The Grimm Chronicles, Vol.3

by Ken Brosky

  “Keep fighting,” I murmured, watching the last two dart past us. One was bigger than his brothers, with a graying coat of fur and a dark red mane. He had a scar along his right eye, and that eye’s golden glow was duller than the left one. I followed above them, willing my body to soar faster and faster over the snow-covered field, feeling my energy drain as if I were running a sprint. I reached out with both hands, grabbing the muscled rear haunch of the smaller lion and pulling with all my might. He lost control, tripping and flipping over again and again in the snow. I soared past him, feeling the cold air cut through my ghost form like a razor blade, reaching out for the mane of the scarred lion, grabbing and pulling with all my might.

  The beast slowed, his head tilting back, his mouth opening to release a deep snarl. He slowed just a bit, then shook his head wildly like a dog shaking off water, throwing me aside with a surprising raw power.

  My body flew through the air. I tried to turn, but I’d lost control. I willed myself to turn and land on the ground. I did, only with a little more force than I’d expected. My ghost-like form kicked up snow as I crashed onto the frozen field. I rolled, turning, watching three of the lions close in on me like I was a wounded gazelle. The scarred one took the lead, tilting his head so that his left eye was focused on me. The scar was deep and dark, running across his forehead and down his snout like a lightning bolt.

  “Ki van ott?”

  We all turned. There, in the doorway of the farmhouse no more than a hundred yards away, was a frail old farmer peering out into the darkness with an old flashlight. The beam landed on the scarred lion and suddenly, instead of a lion, he was a man. A tall man dressed in a black suit and carefully combed brown hair and a well-trimmed graying beard under his jaw. He squinted in the light, smiling and saying something in Hungarian as he took a step forward.

  The man responded with relief, his body loosening up a bit. In the darkness, the other lions moved closer to the farmhouse, their padded feet silently pressing down on the snow.

  “Oh no you don’t,” I hissed, getting up and kicking off the ground. Three lions reached out for me with their massive paws but I was already ethereal again, flying across the field. I collided with the man in the black suit, willing my arms to wrap around his broad chest. He tumbled away from the beam of light and suddenly his broad chest expanded, the fabric of the suit flitting away, replaced with thick gray fur. The lion twisted before I could will myself into my ghost-form again, and the momentum sent me flying into the snow at the foot of his friends.

  “Shut the door!” I shouted to the farmer, turning ethereal again as the lions pounced. They pawed at the snow, clawing up chunks of frozen dirt. The farmer—the danged fool!—still had the door open. He had his flashlight on another of the lions, who of course had turned into a man. The man was walking toward him, holding out a steady hand. With my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see the other lions just out of reach of the flashlight beam, skulking silently in the darkness, moving closer to the house.

  “No!” I shouted, willing my body into the air. I reached down, scooping up the powdery snow and flinging it in front of the man in the black suit. He flinched, growling and turning my way but I was already past him, reaching out for the farmer and gently—well, not quite roughly—pushing him back inside his house.

  I shut the door. The six lions lined up, staring at me. The one I’d flung snow at shook his mane, stepping aside so the gray one with the scar could skulk closer. He had the fluffiest mane of them all, and it looked darker and a bit more snarly, too, like he’d slept on it wrong. If such a thing was possible for a giant Corrupted lion to do.

  “Well?” I asked.

  The lion with the scar turned his head, sniffing the air. He looked down, pushing past his brethren until he found the rabbit tracks. The others turned.

  “Oh, absolutely not,” I said, rushing to the nearest one and lifting from the ground. I pushed him as hard I could, tripping him up with his nearest pal. Two more broke off, circling me. I willed myself to land on the snow, crouching low. Maybe if I could get them to leap at the same time, I could get them to land on each other …

  Suddenly, a sharp pain ran through my left leg. Instinct forced me back into my ghost form almost instantaneously, but the pain was real enough for my body to lose control, falling backward. I turned as I fell: the scarred lion had maneuvered behind me and was snapping madly at the space where I’d just been. He’d gotten me. He’d grabbed onto my leg while I was in solid form and he’d bitten down with such an incredible force that it had nearly put me in shock.

