The Grimrose Path t-2

  The Grimrose Path

  ( Trickster - 2 )

  Rob Thurman

  Bar owner Triva Iktomi knows that inhuman creatures of light and darkness roam Las Vegas—especially since she's a bit more than human herself. She's just been approached with an unusual proposition. Something has slaughtered almost one thousand demons in six months. And the killing isn't going to stop unless Trixa and her friends step into the fight...

  The Grimrose Path

  (The second book in the Trickster series)

  (2010)

  A novel by

  Rob Thurman

  To Michael and Sara

  (who take me to lunch when I’m out of mac ’n’ cheese).

  Acknowledgments

  To my mom, who suggested why didn’t I give my old dream of writing a go. If I become a victim of artistic Darwinism, I blame her; Shannon—best friend, designated driver for SDCC, and undesignated sherpa for various other events; my patient editor, Anne Sowards; the infallible Kat Sherbo; Brian McKay (ninja of the dark craft of copywriting); Agent Jeff Thurman of the FBI for the usual weapons advice; the incomparable art and design team of Chris McGrath (an art GOD) and Ray Lundgren; Lucienne Diver, who still astounds me in the best possible way at every turn; great and lasting friends Michael and Sara; Linda and Richard, and to fellow author Lisa Shearin, who has shown me the Light and the Way—in the church of promotional bargains—and assisted in a time of need. Plus she adopts dogs. What’s not to love? And to Dakota, my original literate dog, my werewolf superhero—life without you is a poor imitation at best.

  Prologue

  Spilt milk.

  My mama had a saying for every occasion under the sun, but even she didn’t lay claim to that one. I didn’t know who did, but everyone had heard it. It had been around forever. Don’t cry over spilt milk. There’s no point to it. You can’t change it, can’t put it back, can’t make it better. You simply cleaned it up and went on.

  Because that was life. Life wasn’t always fair. And some things in life couldn’t be undone. They could be avenged—damn straight, they could—but not undone.

  They could teach a lesson . . . if anyone was around to learn from it—or smart enough to get the point.

  Yet the bottom line was always the same—spilt milk was spilt milk. An inconvenience or a pain, an annoyance or sometimes even a tragedy. But whichever it was, it didn’t matter. You might want to, but you couldn’t turn back time. You couldn’t close your eyes and pretend it was a bad dream. You couldn’t avoid the truth and that was a cold hard fact.

  You couldn’t unspill that milk.

  You couldn’t make it better. You couldn’t make it right.

  I stood and looked at the shattered glass, jagged tears glinting in the sun. I looked at the metal coated with blood—so very much blood—the same color as the darkest crimson rose, and I decided the hell with old sayings.

  I was undoing this.

  I was making this right.

  And I’d like to see the son of a bitch who thought he could stop me.

  Chapter 1

  Life was a trick.

  That was what it boiled down to in the end; life was one big trick, one huge April Fools’. You might think that could be a bad thing . . . depending on whether you were on the giving or receiving end. But that didn’t matter as much as you’d think it would. It was what it was. At the very end of it, we all ended up on both sides. The universe was fair that way, because everyone, without exception, had something to learn. We were all naughty in one way or another.

  And tricks were lessons in disguise. They taught you right from wrong, safe from dangerous, bad seafood salad from good seafood salad. Have you ever had bad seafood salad? That’s the worst eighteen hours of your life and a lesson you’ll never forget. Have you ever put an old lady in the hospital after mugging her for her Social Security check? The lesson regarding that, you might not live long enough to remember or forget.

  Life was a trick, a trick was a lesson, and I was a teacher—the majority of the time. I didn’t teach in a school. The world was my school, and I had a zero-tolerance policy. I taught the teachable. And the others? Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t learn? What’s a woman to do in that situation?

  Apply a “Darwin’s rules” attitude and let the pieces fall where they may.

