Death's Apprentice: A Grimm City Novel

by Gareth Jefferson Jones K. W. Jeter

  A few yards away, Nathaniel stood with head lowered, his burnt and blistered arm dangling at his side. His eyes were half closed, his breath deep and slow as he worked to conserve what little strength he had left. The force that drove the dead’s footsteps still emanated from him; when the spell came to an end, they would return to the cold earth from which they had been resurrected.

  He looked up, catching sight of the figure that had just been thrown to the base of the garden’s peach tree. Slowly, he walked over to where the others stood, surrounding their defeated foe. Something bumped against his forehead as he passed beneath the branches of the peach tree. He glanced up and saw how low they hung, the green-leaved stems laden with ripe fruit, the soft golden skin glistening under trickles of rain. He reached up and touched one with his finger, just enough to set it swaying before his eyes. The prophecy, he realized. It said this would happen. When the time was right …

  Another few steps and Nathaniel stood looking down into the Devil’s eyes. “You’re beaten. You know you are…” He spoke quietly. “But there’s still a way for you to save yourself, if you agree to do what we say.”

  Contempt bittered the Devil’s words. “I’m not interested in your mercy.”

  “Maybe not. But you should be interested in staying alive.” Nathaniel’s burnt arm hung loosely at his side. His comrades, the soldier and the giant hit man, stood close behind. “You’re free to go—as long as you swear to leave us in peace from now on. And by ‘us,’ I mean everyone. No more of your schemes and temptations. Just leave mankind alone, and crawl back into the flames.”

  One corner of the Devil’s mouth curled. “Is that all?”

  “No,” said Nathaniel. “There’s one more thing.” He turned and nodded toward Blake. “Free my friend of the shroud you’ve put him in, and give him back the missing half of his soul. Do that now, and you can live. If not…”

  “You really are a fool, boy…” The Devil dragged himself to his feet, the cloven hoof digging into the blood-drenched ground. “Because you don’t understand me, even now.” His naked back pressed against the trunk of the peach tree. “Mankind is of no interest to me, and never has been. I haven’t acted as I have all these millennia in order to cause you humans pain, but to damage the one who created you. Because for every tear that mankind sheds, God sheds one, too. And His constant pain on your behalf has been my only pleasure.”

  From the corner of his eye, Nathaniel saw the hit man’s fist tighten on the handle of the flaming axe he still carried.

  Blake did the same with Saint Michael’s spear.

  “Victory or defeat, it makes no difference to me,” continued the Devil. “All that has ever mattered to me is that I have a chance to make your Creator suffer. So even in this state, I spit on your offer.… And curse each of you in turn!” He pointed to Ren-Lei, whose small face could be seen peeking out from the battered helmet. “I curse that puking baby you’ve saved to a life filled with loneliness and sorrow. And as for you—” He glared up at Hank. “The oaf who holds her … My curse to you is that you find that fear you’re searching for, and become so crippled by it that it robs you of your strength.” He turned his scathing gaze toward Nathaniel. “To you, the boy who brought about my defeat, I curse you with the task of picking up the pieces of the chaos you’ve caused today. And last of all…” The Devil turned finally to Blake. “To you who needs the most from me, I give the least. I curse you to remain the way you are forever. Let your lifeless, deathless misery be my parting gift to the world. And may it darken the life of everyone you encounter. Until they end up hating your stinking, rotting hide as much as I do.”

  Blake’s face set hard as he gazed at his tormentor. He stepped forward, shoving his way past Hank and Nathaniel, bearing the double-bladed spear in his hands.

  “Is that all you have to say?” he asked.

  The Devil continued to glare at him, but made no more answer.

  “Good,” said Blake. “Then now it’s my turn to give a curse to you…”

  He raised one of the spear’s fire-wreathed blades, ready to drive it forward into the Devil’s body.

  But before he could complete the move, the Devil threw out his palm toward the coat. As Hank and Nathaniel watched, the blood-encrusted shroud tightened around Blake’s body in answer to the Devil’s call, pinioning Blake’s arm in place.