  My head spun. The darkness grew darker as clouds slipped in front of the moon. I fell backwards, aware of the cold snow between my toes, aware that my ethereal form had shifted to something more solid once again as I landed onto the snowy ground, breaking through a patch of crystallized snow.

  I looked up wearily, sure that the remaining lions would be closing in on me. But no, they’d resumed their original intention, bursting through the fence on the far end and following the rabbit tracks into the next patch of trees beyond the farm. The scarred one stopped as the moon reappeared, and from a distance he looked half-human, like a Sphinx. He glared at me, his upper lip curling into a snarl.

  And then he too was gone.

  “Briar!” I shouted, pulling myself to my feet. My arm was sore from the fall. My left leg stung so fiercely that I couldn’t put any weight on it. I’d turned visible again, as if my ghost-form had malfunctioned during the fall. “Briar, run as fast as you can!”

  “Why?”

  I spun around, letting out a very awkward, confused scream. In the moonlight, I could see a figure standing on top of the small aluminum shed twenty feet away. A figure with a rabbit’s silhouette, sitting cross-legged on the roof.

  “What?! How!”

  Briar cocked his head. “I’m Br’er Rabbit, that’s what. And because I’m Br’er Rabbit, that’s how. I made my way north, then climbed the lowest tree and doubled back here.”

  “They’ll find you,” I said, breathless, uncaring of the pain in my leg. I was afraid. Afraid for Briar. It was easy to just let him go off and do his thing, but now that I was here, in the middle of the night, watching him get chased by Corrupted lions …

  “They might,” Briar said, “if I was going that way.” He nodded toward the forest where the lions had gone. “But west is that way, as the stars above clearly reveal.” He pointed over his shoulder, beyond the aluminum shed.

  My nerves settled a bit. I took a deep breath. “You’re freaking brilliant, rabbit.”

  He hopped off the shed, taking a low bow. His eyes found my leg. “Oh dear.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, putting a hand over it. The moment I did, I immediately started worrying. The lion broke skin. There’s a freaking hole in your leg, Alice! “Just bring back good news.”

  Briar hopped onto the fence, traveling along the top beam and then bounding over it when he reached the western end of the farmer’s property. I watched his shadow disappear behind a cluster of houses far in the distance, then turned back to the farm.

  “What else?” I asked the black sky. “What else do I need to see here? Why haven’t I woken up yet?”

  The stars above decided not to give me an answer.

  I willed my body to hover over the snow, sick of the dull cold ache in my toes. I could feel the snow on the bare soles of my feet. I could feel the cold air, only it wasn’t as intense as if I was really outside in my human form. It was like a distant, fleeting sensation, the exact moment after you step into a warm house after an intense day of sledding and can’t quite shake the cold off immediately.

  “What do I need to do?” I asked the stars. “How about a hint, at least?”

  The response wasn’t exactly what I expected: a boxy-looking police car turning onto the dirt road that led to the farmhouse, its dim yellowish lights cutting across the field. It rolled slowly, its tires crunching on the snow-covered gravel. It parked in
front of the farmhouse and a uniformed officer stepped out, his warm breath escaping in a shaky cloud of steam. He drew his gun, shining a flashlight right over me before taking in the strange prints in the snow.

  The farmer opened the front door a crack, peering out. He spoke some frantic Hungarian, no doubt at least some of which consisted of “I swear I saw some terrible monsters here and they almost ate me whole!”

  The officer listened, nodding and turning back to the field. It looked as if the poor farmer was being 100 percent honest, given his bulging eyes and terrified cracking voice, and the policeman seemed oddly accepting of it all. The farmer pointed to the area where I’d tussled with the lions, where snow had been disturbed and chunks of frozen dirt had been torn up by some very, very big claws. The policeman nodded, shining his flashlight on it for a moment before looking around again.

