He nodded. “Aye. We do.”
But he didn’t sound glad of it, and honestly, neither was I. I wasn’t sure what was coming for us, but in my bones, I knew that if Bo or Ichabod hadn’t figured out something new for us, just as Titiana had said, we were all fecked.
CHAPTER 33
DETECTIVE ELLE
THE INSTANT WE arrived back at Grimm headquarters, Bo was waiting for us. Commissioner Draven stood tall and regal behind her, his hands crossed behind his back, aloof and haughty.
“Detectives,” Bo said, and I knew, only because I knew her so well, that something was most definitely up, something I wouldn’t like—at all.
Her shoulders were tight, her eyes pinched and her lips pursed. She was in a foul mood. And I had no doubt it had everything to do with the male standing behind her.
“Come with us.” She crooked her finger.
Hatter and I glanced at one another, wearing identical worried frowns. But we followed like the good sheep we were.
We all walked back to her office, none of us talking or even looking at one another, the tension so thick it was palpable.
“You know, the escort was a little overkill,” I said with a high-pitched chuckle, mostly because I wasn’t sure what else to say. My nerves were a hot mess inside of me, my ears were ringing, and all the emotions I’d blocked out for hours were starting to come at me with a vengeance.
No one said anything, which only further compounded my anxieties.
By the time we actually made it to her office, I was both relieved and ready to puke.
Bo took a deep breath and pushed the door open.
“Really, all this cloak-and-dagger is unnecess—” I began and instantly stopped the moment my eyes landed on a sight I’d never in a thousand years thought I’d see.
Agent Crowley, dressed in his familiar shades of black, glanced our way for less than a second before turning quickly back to the task at hand, namely, fitting Hook—my Hook—with a wire. The miniature black listening box was taped to the side of Hook’s chest. As flat as a paperclip and not much larger, it would be nearly undetectable if someone brushed against him. Because most boxes were now wireless, there weren’t any actual wires to speak of, but he would have to wear an auditory chip so that he could hear the directions being given.
I cocked my head, noticing instantly that Crowley and Hook were basically wearing the same clothes—tight-fitting black pants that left very little to the imagination and a long-sleeved black cable-knit shirt that while not skin tight wasn’t loose, either. As if aware I was watching him, Crowley smirked.
I shook my head, jaw going just the slightest bit slack as that bad feeling I’d had since getting here began to really erupt into pools of unease. Why was Hook out of the orange jumpsuit? Why was Hook out of his holding cell at all?
Hook’s “hand” gleamed silver in the sterile fluorescent lighting of Bo’s office. They’d given him back his hook, which told me a lot. Whatever he was dressed for, he was going out. I twirled on Bo, eyebrows lifted, silently urging her to tell me what was happening, immediately.
“Captain?” I asked.
She nodded and looked as if she meant to speak, but Commissioner Draven lifted his hand.
“Detective Arielle Trident, I feel as though I know you personally. I’ve heard so much about you.” He chuckled softly.
He didn’t say it in such a way that I took it as a compliment. I lifted my eyebrows, waiting for more, but there was no more.
I crossed my arms, and I felt Maddox looking at us both. I shook my head. The commissioner was an odd man.
There was yet another knock on the door, then Ichabod suddenly popped his head inside. “Boss?” he asked crisply before looking around. Once he saw me, his eyebrows twitched. “Elle? What? Why are you— ”
“Come in, Detective Crane,” Bo said wearily with a hand gesture. “This concerns all of us. Shut the door behind you.”
He did as asked, a worried look on his handsome face as he gave me a quick but more shuttered look. I’d worked with Crane long enough to know when he was hiding something, and he was definitely hiding something.
I thinned my mouth.
“Did you bring it?” Bo directed the question to Ichabod.
“Mm, ” he said with a nod as he walked toward her and made to hand her a vial of sand—not nearly as much as what he had in the ones he’d shown me earlier, though. And this sand was just the slightest bit different from the others. I caught glints of blue whenever the vial would turn and catch the light.
