Grimm: The Chopping Block

by John Passarella

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Historian’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Grimm: The Icy Touch by John Shirley

  Grimm: The Chopping Block

  Print edition ISBN: 9781781166567

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781781166574

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: February 2014

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © 2014 by Universal City Studios Productions LLLP

  Grimm is a trademark and copyright of Universal Network Television LLC.

  Licensed by NBC Universal Television Consumer Products Group 2014.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover images © Universal Network Television LLC.

  Additional cover images © Dreamstime

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  TITANBOOKS.COM

  To my wife, Andrea, for understanding my need to dive down the rabbit hole of odd hours, frequent distractions and occasional forgetfulness.

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  This novel takes place between “The Waking Dead” and “Goodnight, Sweet Grimm.”

  “He called them to the grand feast and gathered them in celebration, to remember and enjoy the finer things.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Brian Mathis wondered if he’d made a mistake bringing Tyler, his twelve-year-old son, to Claremont Park. Their little adventure had been fun and cheerful and full of father-son-bonding promise until they left behind the paved path and picnic tables, and wandered into the woods on a course prescribed by the virtual compass in the GPS app on Brian’s smartphone. The overnight rainfall had turned what would have been a reasonable hiking path into a treacherous endeavor. Lagging behind his father, Tyler had already fallen twice on gentle inclines slick with mud. And now the boy was coated with the stuff—hands, knees, shoes, and a caked spot on his chin he’d rubbed the same moment his patience had expired.

  Victim of his own clumsy misadventure, Brian proceeded on a twisted ankle—which continued to throb in counterpoint to his heartbeat—and reminded himself to take his eyes off the compass now and then to pay attention to his footing. Minutes later, head down and cursing under his breath, he walked right into a low-hanging branch. Hell of an example he was setting for his kid.

  “You said we were close, Dad,” Tyler groaned, prefacing that indictment with a prolonged sigh.

  “We are close,” Brian said. “But I told you before. The coordinates aren’t exact.”

  “So what’s the point?” Tyler hurled a rock the size of a ping-pong ball at the nearest tree trunk. The thwock of the impact startled a squirrel, which scampered along one branch, jumped to another nearby and scurried out of sight.

  “Don’t throw rocks.”

  “Nothing else to do.”

  Ignoring the boy’s complaint, Brian explained, “The coordinates take us to the general vicinity, then we look around until we find it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because… it’s like searching for buried treasure.”

  “I’m keeping it.”

  “No,” Brian said. “We sign the logbook and leave the container where we found it. The honor system. If we take it, the next person will go through all this trouble for nothing.”

  “You said I could take something,” Tyler reminded him.

  “Swap something,” Brian said. This particular geocache supposedly contained small toys. If you took something, you were supposed to leave behind an object of equal value. “You brought a soldier?”

  “Yeah,” Tyler said, rolling his eyes at his father.

  It had been years since Tyler played with toy soldiers, which was why he had no qualms about leaving one behind. Tyler hoped for an upgrade, maybe a used video game or something equally unlikely. So his father had spent most of the car ride to the park trying to quash those expectations.

  “The search is the fun part, not the prize at the end.”

  “Some fun,” Tyler grumbled loud enough for his father to hear.

  Secretly, Brian regretted not selecting a cache with the lowest level of difficulty for their first attempt. Instead, he’d chosen a cache closer to home, but with the next highest level of difficulty. A cache with toys, even cheap toys, he’d thought, would appeal to the boy. Brian’s second mistake was misjudging the rapid pace of Tyler’s maturity. At his current age, things transitioned from “cool” to “lame” in a hurry. Since the divorce, Brian saw his son less than he would have liked. The boy’s growth spurts took place in the uncompromising strobe light of his meager custody schedule.

  As a bank of rain clouds passed overhead, the woods became prematurely dark. Shadows deepened like an ink spill soaking the ground around them. The odor of moist earth rose like a clinging mist, enveloping them.

  Brian stopped, rubbed the back of his forearm across his damp forehead and said, “We’re here.”

  Tyler stood beside him, turned in a circle and shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “It’s here somewhere,” Brian assured him, but worried somebody before them might have removed the cache in violation of the honor system. If they left the park without finding anything, his son would never let him forget it. “Remember that time you dragged me through the woods in waist-deep mud for nothing?” Because exaggeration would become a key component in this particular trip down memory lane.

  “What about the clue?” Tyler asked.

  “Oh—right! The clue.” In his growing paternal anxiety, Brian had almost forgotten about the clue associated with the cache. He checked his phone. “It says, ‘Fall up the hill.’”