  Blake’s shoulders twisted from side to side as he writhed inside the coat. Beneath the tangles of his matted dreadlocks, the veins stood out on his forehead as he gritted his teeth. The Devil raised his arm, and the coat’s arm raised itself, too. It tightened itself upon the muscles of his wrist, making it impossible for him to let go of the spear’s shaft.

  The coat’s grime-covered sleeve brought the weapon back upon itself, turning its flaming blade toward Blake’s throat. He tried with all his might to fight it off. But the Devil’s coat was stronger. Inch by inch, the fiery blade moved closer, its edge burning into his neck.

  Blake only had one chance. Beside him on a mound of smoking bodies, he spotted a demon’s curved dagger. Before the Devil could realize what he was doing, he grabbed it with his free hand, and sliced three long gashes into his stiffened arm’s shoulder, elbow, and wrist.

  Blood spattered across the ground in front of him. With his arm now freed from the fabric’s constraint, he tossed away the dagger, seized the spear in both hands, and drove its burning point forward into the Devil’s chest.

  The lunging thrust pierced the eight-pointed star above the Devil’s heart. A thick, glowing magmalike substance crept along the spear’s shaft as the blade burst out again from between the Devil’s shoulder blades, lifting and pinning him to the trunk of the peach tree. Sparks flew from the smooth bark as soon as the Devil’s crawling blood touched it—

  And the world turned silent.

  Across the garden square, the gaze of the living and the bony, hollow eye sockets of the dead turned toward the peach tree. None had ever seen what they now beheld.

  The hinge of Time itself stopped, then turned in another direction. One it never had before.

  For a moment, the rain pelting through the dark air hung suspended, as though each drop were now a shimmering diamond. Above, the low-hanging storm clouds were touched with a new radiance, the crests of the distant hills about to fall beneath a sun that had never risen before.

  Breath held, the living looked around at one another. Seeing the same wordless realization in each other’s eyes. All their history, and that of the generations before them, had been nothing but the pain and torment inflicted upon them by the Devil. Now that history had ended—

  And a new one had begun.

  The rain fell once more, streaming across their uplifted faces. The sodden ground beneath their feet seemed to murmur, as though the earth itself wondered what a world without evil would look like.

  Shadowed by the peach tree’s glistening branches, the Devil’s fiery eyes dimmed, then dulled blank as he hung lifeless from the tree.

  25.

  The desk cracked in two, the mass of black lava-stone splitting from front to back. On the polished surface beneath Ling’s back, the break went right through the middle of the eight-pointed star. She could feel the glowing emblem’s heat begin to die away.

  At the same time, the tattoo on the back of the witch’s neck flared white-hot, as though the ink had been transformed to some incendiary substance. The star emblem, which signaled devotion to the Devil’s service, singed the long black hair that fell across it; Anna screamed in pain, dropping the shard of the broken lamp that she had pressed against Ling’s throat. She clawed at her own bloodied neck, staggering back from the desk.

  “My master!” Anna’s cry cut through the air. The unseen force that had ignited her tattoo now grew even more powerful, shaking the building itself, as though it were gripped by an immense, clawed hand.

  Unbalanced, the two halves of the lava-stone fell away from each other. Catching herself on her hands and knees, Ling saw the
desk’s drawers spill open. A large-caliber silver pistol, malevolently shining, tumbled onto the floor in front of her. She scooped it up in both hands and rolled onto her back, aiming the gun at her attacker and squeezing off three quick shots.

  Flowers of wet red blossomed across Anna’s chest. She fell writhing in the office’s doorway. At her back, above her shoulder blades, the eight-pointed star burst into flame. In seconds, her body was wrapped in fire.

  Ling felt the floor beneath her tremble, as though, with the Devil’s demise, the tower’s foundation and even Hell itself were caught in the tremor of an earthquake. A spiderweb of cracks shot through the office’s ceiling, plaster raining down upon her. She threw the gun aside and got to her feet, running past the witch’s charring corpse and toward the safety of the lobby beyond.