My eyes instantly hooked on his. I frowned. “What is this?”
“It’s what I scraped off the sliver of bark you brought me earlier, Detective.”
I cocked my head. “Sand? Blue sand at tha—” I gasped, and my gaze shot to his very worried one.
Because I recognized what it was. Sands were as distinctive as fingerprints, I’d always said. And Anahita had always drilled that into me. “This is from the sky isles. And this is from Hell. But this, dear sister …” Her voice was a ghostly echo in my ears. “This blue sand, it’s from Nowhere, and gods help us all if it is ever found again.. .”
There was no way in the twin hells that was what I thought it was.
Ichabod gave me the merest fraction of a nod, and my heart felt as if it had literally skipped a beat. I clutched at my breast. I felt Maddox’s questioning look, but I was frozen, staring at that blue glinting sand.
“I called you in here, Detective Elle,” Bo said, voice carrying easily, “because of your powerful affinity to water. I had to verify what Crane had told me he’d seen. And I see that his guess was sadly…” She sighed. “Accurate.”
My hands balled into tight fists. Blue sand. Oh gods.
“Will someone please tell me what in the twin hells is going on here?” Hatter all but growled, and I could feel anxious energy coming off him in waves.
“There is only one place in all of the hundred realms where one can find sands of that shade. But… it’s impossible to reach.” Legend said the bridge to Nowhere had long since been destroyed.
Agent Crowley had sidled over to Bo’s side and was reaching out for the vial, as though he meant to snatch it from her hand. But she whipped her hand down by her side and glared at him. He pursed his lips but didn’t argue the matter.
“I may not have any say on what’s happening here, but this evidence stays with me, Agent,” she snapped, showing the fire inside of her that made her such a damn fine captain—the best, in my humble opinion, we’d ever had.
The irritating special agent smirked. “As you wish, Captain Shepherdess.”
Draven moved… more like glided… to the center of the room and addressed us all. “The finding of these sands means that no longer is this simply a Grimm PD matter. It is obviously no secret now why Special Agent Crowley is here. With the discovery of these blue sands, we have been required to form an interagency task force.”
“What does this mean exactly?” Maddox rumbled softly, standing close to me and as still as a board. He didn’t like it. Welcome to the club, because neither did I.
But at least I knew more than Hatter did. I glanced at Hook. He was looking back at me, eyes soft and his long, dark lashes shading his thoughts from me. I shivered and quickly glanced away.
“Agent Crowley, would you care to do the honors?” Draven asked in his silky voice before giving a small but elegant bow.
Crowley wasn’t smirking as he customarily did whenever the bastard was around me. Instead, he was completely serious, which gave me a chill down my spine.
It was as bad as things got if Crowley couldn’t even find the humor in gaining the upper hand over me.
“It means, Detective,” Crowley began in his rough burr, “that I am now in charge of this investigation. For some months now, my department has been sussing out the coordinates of the gang based on where they struck and when. At first, the pattern was random, seemingly nonsensical. They would go to a museum and leave a fifty-t
rillion-valued diamond alone but take a grain of eternal rice. Their heists completely baffled us, making it impossible for us to really guess where they’d hit next. Which always placed us one step behind and one second too late. But lately, in the last several months since they began upping the body count, a pattern finally began to emerge. The devil’s in the details, as they say. And with the theft of the slipper— ”
I jerked, I’d not told anyone yet what the queen had told me. In fact, that was why I’d come back.
Spotting my reaction, Crowley finally smirked, as he was oh so fond of doing.
“Ah, I see you already knew about this, Detectives Elle and Maddox?”
Bo frowned. “You knew this, Elle?”
I nodded. “We only just learned this, not even an hour ago. Might I ask, how in the hells did you know this already? It was like pulling teeth to get the queen to tell us this.”
“Impressive.” Crowley’s stretched grin looked genuine, which I didn’t trust at all.
I narrowed my eyes to slits.
