Wish Bound (A Grimm Agency Novel Book 3)

by J. C. Nelson

  He strode to the side of the parking garage entrance, staying just inside the shadows. With his attention focused on me, I don’t think he ever saw Ari’s attack coming.

  She hit him with a blast of raw Seal Magic, not even bothering to twist it to an elemental form, throwing him back into the concrete wall. Then she switched her method of attack, drawing Wild Magic from the air around us.

  The huntsman rose with a cough, shaking off her spell. The skins huntsmen wore shielded them from minor details like elemental spells or ordinary bullets, so when I pulled out my nine millimeter, he didn’t even flinch. I squeezed the trigger, and the bullet ricocheted off of the concrete garage roof above him.

  I didn’t miss.

  The ruined sprinkler over him exploded, gushing water like a fountain. It drenched him, soaking his alligator skin boots so that each step he took, he sloshed. The artificial downpour cascaded down into our garage. A little water wouldn’t hurt him any worse than my bullets, something I believe we both knew.

  Ari, however, had a creative streak born from her lack of proper training. Huntsmen relied on their enchantments to stop elemental spells.

  Those enchantments could stop a blast of pure fire, or a wind colder than the last ice age. They couldn’t do a damned thing about the fact that Ari didn’t cast a spell at him. She dropped the temperature to fifteen below.

  If he’d had an ounce of sense, the huntsman would have held still. Instead, he fought to wrench a foot loose, teetered, and crashed into the ground, where his fur froze him to the wet concrete. He shrieked curses and struggled in vain to free himself while a snowstorm formed inside the parking garage, fueled by Ari’s spell.

  “Nice touch.” I unwound the bolo he’d hit me with and rose, just in time to see Ari cast “Foot-to-Head,” a classic spell that worked wonders when one wore steel-toe boots. His furs didn’t protect against that either.

  Ari hit him with another blast of cold to solidify the ice, then grabbed my hand. “I counted four on the camera. Can I borrow your keys?”

  We ran to my car, where I tossed them across to Ari, got in, and then thanked Grimm for making certain I had passenger-side air bags as Ari started the engine and peeled out of the garage, rocketing up the ramp.

  Ari, as we may have gone over, was unfortunately a princess. Natural luck, grace and charm that only got better as she aged, and everything from undead sorcerers to Inferno’s guardians loved her. The exchange principle, however, meant she gave up something.

  Ari never drove. It wasn’t just the eleven times she failed the driving test. Or the three Agency convertibles she totaled without ever managing to leave the parking lot. Hell, the one time we were in a rowboat, I didn’t let her touch the oars because I hadn’t forgotten when the captain of the Ellis Island cruise let Ari steer. Hitting an iceberg in the Hudson River pretty much sealed the deal—the universe didn’t want Ari behind the wheel of anything larger than a model car.

  The thing was, if you wanted someone run over, Ari was the go-to woman. As we exited, she swung the wheel so hard we fishtailed around the corner, then gained more speed in fifteen yards than I would in two blocks. As we approached the cargo bay at the back of the Agency building, she jumped the curb and aimed at the huntsmen standing at the loading dock.

  Anyone else wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. Even my mentor, who taught me how to drive badly, couldn’t have timed it, but right as Ari reached the bay, the universe reached down to remind her to always take a cab. The passenger-side tires blew out, and we ran over a dolly left carelessly beside a truck.

  I wasn’t the least bit surprised when our car rolled on its side, passing exactly between two parked delivery trucks, and flattened an extremely surprised huntsman before burying us in a box of champagne glasses destined for Kingdom.

  I smashed my way out of the side window, lamenting yet another car relegated to the scrap heap, and whipped my head around as the telltale twang of a repeating crossbow echoed from our cargo bay. Ari lay slumped against the wheel, breathing, but unconscious. It figured, being a princess and all, that the worst she’d get out of this was a headache.

  “Grimm, watch out for Ari.” He couldn’t answer without a reflection, but the pulse of his power through my bracelet meant he heard.