  The floor buckled hard enough to throw her against the secretary’s desk. On all sides, the carved depictions of Hell’s torments toppled into the lobby. Stone fragments skittered across the transparent floor as thick black smoke obscured the ceiling. Tongues of fire leapt upward as the floor broke into pieces.

  Arms shielding her head from more falling debris, Ling ran out to the elevators in the hallway. Both sets of steel doors were open, revealing the cables that dangled in the dark, empty shafts, smoke billowing upward from the floors below. At the end of the corridor was the door to the emergency stairway; she yanked it open and started down, her rapid footsteps echoing from the bare steel treads.

  Just get out, she commanded herself. In one piece. She grabbed the stair rail in one hand and used it to swing herself across the first landing she came to, then down the next flight of steps. Heartbeat racing, gasping for breath, she caught the scent of something burning and spotted a few black tendrils seeping up the stairwell. The emergency lights flickered above her head, striking dismay in her gut. If the electricity went off at the same time that the building filled with smoke, the ventilation system would go down as well; she would choke to death, in the dark, before she could reach the exit at the ground floor.

  Another tremor rumbled through the tower, knocking her off her feet and slamming her hard into the corner of the next steel landing. As she steadied herself against the wall, a crack split open beneath her palm; through it, she spotted a flicker of fire, as though the interior of the building’s structure had begun consuming itself. The acrid smell of electrical insulation, the sheathing of the cords and wires burning inside the walls, stung her nostrils at the same time that plaster dust sifted down upon her head.

  You’ve got to get to her— She picked herself up and started down the next flight of wobbling stairs. You’ve got to get to Ren-Lei—

  The emergency lights went out before she could reach the landing below. At the same time, a section of the exterior wall, stretching taller than her and wider than her hands could reach, broke loose and tumbled into the stairwell. If she had been a few steps farther down, she would have been crushed beneath it. A cold wind rushed across her from outside, and she could see the night sky, heavy storm clouds hanging close above. A bright tinge outlined the churning shapes, as though a thread of sun had managed to penetrate their obscuring bulk.

  As she watched, the clouds shifted. At their center appeared an even darker space, a circular gap revealing infinite space beyond. The clouds began to circle it, the rain-heavy masses at the horizon lumbering slowly, the others swirling faster and faster the closer they were to the darkness drawing them to itself. A vortex formed, as though the night sky itself had been turned to a whirlpool. The wind grew more forceful, sweeping across the earth like a tornado. Its spiraling tail reached down through the office towers and toward the tree at the center of the garden below.

  In less than a minute, the black clouds were completely drawn away from the sky’s edges. The peach tree lit up as it anchored the swirling vortex, as though its very branches were formed from the sun that had been hidden for so long. The glow was so bright, it seemed to eat the darkness itself.

  At the world’s horizon, the first light of dawn streamed through the jagged hills, touching the remaining clouds with a dark-red radiance. The night’s fading stars glinted through the gaps torn through the dwindling storm. Across the city, the towers’ rooftops were revealed.

  Ling turned her head, gazing up along the exterior wall that had broken open before her. She could see now the unlit windows of the floors above. What was concealed behind them could only be imagined.…

  The building convulsed again, hard enough that she had to grasp the crumbling edge of the wall segment to keep from tumbling out into the air. Looking down the tower’s length, she felt her head swim, dizzied at the sight of how far the ground was below. A fall from this height would be fatal, and there were no handholds on the sleek, glassy surface with which she would be able to climb down. The stairwell was still her only route of escape.

  Her eyes had adjusted to the dim light. She could see that she would have to go back up to the top of the stairs behind her so she would be able to scrabble over the collapsed wall section and down to the next landing. She would be in total darkness beyond that point, but the way would be unobstructed, at least until the next tremor sent more debris crashing into the stairwell.

