“Your bizarre leaping to other subjects is something we’ll have to work on. That, I’ll never match and the level of Tylenol I have to take to stop the headaches is beginning to become a danger to my liver,” he said, unfolding his arms and pretending to fish in his jeans pocket for a capsule or two. “Why the airport? Did you come up with something for Cronus? If you have, that will top even your Roses.”
“It would, wouldn’t it?” I started toward the kitchen to get a broom and dustpan for upstairs. I moved stiffly, the snowflake touched by a careless finger. Damaged. “Didn’t you say back in January that Thor was hanging out with the Swedish women’s volleyball team?”
“Last I heard.” A crease appeared in his forehead. Now he did actually have a headache. If anyone would give you a head-pounding one, it would be Thor. “In the past months I’ve been getting a lot of late-night drunken ‘Ha, ha. You’re not a god anymore, douche bag’ calls. A few ‘nyah-nyah-nyah mortal dickwad’ ones to add variety. Why?”
“I was thinking about something I saw on TV last year. It reminded me of Thor’s hammer.”
“Mj?llnir? It’s a serious weapon, but it wouldn’t stop Cronus.”
“No, but what made it might,” I said. “That and a trip to hell.” Little h, pa?en hell.
It all came down to what I’d quoted to Eligos before, “I think, therefore I am.” They were good words, those five. Words to live by for some. For others . . . maybe . . .
Words to die by.
Chapter 12
Tricksters are thieves, every last one of us. That was half of the job if you broke it down to the basics. You were either taking something a person wanted or giving them something they didn’t want at all. It was a simplistic look at what we did, but in your life, sooner or later, you were going to steal something—a possession . . . a life. But only the lazy tricksters went for the life off the bat. I was not lazy. Those I tricked had to truly deserve to lose their lives if I took them. I’d said my very first trick had been to steal an entire orchard to punish a greedy man. I’d stolen my bar too. That was more in the range of a good-deed trick. . . . An alcoholic who owns a bar is never going to stay sober, no matter how many meetings he goes to. Not that it was mere convenience that I happened to need an identity and occupation in Vegas at the time—no, that was good planning. Good deeds are nice, but when you can make them pay off doubly, what’s not to love? It was like getting a great dress and matching demon-stabbing stiletto heels, both on sale, only a hundred times the rush.
And being a trickster and a thief meant that you always kept your eyes open. I wouldn’t steal, say, from a museum, but there were those who would. You steal from a museum, you steal from the world. If you did that, I would punish you, because that was naughty—depriving the world. Unless you were a trickster and you were stealing something to save the world.
I hadn’t stolen from a museum yet, but I, bad girl that I was, kept hoping a justifiable reason would come up.
It was while keeping my eyes open several months ago that I saw a special on an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. I’d been about to change the channel to sports for the customers—I mean, I was a living history and while I did embrace the entire keeping-an-eye-out philosophy, just hearing the words New York City still gave me a twinge of a hangover. I’d had the remote in hand when Zeke went to point like a hungry hound on a package of hot dogs. WEAPONS OF THE WORLD had been emblazoned across the screen. Zeke did love his weapons to, what I’d been beginning to suspect was, an unhealthy degree. I’d been relieved for more than one reason when he got a sex life that didn’t involve a trip to the gun shop.