  “Move.” Rosa’s voice startled me so badly I almost shot her. She had her gun leveled at my chest, that same look of lemons dipped in curdled milk, as always, plastered to her face.

  I nodded to the door. “You want the left side, I’ll take right?”

  “No. Stay away.” Rosa hobbled on over to the door, peeking inside. She took one half step in, and fired, paused, and fired again, before pivoting out. Then she put the gun up against the wall and pulled the trigger again, blowing a hole straight through the wall.

  For the record, enchanted furs are also not terribly helpful against a shotgun slug to the face, which was what one of the huntsmen caught.

  The other came rolling through the doorway, and only the slightest glimpse of silver gave me enough warning to throw myself to the floor. A dagger the length of my forearm stuck out of the concrete, and Rosa, she wasn’t nearly as fast or lucky.

  She’d been pinned to the wall with a spent bolt on the outside of her shoulder. I couldn’t tell if it shattered the humerus or not, but based on the lack of gushing blood, it probably missed a major artery. Rosa’s shotgun, along with one of her thumbs, lay on the ground in a pool of her blood.

  I didn’t give the huntsman the chance to finish what he started, squeezing off one shot after another. Problem was, I had the only weapon those bulletproof skins actually worked on. He came for me, pulling fresh knives from the bandoliers about his chest.

  And something inside me seemed to scream, a part of me that I didn’t know was there. I’d felt something similar before, when my harakathin answered. I waited, hoping that one of them might have survived. Blessing or curse? I didn’t care. Either would do.

  Come, I willed them. What stepped out of the shadows in answer to my call, I’ll never be able to forget. A monster like some sick surgeon had grafted a dozen rotten bodies together, lashing muscle to muscle and bone to bone, without regard for or knowledge of anatomy.

  It lurched forward, stumbling and crunching its own bones, gurgling like a fountain of blood ran somewhere deep inside. The eyes on all three of the heads were lit with golden light.

  The huntsman took one look at it and decided that between the two of us, it was a lot scarier. He pulled his hood down over his face and began to fling knives, throwing them so hard they exploded out the other side of the creature.

  I stood transfixed, trying to find a way to send the thing back to whatever gory realm it called home, but I didn’t understand how I’d brought it well enough to punch a return ticket. I glanced back to Rosa, who struggled to pull the bolt from her. As I did, the peephole in the veil drifted into view, and I saw the thing.

  A mass of golden light, it shifted, forming a tight series of intricate patterns like Celtic knots. Rosa, too, stood out, her entire body wrapped in a cerulean aura, the same color as the huntsman and Ari. The monster stumbled a few steps closer, and half lunged, half collapsed, tearing at the huntsman with fingers and teeth.

  He stopped screaming after what seemed like an eternity.

  I can’t say the same for me, because as the abomination rose and came toward me bits of fur and a fresh set of arms waved from its torso. Closer and closer it came, and finally I found a way to run, sprinting toward the elevator.

  Behind me, it grunted with several sets of lungs, and whistled as it sprinted after me, moving faster on broken limbs than I could run. At the back of the loading bay, I hefted a canister of propane for the cutting torch and threw it back at the thing.

  The canister by itself did nothing.

  The bullet I followed it up with, on the other hand, did, causing a fireball the size of
a pickup truck to explode out. I instinctively ducked. I wasn’t faster than a fireball. I barely got my eyes shut before it hit, and if it weren’t for my engagement ring, I’d have lost my eyebrows, and possibly my eyes.

  The body-blob squealed and whined, crackling in the fire, until at last the spell holding it together dissipated. Ignoring the burns on my face, I limped back to the storeroom. Mikey lay, locked in a death grip with a fifth huntsman, one I’d not seen on the monitor. The two wrestled back and forth, despite the fact that Mikey’s entrails decorated the room like confetti streamers.

  Furs don’t protect against tire-irons-to-kidneys either, which I made sure to repeat until he stopped moving. After I helped drag Mikey’s intestines back so he could start healing, I broke the shaft off the bolt pinning Rosa and caught her as she collapsed.

  “Unos Desalmado.” She repeated it over and over, flinching away from me in fear, unwilling to even meet my eye.

