Page 21 of Looking Grimm (Marionette #4)

Nash looked down at the dead man pinned beneath him, his face reduced to pulp. He stared, his chest heaving in the aftermath of exertion, until I said his name again.

“We gotta get out of here,” I told him. “There’s more. He wasn’t alone.”

Nash pushed to standing, then moved to where I hunkered. My body ran warm and cold as blood pasted my shirt to my skin.

The shock on his face told me I must have looked as shitty as I felt.

“Christ,” he whispered.

“But did you see the other guy?” I tittered a weak laugh.

The attempt at humor fell flat as Nash crouched before me. His hands hovered like he wanted to grab me but wasn’t sure where was safe to touch.

“I’ve got some stuff behind the bar,” he said. “Quick patch, but we have to stop this bleeding.”

I shook my head and started to stand. “No time— ”

“Yes, time.” Nash planted his palm in my chest, halting my advance. “If you black out, I’ll have to carry you, which will slow us down even more.”

I couldn’t feel my right hand and couldn’t move my left arm without nauseating pain, which meant I also couldn’t argue with his logic. I swayed on my feet, and Nash crowded in, sliding his arm around my waist to steady me. When he jostled my dead arm, I grunted complaint.

Nash winced apologetically, then muttered, “Plus, I don’t want you leaking blood all over my damn house.”

The bar felt like a cage as we hurried through it. With my injuries only from the waist up, I could get around well enough but found myself leaning heavily on Nash anyway. I’d been in close scrapes before and with wounds more grievous than these, but I’d never had someone beside me in the thick of it. I worked alone and always thought I’d die alone, too. Not that dying with Nash was a comforting thought. Well… oddly, it was. But not today.

He led the way to the bar counter and left me on the outside while he stepped between the swinging doors and hurried to the corner by the wall. Dipping below the copper countertop, he pulled out a white metal box stamped with a red cross. Full-blown first aid kit. I chuckled as he slid it toward me.

“I think a few butterfly bandages should do it,” I said.

Before he rounded to my side of the counter, he grabbed a stack of bleached white bar towels from the wall shelves and piled them next to the medical kit. Coming alongside me, Nash grabbed my waist and eased me down to sit on the nearest barstool.

I glanced over my shoulder at the entry hall we’d vacated. Avery’s backup must have been outside, expecting his triumphant return. How long did they expect his murder mission to take? And what would happen when they got tired of waiting? If they invaded this place, we would be rapidly overrun.

Facing forward again, my brows pinched as Nash turned to the white box and flipped the metal latches on its hinged lid. He was rapidly rifling through it, but every motion felt so damn slow. Even my pulse was sluggish, like a dull throb that seemed to come from everywhere.

“Nash,” I began, trying and failing to catch his attention.

He started pulling items out of the kit. Far from typical drugstore fare. There were, indeed, bandages and a roll of gauze wrap, but there were also bottles. Piles of them. All glass in a rainbow of colors. Some were labeled, others not. He heaped them on the bartop in a clinking, clattering mound before settling on one.

“Nash, we gotta hurry.” My attempt to speak clearly sounded more like a mumble.

Rather than answer, Nash thumbed the cork out of the vial, then thrust it at me. “Drink up.”

It was reddish purple and opaque, in a cut glass bottle shaped like a chandelier crystal. He’d said he had something for blood loss, but I didn’t expect it to be consumable. Maybe more like a cream or a powder he could pour on the knife wounds.

“What is it?” I asked.

Nash frowned. “Now is not the time to start vetting your drinks. Just trust me.”

With a hole through one hand and the other hanging limply at my side, I couldn’t take the offered bottle, so Nash put it to my lips. I bit it between my teeth, then threw my head back to empty it. The sudden motion tipped me backward as what blood I had left rushed my brain.

“Easy!” Nash caught the front of my shirt and jerked me upright. The barstool legs clunked against the floor.

