The Grimrose Path (Trickster, #2)(77)
Waiting for Hell on Earth. It was our only chance now.
Chapter 15
It was past eight by the time we arrived at the museum. It was dark, the time of the more adventurous things in life—such as robbing that same museum we could see through the trees from where we were parked across the street in a lot off Menlo Avenue. “Let me get this again. Thor is going to poof one of us into the museum to grab the weapon mold and poof us back out. That’s your plan. I was going to ask why you didn’t have him simply go and get it himself, but I think I figured that out on my own,” Griffin said as he put his head out the open car window for well over the hundredth time. Taking a few breaths of fresh air, he pulled back in and asked, “I’m assuming there’s a backup plan? Although why not just poof the artifact itself?”
“First off, he doesn’t know precisely where it is in the museum, although if he were sober, he probably would. He does know where we are or I’m hoping he will.” Since we were right in the car with him, although in his shape, that was a big assumption. “Secondly, don’t call it poofing. Kids’ cartoon characters poof. Gods materialize in an awe-inspiring storm of fire, subtly form themselves out of the shadows, or inexplicably appear out of thin air. They don’t poof,” I said.
“Why is that?” Griffin gave in and leaned against Thor’s shoulder. With the Norse god’s size, there wasn’t room to do anything else.
“Because it sounds ridiculous,” Leo said, jingling the car keys, “and we don’t like it.” He jingled again, the clank of metal in a dungeon lock as they came to drag you to the executioner’s ax. “Not . . . at . . . all.”
“Gods are many things, but they’re not ridiculous.” Thor, determined to be an embarrassing thorn in my side, blew a spit bubble and kept on snoring, as unconscious as he’d been since the beginning of our trip. “Okay. Rarely ridiculous. And, Griffin, you should know I have a backup plan. My backup plans have backup plans.” I turned around completely in the seat and shot Thor in the chest with my Smith. I muffled the sound with a pillow that had been left with the sleeping bag the guys were sitting on in the back. The pillowcase, not immaculate to begin with, blackened from the gunpowder. When I lifted it away, the tank top below showed a bullet hole, but there was nothing else. The flesh had already healed, and there wasn’t a single drop of blood, but Thor’s rhythmic snore did skip. That was something. I shot him again in the same spot.
“I’m sorry I doubted you. Houdini is banging his head sitting up in his coffin in wonder at the elaborate nature of this spectacular magic trick. A gun and a pillow. That beats a rabbit out of a hat any day.” Griffin wasn’t impressed, but Zeke was shifting in a way that said he was seconds away from asking for his turn. A silver lining in every gunshot, that was my Kit.
I regarded the skeptical one of the pair patiently. “You’ve been strung up by demons this week, sugar. Do you really want to be strung up by me too?”
“Sorry,” Griffin apologized. “I’m hungry, I haven’t lost my sense of smell as I’d hoped, and I was expecting some sort of complicated world-class jewel thief equipment. You know, with wires and complex laser-generating electronics.”
Leo gave a laugh that was far too amused at my expense, but I didn’t mind. It kept him occupied with thoughts other than gutting Griffin with a pair of car keys for the poofing disrespect. Not that he would have, but it had been a long, odoriferous ride. We could all use the distraction. “Trixa and electronics? She can’t program her TiVo. She can’t work her cell phone. It still chirps like a flock of birds when it rings. She’s set two, no . . . three microwaves on fire. Most couldn’t do it that many times on purpose.”
“I’m not technically gifted.” I shot Thor yet again. “I’m not ashamed. We all have our weaknesses. If you didn’t have a weakness, how could you hone your skills to work around it? Shape-shifting and the powers of persuasion are my skills. Those and the ability to drive a fast car in three-inch demon-gutting boots. I don’t need TiVo to trick, and I don’t need a microwave to kill, although it might be nicely ironic in some cases. Now let me do my job.” This time when I shot Thor, it worked. That was another thing that didn’t require technical skill: pulling a trigger . . . a rather sad commentary on weapons of the day.
Thor’s eyes were open and on me. The color wasn’t clear in the parking lot lights, but I could guarantee massively bloodshot was descriptive enough. I didn’t wait long enough for any emotion to register. I didn’t want to deal with a pissed-off, cranky, heading hard into hangover god. I wanted an amiable, still drunk but conscious one. “Give him a beer, Zeke,” I ordered before smiling at Thor. “Hey, doll, Loki said you’d give us a hand.” The same one that automatically grabbed for the beer Zeke dangled. Guns weren’t the only necessities we’d packed. When dealing with an alcoholic god, it was a good idea to not run out of what kept him happy.
By the time he drank four beers, asked to see my breasts—not that that was how he phrased it—I was inside the museum. It wasn’t an easy ride, far and away the worst I’d been on. I couldn’t poof . . . damn Griffin. I couldn’t appear or disappear at will—that wasn’t one of my skills I’d been talking up earlier. But I could compare Thor’s shortcut to the ones that Leo had taken me on a time or two in the old days. Those had been smooth sailing on a calm sea. Thor’s trip was a roller-coaster ride off the rails and into the screaming crowd below. That I fell only three feet to the floor was something I was grateful for. I could’ve ended up in a display case one-third my size or inside the floor instead of above it.