Eli’s eyes went from hazel to black to hazel again. Black copper full of fury, hazel full of reluctant admiration. He was a monster, a killer a thousand times over, and a sociopath who’d consider torture a mandatory appetizer. Yet he was like me too. He tricked, for a much more sinister reason, yes, but he couldn’t help admiring a brilliant con. “You . . . ? There never was a Rose?”
I did love fooling a demon, a true demon—high-level, Hell’s flip side to a trickster. It was a rush you never tired of. And while I was laughing all the way, if I could survive it, that would be a bonus. Dying for a trick was part and parcel of the job, but living to gloat about it afterward—that was good too. I hoped his admiration of the Roses and the truth would keep me alive long enough to be the smuggest girl in town.
“No. There was a Rose, but she wasn’t Cronus’s.” I didn’t try to sit up. There was no way I was close to that. Breathing was still an effort and keeping the appearance of it, ironically, effortless was more demanding. Instead of sitting, I linked my fingers across my stomach as if I were on a psychiatrist’s couch, spilling my deepest, darkest thoughts.
It was deep and dark, what I revealed. Failure always is.
“She came to me last week, but she called herself Anna, short for Rosanna. She was a sweet girl. Average. Normal. She wasn’t beautiful or an MIT-level genius. She was in art school. I don’t know if she was actually any good, but she had dreams and dreams are nice.” And they were. People without dreams die the same as people without a heart to pump their blood. To live a life without dreams is to be digging your own grave every single day.
“When she was a little girl she was in an accident and had half her face burned off—her ordinary, kind of cute, freckled face eaten away by flames.” I remembered those restored freckles with a clarity of a life brilliantly magnified by tears. “But when she turned twenty-one, one of you was nice enough to give it back to her. You do so love your charity work, your kind.” I tapped my thumbs together and let my smile fade. “I told her I couldn’t help her. She made a deal of her own free will and, sorry, so sorry, little fishy, but swim off and live with the consequences. Or, I guess I actually meant, wait until you die and then suffer the consequences . . . not live with them. She didn’t though . . . wait, that is. She walked out the door, stood for a few seconds on the curb with her bag and her pictures of Sir Pickles the Perilous, and then she stepped into the path of a bus. There was glass and blood and twisted metal. Part of her is still in the asphalt of the road. That darkened stain in front? You probably didn’t notice. Just one more stain in a world of stained things and stained people, but that—that is what’s left of Rosanna.” I’d heard the crash. I’d run to the door, and seen what had been glorious and whole turned into something pitiable and broken. The pictures were scattered with puzzled feline eyes staring blankly at nothing.
Nothing was all there was to see now. Anna was gone.
“And you, you with your infinite ego, thought maybe you could do something about your little Anna’s soul after all when Cronus showed up. What a damn lucky break for you. Well, rejoice, you did do something. Chances are your Rose is free and long gone from Hell.” Eli leaned his elbow on my bed, head against the palm of his hand, bemused as he ran the plan back and forth through his brain, savoring it—an envious twist to the corner of his mouth, before he finally gave in. “Okay, darling, I have to say I raise a glass to balls the likes of which I’ve never seen, except on myself. But I am going to have to kill you for this, and you are not going to enjoy the process at all. You keep me on my toes, and I do like that, but the boss isn’t happy. The boss and if it’s you or me—fuck, sweetheart, you know that isn’t even close.”
“As if you could kill me,” I scoffed, while thinking, oh, for the days when that was true. “I did tell you that Cronus rarely can be bothered to note humans exist. Why would he want to become one? Fall in love with one? You were so easy, sunshine; it’s rather embarrassing for you.” I gathered myself, made the effort, and managed to get part of me upright and resting on my elbows in a move I hoped looked easy and painless, although it was neither. “Besides,” I said, tempting—and demons knew all about that, “if you did kill me, how would you find out what Cronus told me he wants? Truth this time. No Run for the Roses. Because he did tell me. I only told you what I wanted instead. Now that I have that, I have no problem telling you what Cronus wants with Hell and Lucifer.”
“How very unlike you, telling the truth.” He reached with his other hand and ran a finger through the white dust on my face. “An angel made of spun sugar. In other words, worthless and lacking in flavor. All right, Trixa, savior of Roses, tell me. What does Cronus want?” Eli didn’t take back the death threat—death promise—and he knew very well I noticed that, but I told him anyway. Why not? There was nothing he could do with the information and it had a good chance of distracting him from me.