The Grimrose Path (Trickster, #2)(12)
“No,” I exhaled. “You didn’t. He asked. The demon asked for your soul and you gave it to him. And there’s no way out of it.” A helpless guppy all right. On the very day she was able to give her soul away, someone was already waiting to take it. A good girl, a nice girl, and there wasn’t anything I could do for her. Free will was free will. She didn’t deserve Hell, but Hell she would get. I didn’t know her demon, but even if I had and killed him, then another would step up and then another. “No soul left behind” . . . All bureaucracies had their mottoes.
Someone would always come for Anna, one way or the other.
You couldn’t save them all, and I wasn’t in the saving business per se, but if I could’ve saved anyone I’d seen sell their souls over the years, it would’ve been her. But I couldn’t, so I sent her away, her and her pictures with Sir Pickles. She went quietly. She stopped after a few steps, turned to thank me politely for my time, and then walked out the bar door into Hell.
Whether you waited twenty years or twenty seconds, it was all the same eventually.
Hell was Hell.
Leo finally showed his face the next morning. I was already up. I’d opened the bar early to make up for yesterday’s lack of profit. And I’d called and texted everyone and anyone I knew in the pa?en world to see if anyone had heard about the demon slaughter. So far I’d gotten nothing but a bemused feeling at the thought of a seven-tailed trickster fox trotting around Japan with a BlackBerry in its jaws.
Leo, on the other hand, looked like he’d gotten something. He could wear that stoic expression all he wanted, but I knew him. “Not a new one,” I groaned.
“I’m a man with needs.” He shrugged as he put on one of the bar’s black aprons, wrapping the tie twice around his waist.
“Which are oddly enough always met with silicone,” I retorted.
He shrugged again, but this time quirked his lips, “It’s Vegas. You get a free boob job every time you fill up your car. How is that my fault?”
Big breasts, small brains, and underwear tiny enough to have been knitted by Tinkerbell—he did it every time. I could’ve blamed it on him being worshipped as a Norse god, lots of buxom blondes frolicking in the snow, but I wasn’t sure that was it. I thought there was more to it than that. He did it for the same reason I slept with a black raven’s feather under my pillow. If we couldn’t have what we actually wanted, we went without or went for the exact opposite. I wasn’t exactly proud of some of my past dates.
“Spots.” I sighed. Leo and I had ties . . . unbreakable ones . . . two leopards with the same spots. Too much the same in the past, too much the same for now, but maybe . . . maybe not always. I had the feather to remind me of that.
“Spots,” the one who’d given me that feather agreed, the curve of his lips softer; then he continued with a wicked glint to his black eyes, “Her spots are called pasties, I believe. She’s a dancer.”
“Stripper.” I threw a towel at him.
“Who has goals in the theater.” He caught it and polished the bar with broad strokes.
“She wants to be a porn star.” I looked for something else to throw, but there was nothing that wouldn’t come out of this month’s profit.
“And she does charity work.” He tossed the towel across his shoulder and folded his arms.
“She does you for free?” I smiled with caustic cheer.
He frowned. “I do not pay for sex, little girl.”
“You only get to call me that for four more years.” And five foot five was not that short. Maybe in comparison to the six-foot-plus American Indian body he’d chosen, I was somewhat smaller, but I was not little, most especially not when it came to temper, where it counted most. “So did you offer her free drinks here for the duration of your sexcapades or fix her refrigerator?”
That got the towel thrown back at me. “No, thanks.” I folded it and put it aside. “I don’t have to stuff my bra. Unlike some, I don’t feel the need to be a double D or wax myself as bare as a honeydew melon. Barbie dolls are for little girls to play with, not grown, perverted men. Now, about our demon trouble.”
That distracted him. “What demon trouble?”
I told him. He grasped the implications as quickly as I had. “There aren’t many out there who could do that,” he said thoughtfully, before adding, “one less now that I’m grounded.”
“Godzilla to the hundredth power is running around and you have to get your ego in the picture,” I said fondly. “Just remember, your biggest and baddest power now is dropping bird shit on people’s cars.” He kept reminding me how vulnerable I was now. I didn’t want him to forget he was as well.
He ignored the insult—to his manhood and bird-hood. “And Eligos is back.” He turned and served a beer to one of our regulars—a walking handlebar mustache roosting on a skinny guy it was using for life support. The man was a person; he had a name. I knew it . . . first, middle, last, and nickname. I knew where he’d been born. I knew where he lived, who he lived with, how much money he made in Social Security checks. I made it my business to know these things about all my regulars, but one look at him and the mustache never failed to jump into the foreground—an entity all its own. It was like seeing someone with a giant if not friendly spider on his face. . . . It was difficult to ignore.