Page 26 of Looking Grimm (Marionette #4)

I wasn’t sure how they corralled everyone in the city for a triple-bill execution, but they definitely made it harder than it needed to be. They should have just hired a town crier to wander the streets announcing “Fitch Farrow to die at last! Watch his head roll! Get there early and score a seat in the splash zone!”

On that note, I expected posterboards and banners like the ones I’d seen on the Capitol lawn before my trial. But I wasn’t the headliner, merely the opening act, sent out first to warm up a cold and unnaturally quiet crowd. They were packed tight in here, wedged in a square of space surrounded by buildings and Hex rookies who paced the perimeter with assault rifles barred across their chests. It looked more like a prison yard than a public space.

Vinton chortled to himself as he frog-marched me across the execution stage. His anticipation of my death must have overpowered his desire to beat me bloody a second time because he made quick work of dragging me out of the holding cell and through the corridors of the Capitol building. What I saw on the way haunted me. Dead investigators and employees littered the ground. Dozens of them lay in heaps and piles, stripped of their service weapons and discarded like yesterday’s garbage. The gang had turned the building into a battleground and waged a dramatically one-sided fight. With nearly a day since my meeting with Tobin, Felix, and Nash, I checked every vacant face to reassure myself that my allies were still alive and kicking.

We passed the guillotine, that towering, medieval thing made of craggy old wood. Its sharp, angled blade glinted in the afternoon sun. A Bloody Hex initiate stood beside it with his tattooed hand resting on the lever handle. When he caught my gaze, he licked his lips.

I stared so long that I stumbled, nearly falling over the woven basket set before the murderous contraption. The inside of it was stained muddy brown from the blood of hundreds of witches before me who had met this gruesome fate. The sight chilled me through, and I shuddered, frozen with fear until Vinton jerked on my sore arms and steered me around the basket in a push toward center stage.

In the far corner, Maximus and Holland sat flanked by Hex recruits. They wore shackles, antimagic collars, and impassive expressions. Maximus’s attention was fixed on a distant nothing, but Holland turned toward my approach. Her eyes were red and moist.

She mouthed two words I struggled to discern: “I’m sorry.”

Vinton held me by the handcuff chain and collar, forcing me to stand bolt-upright and turned toward the audience. But my eyes cut a hard angle to the right where Grimm stood a few feet away with a microphone in his hand.

He must have been speaking before I arrived because he wasted no time with pleasantries before launching into a monologue.

“Here is a man who requires no introduction, but I would be remiss not to give him the honor of one.” Grimm swung his arm toward me. “Fitch Farrow, Marionette, is one of the most accomplished mercenaries in our city’s history. Certainly, the most gifted telekinetic I have ever known.”

His head dipped in a slow, almost reverent nod.

“He was once like a child to me, my favorite son.” He caught my gaze then, his blue eyes pale and piercing in the light of day. When he continued, his voice held the contempt I’d expected from the start. “But he strayed from my favor. He fell in league with the enemy, swayed to the side of corruption and deceit. He turned on those to whom he should have been loyal and, for that, he must be punished.”

My better judgment warned me not to look across the swath of people gathered below. I couldn’t stomach their scorn and sneers, or worse, their relief at seeing a villain like me being erased from existence. But I searched anyway, hopeful for the flash of Nash’s red hair. I wanted to see a friendly face in the midst of the hate.

God, I was down bad. Obsessed with that lumberjack bastard.

But I needed to find Tobin. He was the one I counted on. When the guillotine blade fell, he would be the one to catch it. Leaving that critical task in the hands of a man who had never minced words when it came to his feelings about me made me uneasy.

Sifting through the sea of people yielded no one familiar. My pulse pounded in my ears as Vinton paraded me toward the guillotine. Grimm kept talking and throwing out words that stuck like knives in my heart.

Traitor.

Disappointment.

Failure.

I should have been numb to all of it, but it stung. Grimm’s disparagement, the loathing of the crowd, the knowing that I had given up so much to survive and even succeed at the life I’d been thrown into. I became the kind of villain my father would have hunted down. A tool, Grimm called me, fit to be used until I was blunted and broken. That had always been the plan: to change me, corrupt me, then cast me out. From the start, everything led to this.