“The queen is notorious for keeping tight-lipped. Though she does have a fondness for male flesh,” he said then flicked his dark eyes toward Hatter, as if he knew exactly what Maddox had had to do to get the Intel. And it made me wonder if Crowley had done the same. If so, that meant the wee queen had played Hatter and me for fools.
Maddox’s jaw was set, and his nostrils were wide. He was not happy, no doubt having come to the same conclusion as I had.
“But no matter. The bureau has our ways too. We learned of the theft early yesterday morning. Then the phone call about the sands, and suddenly, it was all crystal clear. We are dealing with…”
At this, Crowley trailed off, and for once, the smirking bastard wasn’t smirking. In fact, he looked sick and not at all happy about what he was about to say.
But he didn’t need to say it, because I already knew, just by his look alone. And the blue sands that should never have been.
I rubbed my temples and squeezed my eyes shut. Fear didn’t make me weak or pitiful. Fear made me angry. And I felt that sick demon crawling all the way through me. My throat was tight, my skin prickling. I wanted to become that killing monster of the deep, because if I was a killer, then nothing could harm me. Nothing could hurt me, least of all that bitch. A bitch long dead, but even the legacy of what she’d done was enough to make even the most hardened of criminals want to piss themselves.
I shook. “Bonny’s trying to resurrect the deepest darkness, isn’t she, Agent Crowley?” I asked, my voice surprisingly calm considering I was anything but. “What dumb bastard would do such a thing? What fecking bitch would try to raise something so wholly evil?”
I went still all over, thinking about everything I’d seen, all that I’d learned, and my nails dug like claws into my palms. It all fit. That was the missing piece, why I hadn’t been ready to call the case closed as Bo had earlier: the sands; the zombie-like devotion of the Slasher sycophants; spelled grains of golden sand that tied directly to Midas; Lord Humpty’s role in all of it; his fleet of ships that somehow mattered, though I couldn’t quite yet make the connection; and the ability, the almost witch-like mystique of each and every heist gone off without a hitch, especially the way they’d broken into the fae stronghold. Just as Hook had said, Anne Bonny was a witch, but she wasn’t just that. She had to have gotten her hands on some form of arcane knowledge, knowledge that she planned to use to try to resurrect a monster.
“Godsdamnitall!” I hissed. “How did I fecking miss this?” It all seemed so obvious now.
“Elle, talk to me,” Maddox whispered heatedly. “What is going on here?”
I whirled on him. I didn’t give a damn if I was cutting into Crowley’s speech. Maddox was my partner, and he deserved to know the truth—from me.
“She is a legend amongst my people. Something so purely evil that even the children grew up knowing her name.”
“Don’t say it,” Crowley warned.
I snapped at him. “Do you think me a fool? To say her true name is to feed even the spirit of her greater power. We stopped worshipping the sea witch millennia ago, but even so, father destroyed her body and exiled what was left of her to the forgotten realm, one so dead that not even water can exist, only the sands of it. The endless grains of blue. There mere fact that Bonny’s gotten her hands on those blue grains means she’s been there once before already. And the resurrection clearly didn’t work then. But if she’s going back with the slipper, then it means she thinks the resurrection could work now. We have to stop this. Right now!”
Maddox’s nostrils flared, and his blue and green eyes were fixed on my face. Unspoken between us was a thought—the vision I’d shared with him on his arm, the lashing, whipping, and torrential rains and the endless expanse of gray waters and black clouds churning angrily with thunder and lightning. A water realm full of fury and rage. And I’d been trapped in it. But Nowhere wasn’t that. Nowhere was nothing but blue sands and not much else.
So it couldn’t be Nowhere. Not to mention that last I’d heard, the bridge to Nowhere was shattered, meaning travel to that forgotten realm was impossible, even for my father.
Right?
I grabbed my stomach and rubbed at it with nerve stretched fingers, suddenly feeling queasy. I shuddered. I’d never been to the forgotten realm. No one had, save my father. But every naiad, huldra, mermaid, siren, selkie, and every other genus of water elemental knew of its dark legend. There’d been no sand in Hatter’s vision, only the water—the endless stretch of water for as far as the eye could see. So was I really thinking of the same thing? Or was that as yet a different clue to something we’d not yet learned?