He eyed me while the potion went to work. It might have helped, but it was hard to tell since slowing the blood loss did nothing to replenish what was already gone. And it was that absence that had me reeling.

Nash dug back into the medical kit, sorting through bottles till he produced another. It had a menacing, blue-black tone and was, predictably, unmarked. The way Nash raised it to the dim bar lights and regarded it grimly prompted me to draw a steeling breath before I reached for it.

“Might as well top her off,” I said, but Nash snatched the vial away.

“This is not for you.” He dropped it in his sweatpants pocket, still shirtless and making me wonder if he couldn’t have saved his business by offering some kind of drink and dance topless revue. He could serve drinks while flexing his pecs and rolling shaker bottles down his biceps. I was already sold.

“Why not for me?” I asked.

He closed the box but didn’t bother latching it or putting it back beneath the bar before taking two towels from the stack beside him and shaking them out. “It’ll make your heart race, which will make it pump blood, which is the last thing we want right now.” While he spoke, he knotted the towels together at both ends to form a loop.

“Why’d you get it, then?” I asked .

“Because I might need it if we’re gonna get out of here,” he said.

Stepping closer, Nash threw the towel ring around my neck, then took my dead arm and folded it through the makeshift sling. The coagulation concoction hadn’t put a dent in my pain level, and I failed to stifle a groan as his movements stretched the skin and muscles across my chest.

He fussed over it, spreading the terrycloth until my limp arm and hand were situated as securely as possible.

“You’re taking care of me,” I said, my voice distant.

The statement stirred him from concentration, and he met my eyes. His expression softened, but there was no denying the worry lurking behind his smile. “Of course, I am.”

He wrapped my cut palm with another clean towel, then closed my fingers to hold it in place. I watched him, overcome with a sense of gratitude that tugged at my dully thudding heart.

Nine years earlier

I was three blocks from the motel when the rain started. More than just rain, it was a full thunder-cracking, lightning-cutting-through-the-clouds storm that soaked me through in seconds. It blinded me, too, washing my mop of blond hair over my eyes so I had to sweep it away with an unsteady hand. My other palm pressed firmly to my thigh where my jeans were cut and stained with quickly spreading red. The investigator’s bullet had grazed me, missing any vital veins or arteries, but you wouldn’t know it from the diluted blood that squished in my sneaker with every staggered step.

Sirens screamed in the near distance. I thought I’d lost them. Hoped I had because if I led the cops to Lazy Daze, Grimm would make me wish I’d died instead of just been lamed.

What should have been a short walk was excruciating with pain spiraling past my hip. Warmth slicked my fingers as I tried to compress the wound. I couldn’t push as hard as I needed to; it hurt too much, and it was slowing me down.

Across the dark, rain-streaked sky, red and blue lights flashed.

I swallowed a sob and tried to pick up the pace, thoroughly hobbled and swiping water and tears off my face. I hoped Donovan would be asleep but, at not yet midnight, I doubted it. He kept later hours than most eleven-year-olds, I imagined. Later than Dad ever let me stay up. But that was in a time of school days and summer camps and normalcy. Nothing about tromping through the rain to a motel room after failing to dodge a bullet was normal.

Shaking and cold, I sagged against the door to mine and Donovan’s room. Fumbling through my pockets yielded my keycard. My fingers smeared the white plastic with red and did the same to the doorknob as I turned it and shoved my way inside.

Palming the door left a gruesome handprint in my wake. I was likely trailing the stuff, too, filling up rain puddles like a breadcrumb trail the investigators would follow straight here. Then they’d have me cornered, and my brother would watch them put another bullet in me. This one in my brain .

The motel room was lit by only the television, beaming light across the bed where Donovan sprawled, munching ice chips. He was hungry. Always. And that would have been the first thing he said if he hadn’t gotten a look at me first.

“Fitch?”

His voice chased me because I didn’t stop, dripping water and tears and blood all the way to the bathroom. He bounded off the creaky mattress to come up behind me.