Vinton shoved me to my knees before the guillotine. I hit the ground hard and started to tremble. My hands fisted behind my back as I stared at the hole between two pieces of bloodstained wood. The Hex-member-turned-executioner lifted the top piece to expand the opening, and Vinton bent me forward, pressing my neck against the cut-out groove.

The upper wood slab dropped into place with a cracking sound that made me flinch. With my face turned down, I couldn’t see anything but that rotted old basket waiting to catch my severed head. I shifted on my knees, swallowing the acid that surged from my empty stomach.

Mentally, I rehearsed the plan. I revisited every detail until they were all scrambled in my brain. Sweat streaked down my face despite the mild weather, and my toes curled inside the infirmary-issued grippy socks. I didn’t want to die like this. Bedraggled and beaten, wearing blood-spattered scrubs and with my nose caved in. Hell, I didn’t even want to be seen like this. Defeated. Frightened. Ready to beg for mercy to avoid relying on my own shitty scheme.

Grimm’s voice grew louder, booming through the microphone as his speech neared its end. “Let his death be a message to any who attempt to defy me,” he said. “They will be shown no mercy.”

Tenuous thoughts slipped out and tested the lock on one of the handcuffs. I braced, wary of a reprimanding shock from the collar, but none came. Taking the guillotine blade out of the equation made my job only slightly easier. I still had my shackles, the collar, and the wooden stocks to deal with. Then I had to get my hooks into Grimm.

I hadn’t considered the way I would kill him, but I’d fantasized about how it would feel. Fast. Efficient. Satisfying as fuck. I wanted him to bleed out on this stage. I wanted to lord over him while he watched his delusions of grandeur fade. I wanted my traitorous, disappointing, failure of a face to be the last thing he ever saw.

But my mind was wandering, and I needed it focused. There was an order to this. Cuffs first, then the collar, then the wooden stocks needing to be lifted or broken so I could move.

What if Tobin didn’t stop the blade? What if he and Nash and Felix were caught and killed, their bodies discarded in some corner of the Capitol building I hadn’t seen? What if I was, well and truly, alone?

If I wanted to keep my head attached, the answer to that question was the same as I’d given Nash in the cell yesterday: I’d have to think fast.

At the edge of my vision, Grimm beckoned to the executioner. “Now. ”

My body tensed, and my eyes squeezed shut. Thoughts raced in every direction while avoiding the well of terror that opened like a sinkhole in my mind. It grew faster than I could think, threatening to swallow everything else.

I heard the lever rock forward. Felt the guillotine frame shudder.

One cuff unlocked, and I yanked my hands apart. I reached for the piece of wood notched around my neck while flinging a stopping force upward. Unnecessarily. The blade halted in its track before my magic touched it.

There was no time to celebrate or even breathe relief as I shoved the top half of the stocks roughly upward and lurched back. My knees dragged across the stage as I sent mental probes into the collar next. No need to bother with the lock on that; I could snap it open at the hinge.

It swung open, and I yanked it off and threw it as the sound of explosions split the air. That was Nash’s job, creating a distraction to draw Grimm’s lackeys to where Ripley would be waiting with a knockout gas surprise.

My head whipped toward where Holland and Maximus had been waiting on death row. Both father and daughter were gone, and their bodyguards turned confused circles like dogs chasing their tails. Felix must have been pushing his luck not to have had to kill them. But damn. It was working. The plan was actually working.

Gunfire rattled as Bloody Hex recruits fired wildly into the crowd. Casualties were unavoidable. That was a truth Tobin and Felix had been reluctant to accept. I regretted the loss of innocent life, but I understood it as a necessary trade. To accomplish something good, we had to allow a bit of bad.

I scrambled to my feet as the executioner lunged at me with his arms spread, intending to tackle me to the ground. I caught him around the middle and flung him as far and wide as I could. His body sailed into the crowd that had surged into a panic while explosions continued to echo off the buildings around them.

The guillotine blade sang through the air, striking near my feet with a snapping clack. The breeze from its descent washed across my sweaty cheeks, and I sucked a sharp breath. Damn thing passed so close it nearly circumcised me a second time. Only seconds had passed, not as much time as I needed to pivot to the next task. Something was wrong.