  My name is Trixa, and I’m not a woman. I’m female, most definitely that, but I’m not precisely a woman. Trixa was one of the names I’d had in my lifetime, one of many—we con artists had quite a few.This one though . . . This one was one of my favorites, because I was a trickster, born and bred of one of many trickster races. It was why I enjoyed the name so much. I’d rubbed who I was in the face of my enemies for the past ten years and not once had they seen past a simple name. Demons, some were stupid and some were bright, but all were arrogant, which made them blind. The same went for angels. As they were flip sides to the same coin, it wasn’t surprising. And humans . . . Please, don’t even get me started on humans. They were the entire reason we tricksters existed. Or since we had predated them, I guess we chose them as a reason to exist. Those of the supernatural world never were quite as much fun to fool, to put in their place, and life could become fairly pointless without a purpose. Everyone needed a purpose.

  Without a purpose, why get up in the morning? Why eat? Why not just meld with the earth that made you and wait to turn into fertilizer? Someone could grow some nice marigolds in you. I liked marigolds, but they weren’t much of a career choice.

  Taking humans down a notch or ten, that was a purpose all right, and damn entertaining too. Not that I ever received a shiny red apple for educating the masses, but taking pride—and more than occasional excessive glee—in my work, that was enough. Although jewelry would’ve been nice too. I liked jewelry better than marigolds.

  A variety of tricksters were loose in the world—pucks, also known as Pan, Robin Goodfellow, Hob, and so on. They were one race of identical brown-haired, green-eyed cocky immortals. All male—in appearance anyway. A person would need several PhDs in biology to get a handle on their actual reproduction, but you didn’t need a GED to get a handle on anything else regarding them, physically speaking. Sexually speaking . . . not speaking at all because it was rude to with your mouth full. They not only cowrote the Kama Sutra, but they posed for it as well. That’s all I’m saying.

  There was my partner at the bar, Leo, better known as Loki, who was a god first and foremost, and only a trickster because he excelled at it and enjoyed it, but not because he’d been born one. His was a calling, not a birthright. There were also those among us who were just spirit . . . energy, gossamer molecules strung together like a kite string, no more solid than the wind, and even I had trouble understanding them. And kicking back to have a margarita with them to talk work, that was completely out of the question.

  Then there was my kind—shape-shifters. We were hundreds, thousands of legends—Coyote, Kitsune, Kokopelli, Nasreddin, Raven, Maui, Veles—too many to name. Most people had long forgotten those names, but we were still only a Wiki away. We weren’t immortal, but we didn’t have to worry about watching our cholesterol either. I’d been around to see the sky darken half a world away when Pompeii had died. My brother and I had watched it and for a moment we were put in our place. We had held hands and felt an unfamiliar feeling of mortality sharp and cold cut through us as the sky turned from blue to black. We could trick all we wanted, but nature itself would always have the last laugh.

  But now? Now I was still a trickster, but a shape-shifter no more. I was a thirty-one-year-old human—I was actually all human races on Earth. I had done that always. Genes speak to genes on a level people can’t begin to detect, and if I were all people, then I went into ever
y situation with the tiniest of edges, my foot in the door. It had been more helpful back in the day . . . when family, clan, tribe, had mattered to a constantly warring people. They were still constantly warring, but the genes mattered a lot less now. And that was a good development for humanity in general, but I still tried to keep that edge.

  While I was all races, two did rise to the top. That’s what people saw. Eyes I’d admired the last time I’d been on the Japanese Islands, the mouth that was a fond memory of the years I’d spent in Africa, and wildly cork-screwed black curls and skin that were a mixture of both places. I’d spent a lot of time rethinking that hair every morning when I fought the good fight with it and usually had my ass kicked and my brush broken. Ah, well, who the hell was I to say what it should do anyway?

  Did all of that make me a romance heroine who had men flinging themselves at my feet to protect my dainty foot from a puddle? Carrying all my groceries like I was a fairy princess with a wet manicure? Hell, no. It had them tilting their heads trying to figure me out. People liked to label things. I puzzled them, which was good. People needed to be puzzled, curious, unsure. That’s what kept you alive in this world. It was what made life interesting.