  Once, I’d been fooled by Rosa into repeating a lot of very unkind phrases that didn’t mean what she said at all. Over the years, my Internet Spanish classes had paid off, and I knew exactly what it was she meant. Soulless Ones.

  Eight

  AFTER THE AMBULANCE took Rosa away to the hospital, and after I’d woken Ari with a blast from an air compressor, I headed back up to the office, determined to have it out with Grimm. I marched through the Agency door, straight into his office, where he waited in the mirror, hands folded in front of him. Grimm had changed suits to a slightly darker shade of gray silk. His suits often worked like mood rings, but I couldn’t tell what this color meant.

  I plopped down in the left-hand chair. “When I said look out for Ari, I didn’t mean you couldn’t help me. Did you see that thing? Do you have any idea what it is?” My rants petered out as he waited, the slightest twitch of his lips telling me how serious the situation was.

  “Yes, I knew what it was. The Hebrew name would be golem, meaning ‘half formed,’ though, as you could see, it is indeed formed. Sculpted, one might say, from discarded flesh.” Grimm paused, and the door on his office slammed shut, sealing me in.

  “Rosa called it one of the ‘soulless ones.’ That make sense to you?” I kept my gaze fixed on him, watching his every movement.

  Grimm looked down, nodding. “Yes. A body without a soul to guide it. A spell bound to human flesh and let free to walk among men. I do not believe it wanted to harm you. They were traditionally used as guardians.”

  “I wasn’t taking any chances. And how, exactly, does a spell control a body? Or a pile of bodies?”

  “Your blessings were intelligent, and alive. Imagine the chaos capable if they had flesh to wrap their form in. Spells are alive as well; though, like blessings, they lack free will. They must be given directives, and will follow them blindly.” Grimm turned around, staring away from the mirror.

  “Why would anyone create something like that?”

  I thought he wasn’t going to answer. I’d asked him questions before that made him go silent for hours, like “Why did you tip the pizza man fifty thousand dollars?” and “Can you explain why people listen to boy bands?”

  I was just about to leave him to his meditation when Grimm spoke. “Because my daughter shares similar interests to my own. She seeks to create spells that will be her servants and fashion bodies for them.”

  Of the numerous admissions in that statement, I’m not sure what alarmed me most. That the Black Queen was creating more of these things or that Grimm so much as admitted he’d done it before. “That doesn’t answer the question. Why?”

  “She wants what she cannot have. Servants with both unquestioning, infallible loyalty to her, and with the initiative to guide themselves beyond simple instructions. She will fail, as I did, but not before she unleashes more of her creations on the world.” Grimm whispered, so low I barely heard, “She seeks to violate the laws of magic.”

  The laws of magic. Some of them were pretty easy to understand. “Magic may not magic oppose.” So spells aimed at each other usually went wildly wrong, shearing away like magnets of the same pole. “Magic may not to magic give rise.” You couldn’t create a spell that cast a spell, and so on, and so on. That only left the third law. “Magic may not magic command.” Usually this meant you couldn’t have one spell fire another, but it had all sorts of side effects. Magic sensors, for instance, couldn’t trip on spell creatures because it would be two forces of magic commanding each other.

  A knock at the door interrupted what would have been a very awkward conversation. Grimm glanced to the door. It unlocked itself and opened as Grimm intoned, “Come in.”

  Through the door stepped Mikey, in his wolf form. He had to bend over and turn sideways to fit through the door. “Magrraaahahah.” He shook his head, losing a little length on his snout.

  “Mariiffaaa, I garfaaahahhahm.” Putting his claws beside his head, he began to shrink, and shrivel, the fur on him retracting inward like a backwards time-lapse video. “Marissa, you need to do something about Ari.”

  “I’ll schedule her MRI shortly,” said Grimm, his tone saying the matter was settled.

  Mikey shook his head. “She won’t come out of her office, and she’s killing me with her sobbing. Hey, congrats on making handmaiden.” Mikey gave me a thumbs-up, an idiotic grin on his face.

