The Grimm Files Collection Boxed Set

by Selene Charles

  “What?” I snapped, shoving off the railing. “What the hells are you getting at, Crow— ”

  “Time, Arielle!” He rolled his wrists, giving me a “Now do you get it?” look.

  But I totally didn’t. Stiffening my neck, I widened my eyes and said, “Yeah? So?”

  “Fucking hells,” he growled. “Your daddy didn’t just dump the shade of the wicked in there for no reason.”

  “She was trying to take over his realm. Yes, that, I know. Why didn’t you just say so?”

  “Arielle,” he snapped, sounding impatient, “no, it was so much more than that. The witch swallowed a sliver of eternity. Trapped inside of her incorporeal form is literally time. It’s why when the great culling of dark mages occurred, she wasn’t killed. Because to do so would literally unravel time itself. Any place—and not just place, but to be more precise, any moment in history—will be Bonny’s to command if she’s somehow figured out a way to snatch time from the witch. Now do you get it?”

  I looked at him, just looked at him, feeling nothing but a strange, twisting darkness rolling through me. That same slinking energy I’d felt earlier but stronger, brighter. And for just a second, I caught a glimpse of colors. Bright flashes of it. None of it made sense. But I was hearing laughter, bone-chilling and demonic laughter, echoing all around me.

  “Hey,” he said and grabbed my elbow. “You still there?”

  And I jerked, flinching so violently I nearly fell flat on my arse. “What?” I blinked, the image scattering as quickly as it had come on. My head felt suddenly thick and full with fuzz. I rubbed at my now pounding temple. “What?” I said again, softer.

  He had his head cocked and was looking at me as if he wasn’t sure he could trust what he was seeing. “Arielle, are you—what the fuck was that?” he finished, sounding hard and gruff again, but beneath it, I was sure there was a thread of worry there too.

  I shook my head, not even sure myself. “I. Mm. ” I patted my dress, which had definitely seen better days. “I think I’m tired, Agent Crowley. This case and... other things…” I shivered. “Have been keeping me up at night. I’m…” I frowned. “I’m sorry.”

  He looked confused and tired himself. And he was staring at me as he had been earlier, as if he was no longer so sure about me. “I know the feeling. This case has been fucking hells.”

  “Aye,” I agreed with a nod as we settled into a not so uncomfortable silence. I watched the wake of the ship, becoming mesmerized by it, trying not to think about what had just happened.

  I’d been doing a lot of that lately, trying not to think—about anything. Made me wonder if maybe my problem was that I needed to stop not thinking and start thinking. I sighed.

  “The… the girl,” he said softly into the lulling quiet between us.

  I looked at him, trying to figure out what he was saying. He shuddered, and I heard the demons he normally kept leashed trying to come out of him. All cops had our demons. It was just that most times, we were damned good at keeping them our dirty little secrets.

  “So broken.” His voice broke.

  That was when I realized he wasn’t talking about Anne Bonny, not with the pain he wasn’t even bothering to hide. I turned more fully toward him, taken aback by the sudden softness he was openly exhibiting. Since when did Crowley act like that? With me? He was a hard-ass, grade A prick.

  The girl.

  Suddenly, it all clicked in my head. “You were there, at that scene, weren’t you? You saw Holly Th— ”

  He snarled, chest vibrating with a harsh lupine growl.

  I held up my hands, trusting that an agent of the law wouldn’t commit cold-blooded homicide, but then again, we were all alone in the middle of vast waters with no witnesses around—none that would be considered trustworthy in a court of law, anyway. And it was a well-known fact that I was Crowley’s least favorite person in all the realms. Who’d know? It would be the perfect crime, really.

  I narrowed my eyes, and he shoved off the railing, clenching and unclenching his fists.

  Silence stretched uncomfortably between us as he took deep and even breaths. Finally, with a hard crack of his neck, he seemed to get himself together.

  “Are you… o-okay?” I asked, not even sure what to say to him. I’d never dreamed I’d see any kind of actual whatever that was from someone like him in my life.

  “We’re not friends,” he snarled.

  I shrugged. “I never claimed to be,” I said.

  His nostrils flared, and I was struck all over again by the surreal nature of our situation. I hated him. He hated me. So how the hells had we wound up there?

  Once more, he grabbed hold of the railing. “Sometimes I can’t sleep, thinking about what happened to that poor girl. I don’t give two shits what you think about me, fish, but you should know I have a line. I don’t keep with murdering children. And there’s been too damn much of that lately.”

  “Lost Boys aren’t really children. They only look like it. But I’m not trying to minimize what happened to them,” I said quickly, realizing how cold I’d just sounded.

  Crowley snarled.

  “Fuck me.” He rolled his eyes. “Stop, okay? Just stop. I don’t need you to try to make me feel better. Hells, I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. Any of this. Godsdamnit it.”

