed. Half of her face was more or less gone, burned away. The eye was gone too, the hair a memory. They’d tried skin grafts and they covered the skull and muscle, but I don’t think anyone counted the operations a success.

She kept dealing out the photos. Eleven years old, twelve . . . “That’s when they gave me my first wig” . . . thirteen, fourteen . . . “This is when I had my second prosthetic eye. The first never fit right.” . . . fifteen, sixteen, seventeen . . . “This is me with my friends.” They were pictures of her alone. On the couch watching TV. In her room on her bed reading a book. In a backyard with Sir Pickles the Perilous in her lap. Alone again. Always alone. “This is me prom night.” It was another picture of her in a hospital bed. This time her wrists were bandaged. “And this is me”—the last picture—“on my twenty-first birthday.”

She looked as she did now. Smooth skin, freckles, dark brown hair to her shoulders, clear brown eyes. There wasn’t a single scar, much less the massive disfigurement of before, and in this picture she was smiling as she hadn’t since she was ten. She was happy, so happy that she could’ve powered all the neon in Vegas with the sheer joy in her face.

“Oh, sweetie.” I gathered up the pictures and turned them facedown. “I’m sorry. I am, but there’s no help for you.” I wished there were a way to soften it, but in this case there wasn’t. There was only truth, ugly and inescapable.

This time when she blinked it was to clear the tears clinging to her eyelashes. Then she used the back of her hand to wipe them away. “He was our neighbor’s gardener. He was new. He’d only been there for a few days, but he talked to me . . . over the fence. No one ever talked to me much except my parents. He just . . . talked. He didn’t try to make me fall in love with him or anything like that. He didn’t have to. He only had to be my friend. For a week I had a friend. And he was funny. I laughed for the first time since the accident. I spent the whole week laughing and actually not minding living, and then at the end of the week he asked me a question.” She took the pictures back and tucked them carefully away. “I didn’t believe in God. I didn’t believe in the devil. I definitely didn’t believe in demons.”

“But they believed in you.”

She nodded and ran fingers along her jaw. It was probably a habit—making sure it was real. “I didn’t ask to be beautiful. I didn’t ask to be famous or powerful or rich. I just asked to be who I would’ve been if the car accident hadn’t happened. I’m not pretty. I’m average and that’s fine. I never take average for granted now. I work at Starbucks to put myself through art school. I have a tiny apartment I can barely afford. There’s a guy who lives down the hall who smiles at me at the mailboxes. I think he might ask me out. I didn’t ask for anything extra. I only asked for...” She stopped and tucked her hair behind her ears. “I only asked for my life back. And I got it and it was wonderful, but now it’s three years later and I know. Trading eternity for twenty years, I made a mistake.”

Yes, she had—a big one. And she wouldn’t get eternity. I didn’t know why they bothered with that lie. I guess it sounded better than
And sooner rather than later, I’ll eat your soul
. Eternity gave them hope. God will forgive. God will set us free. With nonexistence, there was no hope.

“I only asked,” she repeated, eyes dry now. “I only asked.”

“No,” I exhaled. “You didn’t. He asked. The demon asked for your soul and you gave it to him. And there’s no way out of it.” A helpless guppy all right. On the very day she was able to give her soul away, someone was already waiting to take it. A good girl, a nice girl, and there wasn’t anything I could do for her. Free will was free will. She didn’t deserve Hell, but Hell she would get. I didn’t know her demon, but even if I had and killed him, then another would step up and then another. “No soul left behind” . . . All bureaucracies had their mottoes.

Someone would always come for Anna, one way or the other.

You couldn’t save them all, and I wasn’t in the saving business per se, but if I could’ve saved anyone I’d seen sell their souls over the years, it would’ve been her. But I couldn’t, so I sent her away, her and her pictures with Sir Pickles. She went quietly. She stopped after a few steps, turned to thank me politely for my time, and then walked out the bar door into Hell.

Whether you waited twenty years or twenty seconds, it was all the same eventually.

Hell was Hell.

 

Leo finally showed his face the next morning. I was already up. I’d opened the bar early to make up for yesterday’s lack of profit. And I’d called and texted everyone and anyone I knew in the
païen
world to see if anyone had heard about the demon slaughter. So far I’d gotten nothing but a bemused feeling at the thought of a seven-tailed trickster fox trotting around Japan with a BlackBerry in its jaws.

Leo, on the other hand, looked like he’d gotten something. He could wear that stoic expression all he wanted, but I knew him. “Not a new one,” I groaned.

“I’m a man with needs.” He shrugged as he put on one of the bar’s black aprons, wrapping the tie twice around his waist.

“Which are oddly enough always met with silicone,” I retorted.

He shrugged again, but this time quirked his lips, “It’s Vegas. You get a free boob job every time you fill up your car. How is that my fault?”

Big breasts, small brains, and underwear tiny enough to have been knitted by Tinkerbell—he did it every time. I could’ve blamed it on him being worshipped as a Norse god, lots of buxom blondes frolicking in the snow, but I wasn’t sure that was it. I thought there was more to it than that. He did it for the same reason I slept with a black raven’s feather under my pillow. If we couldn’t have what we actually wanted, we went without or went for the exact opposite. I wasn’t exactly proud of some of my past dates.

“Spots.” I sighed. Leo and I had ties . . . unbreakable ones . . . two leopards with the same spots. Too much the same in the past, too much the same for now, but maybe . . . maybe not always. I had the feather to remind me of that.

“Spots,” the one who’d given me that feather agreed, the curve of his lips softer; then he continued with a wicked glint to his black eyes, “Her spots are called pasties, I believe. She’s a dancer.”

