Page 30 of Zel (The GriMM Tales #2)

Zel turned to take in the room, deciding how best to do this.

He settled on facing away from the bed, with Ulrich seated behind him, and the room in front of them fell away.

The bed remained as if on a precipice, and they were on a balcony like when Zel had learned the first truths of Ulrich's past.

Beyond, scenes began to play, and a city came into focus, Falchovari as it had been twenty winters ago.

The view zoomed in through the streets to the Pied Pipers music shop.

It was a clever name for the place, not only because their surname was Piper, but due to the multicolored or pied brickwork of the exterior, alternating between red, brown, and gold.

“Allow me to share with you my story this time,” Zel said, and as he began his turn at the history lesson, emanating from within the shop came the sounds of a baby crying.

ULRICH

T he first scene Zel displayed to Ulrich showed the panic that had followed his entrance into the world.

“My parents, Gregor and Sophie, told me that my cries pierced through their bedchamber walls, where my mother had allowed in only the physician, a male midwife who our guild master had secured for us.”

Ulrich knew female midwives were more common. A male physician to assist with childbirth would have been reserved for the very wealthy.

“My father entered the room as soon as he heard me,” Zel continued.

Ulrich stood to join Zel at the railing of the manifested balcony.

The physician was doing all he could to clean and bundle the infant Zel when he announced rather gravely, “I’m afraid it’s a boy,” clearly aware of the intended future for the innocent babe.

Gregor and Sophie exchanged frantic looks, before Gregor pulled a dagger.

The physician still held Zel, but that did not deter Gregor from pressing the blade to the man’s throat.

“It is a girl,” he said in warning, “a future bride to be presented to the sorcerer exactly as planned. Do you understand?”

“You cannot possibly hide—”

“ Do you understand ?” Gregor asked again.

The physician nodded, and once Gregor had retracted the dagger, he handed over the newborn Zel into his father’s arms.

“Even my first moments alive involved a dagger,” Zel said.

“How much time passed before your parents dispatched the physician?” Ulrich asked.

“Three weeks.”

“Longer than I would have waited.”

Zel snorted, and Ulrich cast him a wry smile.

Next, Ulrich watched Zel will the view of the past to zip forward in time.

“When I began to come into my own mind and understand things, I thought I was a girl at first,” Zel explained as more scenes unfolded.

“I didn’t know to think otherwise. Eventually, my parents had to explain, pull me aside, make sure I knew not to play peek-a-boo under the skirts with any of my friends.

They didn’t explain all the details right away but slowly introduced me to the idea by saying I had a destiny to fulfill that required sacrifice.

I was special. I had a great purpose. And that meant pretending to be something I wasn’t. ”

The scenes shifted again to Zel in the undercrofts of the Thieves Guild with his parents and other various teachers.

“Then my training began to hone my body, my skills with movement and weapons. Once I neared womanhood— man hood—adulthood I suppose, I was taught how to make the boys want me.”

“To better seduce me eventually?” Ulrich asked.

“Yes, but I did want to titillate the boys,” Zel admitted. “That began long before I was taught to target them. I had always preferred being a girl over wanting to kiss one, so I never had to hide my attractions. But it was still all for you more than for me. My whole life has been about you.”

The final scenes, most recent in Zel’s life, came in rapid succession.

“Training my feminine wiles to seduce you. Training with blades to assassinate you. Even my education was all to better tempt you and win your favor for the sake of the mission. And though I found many of my own pleasures in it all, I hated that. I hated you before I knew you. Especially when I started to feel a deeper desire toward the boys, I resented you because I couldn’t choose what I wanted.

I hated having to be something I wasn’t, and that every day of my life was dedicated to one future moment in time with one person I hadn’t even met yet.

It was only these past two or three winters that I came to accept my fate and resigned myself to not resent something I couldn’t change.

“So, as I admitted during our first night together, I did eventually stop resenting you, stop hating you, and focused on what I had to do to get through this and to maybe have a life of my own on the other side of it.” Zel turned from the scenes that had ended with his mother preparing him in her wedding gown for the trip to the tower.

He took Ulrich’s hands.

