Grim

by Thea Atkinson

  A man. Glamour or not, the thing holding me was real. It was physical. It had managed to find the corporeality it had been draining Sarah for and was on the cusp of its complete transformation. I thought it strange that all the horrible things he could have become, as Azrael had said, it would choose to become a man. A plain and simple man with all the weaknesses and flaws of a human.

  And yet I knew one place men were vulnerable, even if beastly creatures weren't.

  Like I had done to the maniac in the cathedral, I lifted my knee with as much thrust as I could find and it landed directly between his legs. Bastard, I wanted to say. Take that. Suffer. Let me go.

  And it did let me go. Just enough that I could kick him again. Mercilessly. Then again. With a vengeance.

  He dropped his grip on me and when I kicked him the third time, he fell to my feet. Fully a man for all that. Cradling himself.

  I was vaguely aware of a sense of victory, but it wasn't enough. The adrenaline was already soaking my tissues and it was hurtling through my body like a train. I was furious. Righteously angry. How dare it touch me. How dare it come after the people I loved.

  I kicked at the thing, shoving it backwards.

  I scrabbled for the nearest stone and lifted it high over my head. The creature rolled over just enough it could catch my eye. Something shifted in its depths. Before I could drop the rock down onto the creature, the entire thing shivered and wavered in front of me. It was trying to shift again; I knew it. I imagined it fully intended to slip back into that awful looking creature with double rows of teeth. As a man, it could only do the worst a man could do.

  But it was a man. Not a horrible looking creature. A man.

  I dropped to my knees next to it with the rock in my hand.

  "Do it, Ayla," Callum yelled.

  I hesitated. It looked so human. I didn't know how I could go through with it.

  "Now," Callum said.

  Like the flickering of an old-fashioned TV screen, the creature's body shifted and wavered in front of me. I waited, transfixed, only barely aware of Sarah and Callum yelling at me to finish the job. The thing hissed at me, and although it looked like a human, it sounded like a beast from some nightmare. I lifted the stone high over my head.

  Something, some.. One... looked like it was peeling away from the thing's skin. Like a specter from a Shakespearean drama, it started to lift. They were becoming two separate things: specter and doppelgänger, and I realized in that moment that whatever had taken possession of the doppelgänger was trying to escape.

  I couldn't let that happen.

  I dropped the rock directly onto its skull and I heard a crack as the bones split apart.

  CHAPTER 18

  The nausea took me immediately.

  I crawled away into a corner and retched up everything I had put in my stomach that day. I was vaguely aware of someone holding back my hair and rubbing the back of my shoulders.

  It was Sarah's voice that came to me. "It's okay, you're going to be okay."

  The last bit of bile collected in the back of my throat and I had to cough to bring it forward. I spit it out onto the floor of the crypt. The sour stink of sick rose to my nostrils and I laid my hand on the wall, hanging over my knees. I was still trying to breathe, to fuel my quaking legs with oxygen. I shuddered without helping it.

  I didn't want to look behind me at the thing lying on the floor of the cavern. It looked too human.

  "We need to get Callum out of here," Sarah said. Her voice was stronger, much more clear. Her dizziness seemed to be receding and I imagined the adrenaline that no doubt fueled her also swallowed up the residual effects of the medication. I swung my gaze sideways to take in the way she was looking at me with concern across her face. Her eyes darted toward the middle of the crypt, she too, avoiding looking in the direction of the Doppelgänger's body.

  "Is he alright," I said, and heard my voice breaking. Every part of my body seemed to tense as I waited for the answer. "The thing didn't kill him did it?"

  She shook her head. "He's breathing, but he's bleeding an awful lot."

  "We have to call an ambulance," I said, and I felt almost normal uttering the simple words. I thought of the last time an ambulance had come to this place, the way it had carried her out of here. We had come an awful long way just to come right back here.

  "I already dialed," she said. "But we don't want them to come down here, do we?"

  I sighed. "You're right."

