Grimm Awakening

by Bryan Smith

  Lucien turned his head to stare at the stage again. The tiger who’d killed the girl, Zeus, sat licking blood from his paws. Fitzsimmons walked in a slow circle around the bloody corpse at center stage. “Of course, this was just a demonstration. This girl likely was little more than a tasty treat for mighty Zeus.” He chuckled. “We expect more, ah, fireworks as we begin the evening’s main event. Speaking of which--”

  Fitzsimmons waved a hand at his assistant.

  “Lana, would you do the honors?”

  Lana executed a curtsy with surprising grace for someone in platform heels. Then she strutted over to the cage, swinging her hips in an exaggerated way and twirling the key’s thin gold chain on a forefinger. Lucien watched her approach, studying the mocking smile on her face as she drew nearer. The woman was beautiful on the outside, but there was something black and twisted within her. This was a good thing to know--it meant he wouldn’t hesitate to kill her just because she was a woman.

  She slid the big key into the lock.

  She leaned close to the bars to whisper to him: “Fitzsimmons has a gun in his coat.” She turned the key in the lock and turned her back to the front of the stage as she pulled the gate open. “Kill him and get me out of here. Please.”

  Lucien managed to keep his expression stoic. But he was thinking, She’s an even better actress than Madeleine Faust.

  Then Lana jabbed the tip of the cattle prod against his chest and sent a shock through his body.

  Her face contorted as she screeched at him. “Out of the cage, hellscum!”

  Behind her, the big cats growled hungrily.

  * * *

  Raven Rainbolt clung to the strand of concentrated magical energy she’d reflexively summoned in the moment when she went sailing over the Royal Suite’s balcony railing. The energy cord stretched from the Royal Suite balcony to some two and a half floors below, where Raven dangled in midair. The energy that had come shooting out of her body in that moment of crisis was powerful stuff. As a descendent of a branch of the powerful Sylvain clan, she had the ability to manipulate matter and minds. Jack Grimm’s friends wouldn’t have understood the concept, so she’d seen to it that their minds had seen the energy cords as rope ladders. These were handy abilities to have, but right now Raven was unimpressed with herself.

  The problem was simple. She needed to climb the cord back up to the Royal Suite. Normally this would be an easily accomplished task. But she was so weakened by the thrashing meted out by Mona that it was requiring every bit of willpower at her disposal to keep the cord from fizzling out.

  She gritted her teeth and cleared her mind of everything but the need to overcome her current predicament. For several frustrating moments there was no change. Then, at last, she felt a tingling throughout her body.

  YES!

  Feeling stronger by the moment, she focused her concentration and felt the energy building inside her. Powerful light pulsed from within her body, rendering her pale skin almost translucent. The wounds inflicted by Mona’s boot heels scabbed over and healed within seconds.

  Raven smiled.

  I’m coming to get you, you devil.

  Then she shot straight up like a rocket and landed on the Royal Suite’s balcony. She went into the suite, had a look around, and set out to find her uncle and Jack Grimm.

  * * *

  Jack watched Lucien stumble out of the cage and fall to his knees. For a moment, it looked as if he would just topple over completely. But he somehow managed to rally and get to his feet. He wobbled like a palooka after fifteen rounds of pummeling from the heavyweight champion of the world. Unfortunately for the drugged-up hellhound, this sure to be short-lived fight was just about to begin.

  Jack shook his head. “He can barely stand up. You must be very afraid of Lucien to dope him up like that.”

  Mona closed a hand over one of his and squeezed a little harder than necessary, sending fresh bolts of pain through his broken fingers. “I fear nothing.”

  Jack gritted his teeth. “Right. Sure. Okay.”

  Mona released his hand and draped an arm over his shoulders. “I will admit that the traitor--as we must label one who betrays his own kind--would make a worthy adversary for anyone but myself. And perhaps it would be entertaining to watch him fight the cats as a hound. But I haven’t the time. I’ve been called back to hell and will be departing as soon as they’re all dead.”

  Jack almost smiled. “I bet your boss is gonna be pissed when he finds out how little you’ve accomplished.”