  They both cast expectant gazes around, as if expecting a hillside to magically rise from the
surrounding forest, crowned with a glowing treasure chest like a reward in one of Tyler’s video games.

  “That hill?” Tyler finally asked, pointing straight ahead. Brian looked behind them, then straight ahead. They had been following an incline for a bit, something he might have noticed if he hadn’t been mesmerized by the compass on his cell phone. Ahead of them marked the top of the rise, surrounded by an irregular ring of deciduous trees in various states of decay.

  “Must be it,” Brian acknowledged. “So how do we ‘fall up’?”

  We both figured out the falling down part easily enough, he thought, with a chagrined shake of his head.

  Tyler scrambled up the slope, littered with broken branches, twigs, and clumps of dead leaves well on their way to mulch that nevertheless rustled underfoot. He slipped once and caught himself on both hands before his knees touched the muddy ground again.

  “Careful,” Brian said, making his own way upward, mindful of his tender ankle.

  Tyler picked up a stout branch the length of a cane and swung it around to disperse the leaf mounds. When he reached down to flip over a football-sized rock, Brian caught his shoulder.

  “Watch out for snakes,” he cautioned.

  The possibility of encountering a snake, poisonous or otherwise, seemed to excite the boy’s imagination, but he took extra care as he grabbed the edge of the rock and flipped it over, poised to spring away to avoid the threat of fangs. Instead, he grunted in obvious disappointment as several freshly exposed worms coiled in the dirt.

  Tyler circled to the left, poking and sweeping with his branch, while Brian wandered into a tangle of dried brush and broken tree limbs at the edge of the clearing. Brushing away twigs and dried leaves, he discovered a jagged tree stump and, angling away from it, on the far side of the rise, the decaying length of the entire tree trunk, which retained only a few scattered branches.

  “A deadfall,” Brian whispered, then again, louder. “A deadfall.”

  “What?” Tyler called, glancing briefly over his shoulder.

  “This downed tree,” Brian called to his son. “It’s a deadfall.”

  “So?” Tyler replied, more preoccupied with a section of tangled underbrush and loose mounds of dirt—excavated, no doubt, by some burrowing woodland creature—than his father’s pronouncement.

  “Don’t you get it?” Brian asked. “The clue: ‘Fall up the hill.’ It’s a deadfall—on this hill.”

  “You found it?”

  “Not yet…” Brian pocketed his phone and swept both hands across the brittle and decaying debris piled around the deadfall. He omitted telling Tyler that this was a more likely spot for a hidden snake than the underside of a rock. Besides, if Brian had unraveled the clue to the cache’s location, he wanted to find it before leading the boy to yet another disappointment. Once he unearthed it, he’d call Tyler over to claim the prize. He might just salvage the day after all.

  Crouching, Brian caught a glint of color in the natural pocket formed between the tree stump and its fallen trunk; something metallic, painted bright red. Gotcha! he thought in an unexpectedly strong moment of satisfaction.

  Before calling his son over to claim the small square tin, he leaned forward to examine the shadowy depression. He swept the ground with the beam of his keychain flashlight. Though he doubted he’d find broken glass or rusty nails or even an irritable snake, he wanted to be sure, lest their excursion end on a sour note—or a trip to the emergency room.

  “Tyler, come here,” Brian said. “Think I found something.”

  “Me too,” Tyler said, his voice hushed with something akin to awe.

  “No,” Brian said, standing and brushing off his knees. “Pretty sure this is it over here.”

  He looked at his son, who was poking and prodding something with his makeshift cane. Brian’s first thought was that his son had found a snake after all and that poking a snake with a stick was a very bad idea.

  “Tyler,” he called. “Step away!”

  “No, Dad,” Tyler said. “It’s okay.”

  The boy crouched beside the tangled brush and mounds of dirt and clawed at the earth with the tip of the branch, deepening the hole and exposing a length of something white. As Brian circled around his son cautiously, a dark thought began to form. A thought that was confirmed when Tyler reached down into the hole and gripped the length of dull white in his mud-caked hands and pulled it free.

  “Look,” he said, eyes full of pride at his discovery. “Animal bone. A big one.”

  Brian was an investment accountant, not a doctor, but he’d seen enough skeleton illustrations over the years to entertain the disturbing possibility that his son was not holding an animal bone. The rational part of his brain kept suggesting and rejecting other explanations: maybe the leg bone of a large mammal… a deer or a bear or…?