“Stripper.” I threw a towel at him.

“Who has goals in the theater.” He caught it and polished the bar with broad strokes.

“She wants to be a porn star.” I looked for something else to throw, but there was nothing that wouldn’t come out of this month’s profit.

“And she does charity work.” He tossed the towel across his shoulder and folded his arms.

“She does you for free?” I smiled with caustic cheer.

He frowned. “I do not pay for sex, little girl.”

“You only get to call me that for four more years.” And five foot five was not that short. Maybe in comparison to the six-foot-plus American Indian body he’d chosen, I was somewhat smaller, but I was not little, most especially not when it came to temper, where it counted most. “So did you offer her free drinks here for the duration of your sexcapades or fix her refrigerator?”

That got the towel thrown back at me. “No, thanks.” I folded it and put it aside. “I don’t have to stuff my bra. Unlike some, I don’t feel the need to be a double D or wax myself as bare as a honeydew melon. Barbie dolls are for little girls to play with, not grown, perverted men. Now, about our demon trouble.”

That distracted him. “What demon trouble?”

I told him. He grasped the implications as quickly as I had. “There aren’t many out there who could do that,” he said thoughtfully, before adding, “one less now that I’m grounded.”

“Godzilla to the hundredth power is running around and you have to get your ego in the picture,” I said fondly. “Just remember, your biggest and baddest power now is dropping bird shit on people’s cars.” He kept reminding me how vulnerable I was now. I didn’t want him to forget he was as well.

He ignored the insult—to his manhood and bird-hood. “And Eligos is back.” He turned and served a beer to one of our regulars—a walking handlebar mustache roosting on a skinny guy it was using for life support. The man was a person; he had a name. I knew it . . . first, middle, last, and nickname. I knew where he’d been born. I knew where he lived, who he lived with, how much money he made in Social Security checks. I made it my business to know these things about all my regulars, but one look at him and the mustache never failed to jump into the foreground—an entity all its own. It was like seeing someone with a giant if not friendly spider on his face. . . . It was difficult to ignore.

“We knew he wasn’t leaving Vegas,” I said as the mustache shuffled off to its customary table in the corner. “I’m surprised he didn’t single-handedly found the place. This city is tailor-made for him.”

“And I imagine he thinks the same about you. You caught his interest, and right now, being mortal, that is not a good thing,” he said disapprovingly, as if somehow it was my fault that I might be more entertaining to kill than whatever it was that Eli usually came across.

“Don’t think it’s all about me. You’re as intriguing or at least he will think you still are.” I pinched his cheek. “He might even think you’re more ‘purty’ than I am, you never know. A hot babe like you who has to part lusting strippers like the Red Sea just to walk among the common people. He might want to take you out instead of killing you. Of course he’s not a blonde with breasts the same size and shape as the
Hindenburg
, but he won’t drop a pastie in your soup at dinner either.”

“I think I’ll bring Morocco by the bar,” he contemplated. “Let you meet her. I think you two will bond.”

“Playing hardball. Cranky, cranky. I would think you’d be in a better mood having your manly needs fulfilled and all.” I took my apron off and stuffed it under the bar. “Morocco. That’s beautiful,” I said solemnly. “Is that where her people are from? Lots of blue-eyed blondes there.”

“I think she saw it on the Travel Channel,” he replied with equal gravity, “and thought it sounded exotic.”

I thought about spearing his hand with a tiny paper drink umbrella, then gave it up as a lost cause and advised, “Hide all your singles when she’s around. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“And you’re going where while I toil at
your
bar?” he demanded.

“Out to play hooky with demons. You ditched yesterday, so I get to ditch today. Remember, this place keeps a roof over
your
head. Unless you want to take up stripping yourself.” I gave him a wave and went out through the back office to the alley entrance. That was one thing Leo didn’t have that a born trickster did. We were very aware of money . . . how much we had, how much someone else had, and how we planned on conning them out of it. We were magpies, and money—even in the day when money was shells, salt, or measures of grain—money was the bright shiny thing we loved. Some of us loved it more than others. There were tricksters who had an enormous amount of wealth socked away and some, like me, who kept enough just to be comfortably off when human. Leo didn’t have that same need, that drive. When he needed money, he would get it. But when you were born a trickster, you always needed it, whether you spent it or not.

I did like to spend mine.

In the alley, I opened the door to my car. It still had that wonderful new-car smell and like my last one, destroyed in November, it was red—my color and it had been since my very first trick.

It had started with an apple.

No, not
that
apple.

Just an ordinary ripe red apple and a greedy farmer who wouldn’t share with a cute little girl with tangled black hair and dirty feet. He probably blamed it on not praying enough to the local fertility goddess when he woke up the next morning to find every branch of every tree bare of even a single piece of fruit, but it was just a baby trickster teaching her very first lesson. Don’t be greedy, and don’t take anything for granted, because something could take it all away from you.

More than nine hundred demons had apparently learned that lesson in the past six months, taking their lives for granted, or so Eli said. And I trusted Eli’s word. Oh, I so did not. Not even in the womb would I have been that naïve. If all those demons had been killed, more than Eli would know about it—other demons would as well. I only had to track one down and ask him . . . or her. Unlike angels, demons would wear a male or female body—whatever it took to get the job done. Angels, on the other hand . . . I shook my head and backed out of the alley into traffic on Boulder Highway, ignored the enraged honking, and sped off. I wasn’t going to ruin my good mood thinking about those chauvinistic pigeons.