  After a moment he still hadn’t apologized or caught his own mistake. My hands shook and my face turned red. “Do you have any idea what that means?”

  “Yup.” Mikey nodded. “We wolves worked for the Black Queen last time, before Grimms there had her killed. I hear she was way ahead of the times in workers’ benefits.”

  Grimm’s mirror began to glow in a way that said Mikey was about two words from getting hit by lightning or changed into a very hairy, toothy toad. I grabbed Mikey by the hand and ran from Grimm’s office, spinning on my heel as he followed, and delivering a kick to his crotch that left Mikey curled in a ball on the floor.

  “Don’t. Ever. Say. This. Is. Good.” With each word, I landed another kick to him, letting my tears loose and daring the nearest temp worker to intervene. I left him in the hall and went to Ari’s office. Inside, Ari slumped over, her head down on her desk.

  I patted her on the shoulder. “We didn’t get to talk.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I was supposed to save you.” Sobs punctuated her statements, but her dead eyes couldn’t cry.

  I sat across from her, taking her hand. “I’ve been through worse.”

  She glared at me, sending a chill down my spine. “Don’t joke about this. It’s not funny.”

  “I know. But I still tell myself I’ve been through worse.” A wave of self-pity threatened to drown me, so I changed the subject. “Where’s Wyatt?”

  “He ran home to his mommy.” Ari’s tone didn’t carry the contempt I would have used. “He’s asking Ms. Pendlebrook for all the information she has on the Black Queen. And I suspect he’s going to take a few princes out for drinks and ply them for information on what happened to the High Queen.”

  When Wyatt’s mother served as High Queen, she had access to secret files from Kingdom’s Government. “Wyatt drinks?”

  “Milk, juice, and soda water when he has his floss and toothbrush handy. He’ll buy other people alcohol, but sparkling apple cider is pretty hard-core for him.” Ari shook her head. In two years, I think Wyatt not only hadn’t passed second base, he’d run back to home plate a couple of times.

  On the other hand, with twice-a-week therapy sessions, he could now sit beside Ari without breaking into sweats, and as long as she didn’t look at him, I’d seen him kiss her at least three times. The fact that his earliest memory was of a witch killing his father didn’t help their relationship.

  Ari looked up at me and seized my hands so tightly it hurt. “I will fix this. I will do whatever it takes to free you.”

  The bell o
n Ari’s desk rang, and a moment later, Grimm swirled into view. “Marissa, I hate to interrupt, but I’ve spoken with Liam. I need you to go to his workshop, my dear. He’s working on proper armament there.”

  “You find anything on the souls?”

  “Not yet. Keep an eye out on the way to Mr. Stone’s and if you run across them, you can do something about it.” Grimm disappeared before I could comment on how unlikely I was to meet stolen souls while traveling across town. Then again, this was the city, and I’d seen just about everything else on the subway from time to time.

  I didn’t really need any encouragement to go see Liam, even though the only place he could afford to buy was on the south end of the city. Two buses, one cab, and zero souls later, I finally reached Liam’s workshop.

  When we rebuilt it, he insisted on using wood from old houses, scavenging and salvaging for months, but the result was that his studio, the thing he loved before he loved me, was a work of art. Looking like a combination farmhouse, barn, and industrial smelter, its gray wooden walls had never been repainted. They still held stripes of whatever color the original building was.

  I hauled the sliding door open, and the blast of classic rock and the heat of the forge washed out over me. I’d visited dwarf forges a few times. Dark places, filled with smoke and piles of broken material. Liam lit his forge with fluorescent light and kept the floors clean.

  He leaned over the grinding wheel in the corner, throwing sparks against the floor like a shower of fire.

  I walked up behind him and ran my hand up his back. Once Liam focused in on a task, the world might burn down around him and he’d never know.

  He didn’t so much as flinch, or take his eyes off the edge, which he held at an angle, working the blade.

  While he ground it, I ran my hands over his muscles, feeling the tension and strength that held the metal just right. After what seemed like an eternity, he turned off the grinding wheel and set the blade down. “It’s ready. Grimm?”