“About the medium and talking to a dead person.” Griffin held up the bottle after pouring his own glass. “Care to fill us in on how that’s going to help the Cronus situation? It would be interesting—that’s a good word—interesting if you were to give us some information about the plan, this time, before Zeke and I find out this time that instead of being an angel and a demon that we’re actually Batman and Robin.”
That cheered me up more than the wine. My boy, trying to play rough with his big sister, trying to give me a verbal wedgie. It was cute enough that I wanted to pat him on the head and let him play an extra half hour in the sandbox. As an alternative, I embraced who I was and threw him to the sharks . . . for what I thought was the third time this week. “I’m full of information, sunshine. Like how you’re not supposed to mix alcohol and pain medication.”
Zeke promptly snatched the glass from Griffin’s hand and drank it himself. “You’re welcome,” he said pointedly as he put the glass in the sink.
“Yes, thank you so very much for throwing yourself on the grenade like that for me.” Griffin switched his annoyance to where it belonged—on me. “About the medium . . .”
I held up a finger to stop him and swiveled the stool to face the living room. “Shhh. Incoming.”
Païen could almost always recognize their own, whether we currently looked human or not—and, I’d found out, if we were more human than not. Sometimes you had to be face-to-face, sometimes not. Sometimes it was a whisper in the back of your brain and sometimes it was a scream. Oddly, I couldn’t feel Cronus at all. He could be standing inches away and I would feel nothing. I’d told Eligos that the Titan was outside a demon’s frame of reference. Truthfully, he was outside that of most païen as well. But Leo, I knew, and had known for so long, that when I sensed him, it was as if he were standing right behind me, close enough that I could feel his warm breath on my neck, the heat radiate through his skin as he leaned close . . . and swatted me on the back of my head with a newspaper. Romantic it was not, but that’s what it felt like. Leo was a god and the presence of a god packed a punch. They were brimming with power and although Leo’s power was now gone, I recognized him the same as I always had. Only this time it was double the jolt to the brain.
Griffin and Zeke’s house, while impeccably neat on the inside and full of toys like a huge plasma TV mounted on the wall, was a drab and cracked stucco on the outside and located in North Town. If you wanted to live in Vegas and not worry about your neighbors catching a glimpse of you loading up the car with guns, this was the place. The cops would go there, but when you have a house stashed with your own guns as well as drugs to worry about, who’s going to call them? And as the neighbors were more than familiar with Zeke, my boys were able to keep their toys. Their house hadn’t been robbed once—or blown up. The neighbors couldn’t claim the same.
Besides the plasma TV in the living room, there was also a leather couch Scotchgarded against gun oil and demon blood. When Thor appeared, he was already sprawled on it, his feet on the coffee table and the remote in his hand. “Dude. Nice TV. Is a game on?” he slurred, before his chin hit his chest, the remote hit the floor, and he was out. A split second of semicoherence followed by deep alcohol-fueled unconsciousness, and this was what I was pinning all of reality’s hopes on.
Leo, who had shown up in midair in raven form with wings flapping, changed back to human form. I hadn’t decided yet if I was happy or disappointed that the Light had let him keep his clothes as part of his raven-shifting ability. “Hail the Mighty Thor,” he snorted as Thor began a drunken snore that anyone who’d owned a bar before could recognize. It was thick, loud, and accompanied by just enough drool to make it intriguing. “This is our third attempt to make it here. Midair over the Grand Canyon was scenic.” That would explain the bird shape. There was never a designated nondrinking god around when you needed one. “I thought you’d come here since Cronus has marked the bar as his territory.”
He might have marked it, but he wasn’t keeping it. “Does he have the weapon mold?” I asked. It wouldn’t matter if Anna came through with what we needed from Hades—the place, not the dead god—if we didn’t have a way to construct a weapon out of it.
“Do you think I would have him come along if he did? I would’ve taken it and had him send me back . . . blessedly alone. Right now his company isn’t that enthralling. Hell, neither is his hygiene, and considering I clean the bar’s bathrooms, that’s saying something.” Leo studied his foster brother, which was as close an approximation I could come to how the Norse gods sketched out their family tree, although fostering had a much different connotation to the Norse gods and the Norse people. It built ties of loyalty among families where before there had been none. Leo lifted his upper lip with an emotion that appeared to be anything but familial or loyal, and brotherly love was completely out of the picture. “I try to destroy the world once and they give me holy hell about it forever, but golden boy spends his life staggering here and there, leaving vomit behind him like a trail of bread crumbs for Hansel and Gretel to follow out of the woods, and he’s raised on high. Worshipped above all others. Vikings named everything including their dicks after him. Unbelievable.”
“I thought Thor was a great warrior, per mythology anyway.” Griffin left the kitchen and went in for a closer look at mythology come to life. “Not to mention somewhat of a compadre of yours until you caused too much trouble for him to overlook.”
“We were ‘compadres’ until I outgrew the drinking, until I puked every day all day, which would’ve been a week after I started drinking. Every creature he killed, it was because he passed out on top of it and smothered the poor bastard. He was born with a horn of mead in one hand and a woman’s breast in the other. The hammer I gave him? The weapon of myth and mystery? He cracks walnuts with it.” Thor was bringing out the Loki in Leo in a big way.
At Leo’s last words, Thor’s snoring hitched. “Walnuts . . . good.” He drooled a tad more copiously and the snoring began again. As muscle-bound as artists of old had depicted him, he was dressed in a tank top—all the rage for Colorado in February—and a pair of sweatpants. One foot was covered with a black sneaker and the other one was bare. He did have shoulder-length blond hair, but from the dark roots and artificially even color, it was dyed. Worse, not only dyed, but it was a genuine at-home, from-a-box job. If you drank, that was your problem. If you drank too much to find a good hair salon, that was my problem, visually and aesthetically.
Being a god didn’t automatically mean you were a shape-shifter. It also could mean you were big, dumb, and just very, very difficult to kill. Thor fell into the latter category. In fact, he might have been the entire category, hogging it all to himself.
“That’s it. I need hair of the dog.” The drunken dog that was lying on the couch. Leo headed for the refrigerator.
“Since he is here, in all his glory.” I ducked as Zeke tossed Griffin a can of room deodorizer that was applied in earnest to the pile of Norse muscles, from big feet to bad dye job. He was pungent, there was no doubt. “Does that mean he’s going to help find the weapon mold, knows where it is, or is he here to laugh at you when Cronus squashes us like bugs on a windshield?” I asked. “Not that I can’t understand the entertainment value if I weren’t one of the bugs myself.”
Leo already had a beer open and half of it down. “He’s going to help. I humiliated myself and apologized . . . several times as he kept nodding off and missing parts of it. It’s all forgive and forget for now—unless he sobers up, but as I’ve not seen that happen since Leif the Lucky discovered America, pissed on a tree, and then left, I think we’re safe.” He drained the rest of the bottle. “We just need to get to LA. Hopefully by then our stand-in from a bad wrestling movie will be awake, but still not especially coherent. We can point, he can send one of us in, and we have the mold.”