  Mona lifted her forearm and ran her fingers through the hair at the back of his head. “You should know that I’ve changed my mind about something. I’ve decided to keep you alive and take you back to hell with me.”

  Jack sighed. “So you can torture me for all eternity, right?”

  Mona leaned in to plant a soft kiss on his cheek. “I enjoy you, Jack, despite your more pitiful qualities. I’ve liked having you around again, I can admit it now that the game’s nearly over. You’ll be my pet. My plaything. Doesn’t that sound lovely?”

  Jack mulled over a number of possible scathing replies, but he remained silent as he began to perceive that something odd and inexplicable was happening on the stage.

  Mona shot up out of her seat and screamed at the stage: “No! That can’t be!”

  The corners of Jack’s mouth crinkled in amusement.

  “Oh, but it is.”

  * * *

  Lucien stared at the stage floor and tried to make sense of what he was seeing. At first he thought the dope flowing through his blood was causing him to hallucinate, because his eyes were trying to make him believe that a section of the floor had vanished--taking Victor Fitzsimmons with it.

  What he was seeing was just a blank space, nothingness, a hole in the world. But there was something familiar about this nothingness, something...and then he had it. His memory of the journey through the reality gaps emerged through the drug fog in the same moment that Raven Rainbolt emerged from the nothingness.

  Raven--who ought to be a bloody smear on the sidewalk--stood at center stage, showing no signs of the apparent mortal wounds inflicted upon her a short while ago. Victor Fitzsimmons was back again, lying in a fetal ball at her feet, shivering and whimpering like an animal left out in the cold. The floor appeared to knit itself back together beneath them.

  Raven held a broadsword in one hand and a round ball of some sort in the other. But…no…that was no ball…that was…

  “THE EYE OF SYLVAIN!”

  Lucien saw Mona Faust making her way through the orchestra pit. Jack was hurrying after her. And the Black Guild assassins had abandoned their perimeter positions and were converging on the stage. Frustration burned within him as he tried to imagine fighting off so many adversaries in his present condition. The sad bottom line was all too apparent--he would be of no use in the big showdown that was moments away from occurring. He took a staggering step in Raven’s direction and saw that her gaze was locked on him. She smiled when they made eye contact. Funny, for a tiny woman facing down snarling wild animals, a she-demon, and an army of machete-wielding assassins she didn’t look all that worried.

  Her smile broadened a bit before she said, “Catch.”

  Then the Eye was floating through the air. In the glare of the stage lights it appeared to have an almost elastic quality that made it look like a beachball. Lucien watched the Eye as it began to descend toward him.

  Mona Faust screamed again: “NO!”

  Lucien held his hands out to receive Raven’s gift.

  * * *

  Mona tripped over her high-heeled boots as she reached the stage. She was up on her feet again in an instant, but that brief delay gave Jack all the time he needed to catch up to her. He scrambled up to the stage, assessed the situation in a heartbeat, and realized that at last he had an opportunity to make a difference. He dove and tackled Mona, driving her to the stage floor a nanosecond before she would have stepped in front of Lucien and snagged the Eye for her
self.

  He looked up and saw Lucien catch the shimmering silver ball. Then he hellhound was shaking like a condemned man taking a ride on Ol’ Sparky. His nostrils flared and the hair on his head stood on end, making him look like a refugee from an old Looney Tunes cartoon. Then the seizure abruptly ended and there was a sharpness in Lucien’s eyes that hadn’t been there a moment earlier.

  Jack rolled away from Mona and got to his feet. One of the tigers--Zeus, the one that had already tasted human blood--was coming at him. Jack froze like an escaping convict pinned by searchlights. Zeus hunched down and prepared to leap. The beast would have torn out his throat had Lucien not intervened. Whatever had happened to him a moment ago had negated the effects of Mona’s drugs, allowing him to go to hound mode. Stunned, Jack watched as the transformed hellhound tore the big cat apart.