I glanced across the stage to where Grimm and Vinton had stood. If all went well, they would have been caught in Tobin’s time-stop bubble, trapped and waiting for me to finish them off. Vinton was where I expected to find him, red-faced and snarling with a shock collar remote in his hand. He was perfectly posed, unmoving… and alone.

Fuck.

My eyes darted across the platform in search of Grimm’s retreating form. The Hex members had given up looking for Maximus and Holland and turned their attention to me, but I didn’t have time to deal with the rabble.

A flash of motion caught my gaze. Wavy brown hair fluttered as someone leaped off the front of the stage and into the chaos below. Grimm’s illusion powers made him no kind of combatant in a battle, but he was a hell of a strategist, and the obvious strategy in a mob was to disappear.

I wouldn’t allow that.

Vinton seemed to gnash his teeth at me from inside the time bubble. He was helpless, but I had been, too, as recently as yesterday when he beat me bloody on the bathroom floor. Like Avery, he deserved to die. They all did.

Bolting forward, I stretched my hand toward the necromancer. I hoped he saw it coming. I hoped he felt my mental claws dig into the meat around his spine seconds before I yanked it free. Bones exploded out of his back in a gruesome string. It hovered in the air, suspended long after I let go.

I didn’t wait to see him collapse and his fluids rush out before I sprinted to the edge of the platform and dove into the tangle of bodies. Civilians scurried this way and that, ready to trample anyone who dared stand still. I couldn’t see through them but, even if I could, I wasn’t certain who I was looking for. Grimm could have been any one of these scrambling schmucks, masking his true face like the coward I knew him to be.

“Grimm!” I shouted, my voice a roar.

My blood ran hot, fueling the magic that coursed out of me as I swung my hands in broad, sweeping gestures. The handcuffs still attached to my right wrist rattled through every motion. Civilians were knocked aside and brushed away to clear a path toward—I looked up long enough to see the direction I was headed—the Capitol building.

Screams resonated near my ears, and I gritted my teeth, forging through the opening I’d created.

In the near distance, gray-green smoke clouds rolled in, chased by all-consuming quiet. Ripley was on the job and outdoing himself, by the looks of it. The creeping haze stoked the panic of the people around me, all of them frantic to avoid the gaseous cloud as it advanced.

“Grimm!” I yelled again.

Another group of people were sent crashing into their peers like a receding wave. I squinted through the throng, watching for anything out of place.

At the back of the retreating swarm, a young woman paused. Her ponytail swished across her shoulders as she gaped back at me with her blue eyes wide. The flavor of her fear was different. It ran deeper, seeming to seize her whole body as she drew a pistol from the holster on her hip.

Not an investigator, but she held an investigator’s gun.

“There you are.” The words slipped out of me in a growl.

I reached for her, clawing with mental talons meant to grab and reel her in. The line was cast but not yet set when a barrel-chested man crashed into me. I staggered into a wall of people, barely keeping my feet under me so I didn’t get pulled into the undertow. The bulldozer of a man plowed on past, parting the crowd and dragging his petite wife along behind.

When I spun around to where I’d last seen Grimm’s illusioned form, the schooling strangers had closed the gap and blanked her from my view.

Ripley’s poison crept closer. If it got to me before I got to Grimm, it would mean game over. At best, I would fall unconscious, rendered useless, and every bit the fuckup Grimm claimed I was. At worst, the old man would take the chance to put a bullet in my brain.

The Capitol building crested the nearby horizon, and a lone figure burst free of the crowd to climb the hill toward it. Grimm—still wearing the female disguise—had put a decent gap between us. I stretched my mental range to its max, swiping and missing as the illusioned woman continued her mad dash. She was too far for me to reach. Getting away.

Inside the building, winding hallways and scores of offices provided ample hiding places for a game of cat and mouse. Not to mention all the hidey holes where Grimm could post up and wait for me to walk by. It would only take one well-placed shot to put me down.

With an angry shout, I sprang into motion once more, barreling ahead while carving a tunnel through the swarm. My heart thundered as I sprinted toward the Capitol building’s bright white dome, hoping like hell I could catch up to Grimm before he got there.