  Here they were: human beings who’d been unwittingly dragged into the affairs of the hero and the Corrupted. Human beings caught in the crossfire, whose lives were forever changed. Just like Harper, who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time at the Assassin fortress. Just like the sailors who’d made a deal with the wrong captain. Just like Edward’s unfortunate victims. I felt a pang of remorse for the farmer, knowing he would never forget what he’d seen. In fact, he would probably spend a good portion of his life trying to forget what he’d seen.

  The police officer definitely didn’t want to stick around. And the farmer wasn’t too happy about that, but the officer didn’t seem to care all that much about pleasing him. He pulled his blue cotton hat down over his ears, walking back toward his car. The farmer shouted at him, pointing in the direction of the northern forest but the policeman, bidding him a curt goodnight, got back in his car and slowly pulled back in reverse.

  The farmer shut his door. With the headlights from the police car still aimed at the house, I could make out the door clearly.

  And I could make out the symbol carved into the door:

  %

  Chapter 5

  I woke to the sound of my phone alarm, my mind not quite ready to jump back into my real body. I reached groggily for the phone on the nightstand, nearly knocking over the who-knows-how-insanely-expensive glass table lamp in the process. I yawned, rolled out of bed, landed on cold floor, and felt a dull ache in my left leg.

  “Ouch!” I said, limping around the bed and into the bathroom. I turned on the light to examine my thigh, terrified of seeing a puncture wound that would no doubt mean another trip to the doctor and a thorough cleaning to ensure there would be no infection. But the hole wasn’t there. The skin was badly bruised, and shallowly indented in four places.

  Right where a lion’s teeth would be. Not as bad as it had been in my dream, but still bad enough to make walking a chore.

  “But it was just a dream,” I whined, sitting on the toilet and examining the bruise closer. The punctures hadn’t drawn blood; the skin was a dark purple around each circular depression. I shuddered—if my body hadn’t instinctively turned ethereal when the lion had chomped down, it might have taken my leg clean off.

  And then what would have happened when I woke up?

  “It would have been time to pass the torch to a new hero,” I murmured, taking off my clothes and stepping into the little shower stall. I let lukewarm water hit my face, keeping my eyelids half-open so I could get some refreshing water on my eyes. I liked the feeling, especially in the mornings. And I didn’t want to be trapped in the darkness behind my closed eyelids.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the next hero. Just repeating the words in my head sent a chill down my body. The more I thought about it, the worse the chill got. I grabbed the metal railing attached to the tile wall to keep from falling over.

  There would be another hero. I would eventually die. It would happen sooner rather than later. Whatever normal life I could piece together would be short and occasionally interrupted by dreams about terrible creatures that lurked in the shadows. One of them, someday, would kill me. Would it be Sam Grayle? Would it be the Malevolence? Or would it be something I’d never seen before, slipping out of the shadows and killing me? It could happen anytime. My last diary entry would be unfinished, splashed with blood, my last words trailing off.

  I see the death of your loved ones …

  Would I be with someone when it happened? Would the Corrupted kill whoever I was with, or would Briar somehow save them? I thought again of Chase, of his limp body just sitting in his wheelchair in the prince’s courtyard. He’d died. I hadn’t been able to save him without the help of a little magic vial that had once belonged to a fairy tale character.

  “Don’t worry about the future. Worry about now,” I murmured, stepping out of the shower and wiping the film of steam off the mirror. I stared at the healing cuts on my shoulder. They were a little red and puffy, so I dabbed the corner of the towel with hydrogen peroxide and carefully patted them. The cuts immediately began to tingle, just another reminder of how fragile my body really was.

  I was going to be the next one to die. I could feel it. My body was falling apart, tallying up bruises and cuts and cracked bones faster than Chase used to tally up home runs. This chronicle of my life would abruptly cut off, and then Briar would be tasked with carefully hiding away the pen for the next hero. I’d be laid to rest, or maybe I would suffer a worse fate, like Juliette.