  Something was wrong. He could sense it at an atavistic level. Some detail that refused to register—until he was near enough to his son’s outstretched hand to notice the cleanly severed end of the bone.

  “Put that down,” Brian said. “Drop it.”

  “But Dad—!”

  “It might be—could be diseased—parasites,” Brian muttered. But, another word came to mind. If the bone was human, with a break that clean.

  Evidence.

  Disappointed, Tyler dropped the bone, but he reached over to push aside some brush and said, “Look! There’s more.”

  Brian took a hesitant step forward and looked down at a jumbled pile of bones. No flesh or organs, no muscles or tissue. Bare bones. Enough bones to make…

  He noticed something rounded toward the back of the pile, with the telltale curvature of a hemisphere. Then Tyler disturbed the mass of bones with an exploratory poke with the tip of his branch. Disconnected rib bones slid aside, exposing the dark circle of an empty eye socket, twin nasal passages and a row of teeth. There could be no other explanation.

  Brian was staring at a human skull. He’d led his twelve-year-old son into the woods to discover human remains. His ex-wife would never forgive him.

  He fumbled for his phone and stared at the screen for a few punch-drunk moments with no idea why the display showed him a compass. Finally, he remembered how to quit the app and use his damn smartphone as a phone.

  Meanwhile, the geocache search—the whole reason they’d come to the park in the first place—had become a distant, confusing memory.

  Instead, two other ominous words popped into his head.

  Shallow grave.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Detective Nick Burkhardt parked his Land Cruiser on a narrow access road overlooking Claremont Park, behind a row of official city vehicles headed by a pair of police cruisers with flashing light bars. Judging from the rest of the stalled procession, paramedics, crime scene techs and someone from the coroner’s office were on site.

  He turned to his partner, fellow detective Hank Griffin, and said, “Gang’s all here.”

  “Makes us fashionably late.”

  They climbed out of the SUV, Hank taking a few moments longer to maneuver on his cast as he reached over the seatback for his crutches. While in Kauai on a long overdue vacation, he’d taken a bad fall—“landed a little too enthusiastically” in Hank’s own words—from a zip line, tearing his Achilles tendon. In the past few weeks he’d become quite nimble on the crutches, but he left the foot chases to Nick.

  Hank joined Nick at the side of the access road and frowned.

  Nick understood his partner’s consternation. Glancing down the irregular slope of the makeshift path delineated on either side by crime scene tape looped around tree trunks, he had the impression of facing a woodland obstacle course.

  “Maybe you should sit this one out, Hank.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Sure?”

  “I’ll get there,” Hank said confidently. He cleared his throat. “Eventually.”

  Nick started down the path, paused to look back and saw Hank prodding the ground with the tip of one crutc
h. Nick raised a hand to point at some overhead branches and smiled.

  “I could ask them to install a zip line.”

  “Funny, Nick,” Hank said, with a sweep of the crutch as though it was an extension of his arm. “I’m laughing on the inside.”

  Though Hank had joked that his doctor had told him to leave all the work to his partner, he was too proud to easily admit any limitations. Nick hoped his good-natured ribbing would keep his partner’s spirits up, so he was less focused on what he couldn’t do in his current condition. At the same time, he hoped Hank remained cautious enough to avoid further injury. He knew his partner was counting the days until the cast came off.

  Nick turned his attention to the path ahead, noting the presence of techs and a few uniforms. Farther ahead, two paramedics stood talking to each other in low tones with an occasional glance at the techs taking measurements and photographs.

  On the other side of the crime scene, Sergeant Wu spoke to the father and son who had reported the human remains. A tall, birdlike woman with a long gray ponytail, dressed in a blue denim blouse and khaki slacks, interrupted the group to speak with Wu. A forensic anthropologist who consulted with the medical examiner’s office, Nick recalled. Her exact name escaped him. Yolanda Candella or Canders.

  Angling toward the mound of bare bones, some of which had been laid out for measurement and photographs, Nick crouched for a better examination. More than a few of the bones had clean breaks. And that raised all sorts of questions.

  He’d been a Portland homicide detective long before he discovered he was a Grimm—descended from a long line of Grimms that included his mother and his late Aunt Marie. As a Grimm, Nick had the ability to “profile” what he had always assumed were mythological creatures, most of whom were at odds with humanity. They called themselves Wesen, and in moments of stress or extreme emotion, they transformed—woged—and revealed their true nature. But the transformation was visible only to a Grimm. Other humans were unaware of the change in appearance—unless the Wesen chose to reveal its true face to them. Not something that happened often because the Wesen hid in plain sight, wolves in the fold of humanity.