  I pushed myself off from the wall and took deliberate, if not shaky, steps toward the middle of the cavern where Callum lay on his side. Dark blood pooled out around his chest. He was clutching it and his eyes were wide as softballs. I knelt down next to him, feigning a calm I didn't feel.

  "We have to get you out of here," I said. I looked him in the eyes when I said it, trying to tell him without saying so that we couldn't risk anyone coming down here. They would see that creature looked ever so much like a human man's body and then we would be in for a world of questions we couldn't answer.

  "Do you understand?" I asked him.

  "I'm not deaf," he said. "Just hurt."

  Together, Sarah and I managed to push him up so that he was half sitting and half leaning on us. If he was in pain, he did no more than grunt and as I eyed him cautiously from beneath my bangs, I realized he was biting the bottom of his lip.

  We managed to get him to a weak stand, and he slung his arms over our shoulders. We stumbled and staggered our way to the entry and picked our way past the graveyard of fallen bones. We only had to get close enough to the tunnel entrance that no one from the ambulance would come in any further and see enough to decide to investigate further in.

  I noticed Sarah plucked one of the bones from the nook where the undisturbed skeleton sat, its skull grinning out at us. Without a word, she shoved it in the back of her pants, beneath the waistband of her jeans and if Callum noticed he was too busy fighting back the pain to say anything.

  All three of us collapsed at the entrance to the crypt and that was where the ambulance found us not five minutes later.

  I was on my way to the hospital in the back of the ambulance before I realized the Doppelgänger's brand hadn't come. My fingers trailed to my rib cage where the first had burned in. I tried to feel relief that I didn't have to experience a second one, but I couldn't help thinking that I felt cheated somehow.

  We had to do a bit of lying about running into a bobcat to explain the deep gashes in Callum's chest, and I wasn't sure if anyone in emergency really believed us. Luckily, when the victim agrees with the story, triage nurses merely look over the patient's head at each other. If they doubted us, they said nothing.

  The main thing was that he was going to be fine, and I hadn't realized how much that mattered to me until he was all bandaged up and coming out into the waiting room. There was a spark in his gaze as it landed on me that took the wind from my lungs. I sagged onto one of the hard back plastic chairs.

  We were exhausted, all three of us, but I had one more stop to make before I could go home and they seemed to sense it. Callum was the one who headed to the elevator first and punched the button. We trooped into intensive care and they waited outside the door while I went in to see my grandfather.

  He was still hooked up to dozens of wires and tubes, but his black eyes landed on me with all the alertness they'd always had. He looked relieved to see me. I clutched his hand a little tighter than I normally would. When he squeezed, I fell across his waist and sobbed until the blankets beneath my cheeks grew wet.

  It wasn't until I felt someone standing behind me that I sucked in the tears and peered over my shoulder.

  "The nurse says he's doing remarkably well," Callum said.

  I nodded. I felt as though I could finally breathe.

  Gramp seemed to look a little less pale than when I'd first come in. I ran my hand through his hair, smoothing it down around his ears were the tubes made it stick up.

  "I can leave you alone with him,"
Callum said, "if you want to talk to him in private."

  I shook my head.

  "I can't do it alone," I said. It was a hard admission, but I felt stronger with Callum there. There were plenty of things I wanted to say to Gramp. I wanted to tell him I didn't know what I would do if I had to live without him, that I would rather spend an eternity in the top of some angel's cane before I let anything happened to him. That he was the most important thing in my life.

  I swallowed down all those words because they didn't seem to contain exactly what I felt.

  "You're a tough old fart," I said to him.

  The ghost of a smile played at the corners of his mouth.

  Callum went around to the other side of the bed and I watched Gramp's eyes follow him.

  "They're going to take all those tubes out of him tomorrow morning if he keeps this up."

  "The nurses better watch out then," I said, feeling as though someone had taken a very heavy cloak off my shoulders. "Don't argue with them when they bring you oatmeal," I said. He hated oatmeal. He lifted his hand from the sheets and made a motion like he wanted to drink.

