The Grimrose Path (Trickster, #2)(46)
I could hear a siren in the distance. “That sounds wonderful for you, Eli. Your work ethic astounds me. Now take the car and go.”
This time the clamp of his hand was painful, but I didn’t let him see it. “We set the Roses free an hour ago. Find out if that satisfies Cronus. Find out soon.” Then he was gone to drive off one of the vehicles to create more of an evidence mishmash for the cops. As for the freedom of the Roses satisfying Cronus, unfortunately for Eli and Hell, that wasn’t going to happen.
But it certainly satisfied me.
The hospital was as most hospitals are or I was guessing. This was only my second time in one. But they were similar. Busy, sharp with the smell of alcohol, and staff who positively wouldn’t consider letting nonfamily members stay with a patient . . . unless you were the patient’s power of attorney—that would be me. Eden House demon slayers weren’t the only ones with a library of fake IDs to hand out. When it came to kicking Zeke out . . . there was absolutely no admittance, and then there were the absolute exceptions. The doctor and the nurses each had a quick look at Zeke and that was the end of that. No calling security. No urging him out. Zeke, at the moment, was why people in the Bible feared to look upon angels.
They were scary sons of bitches, some of them. It hadn’t been a demon or Lucifer who’d killed the firstborn of Egypt. It had been an angel. The staff in the ER saw, unknowingly, in Zeke what people had cast their eyes away from in ancient times—the inexplicable or a reckoning. Trying to toss Zeke back out to the waiting room was a reckoning waiting to happen. Wisely, no one took him up on it.
The police had come and gone and I’d given them a story about being kidnapped by two men with guns—we sacrificed my favorite shotgun and Zeke’s Ruger for verisimilitude—very pasty white men who beat up our friend, robbed us, and then left us—not to die, but probably because they were late for the latest World of Warcraft campaign or a slot machine appointment with their grandma. They were, after all, incredibly, unbelievably practically glow-in-the-dark white . . . with socks . . . and sandals.
About time that slice of the population had the blame dumped on them for some fake crime. I was happy to even the score a bit, although good luck narrowing down “two pasty white men” in Vegas where the tourists primarily came in two colors—alabaster and fake-tan orange.
Zeke went with Griffin for the CAT scan and I waited, pacing—no hard plastic chair for me, no standing still when my boys might need me. I called Leo and filled him in. “Goddamn kid.” He sighed at Griffin’s one-man quest to make up for a past that wasn’t his anymore. I’d reminded him Griffin might be older than Leo was; you couldn’t be sure. Correction, I couldn’t be sure. Leo could. “Older than you, little girl, maybe, but he’s not older than I am.”
“Because you’re forever, ‘Grandpa,’” I mocked, an argument we’d long thrown back and forth between each other.
“Damn close.” He sounded smug. He sounded less so when I told him Hell had set the Roses free. “That’s nice for the Roses, escaping torture and being a demon’s supper, but it doesn’t help us with the Cronus situation or the Eligos situation when he finds out what you’ve done. You managed to kick Hell’s ass and f*ck up intentionally all in one. That is quite a trick.”
“But it’s a good one, isn’t it?” I asked, an excitement no trickster could deny sparking through me . . . distant fireworks on a passing Fourth of July. What I’d done was more than good. It was, for one, nearly impossible to pull off. Second, it saved thousands of souls from horror, then nonexistence. Third, and best of all, it screwed Hell itself. You couldn’t ask for a better hat trick than that.
“Yes,” Leo admitted with a mixture of reluctance and an echo of the same excitement in his voice. “You are now legend with this one.” As if I weren’t legendary before this, ass, I thought, somewhat disgruntled. “I’ll be at the hospital as soon as I can. The tourist doesn’t want to go down. Hard digging out this way. I picked a bad spot. But I’ll be there in at least two hours. Griffin will live, won’t he?” He didn’t sound worried, but he was. Griffin and Zeke had been his strays as well as mine when they’d shown up at the bar as teenagers on the run.
“If I had my doubts, I’d be in Hell myself right now, beating Cronus to the punch. Oh, and if you see Beelzebub on the way, kill him for me, would you?” I clicked the phone shut as Griffin was pushed back on his gurney into the curtained enclosure of ER bed 7. Lucky seven, I was fervently hoping.
Zeke immediately took the plastic chair I’d disdained and pulled it up to Griffin’s side. “No hematomas, subdural or epidural.” He might not bother himself over the larger words that made up the English vocabulary, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know them. He did, and when it was important, he could not only use them, but he could amaze with what he knew. “But his Glasgow Coma Scale is seven.” He put his hand very lightly on Griffin’s forehead, the purple bruising feathering up under his palm.
“And that’s not good?” It didn’t sound particularly good the way Zeke said it. Lucky number seven wasn’t so lucky this time.
“No. I made the doctor explain it to me.” I wished I’d been there to see that—what sort of medical equipment had been involved and where it had threatened to be inserted. “It means he won’t open his eyes, he won’t speak, but he does react to pain. He’s in a coma. Deep.” Zeke bared his teeth briefly, as I saw him thinking how Griffin had gotten there, but he recovered his calm quickly in a manner so unlike him, I felt like the one who needed guidance. Tutoring, as his partner gave him. I felt like the one who was lost. When Zeke was more on top of things than I was, I was through the looking glass hanging out with the Mad Hatter. But that was making this about me, and it wasn’t. It was about Griffin and what I could do to help him.