Death's Apprentice: A Grimm City Novel

by Gareth Jefferson Jones K. W. Jeter

  The Devil’s gaze narrowed. “I’m not used to having people disobey me. Luckily for you, I know it’s your pantaphobia that’s to blame—which is still something that I need.”

  Hank didn’t care. “And the symbol?”

  “Very well—” The Devil humored the giant, and held his own hand an inch away from the eight-pointed star that Hank had drawn, as though admiring it. The symbol suddenly burst into flame, etching itself into the glass.

  “In short, it is me…,” he said. “Or more accurately … it is God’s name for me. My crest. My truest, simplest symbol. At its purest, it is a symbolic representation of the primordial quasar that I formed on the first day of creation, from which all subsequent stars were born. But it is also the flag that my army fought under in Heaven. That is why those who serve me bear this mark.”

  Hank nodded. “So, the little guy. If he has this on his ring, it means that he’s more than just your lawyer, right? It means that he’s part of something bigger. Something … bad.”

  The Devil tilted his head to one side, studying Hank with narrowed eyes. “You could say that, yes. If you wanted to. But—” He began to grow suspicious. “Why do you need to know so much about him? I sense that you’re keeping something from me. Is that true?”

  Hank shrugged. “Why would I do anything like that?”

  “Possibly…,” said the Devil, “because you are not quite as stupid as you look.”

  Before Hank could move away again, the Devil reached out and laid his hand on Hank’s brow to read his thoughts.

  “I see a woman … and a child…” The Devil closed his eyes and pressed his hand tighter against the other’s forehead. “I see an obligation … and hatred, too … for the man I call my greatest friend…” The Devil opened his eyes and removed his hand. He looked at Hank with scorn. “I was wrong. You are a fool.”

  “Why—” Hank saw no point in denying it now. The Devil knew why he was there, so he threw off the charade. “Because I care for someone?”

  “No. Because you meddle in things that don’t concern you. And meddling like this will only get you killed.” He fixed Hank with his sulphur-blue eyes, as if staring down a rogue bull. “At any other time, I’d let you go ahead with it and destroy yourself. But I still need you, so I’ll give you a warning that I expect you to heed.” He lowered his voice to a threatening whisper. “The man who took that child has the ability to kill you as soon as look at you, even with your great size and strength. On top of that, he is under my own personal protection, so any move against him is a move against me.”

  “And Ren-Lei?” demanded Hank. “What about her?”

  The Devil regarded him with contempt. “Forget her. If she isn’t already dead, she soon will be. So just get back to the job I’m paying you for, and stop wasting any more time.”

  Hank could feel his knuckles going white with frustration and anger. “But … who is this damned dwarf anyway? Why does he do such terrible things?”

  “Because I allow him to, that’s why!” Sadistic pleasure mixed with pride in the Devil’s voice. “He is my Lieutenant, my second-in-command. He has been my closest ally ever since the war in Heaven. But after he fell to earth with me, he was not bound by the same rules of behavior that I was. I am forbidden to pass on the sins of a parent to its child. But he is hampered by no such distinction. Therefore, when someone seeks advancement through him—and enters into a contract by shaking his hand—he takes the child of those he’s dealt with as his payment, just as I might take a person’s soul. Then, down in his lair, he consumes the bodies and drinks the blood of those babies—as an affront to the senile God who cast me out and crushed my followers beneath His heel.”

  Silence filled the office, hard and oppressive. After a moment, the witch spoke in a small voice from the open door: “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

  The Devil dismissed Hank with another wave of his hand. “And this time, do as you’re told.” He crossed back to his desk and swiveled his chair around so that he could gaze out at the low-lying storm clouds roiling across the city. “For both your own sake and mine, forget my Lieutenant—and find me those three opponents that I need.”

  Hank glanced at where the burning symbol had eaten into the windowpane. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll get back to finding them straight away. With this glowing blood of yours, it’ll be a breeze.”

  Another empty moment passed, then Hank turned and followed the witch out of the office.

  13.

