I knew it was Cronus the moment I opened the door to the stairs and saw him. I had one hand still rubbing lotion on one arm when I froze—froze except for continuing to automatically rub in the lotion. When I’d figured out I was going to have to work to keep my weight at demon-kicking prime, I’d then discovered living in the desert when you can’t shape-shift for a while is unbelievably hard on the skin. At the rate I was going, I would need an entire staff of cosmetic, nutrition, and health professionals to keep me from disintegrating in the next brisk wind.
But I was here now and still relatively moist and mobile . . . when I wasn’t facing a Titan. Not that Cronus looked like a Titan. I had no idea what a Titan did look like and I was happy to keep it that way. I was a trickster. I bowed to no one, not ever, but I knew that seeing a Titan . . . That couldn’t be a good thing. They had given birth to gods, were a level above gods, and Leo, a god himself, was hard to look at in his natural form. Not because he was hideous—he wasn’t. He was glorious and terrifying, an infinite darkness and a blinding light, good and evil, the earth and the sky, exuberant life and the unending stillness of death—all in one. He was inconceivable and when you looked at him, even a trickster like me knew . . . his existence defied the universe itself. And that was a god. What would seeing a Titan be like?
Most likely similar to seeing a nuclear explosion at ground zero. Oh, hey, there were some lights and it was really hot and then I was less than ashes—all in a microsecond of a microsecond. And best avoided if at all possible.
Today, Cronus looked like a nineteen-year-old kid. He sat at one of the tables, hands folded on the wood with a checkerboard in front of them. He wore a simple short-sleeved black T-shirt, inside out and backward with the tag showing. It was nice and flat, not curled as tags tended to be after a few washings. He also had on jeans, but this time right side out and with the zipper in the correct place.
“Cronus?” I asked, letting the door close and taking several cautious—any more cautious and they would’ve been going backward—steps toward him.
He didn’t look at me or act as if he’d heard me at all—only stared ahead, over the checkerboard and at the wall. His hair was brown and not dark brown or light brown or any human color of brown at all. There was no depth to the color, no shadings, no bounce of light. Every single hair was the same precise shade of brown, from the root to the end, and the same as the one next to it. Mud. It was the color of mud, not the kind you’d want to play in as a mud pie-loving kid either. It was the color of toxic mud found around chemical waste plants . . . where frogs are born with six legs, the fish with two heads, and nothing else is ever born at all. As I moved closer, I could see his skin was poreless. If it had been shiny, it could’ve passed for plastic and he could’ve passed for a giant doll. But it wasn’t—it sucked in the light the same as the hair and when I set across from him and saw his eyes . . .
I was wrong. He was a doll, the most cheaply made imitation of a human being you could find on a thrift store shelf after some little girl’s brother had popped the toy’s eyes out to see if they would roll like marbles. Cronus had only oval-shaped holes that revealed the shadows inside his skull. Shadows of men strangling their wives over the grocery bill, the drift of darkness that was SIDS claiming an infant’s life between one breath and no next, the midnight cloud of poisonous gas mixed with volcanic ash that buried cities and killed every living thing for miles and miles and miles.
This was Cronus. This was the thing that had put on its casual clothes, a human suit it couldn’t be bothered to get correctly although it could create living human beings if it wanted, beautiful, intelligent, amazing human beings. When you could make gods, human beings were as easy as chocolate cake out of an Easy-Bake Oven. A lightbulb and some batter. What was difficult about that? But it . . . No, best think nice, the better to play nice. . . . He . . . He had put on the casual attire, because the real deal was too much of a boring chore, and was impassively waiting for Leo to show up and play checkers.
Gods, Titans, how they both got their rocks off, it was usually freaky. The kind of freaky that would have a cross-dressing Furry who put pickles where pickles weren’t meant to go giving it all up and deciding The Price Is Right with a microwave dinner was as far away from vanilla as he planned to ever get again.