Grimm - The Icy Touch

by Shirley, John

  “I...yeah,” Monroe said, looking at her shapely form in the clinging gray silk dress. “I like the dress. Very, very... nice. It’s like... really tight. Not that, uh, that is all I like about it. I mean, it’s a great dress. It’s got real... Sorry. I’m not a fashion guy.” He nodded at Nick, then looked back at her more seriously. “But... Rosalee...”

  “But what?” she asked.

  Nick leant on the counter, looking at a twisted, blackened homunculus in a half-gallon jar. What was that, dried dwarf fetus?

  Monroe went on, all in a rush, “But all I can think about is—I don’t think you’re safe here alone right now.”

  “Oh you are so full of it. You get so— Nick, tell him!”

  Nick smiled at Rosalee.

  “She’s not in any imminent danger that we know of, Monroe,” he said.

  Monroe snorted. “‘Not in imminent danger.’ Oh, hey, dude that’s so reassuring.” Monroe turned to Rosalee and took her in his arms. “Rosie, you don’t understand. If you knew what was going on... Stuff that would make your head explode... Well, my head hasn’t literally exploded, no, but—”

  “It’s all right, baby,” she said softly, returning his embrace. He nuzzled her neck.

  Nick suddenly felt a bit awkward.

  “I should go,” he said. “I just wanted to suggest— maybe you should go see a relative, or something, Rosalee. Just for a few days. Take a trip, till this Icy Touch thing is over. They’ve been forcibly recruiting Wesen. Monroe can call you when it’s all clear...”

  “What?” She drew back from Monroe. “No! I just got back from a trip, I’m behind on the bills; I’ve got work to do! No one’s going to want me to join a gang! Do I look like a gangbanger?”

  Nick pretended to look her over doubtfully.

  “Um... I guess not.” To Nick she looked like sweet-faced, brown-haired Rosalee Calvert, in a new blue silk dress. Nick had seen her fox-faced Fuchsbau form—and it was almost as sweet as her human form. “But—they make a point of recruiting a certain number of people you wouldn’t expect in a crime cartel. And you’d be valuable.” He nodded toward the crowded shelves of her herbal apothecary shop. “Those skills—your herbal knowledge, your Wesen lore, all the supplies. This shop used to be... kind of shady. Before your time here, I mean. You know? Wesen working the dark side of the street are going to remember that.”

  “Oh, look, no one’s going to make me do anything I don’t want to...”

  “Rosie, honey,” Monroe said, taking her hand. “They have a policy about people who don’t want to play along. They make an example of them.”

  “Well... stay here with me, watch my back, then, Monroe.”

  “Hey—I’ll camp outside the door if I have to.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I might just find a spot for you with me...”

  Nick’s phone buzzed.

  “Your pants are ringing again,” Rosalee said. “You ought to get that looked at, Nick.”

  He laughed and fished the phone out of his pocket.

  “Burkhardt.”

  “Nick...” Hank’s voice said. “That Drang-zorn of yours?”

  “Yeah?” Nick felt a sinking sensation.

  “He’s dead. Looks kinda like a heart attack but... he had some marks on his back.”

  “Two marks, about fang distance apart?”

  “You guessed it.”

  “Shit. Königschlange.”

  “Don’t speak German to me, man. Just—get over here.”

  * * *

  “I seem to be spending a lot of time in morgues lately,” Renard remarked.

  Renard, Hank and Nick were standing around the body of the Drang-zorn. The morgue was cold, and smelt medical. The odor of the place, a mix of chemicals and decay, always made Nick’s stomach twist.

  He was bent over the body, a ruler in his hand, measuring the distance between the puckered bite marks on Doug Zelinski’s back.

  “Just right for a Königschlange,” he said after a moment, shaking his head. He stepped back, and stared at the dead body lying face down on the steel table. “Juliette says she likes pretty much all animals. Königschlange— even she’d find that one a challenge.”

  “Are they animals?” Hank asked. “They’re people, who can shift to...” He glanced at the door to make sure it was closed, and no one was listening. “...to become more... animal.”