  No, I wasn’t beautiful. I chose this body. I made it. Why would I want to be beautiful? Fields of wildflowers were beautiful. Waterfalls were beautiful. Secluded beaches were beautiful. Size-zero vacant-eyed and vacant-stomached runway models were beautiful . . . at least that’s what society told us, but society had a vacant brain to match those vacant eyes. Not one of those things, vacant or otherwise, could put a pointed heel of a boot through a demon’s stomach and a bullet in his scaly forehead. I could. I was unique.

  I could not . . . would not be tagged, identified, labeled, or stamped.

  Unless it was by the fashion industry. I scowled at the sweatpants and T-shirt I was wearing as I came down the stairs that led to my apartment over my bar, Trixsta. The sign in the window was red neon to match everything else red in my life. Did that mean I wore a lot of red clothing? Maybe. But more than that, it meant I signed my work with the color—names changed; colors never did. I applied that signature to all my work, and I still did my work, my true work—human or not.

  And Las Vegas was the perfect place to do it—a city of deceit and sin. It was a wonderland for both tricksters and demons. We did have demons aplenty, but as far as I knew, there were only two tricksters here currently: me and the one fiddling with the television.

  Leo turned the TV on and wiped a film of beer off the screen. My bar was small; the brains of my clientele even smaller. It was the only excuse to waste good beer—or mediocre beer with good beer prices. If you couldn’t tell the difference, that was your lesson for the day. A trick a day kept boredom away, but the thought of making money off the drunken or idiotic couldn’t cheer me now, not with what I had to do.

  “Exercise,” I muttered, and then repeated it because it was simply that horrifying. “Exercise.” I glared at Leo as if it were his fault. It wasn’t, but he was the only one around to blame, so I took the opportunity. “I have to go run, lift weights, and do other things banned by the Geneva Convention. If your Internet steroids arrive, don’t go wild and take them all at once.”

  With his long black hair pulled into a tight braid, copper skin, and eyes as dark as his hair, he looked pure American Indian, and he would look that way for four or five more years—but for one exception. That exception showed itself right then. Leo disappeared in front of me and where he had stood flapped a raven who croaked, “Must be jelly. Jam don’t shake like that.” I thought about swinging at him, but I settled for retying the knot on my sweatpants. Lenny or, as we called him in raven form, Lenore—Poe, you couldn’t avoid it—landed on the bar. “Want fries with that shake?” he added as he preened a feather.

  “You’ll be the one who’s fried and served up with mashed potatoes and cornbread stuffing when I get back,” I promised, enjoying the vengeful mental image. “I’ll make you the early-Thanksgiving special.”

  If birds could snort, Lenny would have. At one time, three months ago, Leo might’ve been able to give me something to think about. After all, he’d been a god; I wasn’t. But both of us were human, more or less, now, at least for the next four or five years, thanks to my showing off and an artifact who thought the experience might do Leo some good. For me, there were no shape-shifting powers, no powers of any kind except a natural biological defense against telepathy and empathy and the ability to tell my own païen kind when I saw them no matter what shape they wore. Leo was one up on me. He was stuck in human or bird form, and it was my fault. I’d drained my batteries by overusing my powers to take down the killer of my brother in an extremely showy and vengeful way. I wasn’t sorry. The bastard had deserved it. He’d killed my family, my only sibling. For what I did to him, things dismemberment-loving demons themselves would’ve applauded . . . no, I wasn’t sorry. I would never be sorry for that. I’d only regret I couldn’t do it a few more times.

  Oddly enough, even after that show, a sentient artifact that I’d been using as a bargaining chip against Heaven and Hell had thought at the time that I was a good influence on Leo/Loki. The Light of Life, the artifact, had decided he should stick around with me for those four years it would take me to recover my shape-shifting abilities. As it was more powerful than Leo and I combined, it didn’t ask us for permission either. It neutered him—on the god part at least. The rest of him, I assumed, was in working condition. Although as I had to exercise, it would’ve been nice for Leo to have suffered a slight bit more. We’d see how many funny quips about my weight he’d make while buying Internet steroids and Viagra.

