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.
Checkers though . . . That was a new one. Not chess, the supposed game of Death—just simple, childlike checkers.
As I sat in the chair across from him . . . badass mother trickster—that’s one for you, TV censors—badass mother trickster, badass motherfucker, I reminded myself one last time. I opened my mouth to repeat his name, when the front door opened and a “customer” walked in. It didn’t matter who had unlocked the door, Cronus or the demon in a much better human and a familiar disguise; it was just one more thing to go wrong. I put it aside and went on as he took a seat across the room and pretended to read a shiny new copy of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Cute. I wondered which circle of Hell he was on. The silver hair and dark eyes—it was our friend Amdusias, better known as Armand from the casino. Eli had sent a minion he might actually miss. He truly did want the info on Cronus to offer up his future version of a fine cut of Kobe beef in the hopes of getting it.
Because, after all, I might lie to him.
Me? Never.
Or Cronus might erase me from reality as if I’d never existed, which would make passing on that info to Eli difficult. That Eli, so thoughtful, always thinking of others. Always thinking . . . period. Mother Teresa and Machiavelli had had nothing on him. But time to get back to the matters at hand—staying alive being part of that. For that I needed to be in top form, my attention focused.
“Cronus,” I tried again. I didn’t bother to introduce myself. I had a hundred names, not quite legion but more than a few, and Cronus wouldn’t give a damn about a single one of them. “Leo . . . Loki asked to speak with you on my behalf.”
Nothing.
“It’s about the demons you’ve been killing, their wings, the map to Lucifer. I was curious . . . just a little . . . as to what’s going on in that whole area. Anything the rest of us païen should be concerned about? Lucifer going to take a peek out of Hell like a groundhog? Checking for spring or Armageddon? Should we head to the Hearth?” The Hearth was païen sanctuary. The Light of Life shielded us there, from Heaven or Hell. It was our bomb shelter should the Penthouse or the Basement decide to take us or each other out. The Hearth was, ironically, the Noah’s Ark for pagankind. We were here first and we would be here last. End of story.
My questions to Cronus were good questions, I thought, païen pertinent definitely, and Titan or not, he was one of us . . . païen. Yet it was the same. Nothing.
“Okay,” I exhaled, pushing the shower-damp curls back. I’d tried playing nice. It hadn’t worked. Instead, I’d try playing a different way—I’d try playing first. “How about this?” Red was on my side . . . I took that as a sign. My color, my signature, my move. I pushed one of the round plastic circles forward on the board.
The head tilted downward, not as much taking in my move—Cronus didn’t need his empty eyes to be aware of that—as taking in my sheer audacity to make myself known to him. To stand up on my back legs, tiny ant that I was to him, and wave the others at him. Look at me! I exist! I exist right now, right here, the same as you!
Or he simply wanted to play the game. I was sincerely hoping it was the game, because ants who get noticed almost always get squashed. By a snotty little kindergartner’s foot or by the whim of a Titan. It didn’t matter which. Squashed was squashed, to ant or trickster.
A long pale finger extended and moved a black checker diagonally right.
I’d made it one second without being stomped flat. Good for me. I made my next move silently. We know how to talk, my kind, not as much as pucks—no one alive, dead, or in between could touch a puck for talking—but we know when to stay quiet as well, which is something no puck has ever known. I knew, very clearly, that if a Titan didn’t want to talk, I couldn’t make him. I would have to wait him out or wait until Leo showed up and see if it was a Boys’ Club. Guys and guys. Titans and gods. Too good to talk to down-to-earth fun-in-the-sun Trixa. I gritted my back teeth, then smiled victoriously ten minutes into the game as I jumped him and took his checker. Such a simple kids’ game and this is what he played. “So this is what you do for entertainment?” I asked more cheerfully as another customer, a tourist this time, came in and sat at yet another table to study the plastic laminate with four wide and wonderful choices of appetizers. Fried cheese. Fried chicken wings. Fried potatoes with ranch dressing. And all three combined on one plate and fried just a little bit more. “You play this for fun?” I went on.