  Lucien flipped the dead animal off the stage and turned his attention to Mona, who was watching him with wide-eyed incredulity. Jack’s gaze darted everywhere. At Raven, who somehow had the so-called Eye of Sylvain in her hands again. At the remaining big cat. At Andy and Ben, who were just now emerging from the cage. A panicky glance behind him at the army of black-clad men surging through the orchestra pit. They would be swarming the stage within moments and likely vanquishing the daring uprising staged by Raven Rainbolt. In the next moments, however, he learned again how unwise it was to underestimate the odd young woman. She moved to the front of the stage, held out her hands, opened her mouth wide, and unleashed a sound that made Mona’s dungeon screams of outrage seem like the breathiest of sultry whispers.

  Jack clapped his hands over his ears and dropped to his knees. Covering his ears afforded scant protection for his eardrums, though. Unnatural howls of anguish pealed out of the mouths of the surviving animals. Then, mercifully, the sound ceased. He looked around, blinked at the impossible thing he was seeing, and grinned when he realized it was real.

  He looked up at Raven. “Can you teach me how to do that? Freezing people would come in pretty fucking handy in my line of work.”

  She smiled. “It is Rainbolt magic. Derived from Sylvain magic. Regardless, I will not be able to do it again once the Eye of Sylvain is no more.”

  “WHAT!?” Mona was on her feet again. She approached them again, but with more caution this time, moving slowly to the left even as she moved forward. “I can’t allow destruction of the Eye, you fucking bitch.”

  Jack made a sound of disgust. “Can’t you just freeze her, too?”

  Raven shook her head even as she kept a wary eye on Mona. “No. She is too powerful.”

  Mona smirked. “You got that right, bitch. As you’ll find out shortly when I twist your little head off your shoulders.”

  Raven laughed. “I only meant you were too powerful to be susceptible to that spell. You are not so powerful that I can’t kill you.”

  Mona snarled like one of the big cats and came at Raven like a runaway freight train. Jack grimaced, expecting the she-demon to flatten the smaller woman. But Raven sidestepped at the last possible instant and executed a spin kick that, if anything, was even more deftly executed than the moves Mona had displayed in the Royale Suite.

  The air exploded from Mona’s lungs and she went flying backward. She landed hard on her rear end and uttered a cry of pain. Before she could manage to get upright again, a tiny blur came at her. Then Raven was standing over her, with a foot planted on the she-demon’s throat. Mona thrashed and clawed at Raven’s bare legs, but she couldn’t dislodge the foot.

  While this was happening, Lucien corralled the remaining animals and herded them over to the cage. He threw the door shut and when he turned back to face the others he’d shifted back to his human form. He went to Lana, who was still sprawled on the floor, and helped her to her feet. When he deemed her steady enough, he went after Fitzsimmons, who’d taken advantage of the confusion by attempting to crawl away. He grabbed the man by the collar of his long coat, pulled him to his feet, and looked at him with flat black eyes devoid of pity. One of the man’s shaking hands dipped inside his coat, but Lucien seized his wrist and snapped it. The man whimpered and sagged in Lucien’s grip. Lucien withdrew a 9mm pistol from the man’s coat pocket and pushed it into his mouth. Fitzsimmons’s eyes went wide with fear as he started to mewl like a baby. Lucien squeezed the trigger and a burst of red leaped from the back of the man’s skull. That done, he tossed the corpse aside and joined Raven. The others crowded around them, getting a good look at the woman who’d orchestrated the sick ‘entertainment’ spectacle that might have taken their lives with just a little less luck on their side.

  Andy looked at Lucien, who was pointing the barrel of the 9mm at Mona’s forehead. “What are you waiting for? Blow her infernal brains out.”

  Lucien glanced at him. “Would that kill her?”

  Andy shrugged. “Maybe. Doesn’t seem quite as invincible now that her connection to the Eye has been severed. Try it.”

  Mona’s voice emerged as a croak: “Don’t. I can give you anything you want. All of you. Riches beyond your wildest dreams. Power. You’ll be able to make anyone do anything you want. Join us and we’ll rule this rotten world together.”

  Jack shook his head. “Whatever, Mona. I’ve heard this routine from you before. But you keep forgetting something--we’re the good guys.”