  Not that my humiliation stopped there. My mama had laughed herself sick when I told her anyone or anything thought I was a good influence. Then again, Leo had been a very bad boy in his day. He had once wanted to end the world—Ragnarok, the Norse end of days—and that had just been for kicks and a way to waste a boring afternoon. But that had been when he was Loki, a long time and a lot of raging darkness ago. He was different now. So many say they want to change; he was one of the few I’d seen do it. He was one of the few with a will stronger than the shadows that had filled him up, shadows that were there still but leashed. Is it nobler to be born good or to be born on the farthest end of the bloody spectrum and have chosen to be good? When I looked at Leo, it was an easy question to answer.

  Ancient artifact or not, he would’ve stayed with me, to help if worse came to worst. He was that way. I would’ve done it for him if the situation were reversed. Friends . . . You didn’t take them for granted. But that didn’t mean I had to listen to his jokes about my ass. That was the great thing about being a shape-shifter. Calories? Fat grams? Whatever. Turn them into extra hair or an extra inch in height or shed them as pounds of water. Or in the other direction, if you wanted to be a two-hundred-pound coyote with the voice of an avalanche, take the extra you needed from the dirt, rock, or the moisture-soaked air around you.

  But now I was human, and had discovered living off diner food. . . . It was less than a block away; what could I do? I packed on five pounds in two weeks. She Who Would Not Be Labeled had become She Who Must Find the Nearest Gym. Leo, with his damn male metabolism, was still sucking down all that was fried with no signs of a potbelly as of yet.

  Men. I hated men sometimes.

  But I hated demons more. And as I ran down the sidewalk toward the grubby gym seven or eight blocks away, I got to prove it.

  I kept a slow and steady pace. It was February now and still not too bad. When it came to summer, I’d drive to the gym, seven blocks or not. If you ran in the Vegas summer heat, you were either insane, suicidal, or a fire elemental out for a stroll. I ran past porn stores, liquor stores, more porn stores, a tiny car lot . . . and that’s where I stopped. I saw the blinding flash of a grin and puppy dog brown eyes, man’s best friend, as a perfectly tanned hand patted the cloth top of a black convertible as the mouth moved a mile a minute, pouring l
ike the best caramel syrup over a pudgy tourist. A car salesman. A used-car salesman. If you’re after someone’s soul, you should be a little more imaginative with your disguises than that.

  Not that this guy was after someone’s soul. I usually didn’t interfere there. That was between Heaven and Hell and that tug-of-war known as humanity that lay between them. They had some reasonable enough rules set up. First, you had to be of age—mature mentally; no trading your soul for a Tonka Toy or a pony. These days that tended to mean you were old enough to drink, vote, and die. Second, you couldn’t trade your soul for a righteous and selfless act. You couldn’t trade it to save the polar bears or stop world poverty or even save your child. Hell and demons either weren’t allowed or simply couldn’t do good, no matter how many souls they received in exchange. Which made sense—evil did not beget good. Bad luck for the polar bears.

  No, Heaven and Hell could play all the games they wanted. As one puck had first said a long time ago, caveat emptor. Buyer beware. Grown-up boys and girls should know better and if they didn’t, well, Darwin had something to say about that too.

  But this sleazy guy—demons and pucks both loved the used-car-salesman front—wasn’t after a soul. I could tell by the especially bright glint in his gaze. He was after some old-fashioned fun. Ripping, shredding, tearing a man to pieces and if his soul whizzed upward like a sky-rocket, I doubt the demon much cared. Maybe he wasn’t hungry. Demons ate souls. God no longer sustained them with his light and love and Lucifer was fallen himself. He couldn’t. Demons had to feed themselves and Hell was nothing but one big pantry. But demons enjoyed other things than a light snack. They had hobbies the same as anyone else. Theirs simply happened to be killing. To a one, killing was their one true passion. Trading for souls was entertaining and good nutrition, but killing someone . . .