“I never could have predicted how that one future moment in my life would end up being worth the difficult road to reach it, one small stretch of time enough to change everything and make me want so deeply that I cannot imagine drawing breath anymore without you there. My past had to be all about you, but I want my future to continue to be because it is what I choose.”

“Zel—”

“My parents live under the thumb of the guild leader, Lothar.” Zel squeezed Ulrich’s hands tighter, refusing to let him pull or look away.

“And he lives under the thumb of the evil Queen. We all do. Everyone’s life is beholden to another in some way, whether they know it or not.

But my parents have always found joy in life together despite that.

I have never met another who made me feel like I could have what they do. Not until you.”

Ulrich didn’t try to pull or look away, but he looked at Zel seriously. “Do you truly know what you ask? Even when what you have said and shown me proves the point of why we should not be together? I molded you to be what I wanted—”

“No. You made sure I had the magic you needed to achieve the goal you thought you wanted. My parents and my experiences molded me. You lit the spark, but life fanned the flames. And where I could, I made my own choices. You want me not for who I could have been or pretended to be, but for who I am. Don’t you? ”

“Yes…” But that truth only made Ulrich’s grief stronger, when he had never thought he could know grief again.

“Once I am immortal and you are weakened, instead of succumbing to my blade, could you not replenish your magic over time?”

“I could. But listen to me—”

“If you had no desire for me at all, would you have bedded me?”

“Possibly.” Ulrich’s sorrow cracked with a grin, but Zel stared him down, clearly in no mood for levity. “No,” Ulrich recanted.

“I had no intention of bedding you either. For different reasons initially, but because of who you truly are and what I have seen of your healing heart, I want you all on my own. Please, Ulrich.” Zel took Ulrich’s blackened hand with his left and reached with his right to cup the curve of Ulrich’s cheek.

“Make me immortal like you planned but stay immortal with me.”

“Do not ask this of me, Zel. The last companions who trusted me regretted it. Even if my old apprentice does not, one can hardly consider it an improvement when you now call her the evil Queen.”

“You… you mean your apprentice was the Queen?” Zel gaped.

Ulrich took Zel’s hand from his face to hold both between them again.

“How did you think she came into power? I gave it to her, but not before molding her into the perfect, terrible replacement. She had to be worthy, and back then I believed that meant she needed to be willing to step over anyone and everyone she cared for, even her own family, to maintain the power I taught her to wield. You say I did not mold you, but I did mold her, and you and others have suffered for it and continue to even now.”

The admission made Zel hesitate, but stubborn youth that he was, his resolve returned. “Neither a guardian nor a mentor is responsible for their charge’s choices.”

“An easy excuse—”

“You eventually left that life and chose to be better.”

“ Zel . I am getting rather tired of you interrupting me.”

Zel wisely snapped his mouth shut.

“Thank you.” Holding Zel’s soft, deceptively delicate hands did not make it easy to keep denying him. “You think I live a better life than when I was a tyrant? Devouring souls in the wood and luring unsuspecting beauties into my bed?”

Zel waited a moment before responding, as if to be certain he would not interrupt Ulrich again.

“I was not unsuspecting. I asked to be taken to bed. And the souls you devour now know the risks of entering the wood and crossing onto your land. We are what molds us, but we can choose to break free of the cycle without choosing death for ourselves. Can’t we? ”

“That was not the plan.”

“It wasn’t mine either. But one does not plan when or with whom one falls in love.”

Ulrich was too stunned to speak. His instincts, his experience, all he had come to know of Zel, told him those words were earnest. Ulrich had heard them before but from fanatics who worshipped him or those willing to say anything to earn his favor even if they actually loathed him.

He couldn’t say whether he had ever heard words of love spoken with heartfelt meaning, other than by his mother and the friends he had eventually killed.

It was Ulrich who reached for Zel’s cheeks then, cradling his face. Against all sense that he should pull away now more than ever, he began to lean down.

Ulrich snapped back from the kiss he had been about to offer.

“What is it?” Zel asked.

“Trespassers. I can sense them on the grounds.” Ulrich’s connection to the tower and the land surrounding it made unexpected footfalls upon his property feel like someone walking over his grave, causing little pinpricks and tingles down his spine.

“And judging by the strength of the feeling, there are several.”

He waved a hand, and he and Zel were both dressed, with Zel’s hair neatly braided, much as Ulrich hated giving up their routine of him brushing it first.