  "Water?" I asked.

  He shook his head and made the motion again.

  "Cocoa," Callum said and Gramp touched the tip of his nose with his index finger. I couldn't help but smile.

  "Maybe when you're all divested of those restraints," I said with a chuckle. It felt good. Liberating. For the first time in days I imagined things could actually look up.

  I gave Gramp's hand a short squeeze then pushed myself to my feet and shoved my hands in my pockets. I felt as though I could sit there and watch him for hours, just seeing that chest rise up and down as he inhaled and exhaled. I hadn't thought about his mortality until the moment I realized he was mortal. I hadn't thought about mortality at all. Ever. When my parents had died in that car crash, I had just sort of shut down. Death wasn't something that happened to your own parents. It was some unfortunate event that happened to someone else. While I'd been unequipped as a young teenager to deal with it then, I had the feeling with his near miss that whatever I hadn't processed all those years ago was going to come back fourfold. I wanted my grandfather around to help me through it.

  One thing nagged at me, though. One thing still unexplained that he would have to divulge when all this was over and he was feeling better. I couldn't ask him then, but I wanted him to know he still had some explaining to do.

  "Rest assured," I said to him, smoothing over his sheets. "You're gonna tell me what was in that bag."

  "That's easy," Sarah said from behind me. I turned around to see her leaning into the room, peering around the door frame.

  "The same sort of stuff that's in every malice bag," she said. "Although I'm not so sure you want to know how he has such a thing."

  "I don't even know what that is," I said and looked sideways at Callum. He shook his head, as oblivious as I was.

  Her chin seesawed back and forth and I had the feeling she was trying to decide how much to tell me. I sighed.

  "Go ahead," I said. "You might as well tell me."

  "It's made with witch's hair."

  I noticed her gaze flicked to Gramp where he lay on the bed. In response, my grandfather squeezed his eyes shut as though he had suddenly been taken by a Rip van Winkle need for sleep.

  Compared to all the other things I had experienced in the last few days, that actually didn't sound too bad.

  "Simple enough," I said and Callum echoed my sentiment, although I noticed he too flicked his gaze to my grandfather's face.

  "Well there's something else inside too," she whispered, her voice going harsh in the quietness of the room.

  "How bad is it?" Callum said over my head. There was an almost macabre sort of fascination in his eyes as he asked. I would have thought he'd had enough of supernatural things as well. The drawn outlook in his face certainly said so.

  Sarah leaned in toward him, rasping out the words and I noticed Gramp flinching as she spoke.

  "A little bit of liver or little bit of heart. It's never the same. But it's always from the same witch who donates the hair."

  "You say donate, but.." I trailed the last of the sentence off because I had a hard time contemplating how he'd come into possession of it, let alone saying it out loud. A person couldn't exactly donate their liver or their heart.

  "Bingo," she said. "The witch would need to be dead," she said. "Which means that your dear old Gramp here knows a little bit about sorcery and magic, and not the lovely white unicorn kind either."

  I caught Callum's eye and saw in their depths a look of disbelief that must have mirrored my own.

  I dropped my gaze to Gramp. I saw him peeking out through one squinted eye.

  "Druid, huh?" I said. "It sounds to me like that's just a cover. Maybe someone has a secret."

  Gramp's mouth twitched around the tubes.

  Sarah came up beside me. She ran her hand over Gramp's heart, her fingers fluttering in midair as they hovered over his solar plexus. "Actually," she said. "Druid magic is quite complex and can be quite dark at times. I'm sure he's telling you the truth."

  She looked at me sideways. "And since that seems to be the case, I'd bet that would make your house a perfectly safe place for a necromancer who has nowhere else to go."

  I couldn't imagine what Azrael would say when he realized I was housing a druid as well as a necromancer. I kind of wanted to tell him just to see the look on his face.

