Armageddon ten thousand times over has a way of distracting nearly anyone.
I didn’t think he could settle on me more heavily, but he did. “What,” he asked, “does Cronus want?”
“All,” I answered. No deception this time. It wasn’t needed.
He narrowed his eyes as the dust he’d scattered from my face hung in the light around him, hundreds of microscopic snowflakes, because winter was coming. The end was coming and, like the obliviously playful grasshopper of the parable, we weren’t ready for it. I don’t know what happened to that grasshopper . . . if he died of hunger or the industrious ant who’d stored up food all summer took pity on him, but I did know Cronus, like winter, had no pity. We might not die, but there are so many worse things than dying, and if Cronus succeeded, death itself wouldn’t be an escape from him. Nothing would.
“All?” Eli straightened, dropping his hand from tracing patterns on my cheek and leaning back slightly as if it gave him room to think. “You asked him what he wanted and the only thing he said was ‘All’? Well? What does that mean? All. He’s ripped off the wings of nearly a thousand demons, only one wing per demon if you were wondering, that’s what it takes, and the most conversation the son of a bitch can muster up about his wholesale slaughter of my kind is ‘all.’ It’s meaningless.”
I gave him a look every teacher slips up at one time or another to bestow on her slowest student. “Eli, you can’t mean that. You don’t get it? You? I’m disappointed.” I leaned toward him as he had leaned away. “Don’t be Eli, wearing your fancy human suit. Be who you are. Be Eligos. You know of Cronus. He’s a Titan. He gave birth to gods, but no one gave birth to him. He birthed himself out of the universe . . . out of the sky and the earth. They were said to be his father and mother; that’s a myth. He created himself—the ultimate ‘I think, therefore I am.’ He was once locked in Tartarus, a pa?en hell, and he took it over. Then he took over the Elysian Fields, a pa?en heaven. And it wasn’t enough. One hell and one heaven weren’t enough to occupy him and he deserted them. He was bored. What do you think it would take to satisfy him? What could possibly do it?”
His jaw tightened. “All.”
“Exactly.” When I was sure that one hand would support me, I ran a hand through the mess of my hair to shake at least a pound of dust free. “Your Hell, your Heaven, every pa?en hell and heaven and all the thousands of ethereal worlds in between. And, last but not least, this world. The one we live in now. There will be nowhere to go to escape him. If he consumes Lucifer and Hell, one in the same that they are, and adds that energy to his, he’ll have more power than anyone could possibly conceive. He will rule every place that there is a place. If you think your boss is tough now,” I said, my voice hardening, “you wait until you see your new one in action. Lucifer might be fallen, you might be fallen, but you’re sane. You do enormous evil, but you do it with logic and reason. You enjoy it. You need souls and you like to kill in your off-hours. It’s disgusting, but there is a twisted motivation behind it. Cronus is nothing like you. Cronus is outside your frame of reference. He could move past you and nothing would happen, and then a second later he could look at you and drive you and everyone in the hemisphere instantly insane. Worse,” I said with a sigh, “he very likely wouldn’t know he’d done it. He’s a giant and you’re a ‘tiny slow-moving caterpillar on the sidewalk’ demon. Fuzzy and cute, but powerless. There’s nothing you can do.”
“What about that artifact you stole?” he said abruptly. “The one that made your sanctuary for pa?en against God and Lucifer?”
“Heaven and Hell it can stop. Cronus would crumple our shield like tissue paper and toss it over his shoulder. Do you think we’d all still be hanging around if that weren’t the case?” I snorted. “We’d leave you all a nice sympathy card and be running for the hills.”
“Then why free the Roses at all? If they’re going to end up in places worse than Hell, places ruled by Cronus,” he demanded, “what’s the point?”