They had uninvited guests.

“You included my dagger, I hope.” Zel reached under his skirt to confirm its presence—a single layered skirt, one of Zel’s outfits he had made with the loom, complete with breeches and lacking a corset as he preferred.

“It is your choice if you wish to join me,” Ulrich said, “but I assumed you would want to.”

“Now and forever.” Zel brandished the dagger. “I do not like being interrupted either, and we aren’t done talking.”

“I supposed we are not.” Ulrich led the way out of the chamber into the main room where no trespassers had yet reached. “You are skilled, Zel, and much magic protects you, but you are not yet immortal.”

“ Yet ,” Zel repeated. “I will be careful.” He lifted onto his toes to kiss the side of Ulrich’s mouth. Then he charged for the stairwell, while Ulrich went to the window and leapt onto its sill.

When Zel realized he was not being followed, he looked back at Ulrich with a snort.

“You don’t even need stairs, do you?”

“Not when I need to be swift.” Ulrich dove from the window, descending to the garden like a bird of prey.

A gasp at his left when he landed alerted him to his first meal of the morn.

The attacker hesitated to strike a blow, leaving Ulrich an opening to lash out first. A fatal mistake. Ulrich had him by the throat, weapons dropped and mask down to suck out his soul in mere moments. As Ulrich finished the husk, he felt a tickle at his back.

He dropped the corpse and turned, summoning his magical fury to pulse around him with visible aura, which caused pure dread to anyone who perceived it.

Two bandits stood before him, one closer, gazing in horror at her now bent sword that had failed to skewer him.

The second held two handaxes and trembled as he threw one, then the other.

Ulrich caught them both.

The woman dropped her sword, attempting to flee, but Ulrich flung the handaxes into her back, dropping her at the other bandit’s feet. Toppling over onto his backside, he stared wide-eyed at his own weapons buried in his companion.

She was dead, but Ulrich snatched the male up and sucked his soul out like the first.

Spotting a fourth bandit rigid with fear, Ulrich swept forward to descend upon her next, only for a dagger to lodge in the bandit’s throat.

From around the curve of the tower appeared Zel.

He tore his blade free, and the bandit gurgled up blood behind her mask, staining the dark fabric a deeper black, before she crumpled forward.

“Three for me,” Zel said, wiping his dagger on the bandit’s back. Then he noticed the bodies left by Ulrich. “Guess we’re even.”

A yelp brought their gazes to the wall, where a new bandit had been about to leap into the garden.

He didn’t notice their stares at first, for his cry had been for the bodies strewn about.

Then his eyes went from Zel to Ulrich, and he promptly jumped the other direction, back into the autumn weather of the wood.

“I believe I am about to pull ahead,” Ulrich said, and leapt up after the bandit as easily as he had flung himself from the tower window.

When he landed outside the wall, he spotted the bandit zigzagging into the trees, smart enough to not give Ulrich a direct path to follow, but that would hardly save him.

Ulrich spared a glance at the wall, intending to open the way for Zel, but he saw atop the wall that Zel had scaled it after him. If there were more bandits about, Zel could handle them. Ulrich’s job was to catch the one foolish enough to flee.

Once the bandits were dispatched with only cleanup remaining, Zel would inevitably speak his request again. How was Ulrich to respond? It had not been his plan to go on living and actually keep the bride he had lied about wanting, to stay immortal when he had thought it a curse for so long.

What surprised him was how tempted he was to turn that plan on its head.

His immeasurable hours alone had made him long for the very end he'd toiled so hard to prevent, yet Zel's arrival had done the one thing Ulrich had thought impossible—brought life back into his monotonous existence, instilling a craving for that life to continue.

Ulrich caught the bandit and drained him like the others, positively bursting from the meal they had provided, but even multiple souls paled in comparison to how good it felt to touch Zel, to hold him, to even just be near him.

It would be easy to say it was because of the rapunzel , the magic, the balm of Zel easing Ulrich’s aches, but he enjoyed Zel’s company too much to believe it was only that.

Letting the final husk drop to the ground, Ulrich was honestly considering agreeing the next time Zel asked for him to stay, when he heard Zel’s scream echo through the wood.