  I looked to see her grinning at me and I realized exactly how afraid she had been in the crypt. She looked like her old self again, back before the government services tried to send her home. She reached out for my hand and I felt her squeeze it.

  She looked at me with a plea in her expression even though she should have known perfectly well that I didn't need for her to ask. It wasn't up to me, though; it was up to Gramp.

  The nurse poked her head in the door. She looked annoyed as she took in the amount of people hovering around Gramp's bed.

  "I'll leave," Callum said.

  "You all need to leave," the nurse said.

  I didn't want to go, but had to.

  "You need to sleep," I said to him. "I'll be back later."

  His hand snaked out and gripped my elbow. He tugged on my arm. When I turned to look at him, I realized he was doing his best to pucker up around the tubes.

  With a small clucking sound, I pecked his forehead with a kiss. He caught my eye as I pulled away and flicked his gaze toward Sarah. I got the message immediately.

  "You can have my room," I said to her. "I'll stay in Gramp's for now."

  The relief that crossed her face was palpable. And I realized how good it felt to have a friend again.

  I left the hospital with the sense that something still hung over my head, but I decided to shelve that particularly unsavory feeling until I had more energy.

  All I knew was that I needed to get home. I needed to see the familiar 70s wallpaper and the line of pictures going up the stairs. I needed to drop on my bed and fall asleep for a million years.

  CHAPTER 19

  I woke several hours later with a telltale pain in my ankle. The only light in the room was the yellow glow from Gramp's old-fashioned digital alarm clock. I shot up in bed, gripping my foot with both hands and doing my best to bite down on the moan working its way through my throat. I rocked back and forth on the bed, cradling my ankle in the vain hopes the pain would recede. It occurred to me, as a fresher wave crested up my calf, that this was exactly what I had felt hanging over me. I should have known I couldn't escape it for long.

  Azrael came when the pain was at its worst. and he rode it out with me. He held my hand through it all and squeezed my fingers to distract me. Every now and then he caught my eye and while I thought that wry twist to his mouth would be to mock me, he said nothing until the pain was done. Then he pushed himself to his feet, brushing his suit free of wrinkles and stood looking down at me.

  He looked too compassionate for my
taste. I wanted to hate him. I had to remind myself he was the reason I was suffering.

  "What took you so long?" I bit out.

  "You needed your sleep," he said and ran his fingers through the black forest of hair so that it waved delicately around his ear lobes. That peculiar light edged his body again, and I could swear I heard harp music.

  "I prefer you looking like an old man," I said. Being woke up in the middle of the night was bad enough, but being rattled awake by pain in the presence of the Angel of Death was most decidedly not on my fantasy list.

  His chuckle was like the sound of a harp being plucked in all the wrong places. I glared up at him from the bed. The pillows behind me bundled up against my back in an uncomfortable way.

  "If you knew I needed my sleep, why didn't you just wait until morning?" I flipped the blankets back and limped over to the light switch. I took perverse pleasure in snapping it on, hoping he might have to blink away at the sudden light. He didn't. The only one left squinting in the glare was me.

  He chuckled and tapped my bed with the tip of his cane. "Spiteful even in your human flesh," he said. "Come have a seat."

  I crossed my arms over my chest. "I prefer to stand."

  He pulled his suit legs up at the knee and eased himself down on the edge of the bed and let me look down on him. I got the feeling he was trying some warped reverse psychology. The cane propped between both knees with both his hands on the top. I noticed how elegant those fingers were as they curled around the grieving angel.

  "It's done then," he said.

  I nodded, not trusting my voice.

  "But no necromancer," he said.

  "You really thought I would reap her?" I said.

  He lifted an eyebrow. "Actually," he said. "I would've been surprised if you did."

  "Damn straight," I said and glowered at him. "What in the hell was that thing?"

  "Which thing, exactly?" he said in a frustratingly naive voice. Then he laid his cane against his chest and lifted his hands to count the fingers on one hand. "There's the druid in the hospital bed," he said. "Then there's the necromancer, the doppelgänger the –"