“Where’ve you been? You’re wet. Are you okay?” Questions and statements pelted me, and his proximity got my hackles up.

I didn’t want him to see this, didn’t want him to know, didn’t want him to worry.

“Back off, Donnie.” I flicked my fingers toward him. It was a shove more than a strike, but it didn’t take much to double him over.

It knocked the air out of him, too, but he gathered enough breath to snap back at me. “Fine! Dick.”

It sounded almost foreign in his childish voice. His balls hadn’t even dropped, and he was trying to cuss at me.

I glowered at him while standing hunched over and gripping my thigh. “You wanna talk tough, you’re gonna have to do better than that.” I huffed a breath. “Pull out the big guns.”

Donovan’s face scrunched. His cheeks puffed with building momentum before he spouted off, “Fine, fucker!”

My head rocked back in an exaggerated nod. “There we go.”

Mentioning guns seemed to make my leg ache more, and I groaned through the last few steps into the bathroom.

I barely rounded the door before shoving it closed and letting my back slam against it. My knees buckled and I slid down to the tile floor, immediately creating a puddle of rainwater swirled with diluted pink. The tiny room housed only the shower tub and toilet, but it was the towel bar on the wall I needed.

Tugging the pair of bath sheets off the rack, I hastily wound them around my thigh. They smelled like bleach, and I half-expected them to sting my open wound but, aside from the pressure mounting as I tied the thick fabric into a knot, nothing changed.

It was quiet and dark because I hadn’t bothered with the light switch, and every rattling breath echoed off the walls.

A timid knock shook the door, and I braced my good leg against the tub enclosure.

“Fitch?” Donovan’s voice was muffled by the barrier between us.

I mopped my face then my hands on the tail of a tied towel. My lack of response prompted Donovan to repeat my name, then chase it with a sheepish, “I’m sorry.”

I was sorry, too. I could write lists and maybe even books of all the apologies I owed him, but I settled to say instead, “Don’t talk like that, okay?”

He was quiet for a few seconds, then grumbled, “You say that stuff all the time.”

“ You don’t.” He still didn’t agree, so I prompted him again. “Okay? Say okay.”

A long sigh petered out of him. “Okay.” He paused. “Will you come out now?”

My leg throbbed and so did my head. I was bone-tired, wet, and chilling, and the cold seeping in through the grimy tile floor was doing me no favors. But I couldn’t drag my ragged ass out there and into the bed that sounded amazing right now. Not while I was leaking blood like a faucet and Donovan’s concern was so fresh in his mind. I needed to wait him out, at least.

“In a little bit,” I replied. “You should go to bed, though. It’s late.”

My chest rose and fell more steadily as I waited for him to move away. The television droned in the background with a laugh track from some oldie sitcom. Fabric swished against the other side of the door, and I glanced down to see little fingers slip under the gap at the bottom.

Like a damn cat, this kid. Wouldn’t give me a moment’s peace.

I heaved a breath of my own and resolved to ignore Donovan’s hand until I saw it stretching toward the watery blood puddle in which I sat. I stopped it short by placing my own fingers atop his.

“Can I wait for you?” he asked softly.

The knot suddenly in my throat made my voice rasp as I answered, “Sure, Donnie.”

Nash led me toward the back of the building. He hadn’t expressed a plan, but the deep furrow of his brow and the speed and purpose of his strides put my fears at ease. I studied his profile as I shuffled along, warring against churning nausea and thoughts that didn’t piece together quite right.

My breathing seemed loud, eclipsing all other sound until we arrived at the back door. Nash tugged it open inward to reveal a wall of craggy gray rocks. They looked like the stones that bordered the bluffs: sun-bleached and crusted with salt. They were large, too. Not one was smaller than my head, and they were piled in layers judging by the lack of light seeping in between them.

“Shit,” Nash muttered.