  “Yes and no,” Renard said. “But then ordinary human beings are animals—they’re primates. Related to apes. Human beings are animals and something higher than animals all at once.”

  Nick set the ruler down on the steel table.

  “Lot of people turn into beasts without having to be Wesen. Serial killers. The worst kind of drug dealers—all the basest of animals.”

  “True,” Hank admitted, frowning at the body. After a moment he asked, “The transformational thing Wesen do, the woge thing... Is it magic? Or evolution?”

  “I don’t know,” Renard said. “Maybe it’s mutational, but... no one’s done any real thorough biological study of Wesen that I know of.” He looked at Nick, his eyes going flinty. “Not even Grimm. They mostly research how to kill them.”

  Nick noticed that Renard never spoke of Wesen as “we” or “us,” though he was part Wesen himself. But maybe that was only because he happened to be talking to a Grimm. Renard was stuck with Nick, for now—but it seemed he could never fully trust him. Well, Nick figured, that feeling is pretty mutual.

  “How did the Königschlange get into the cell?” he asked. “Who booked him in? We gave an order that nobody but Zelinski was supposed to be in that cell.”

  Renard rubbed his chin. “Technically, it was Brian Murphy. But Murphy says he can’t remember who gave him the paperwork to book the Königschlange into the cell...”

  “He can’t remember?” Hank said, in disbelief. “Murphy’s not that flaky.”

  “Hexenbiest, maybe, controlling him while the assassin was booked in,” Nick said. “Possibly using Seele Dichtungsmittel—so Murphy just goes with it.”

  “Hexenbiest?” Renard looked coldly at him for a moment, then he conceded. “Maybe. Murphy booked Colney out, too—but he doesn’t remember that either. And Colney’s nowhere to be found now.”

  “Colney’s the cobra guy?” Hank asked.

  Nick nodded. “That’s what he called himself when they booked him in.” He felt bad about Zelinski’s death. He’d thought the Drang-zorn would be safe in custody until something else had been worked out.

  Don’t assume.

  “So—any documentation on this Colney? Fingerprints in the cell, rap sheet, anything?” he asked.

  Renard shook his head.

  “He was careful. And Murphy’s got nothing. Not one sheet of paper. Being pretty defensive about it. Claiming someone broke into his files. Maybe he thought he saw paperwork that wasn’t there.”

  Hank looked at Renard, eyebrows raised.

  “This Seele Dichtungsmittel—it can do that?”

  “It could.”

  “Not a lot they couldn’t get away with, using that stuff...”

  “What bothers me most,” Nick said, turning away from the corpse, “is how many different kinds of dangerous Wesen are turning up in this town. It’s like a convention of the nastiest barrel scrapings of Wesen-kind.”

  “We done here?” Renard asked.

  The detectives nodded, and the three of them left the corpse, heading gratefully into the warmth of the corridor.

  “What’s their next move?” Hank wondered, as they walked.

  “We need prisoners to interrogate,” Renard replied, glancing down the hall. Sergeant Wu was coming toward them. In an undertone, Renard added, “If we have to use Seele Dichtungsmittel ourselves... so be it.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Monroe lay shirtless on Rosalee’s bed, as she fussed over him. He enjoyed the attention as she changed the dressing on the Blutbad bitemarks. She’d put the bandage on a few hours earlier, after they’d gotten undressed—
he’d hardly noticed the wound on his shoulder, hadn’t even mentioned it to Nick after the fight in the tunnel, or done much for it besides spraying a little Bactine on it. He’d been thinking more about how he’d bitten Nick’s hand while his friend was trying to help him.

  “You’re lucky this didn’t get infected,” Rosalee said, tightening the bandage. “Ignoring it like that.”

  “I’m lucky I didn’t give Nick an infection. You know I bit him?”

  “What? On purpose?”

  “No, of course not. His hand got in the way when I was fighting the other guy. Nick was just trying to help me. Wasn’t that bad a bite but... it worries me that I’d bite him at all. I was woged, feeling about as Blutbad as I ever have, and there was a hand in front of my choppers and maybe I thought it was the creep I was fighting—or maybe I didn’t care.”

  “I don’t believe you wouldn’t care, Monroe. Not you.”