  The back door of the town house creaked open an inch with a single push from Hank’s palm. He had already torn the rust-corroded padlock and hasp from the rotting wood and tossed them aside. Peering inside, he saw nothing but darkness and dust.

  He’d had to shove his way through two separate crowds just to get to this doorstep. The first had been right inside the lobby of the Devil’s office. After finding out that the Devil’s lawyer wasn’t just some kind of weird sicko, but something worse, he’d pushed his way through the mass of supplicants, clutching their file folders and manila envelopes stuffed with photographs and testimonials. Lining up like that to beg the Devil for an extension on their contracts, they had reminded Hank of the densely packed cattle at the city’s slaughter yard. Those poor beasts had no more chance of rescue than these two-legged ones. But at least there in the lobby, with the stench of their anxious sweat clotting sickeningly in his nostrils, he’d found the answer that he needed so badly.

  “If you’re looking for the dwarf, I can help you.…” The woman in the middle of the crush looked like a high-up executive from some multinational fashion firm. An older woman, who still would have been striking, if not for the anguish that had consumed her face. “I only have a week to go before my contract’s up, and that bastard is going to screw me, I know.” She kept her voice down so that the witches wouldn’t hear. “Someone over by the door heard you discussing his Lieutenant. Believe me, we all know him. And we all hate him as much as you do.”

  “But do you know—” Hank lowered his voice, too, and bent down so that none of the witches could see him. “Where I can find him? The big boss said he had a lair. But where is it?”

  “Across the square.” The woman squeezed his arm. The thought of revenge, from anyone, seemed to excite her. “There’s an old town house there. One of the oldest in the city. It’s boarded up now, but I saw him enter it once.”

  Hank got out of there as quickly as possible once he had the information. But picking his way through that mass of humanity, with its mingled atmosphere of despair and desperation, had been weirdly easier than escaping the second crowd he’d had to push through. That had been when he had gotten down to street level, and the crowded garden square. The people were still packed into the space, despite the pounding rain that continually threatened to extinguish the uplifted candles. Shouldering his way among them, he had barely glimpsed from the corner of his eye how large the swelling fruit on the pear tree had become.

  Those people, the ones in the garden—their sense of hope was real. Something that had always been in short supply in this city. But somehow it had risen among them, as though the tree’s roots had broken open a wellspring below the cracked pavement. The excitement was palpable among the crowd, brighter in its crackling electricity than the streaks of lighting that stitched the dark clouds hanging above their heads. A few of the murmuring voices broke into louder, wordless, enraptured cries. Hank passed by others, speaking unabashedly to anyone who would listen, heedless of consequence—their words spoke of revolution, hated despots being overthrown, new days dawning. They turned from one another and cast tightly smiling glances at the tower next to the garden, as if they could already envision it crumbling apart, a vertical chasm tearing it from top to bottom.

  * * *

  Just enough light slid in from the back door for Hank to make out the interior’s dim outlines. The woman in the Devil’s waiting room had told him that the town house was one of the oldest buildings in the city, and it smelle
d like it, too, the enclosed air rank with mold and mildew. As Hank’s vision adjusted, he could discern a bit more. From what he could tell, the town house hadn’t been lived in before it had been boarded up and left derelict. The wood floors were bare, the carpets still rolled up along the baseboards, with customs duty tags hanging from their raw jute bindings. The chandeliers were still bagged in canvas, like enormous, grey bats sleeping above stacked and shrouded furniture.

  It’s some kind of a con job, thought Hank as he looked about himself. Like a false front. Somebody, a long time ago, had set it all up to convey the impression that the town house had been inhabited. But the decanters on the grime-shrouded tables had never been unstopped and filled, and the wicks of the candles in the tarnish-blackened candelabras had been left unlit, no fires ever kindled in the empty fireplaces. The town house’s only residents were the spiders who had draped the cornices with their dust-thickened cobwebs.

  He fashioned a torch from a chair leg, its splintered end wrapped with a tattered sofa cushion. Once the fabric had been set ablaze, he stepped farther into the town house’s shuttered rooms. Sleek rats pattered away at his steps.