I could have moved them. Another day or time, it would have been a small matter to pull the rocks in or push them out, three or five at a time. Now, though, even the thought of magic made my brain squeeze dry.

“Let’s check the front.” I started that way. “Come on.”

Rather than follow or even respond, Nash grabbed hold of one of the small boulders, digging his fingers around it in a scrabbling effort to gain purchase. While he got his grip, he spoke in a low voice. “We need to get to the garage. My car’s in there. Keys, too. We could drive away. Besides, if they think they’ve blocked this, they’ll be expecting us to double back.”

The ominous “they” remained a mystery. There could have been ten people outside, twenty, or the whole damn gang wielding pitchforks and torches.

I killed Avery. That realization trickled in as slowly as everything else. I killed Avery so he didn’t kill Nash, and so Nash didn’t kill him. I should have been proud. His death combined with Isha’s made for some serious “take back your power” self-improvement bullshit. But if anything, I felt weakened by the loss. Everyone was going away. Leaving me.

I glanced over at Nash prying rocks loose and causing more to pile into a heap at his feet. No light penetrated the wall of stone .

Distant voices clamored at the other end of the house. They echoed off the high ceilings of the entry hall where Avery’s corpse told a brutal story.

“What’s taking so damn long?” someone unseen shouted.

“What the fuck?” another called back.

“He’s dead!” a third chimed in.

Clammy sweat prickled at my temples.

“Nash!” I whisper-shouted, crowding close in case he’d somehow missed the sounds of the new arrivals. “Nash, they’re inside.”

He set his jaw, pulling stones and heaving them aside. I barely dodged one dropping on my toes. He was sweating, too, from the exertion. I had to wonder how early this morning the gang had been at it, burying us in stones stolen from the rocky coast, or if they had some kind of rock-o-mancer who fabricated the stuff.

The racket in the entry hall increased, and I heard feet rushing upstairs. They would search the whole building and, unless we were prepared to bail out a window, a conflict was inevitable. I couldn’t carry on with this clinging numbness. Not helping was not an option.

Nash’s back muscles strained as he pulled another stone through the doorframe.

This time, I snapped his name.

When he turned around, his wide brown eyes showed a sinking sort of fear I’d hoped to never see there.

“Gimme the go juice.” I motioned toward his sweatpants pocket.

He clapped his hand over the potion bottle inside, and his eyes darkened. “You’ll bleed out. I’ll take it. ”

The fear didn’t lessen. And, while he acted ready to pop the cork and down the thing like a New Year’s toast, he didn’t pull it out.

I pushed as close as I could, standing firm despite my wobbly legs. With both hands out of commission and my magic beyond reach, I needed him to facilitate this.

“And do what?” I glanced at his fingers, rubbed raw and leaking fresh red that added to the drying brown caked on his knuckles from caving in Avery’s face.

“Hulk smash?” I asked. “You might get two of them. Or three. Then we’re fucked.”

I arrived at the conclusion he should have. Maybe he knew it when he grabbed the magic adrenaline in the first place but didn’t want to admit it.

“It has to be me,” I said.

Nash’s hard glare went soft, almost sad. He shook his head. “It doesn’t always have to be you.”

A new barrage of conversation pricked my ears to the front of the building once more.

“He’s gotta be in here somewhere,” a gruff voice declared.

Another male fired back, “You wanna look around or…?”

“Torch the place,” was the immediate reply.

The color drained from Nash’s face. He spun away, looking at the mountain of rocks but not reaching for them.

“ Nash ,” I repeated.

He stood with his back to me, hesitating.

It chafed my brain. Rubbed my neurons the wrong way to worm a thought into his unguarded pocket and snag the bottle. The cork shot out on its way to me, bringing the open vial straight to my mouth for a single, gulping swallow.

Nash whipped around to watch the bottle fall and shatter against one of a dozen discarded rocks. The sound seemed deafening in the sudden silence. Indeed, it was loud enough to merit a question from the invaders in the entry.

“Did y’all hear that?”