  Chase would probably cry. He’d better cry.

  Briar had told me once that Eugene Washington, his creator, had been so beaten down after ten years of Corrupted hunting that he couldn’t even stand up straight. His back hurt every morning, forcing him to stay bent over and sometimes keeping him in bed for days at a time. He couldn’t run more than a handful of steps before his legs gave up. And that was after ten years. I hadn’t even made it through one yet.

  I dressed, combing my hair and applying a thin layer of makeup in attempt to hide my exhaustion. I couldn’t shake the feeling of my own mortality, and seeing the cuts on my shoulder wasn’t helping. I grabbed another towel, draping it around my neck to hide the wound. There. Mummy Alice. But the terrible feeling still wouldn’t go away! I couldn’t stop shaking this horrible feeling that the words in my diary would simply cut off.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Brenda the Blacksmith.

  Brenda was one of Briar’s first charges right after the death of Eugene Washington. She’d been having the same weird pen dream over and over and over and over and over until finally, figuring it probably meant something important, she travelled to a library in New York. Briar and the pen were waiting for her. I’m sure you can imagine what happened next: lots of screaming and freaking out.

  But there was no time to waste. After Eugene’s death, someone must have given the “all clear!” to every Corrupted in the world because a bunch of them decided it was the perfect time to visit America for a while. (Briar, smart little rabbit that he is, periodically checked the ship manifestos and recorded the number of people arriving with the name “Hans” or “Gretel.”)

  It only took five days for the nightmares to start.

  You know what I’m talking about. Floating around, invisible … following a scary fairy tale monster as it hunts down its prey … waking up drenched in a cold sweat … all that fun stuff. Brenda’s first quarry was Red Riding Hood herself. Only this wasn’t the cute little girl from the fairy tales … the Corruption had changed her. She kept the red hood, patching it up whenever she needed, making sure no one saw her pale, skeletal face as she skulked from one town to the next. She’d gone positively loopy, according to Briar. She was a modern-day angel of death, slipping into houses and searching for Grandma. When she found someone who looked close enough … well, it didn’t end happily.

  So here’s what Brenda did: she made horseshoes. She used her pen to draw horseshoes and she hammered them to her best horse and then she traveled a hundred miles west, hunting down Red Riding Hood and trampling her. Poof! Gone.

  But guess what? Red Riding Hood had a friend
. A prince from another fairy tale who totally wanted Red Riding Hood to be his wife and wouldn’t take no for an answer—typical fairy tale prince, if you haven’t noticed yet. When he saw his beloved trampled under the magically-endowed hooves of Brenda’s horse, he attacked them both.

  And killed them.

  End of story. Brenda the Blacksmith, dead at the tender age of 18. She was hero for about a week. That’s the dark side of the hero’s journey. For every Perseus and Luke Skywalker, there are a hundred Brenda the Blacksmiths.

  So which one was I? Luke Skywalker or Brenda?

  “You’re Alice,” I told my reflection. “And you’re not just a hero. You’re a person with a life and guy who really digs you. And you’re going to kick some butt fencing. That’s all that matters right now. Right, Reflection Alice? Right, Real Alice … totally. Do not worry about the malevolent force of evil that’s biding its time and waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Thanks, Reflection Alice. You always know exactly what to say.”

  I took off my towel, looking down again at my bruised leg. It looked bad, but not as bad as it had been in my dream. In my dream, there had definitely been punctured skin. Lacerations from the scarred lion’s incisors. Like the dull cold of the outside air, it was as if my ethereal form was … tougher.

  Show time. Ten o’clock on the dot and we were suited up, waiting for the Romanian announcer to call on the U.S. team to enter the arena. None of us had any idea what to expect. We’d seen the arena before it was finished being set up and it had looked a lot like a basketball arena, only with seats in place for the scoring judges and the flashy signs above were all for fencing stats and not basketball stats. It had looked like a big deal.