  Passing through what had evidently been intended to be a sitting room and a parlor, he found himself in the town house’s library. Most of the mahogany shelves were bare, the volumes intended for them still piled up on the floor. A draft fluttered the torch’s flame; he peered closer at the nearest bookcase and spotted a thin opening along one end. He managed to dig his fingertips into the space, then pulled. The bookcase pivoted, revealing a hidden passageway.

  Stepping cautiously forward, he followed the passage to the chamber at its end. That room’s dimensions were of a perfect square, the walls bare and unadorned. Each of the four walls showed a doorway leading to another part of the town house. At the room’s center, a rickety staircase stretched downward. Leaning in with the torch, Hank was unable to see the bottom of the spiraling steps. The stairs might have been a mineshaft to the center of the earth.

  He squeezed past the side of the bookcase and set his foot on the first of the steps; it groaned beneath his weight. But he heard something else as well. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw shadows approaching one of the other open doorways, human figures silhouetted by the dim light behind them. Two men stepped into the room.

  They stared at him in surprise equal to his own. One of them looked like some kind of beggar, with long, matted dreadlocks trailing to the shoulders of a filthy, stitched-together overcoat; the other was younger, no more than a teenager, wearing a black leather jacket.

  He raised the torch higher, so he could get a better look at the pair. He figured the grime-encrusted one was just some poor homeless bastard; the city was full of them. “If you’re looking for some place to sleep, I’d advise going somewhere else. This place is—”

  Suddenly, he felt the heat of something burning in his own coat pocket. Puzzled, he reached in with his other hand and pulled out the diamond flask that the Devil had given him. The thick, magmalike fluid in the vessel now churned and bubbled, as though boiling in fury.

  The beggar stepped closer, circling around the staircase toward him. As he did so, the flask in Hank’s grasp exploded. The bright, searing fluid spattered across his chest like molten iron.

  He’s one of them— Hank’s eyes widened as he looked at the filthy specter before him. One of the three that he had been recruited to find; one of those men that the dwarf had said could harm Hank, and bring him fear. Shards of the diamond flask were still clenched in his fist, the sharp edges protruding from between his fingers like a multibladed weapon. He dove toward the beggar, his arm sweeping in a level arc to bring the shards across the man’s throat.

  With an upraised forearm, Blake blocked Hank’s attack. The impact snapped into Hank’s chest, a shock wave as solid as though he had struck a wall of granite. With his greater mass and the speed of his rushing leap, he should have been able to barrel over the beggar, flattening the dirt-encrusted figure onto the floor. Instead, the beggar had vaulted over him, eluding Hank’s blow like a seagull spiraling above an ocean’s crashing wave. He felt one of the beggar’s black-grimed hands seize him by the throat; still in midair, the beggar thrust his arms straight, toppling Hank backward.

  Hank’s shoulder brushed the edge of the central stairwell as he sensed himself falling into the opening. He caught a vertiginous glimpse of the spiraling stairs beneath him, with nothing but darkness at their bottom. Just before he collided with the staircase’s curving rail, he rolled to one side, his knee catching the beggar under the chin with enough force to throw him against one of the chamber’s walls. The stench of the grimy overcoat filled Hank’s nostrils as the beggar lithely rebounded, leaping forward in a low, horizontal arc. The fingertips of one of Blake’s hands touched the floor for a split second, enabling him to pivot his entire body around with even greater speed. His muddy boot caught Hank straight on the side of his head, hard enough to blur his vision. All he could do was blindly grapple the other man around the waist as he toppled backward. Both men landed entwined on the steps of the staircase, their combined force splintering the wooden treads beneath them.

  Pounding a fist into the beggar’s chin, Hank felt the staircase begin to disintegrate. Scraps of ancient plaster spotted his face as the bolts that held the central support to the ceiling were yanked free. The rail pulled loose from the steps and swung about, beating into the walls of the narrow space. Any of the blows he landed would have knocked another man unconscious, but instead Hank found himself gasping for breath as the other’s knee slammed into his gut.