  She quickly reached the point where she could clamber across the top of the fallen wall. There was a gap only a couple of feet wide between the wall’s edge and the landing’s ceiling. Jagged concrete and broken iron rebar scraped at her stomach as she crawled forward—

  A hand seized onto her ankle, dragging her back.

  Ling rolled onto one side, shoulder pressing against the ceiling. In the darkness, she could just make out Anna’s hideously blackened face, glaring red eyes burned lidless by the fire that had engulfed her in the Devil’s office. The witch’s broken nails dug into Ling’s knee as the hissing, snarling specter clawed itself toward her.

  She brought up her other leg, far enough to slam her heel sharp into Anna’s fire-blistered face. Two hard blows, but the witch still clung to her. In the narrow confines of the space in which she was trapped, Ling realized there was no way to break free of the witch’s grasp, to get away from the blackened hand reaching for her throat—

  Her fingers sank into burnt flesh as Ling grabbed a blackened arm. She pulled the witch up on top of herself, what was left of her enemy’s face pressing against her own. There was just enough space for to bring her knee into the woman’s abdomen as she felt broken teeth gnawing at her own throat. Muscles straining with the effort, she yanked Anna’s body higher across herself, then turned onto one side and hurled her toward the crumbling gap in the building’s exterior wall. The witch’s clawlike nails raked across Ling’s cheek and the corner of her brow, then the woman tumbled free, falling into the night’s cold, empty air.

  She dragged herself to the top of the section of the wall and looked out. The witch already appeared the size of a doll, then no larger than a handsbreadth, as she spun cursing and screaming, a black silhouette against the bloodied pavement rushing up from below. A final burst of dull red sparks shot out from her body when she struck the ground. Then she lay motionless, her shattered form contorted out of any human semblance.

  Ling panted for breath, gathering her remaining strength before she let herself slip down the angle of the wall segment. She managed to reach the stairs beyond, then started down them, hurrying into the tower’s darkness.

  26.

  The first light of dawn summoned the priest.

  It had been a long night. The darkest part of it had been spent by him in the cemetery behind the little church. Rain had soaked his heavy woolen cassock as he had stood among the graves, their tombstones toppled over by the cold, lifeless hands that had clawed up through the sodden earth. Tombs and caskets had been shattered open by the force of that mass resurrection. The grey forms of the dead, some of whom he had recited the funeral service over, had shambled past him, unheeding of his awestruck terror. When the graveyard had finally been emptied, he had watched the corpses joini
ng up with others, all heading to the battle for which they had been summoned. He had known that it was some great climactic struggle that was their destination—the grim set of their jaws and empty eye sockets had told him as much.

  Which meant they still needed his prayers, as did the living. Overcome by his own shameful fears, he had hid himself inside the church, kneeling before its altar and praying for his own deliverance. Paralyzed with terror, he had remained motionless there, head bowed, as hours had passed …

  Now he pushed open the heavy front door of the church and looked out. And saw something that he hadn’t beheld before.

  Across the city’s skyline, a reddish gold radiance sparkled off the buildings’ windows. The puddles of water in the streets were just as luminous, reflecting the sun’s topmost edge, just breaking over the darkly silhouetted hills in the distance.

  The sky was in motion, black clouds swirling into a vortex somewhere above the center of the city. He knew what spot it was—the garden square at the base of one of the tallest and most oppressive-looking office towers. Something had happened to the building; part of it had broken away, and the rest of the exterior walls were blackened with the smoke still drifting upward.

  All through the night, as he had prayed unceasingly, he had heard the sounds of frightful battle coming from that direction. Now everything seemed peaceful, there in the distance and throughout the city.

  He turned his head and saw others streaming from the tenements and shops all around the church. Fear had kept them inside—and who could blame them?—but now they stepped out into the golden air, looking up and marveling at the transformation that had been wrought, somehow tangible though yet unseen. With hands outstretched at their sides, they stood in the middle of the empty streets and slowly turned about, as though trying to catch the smallest glimpse of the grace that had suddenly been bestowed upon the earth.