  He smiled sadly. “You haven’t known me very long.”

  “If you feel bad about nipping Nick, apologize to him.”

  “I did. But see—it’s not just that, Rosie. I’m worried that being involved in all this stuff with Nick, advising him, getting caught up in investigations... that it might be making me, I don’t know... prone to relapse. To falling back into what I was. It’s like—you ever feel like something’s coming to a head in your life, kind of bubbling up in the back of your mind, and you’re seeing it everywhere? Maybe stuff you haven’t dealt with completely?”

  She patted his belly. “Yep. Been there. Felt that.”

  “That’s how it is now. The other day I was on my porch, checking out the smells from the woods. It was like the forest was calling to me.”

  She smiled. “It was. It calls to me all the time.”

  “But this was like it was saying, Let go. Go full on Blutbad! Let the wolf out and let the chips fall where they may. And I was tempted.”

  “So... head for the mountains, take off your shoes and have a good run.”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re Fuchsbau. You can do that.” He sighed with envy. “You can go all fox-woman out there. Me...”

  A thought struck him.

  “Maybe if you were with me. You know, like a chaperone! I can’t go by myself or with another Blutbad. You Fuchsbau—you might nip a human being. But you wouldn’t... kill one.”

  She seemed to consider.

  “Well... no,” she said. “It’s not very likely we’d kill anyone, as Fuchsbau. But I wouldn’t say it’s never happened.”

  “If it did, it was probably the human in the Fuchsbau, not the fox that did the killing. But with Blutbaden—in the old days we preyed on anything that came along. Including people. Most of us know we can’t do that anymore. So, people like me, and Smitty, we work the Twelve Steps, we work on our recovery.”

  She looked at him expectantly.

  “Seems like there’s been something you’ve wanted to tell me for a while, Monroe...”

  He let out a long slow breath.

  “Yeah. I mean—you’re Wesen, you had drug problems, you’ve got your dark side. But it’s not like this. And maybe you should know. All of it...”

  “I’ll get us some wine. And you can tell me...”

  * * *

  It didn’t start with Angelina. But she brought out the predator in me. Big time...

  You remember hearing about Angelina. Kind of a tough Blutbad bitch. I used to take her out on my motorcycle— you didn’t know I had a motorcycle, did you Rosie? I used to love that old rebuilt Indian bike so much I could kiss her. She ran like a fine Swiss watch. It was a Chief, with a 105ci PowerPlus, two-into-one stainless steel exhaust, really stripped down and beautiful. Angelina loved it even more than I did, and I gave it to her, eventually, as a goodbye present. Anyway, we’d take it out into the mountains for long rides, her holding onto me behind, and we’d wear those full-head helmets that cover you right up... and we’d woge during the ride, right? Just go all ‘full moon werewolf’ astride this motorcycle, barreling along at sixty miles an hour on a mountain road. But our Blutbaden state was hidden beneath our jackets and helmets and inside our gloves and boots. People would drive right by us in their RVs and not guess those bikers had fangs and fur.

  See, the whole ride was different, that way, when you’re woged and riding a motorcycle. It was something really savage. Talk about “Born to be Wild!”

  And then come sundown, I’d drive it up some old gravel fire road, way into the woods, park it off road somewhere, and we’d take off our helmets and gloves and boots and just... woge. We’d go looking for dinner. You know, al fresco, and I mean truly fresh. Raw. We’d chase down a couple of rabbits, even a small deer, and we’d... kill. And feed! And then we’d get crazy, make love all bloody from our prey. Don’t get that look, Rosalee, I’m not going to go into it. I don’t miss her at all. Really. No, I really don’t. And you probably had some experience like that as a Fuchsbau.

  So anyway—sometimes we’d encounter a bear, or a wildcat, and we’d have to drive it off. Those critters could be pretty territorial. We were hyper aware of the dangers out there and we got even more savage because of that.