  This bastard should be out of it—

  The single thought lit up the inside of Hank’s head, like a match dropped down a well. Adrenaline surged through his veins, not just from the stress of the fight, but from the realization that he had found at last who he had been looking for. What he had been promised. The butt of the beggar’s palm slammed under the corner of Hank’s jaw, blocking his carotid artery, pulsing stars and grey fog welling up in his skull. This is the one, he told himself. His heart sped, pushed by something he had never felt before. The one he couldn’t beat, the one who could beat him, could kill him, anything was possible now, everything …

  He managed to shove the beggar’s hand away from his throat, a sudden tide of his own heated blood washing through his brain. The staircase yawed sickeningly in the darkness, more of its splintered fragments, broken steps, and rail segments pelting across his face and the beggar’s shoulders.

  His knuckles ached and leaked blood as he tried to pound more blows into the face of his opponent. But his fist swept through empty air more times than it hit flesh, the beggar ducking and weaving as though he could see every strike before it was launched. He managed to connect a few times, leaving the beggar’s matted hair and beard glistening with red, the skin beneath scraped raw by Hank’s knuckles. But for every blow he landed, as their bodies crashed through section after section of the staircase, the beggar came back with a quicker flurry, blinding and dizzying him.

  Can’t beat him to death—he’s too fast—

  There had to be another way, some weakness, an opening. Hank sucked his breath in through clenched teeth, his fragmented thoughts flailing from one side of his skull to the other.

  Then he saw it. The corner of one elbow had dug under the lapel of the beggar’s filthy overcoat, ripping apart the neat stitches and peeling back the crusted fabric. Revealed underneath wasn’t skin and dirt, but raw flesh and shimmering lungs, as though all that held the beggar together was the spidered cage of his ribs.

  That’s how—

  Wood splinters and ancient dust bellowed around Hank as his weight, combined with the beggar’s, shattered another section of stairs, his back plummeting through the broken pieces. Desperate, he didn’t block the beggar’s next punch, but let it crack like a boulder against his cheek as he plunged his own hand through the bloodied skin and into the beggar’s wet, red chest. His fingers clawed pas
t the pulsing fist of the heart, straining to reach the spinal column behind. He knew instinctively that that was the only way to defeat him, to snap the linked bones and the nerve fibers they held—

  Just as Hank’s fingertips grazed the vertebrae, his hand and forearm went numb. Rearing his head back, he could see the bloodied edges of the beggar’s overcoat seizing tight upon his arm, like a pit bull furiously clamping its jaws upon another beast’s neck. Panic, never experienced before, erupted inside Hank; he futilely struggled to pull his captured hand free. It felt as though the combined force of the coat and the beggar’s raw flesh were about to snap his forearm like a bundle of dry twigs.

  Suddenly, a harder blow hammered up through Hank’s back and shoulders, leaving him stunned and without breath. Dizzied, he was just able to perceive that he and the beggar had struck the solid stone floor at the base of the disintegrating staircase. A cloud of dust rose around them, obscuring the nearby walls. Broken segments of wood cascaded across his face and upraised forearm—that was when he realized the force of the impact had dazed the beggar as well, enough that his arm had yanked free from the grisly trap in which it had been caught.

  Hank staggered to his feet. Through the dust roiling around him and the blood streaming across his eyes, he could barely discern the beggar splayed on his back amidst the staircase’s wreckage, slowly shaking his head. Hank knew he had only seconds before the beggar regained enough consciousness to launch another leaping attack upon him.

  They seemed to have landed in a cellar chamber with an arched stone ceiling only a couple of inches above Hank’s head. He looked around and spotted a section of the stairs’ railing that was long and straight enough to use as a spear, one end broken sharp. Snatching up the wood segment, he raised it above his head in both hands, bracing himself to plunge its point into the beggar’s chest.

  The beggar’s vision cleared enough for him to see Hank rearing above him. Just as he raised his hand in a futile effort to ward off the blow—