Agent Crowley licked his front teeth, now far sharper than they’d been before. “This will not be easy, and in order to slip in, we must keep our numbers small,” he said.
“It’s impossible!” I declared. “Nowhere is impossible to reach.”
“Yet you see the sand!” he snapped, gesturing at the captain with a free hand, glowering with red glowing eyes at me.
“No!” Then softer, I said, “No.”
Crowley’s jaw worked from side to side. His look was hard but now no longer so heated. “We have to ascertain whether Nowhere is now a threat, siren. You know we do. Those sands only come from there.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, no longer able to hold his concentrated stare. How was it even remotely possible? It wasn’t. Yet… Hook was alive. And that was an impossibility too.
I opened my eyes and stared at my silent ex-lover. “Is this possible? Do you know anything?” I whispered. “Anything at all?”
For a second, it was as if nothing else existed but us. His dark eyes searched my face, and in them I read only honesty as he said, “I heard whisperings. Mutterings. It was what I’d tried to warn you of earlier, lass. Bonny wants power, and the only way to gain it is to bring the monster back. She claims that by raising it, she can control it and, by so doing, will control all of the hundred realms.”
I trembled and wrapped my arms around myself. How did he know all this? How could we afford to trust him? Yet how could we afford not to?
Crowley grunted. “There’s no time to waste. We leave as soon as the bureau gives the all clear.”
“We?” I asked, my voice cracking a little. But deep down, I already knew.
“We. Me,” he said and pointed at his chest, “Hook, because he’s involved in all of this still, and now… you.” He pointed at me. “Detective Arielle. Daughter of a king and princess of the deep.”
The fact that he’d so formally said my title let me know just how deep in shite we really were.
I swallowed hard.
Maddox grunted. “No way. No way in hells.”
I shook my head. “Stop, Maddox. You know I don’t— ”
His voice sounded more like a beast when he said, “This isn’t happening. I’m coming too. I don’t know what the hells you’re planning, Crowley, but you’re not getting your hands on— �
�
“Detective Maddox!” Captain Bo snapped, and we all jumped at the sudden authority in her voice.
Maddox was breathing like a bellows, looking furious, and I knew why. Crowley was no fan of mine. In fact, everyone here knew of his deep-seated hatred and prejudice toward me. But I couldn’t shirk my duties.
“Do not forget your place,” the captain snapped. “You’re not lovers. Family. Or otherwise. You are a detective of Grimm PD, and you will do exactly as told!”
Maddox’s jaw clamped shut, and his throat moved with his hard swallows. He was pissed. In fact, Maddox was starting to burn. I could feel the heat of him singeing the fine hairs on my arms. His flames were invisible, but they were there.
My pulse skittered in my veins.
I had to help calm him somehow. I didn’t know how much Bo or even Draven knew of Hatter’s true identity. I wasn’t even sure what he was, and though I would really, really like to know it someday, this wasn’t how it needed to be found out.
“May I speak with my partner?” I chimed in quickly, seeing Hatter start to tremble with the need to explode with his power. “Alone.”
Bo lifted an eyebrow, but Draven flicked his fingers. “Go. Five minutes. Prepare as you must. You will all leave soon. Crowley will fill you in on the rest once you do.”
“Come with me,” I snapped, latching onto Hatter’s hand and yanking him behind me. Steam curled between our palms as his invisible heat lapped at the water-rich flesh of my body.
I felt Hook and Crowley’s eyes follow me out the door, and to a lesser extent, even Ichabod’s.
I marched us into the blessedly empty filing office across the hall and closed and locked the door behind me. Then I snapped my fingers and shot a jet of water at the hidden cameras around the room.
And only once I was sure no one would hear or see us, I whispered, “Go.”
The Grimm Files Collection Boxed Set Page 47