  One night we’d slept out in the wild, and next morning we woged, drank from a stream, went hunting for breakfast—you know how it can be, out there. You get almost drunk on the smells and the textures and the sheer life-force of the forest. You go all primeval—you almost forget words! We pretty much used no spoken language, on these trips. We were just in this almost frenzied state of alertness—and then one time we encountered a cougar. Or he encountered us. The old canine versus feline, wolf versus wildcat thing was in the air. It was hissing and roaring and slashing at us with its claws and we were snarling and growling and snapping back at it. I finally drove him off but it was touch and go there for a while and we were, like, so adrenalized, after that. Our blood was up.

  And then Angelina ran into the forest ranger.

  The ranger was just hiking up a creek, doing his job. I think he wanted to drag out some dead elk supposed to be polluting it, farther upstream. Angelina was a little ways away from me, sniffing for prey—she just blundered into him, while she was still in this hot blood state. She slashed at him and snarled. Later on she claimed he was reaching for a pistol.

  I heard her yip like she was in danger, I ran over there with my pulse just slamming. And when I saw the two of them facing off, I guess I lost it.

  I leaped off a boulder, and attacked the guy.

  Maybe I had in mind I’d just knock him down and we’d run off and he wouldn’t know what had hit him, but he’d gotten hold of his gun, and it went off. It didn’t hit me, he was just twitching his finger on the trigger... But I guess it freaked me out.

  And I...

  Rosie, I ripped out his throat with my teeth.

  Let me have a glass of that white wine. No, definitely not the red wine, not right now.

  Okay. I bit through his jugular—and he died. You can say, natural mistake. Angelina said as much. I tried to think of it that way. But I know if I had come upon the scene when I wasn’t all worked up in full-on woge, if I wasn’t in that state, I’d have handled it differently. And the guy would still be alive.

  I had a sick physical reaction, afterward, when I spit out the flesh of his neck, spat out his blood, brought myself back to a default human state... and saw what I’d done. I threw up. And then I wanted to run, to just leave him there and try to pretend it hadn’t happened. But I made myself kneel beside him, and go through his pockets, try to get a sense of who he was. Angelina all the time urging me to just turn away, to let it go.

  My hands were shaking so much I barely managed to find his wallet. I memorized his name, his address from his ID. And I found something else in his wallet—pictures of his wife and kids. I memorized those faces.

  “You’re just beating yourself up, staring at that stuff,” Angelina said.

  I didn’t respond to that. I wiped my fingerprints off the ID and pict
ures, and put them back in the wallet, put the wallet back in his pocket. He had a map of the area in his jacket, and I worked out exactly where his body was on the map. I took the ranger’s cell phone so I could call it in on that. Then we got rid of all trace of our being there, as much as we could. We literally covered our tracks. And we walked back to my bike. All the way there, Angelina was telling me it wasn’t my fault, I’d saved her life and we were in a wild place and a ranger takes his chances in a place like that. She said it was part of his job to risk encountering dangerous wildlife and that’s what we were.

  When I didn’t respond to that she said something that really ticked me off.

  “He’s just one of them, anyway. A human. He’s not Wesen.”

  “You’re a sick little wolf bitch,” I told her. “We’re all humans. We’re just a different branch of the human race.”

  She said, “Not all Wesen agree with that.”

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” I said. “I have to take responsibility for this.”

  At this point I started to think maybe I should turn myself in. I wouldn’t have to break the code of silence. I could say I’d been on drugs or something. Like that “Bath Salts” stuff. Tell ’em I tore out his neck in a state of insanity and they could go ahead and incarcerate me.

  But there was too much risk that Angelina would be dragged into it. And anyway, I couldn’t face jail or a mental hospital. I’d probably kill myself in there.

  So I found another way to live with it.

  First I called the rangers, gave them a phony name, and said I was a hiker, and I’d come upon a dead ranger. I gave them an exact description of where he was. The creek was on a map and they had no trouble finding his body. I used his cell phone and then tossed it away. I checked the news that evening, and sure enough they found his body before the scavengers had gotten to it. Authorities figured a cougar had killed the guy. They didn’t look too closely at the wound. What else could they conclude? They don’t know about Blutbaden.

  I broke up with Angelina over this. But I gave her the motorcycle. I wanted her to know I didn’t blame her for what happened. I just couldn’t be with her. She was too feral.