The Grimrose Path (Trickster, #2)(63)
“Demon.” His attention was back to the right, toward the bar. “In this place. It has been everywhere in this place. I want it. Make it come here.” He rested his hand on the hood of the truck. It sank instantly and a moment later he lifted it back up as metal poured in a liquid stream from the plastic fingers. The same plastic lips smiled. I’d never seen a Titan truly smile, not a genuine smile. I never wanted to see it again. A blank-faced Titan bent on control of everything in existence was one thing; an enthusiastic, happy Titan bent on the same was . . . shit. Just holy shit. There’d once been a god, or what people had thought had been a god. Moloch. They made huge metal statues of him, built furnaces in his grinning mouth, and fed live babies into the fire. Feeding their god. Supposedly. The rumor went. I hadn’t been in that area at the time.
But if those statues had existed, I think their smiles would have been identical to this one. Full of a heat to suck the air from your lungs, fire to cook flesh, the screams of infants. The screams of parents losing their children, sisters losing their baby brothers. Screams that never stopped, fear and pain that never ended. On and on until you were nothing but a scream yourself. Not a person, only a sound of terror that ripped the air until the end of time itself. And you could hear yourself—hear the scream that was you, the tearing and clawing of it in your mind so loud, so wrong you couldn’t imagine how it didn’t kill you.
Wishing it would kill you just to escape it.
“Soon.” Cronus vanished, taking a handful of Leo’s engine with him. That was fine. He could have that engine, as long as he took that smile and the screaming with him.
“Trixa?”
I kept my eyes front and center as I put off Zeke for a second. “Hold on, Kit. I’m doing my best not to pee my panties right now.”
He waited for nearly five entire seconds. “I just wanted to know,” he started, sounding profoundly put upon, “are we there yet?”
Bending over, I rested my forehead against the dashboard and laughed. I couldn’t do anything else. Here we sat in an alley, in a truck destroyed by one stroke of a Titan’s hand, we could’ve been destroyed ourselves, and Zeke was making jokes. If that wasn’t more frightening than a Titan, I didn’t know what was.
Leo caught a cab to the airport, while I changed my panties. It was worth it, pantywise. When you can laugh that hard in the face of a horror like Cronus, it was more than worth it. It was beyond amazing, it was extraordinary, and, what the hell, that pair had been on sale at Victoria’s Secret anyway.
From outside my closed bedroom door, I could hear Griffin and Zeke squabbling as they sat on the top step. It was nice, that touch of normality. I’d told them what was coming, and they’d seen Cronus for themselves, but if you weren’t a born pa?en, you couldn’t know. You couldn’t truly comprehend what a Titan was, not if it stood right in front of you and nearly screamed the sky down. You simply couldn’t grasp it. They say ignorance is bliss. About now I’d settle for a little plain stupid if ignorance was too much to ask for.
Unfortunately, my boys weren’t as blissful in other areas as I wished they were. There was a polite knock at the door to get my attention before Griffin asked through the wood, “Was Cronus talking about Eligos? Is that what he meant by a demon being . . . what? . . . embedded in your bar? Tainting it?”
Eligos had been in Trixsta only a few times—not nearly long enough to put a mark on it, much less taint it. And it wasn’t tainted. What Cronus sensed wasn’t demon—not anymore. “Yes,” I lied in word, thought, and emotion, all the while buttoning my new pair of jeans. I was talented that way. “It’s bad enough that his I-wanna-be-a-big-boy-in-big-demon-diapers Armand stained my floor, but now Eli has funked up my bar with demon BO. I don’t think they make a room deodorizer for that.”
It was Griffin who had wormed his way to the very heart of the bar. He’d spent several years growing up here, had been in the bar working every day and sleeping every night along with Zeke in what was now Leo’s office. And after Eden House had recruited him and Zeke, he’d still come by almost every day. That was what family did. Years of Griffin were in every nook and cranny of the building; Griffin when he’d thought he was human . . . and, in his mind and his heart, had been human. But it wasn’t his mind and heart that Cronus had picked up on. It was the physical that had lain under the human at the time. Now all that was left of that were wings. Beautiful, glorious wings—Hell-changed to glittering scales and exactly what Cronus needed.
That, however, was something Griffin didn’t need to know and overprotective Zeke definitely didn’t need to know. I knew. Leo knew too, I had no doubt. That was enough. We were lucky Cronus hadn’t bothered to look past me as he was making his demand and smashing an angel to pieces. Another ignorance-is-bliss situation and I was grateful for it. Cronus saw Leo and he saw me, the ant who dared play a game with him. If we could keep his focus there and only there, it would be good. Very good.
“So when Leo comes back from Colorado, he might have something that will kill Cronus? That’s the plan?” Griffin didn’t knock politely this time, and he sounded rather skeptical. I couldn’t say I blamed him.
“Colorado? We were going to the airport? I thought we were going to Disneyland,” Zeke grumped in turn. I heard a distinctly disappointed thump against the door. That would be him leaning and sulking.