“Again, why? Whatever it is that Cronus wants or is doing, there’s nothing we can do but stay out of his way. And I’d have said the same thing last year before we were both temporarily demoted.” He watched as I whipped up the world’s fastest sugar-loaded orgasm, studying me intently before accusing, “But you’re curious, aren’t you?”
“Among other things.” I told him those other things as I coated the martini glass in a slow slide of chocolate, then admitted, “But curiosity is one of them. That’s why you’ll always be an amateur trickster, studly, never a pro.”
“Because I can suspend my curiosity and trickster-loving ways to not die a horrible death?” he said dryly.
“If you’re careful enough, you don’t have to die.” The chocolate was all I’d hoped, the alcohol a little less. “And the curiosity isn’t actually a choice. You’re born with it.”
“Like scaly sex appeal.” The air shimmered across the bar and then Eli was sitting on a stool. He was wearing a brown bathrobe, expensive naturally, and his normally sleek pelt of straight hair was rumpled from sleep. Demons actually slept. There was an interesting fact. Or maybe they only slept while transformed into their human costumes. Regardless, I was glad he’d bothered with the robe, because I knew there was nothing beneath it. Eli in pj’s—I just couldn’t see it. He yawned and went on. “I’m assuming whatever you found out is earth shattering . . . as in a ‘Kennedy killed Marilyn Monroe and her corpse rose from the grave to pull a zombie-revenge assassination’ category of earth shattering. Because it is that early in the morning. That goddamn early.” He cheered as he brushed a hand over his hair. “You want to know who really did kill them? If you’re as curious as you say you are, maybe we could arrange a trade. I know you don’t have a soul, not the kind I can take, but I have quite a few things I could think of that you could cough up that would make me a very happy demon.”
“Happy? Really?” I smiled, put down the martini glass, lifted the rose from the vase, and tossed it to him. He caught it effortlessly and with an inhuman speed I’d unfortunately had to give up for a while. Turning it in his hand, he saw the ribbon . . . and read the name on it. “Happy now?” I asked. I didn’t have to be curious about that, because I knew the answer.
One big fat no.
Since Eligos was in his human body, it had the same human reaction as any human body. He paled slightly. I was impressed. A lesser demon/human would’ve probably vomited on the bar. “This had best not be some pathetic version of a trickster joke,” he said with a quiet as darkly malignant as a newborn cancer cell.
“Trust me, sugar, even I don’t think this is funny.” I returned to the martini. “We all liked it much better when Cronus was stuck in Tartarus or had that bipolar happy moment and skipped around the Elysian Fields keeping things in order. But those days are over. He’s here in this world now. Has been for a few hundred years, but this is the first time he’s decided to have fun. But for the life of me, I can’t think why killing demons would be that entertaining for him. Like swatting a fly. A slow-moving, half-dead fly. Where’s the sport?”
“There has to be a reason,” Leo added. “Cronus is mad as they come, but even if killing your kind were entertaining for him, he’d have still bored of it long before nine hundred.”
Eli ignored the “reason” topic, which meant he knew the reason and had known it most likely when he’d had his chat with me at the car dealership. That made him more deceitful than I’d given him credit for and I’d given him very high credit in that department. It was too bad about him being a murdering sociopathic spawn of Hell. We tricksters did love deceit. If he were a peacock, his feathers would be brilliant, bright, and attracting every female in sight. But he wasn’t a vain bird. He was a killer and right now a stronger and quicker one than I was. I kept that in mind as I regarded him over a surface of rippling chocolate. I also kept in mind that I was smarter. False modesty could kiss my ass.
“Where did you get this?” he asked, dropping it onto the bar.
“It was left on the doorstep. I found it when I got up this morning.” I sipped.
“And why did he leave it here . . . for you?”
“Insane doesn’t always have to mean impolite, but to be honest,” I said, surprised the air didn’t sizzle on my tongue when I uttered that word, “it’s less for me than for Leo. Cronus was a ... a fan, I guess you’d say . . . of his work. He has a certain respect for him, rather like you would for a precocious three-year-old who drew you an especially pretty picture for the refrigerator.”
Leo growled at me but confirmed, “If we stay out of his way, he won’t obliterate us. Maybe. But we know the same isn’t true for you. Too bad.” He gave a rumble of amusement. “Yes, too damn bad.” Leo didn’t out and out grin often, but he did now as he finished off his second beer.
“You wouldn’t know why Cronus is into killing helpless little minnows like you, do you?” I gave Eli a second chance to tell us the why . . . although the why was only half of what I was interested in—the how I could use it to my benefit was something I was invariably interested in. “Don’twant to share? Sharing’sgood for the ...mmm ... whoops. Not the soul obviously. Psychological well-being?” I leaned over the bar and smelled the rose still in his hand. “Assuming you have a being to house that psyche in.” I looked into eyes that were distant, the bits of copper bright in churning thought. “And, Eli? Sweetie, that’s one assumption you can’t be making for too long, you hear?”
He heard all right. Enough so that he was gone, bathrobe and all, but he left the rose behind on the stool. Off to Hell to tell his boss and up the food chain it would go . . . all the way to the top—or maybe bottom would be more appropriate. I walked around and replaced the flower in the vase before resting a hand on Leo’s shoulder to whisper in his ear, completing what I’d been telling him while making the martini.
After nearly a minute, I stopped talking and went back to my chocolate elixir of the gods. You should never waste the good things in life. And where Eli had gone, there were no good things, not ever. “Flowers don’t always say, ‘I love you,’” I murmured to the empty stool as I picked up the rose.
“You are a bad, bad girl,” Leo said with a reluctant admiration. Coming from such a bad boy, that meant something.
“Yes, I am,” I said with a satisfaction that tasted sweeter than the chocolate. “I most definitely am.”
“What do you mean we can’t kill demons?”
Zeke sounded as outraged as an eighty-year-old meat-and-potatoes guy told he had to go vegan. “Relax, killer.” I pulled up my hair and then tied my sneakers. I hated sneakers, but you couldn’t run in boots. Or you could, but it wasn’t cardio-effective. How many blocks did a chocolate martini equal? I did know who killed Marilyn Monroe, thank you, Eligos, spawn of Hell, and I even knew where Jimmy Hoffa was, or what was left of him, but blocks versus chocolate calories, that I didn’t know. I only knew I had to run them off or outrunning demons was going to get more and more difficult. “It’s just for a while—until Cronus is out of Vegas. You don’t want to get between him and his nummy-num.” Or whatever a demon was for him.
“Cronus . . . He was a Titan, right?”
I gave an approving pat to Griffin’s knee as he leaned against the back of my car parked in its usual spot in the alley. “Someone studied at Eden House.”
“I studied,” Zeke complained as he gave the nearest tire a considering look and his foot twitched. I gave him a similar look and he rethought it, scuffing his shoe against the asphalt instead. Boys. Ex-angel, in reality probably older than I was, twenty-five human years genetically, but he was still a spoiled kid without his toys . . . dead demons. And that made him a strange spoiled boy, but weren’t we all a little strange now and again?