  Mona made a sound that might have been a laugh (it was hard to tell with Raven’s foot still constricting her windpipe). “Bullshit. You’re damned, Jack. You’re bad. And one day you’ll be a servant of hell, too. Your friends would do well to keep that in mind.”

  Jack wrestled the gun from Lucien and pointed it at the middle of Mona’s sneering face. “I think it’s past time I killed off at least one of my personal demons. Go back to hell, bitch.”

  He squeezed the trigger and a bullet punched through the bridge of her nose. Another squeeze and another bullet made a hole in her forehead. Yet another bullet made a pulpy mess of one of her eyes. Then the other eye went. Shot after shot in rapid succession obliterated the image of otherworldly beauty--the face that had once held such sway over Jack’s dreams and nightmares. For several seconds, the act of murdering his former wife became the most grimly satisfying event of his life.

  Just one problem.

  She didn’t die.

  Instead, the physical trauma seemed to energize her. She howled like a wild beast, grabbed Raven’s ankle, and flipped her away. She rocketed to her feet and started capering about the stage, looking for someone to dismember. Their one advantage over her was her lack of sight. Jack fired the remaining rounds in the 9mm’s clip into her already bullet-riddled head, but beyond the additional holes punched through her flesh, they had little effect on her.

  She caught Lucien’s scent and staggered in his direction. Lucien moved away from her, but even blinded she was relentless and was closing the gap between them quickly. Jack watched helplessly as this latest bit of drama unfolded, but something happening in his peripheral vision diverted his attention. Raven Rainbolt was handing off the Eye to Andy. And now Andy had a firm, two-handed grip on the object. He looked like he was protecting the Eye, which made Jack frown. Hadn’t Raven said something about destroying the thing? Andy was likely too caught up in the moment to think of something as simple and obvious as dashing the damned thing against the stage floor.

  So Jack raced over to where his friend stood and wrested the thing from his grip. Andy looked confused, but there was no time for explanations, so Jack raised the Eye high above his head then brought it down with all his might. Instead of shattering it bounced like a basketball and shot skyward.

  “Goddammit.”

  Raven leapt into the air and intercepted it. When she was back on the floor, she looked at Jack and shook her head, affirming the futility of that approach in pointed non-verbal fashion.

  Mona broke off her pursuit of Lucien and turned toward Raven. She smiled with what remained of her mouth. “I’m coming to get you, little girl.” She took a slow, confident step in
Raven’s direction. And Jack saw that she had ample reason for confidence. Her damaged tissue and bones were healing. Reforming. “Rapid regeneration is another perk of the hellspawn. The traitor hound could tell you that. So you can’t stop me. Not now. Not ever.”

  Jack glanced at Andy. “Did you see the way that thing bounced? How the hell are we supposed to destroy something like that?”

  Andy shrugged. “You’re asking me? Shit, I don’t know.”

  Ben, who’d been observing the drama from a corner of the stage, approached Raven and whispered something in her ear. Whatever he said appeared to startle her because she gave her head several emphatic negative shakes. But Ben was just as insistent. He gripped her right bicep, pulled her close, and spoke urgently into her ear. Her state of denial appeared to give way to begrudging acceptance as tears appeared in her eyes.

  Then she handed the Eye of Sylvain to Ben, who moved as far away from the rest of them as possible. He went to the far right end of the stage, descended the steps to the floor, and moved into the orchestra pit.

  Raven wiped the moisture from her eyes and walked rapidly to where Andy and Jack were standing. Jack looked past her and saw that Mona was squinting in the general direction of the orchestra pit. She evidently still couldn’t see clearly.

  “You. Old man.” She moved slowly toward the front of the stage. “I urge you to choose better than these idiots. I can give you all the things I promised them. I can make you young and strong again.”

  Ben laughed. “I’ve got that covered, lady.”

  “I know all about you, Benjamin Siegel. You can only perform a temporary transformation. I’m offering you a true return to your youthful state. Surrender the Eye and you can be lord of this city again.”

  Raven clasped hands with Jack and Andy and guided them past Mona, who was oblivious to them now. She led them to the center of the stage, where Lucien stood waiting with Lana.