  “Bloody hells,” I snapped, “riding the crimson wave tonight or what? Don’t forget you walked over to me. You want to stop talking, fine. Good. Go. I didn’t ask you to— ”

  At first, he looked seriously pissed. But as I kept talking, his face began to slowly change, from severe and feral to humored, and finally, he chuckled.

  “Shit, I’m riding the crimson wave? Okay. Yeah, good one, fish.” He snorted but couldn’t seem to stop chuckling, and watching him lose his usual sharply controlled demeanor like that was startling to say the least.

  “Have you lost your damned mind tonight?” I asked, thoroughly confused by him.

  “Shit,” he said on a sigh as he finally stopped laughing. “Trapped on a ship to Nowhere with my least favorite people in the world. I’m in a fucking nightmare.”

  “Pretty much my idea of the worst first date ever,” I said, chuckling softly.

  At first, he grunted, then he began to chuckle again. “Don’t you wish, little siren. Don’t you just fucking wish.”

  “Not really,” I said but couldn’t help but grin. Because what the hells—we must have sailed through to some alternate dimension where Crowley wasn’t an uptight arsehole but a somewhat decent unhuman being.

  Rolling his eyes, he stared out at the horizon, and I followed suit just a few seconds later, and somehow the silence between us no longer felt so weird.

  “Why the hells are we riding toward what is likely to be our certain doom again?”

  He snorted. “You’ve got a point, dammit. Which is annoying as all fuck.” He glanced at me, a strange look upon his handsome face, as though he couldn’t quite figure out why we were still even talking. He gave his head a slight shake. “But you’re not entirely right, either. Anne’s the reason why we can finally put a stop to the syndicate.”

  “You really think so? After ten years of dealing with this gang, you really think this could be the end of it?”

  “Don’t you?” he asked, sounding confused. “For once, we might just actually be a step ahead.”

  I licked my front teeth. “Seems too easy. I dunno. All of this.” I shook my head. “I just… I don’t… know.” I frowned, not even able to coherently put my thoughts and feelings into any semblance of order. I blew out a harsh breath and gave a self-effacing laugh. “I just fecking need sleep. Why do you always have such a hate on for me?” I asked, and I froze, because I’d not expected to ask him that, but we’d actually been civil to each other for longer than a minute, and I was sleep deprived and so damned confused and it just sort of came spewing out of me. “Wait, I don’t— ”

  The strange and surprisingly easy banter between us suddenly felt icy and
tense again, just as it usually was with us. His nostrils flared, and his green eyes suddenly seemed to glow that shade of bright, eerie red that made my blood run cold.

  “I hate you because I know who you are. I chased you. Me”—he pointed at his chest—“for three years. Hunting you down like the fucking spoiled fish you were. Finding one nasty mess after another left in your wake. Fucking monster,” he spat.

  I winced. Because he was right. I had done that. My past was dark. I could not deny it. So I wouldn’t even bother trying.

  “Then I catch you. I fucking bag the biggest bad in the hundred realms. I did it. Me. Then Daddy Dearest,” he growled, “with all his pomp and swagger and pull, somehow gets you off the hook, and now, not only are you free, but you’re a fucking lawman to boot. It’s insulting. Makes me sick. Makes me want to break you. Because you know what, Arielle?” He leaned in, a deep growl reverberating from his chest and making mine tremble. “Fish don’t change their scales. Deep inside of you, that she-bitch still lives. You’re not changed from that same monster I tracked all over the fucking realms. That’s you. And that will always be you. And I’m gonna be right there, ready to take you down, the day she comes back out. That’s why I ride shotgun on you, why I’m always there, always foiling whatever the hells you’ve got up your sleeve. Because soulless monsters like you, they don’t change. Ever.”

  With those words, he pulled back, but his eyes gleamed like a wolf’s in midnight, and his skin looked darker. I could see his fur just below the surface ready to break free.

  I swallowed hard, feeling surprisingly raw by his words. He’d picked at a very deep and secret fear of mine, that inside of me where there was nothing but shadows and darkness, my evil still lived, still breathed, just waiting on me to call it back out again. “My father had nothing to do with that. And if you think he did, then you’re an even greater fool than I thought.”

  Standing upright, he laughed loudly and heartily, as though greatly amused. Crowley had been my greatest adversary since I’d joined the ranks of Grimm PD. Always there, always giving me the sense that he wasn’t just waiting but actively attempting to prove to the world that a leopard was incapable of changing its spots, making my life absolute hells as he always moved against me to impede my cases and my progress. And deep down, I’d always known that was why. But hearing him say it somehow felt like a relief, as if I wasn’t a conspiracy-theory nut job. He was wrong, though. What he thought he knew, he was dead wrong. And I could correct him—hells, I could even prove it to him—but what was the godsdammed point? Even with the proof staring him right in the face, I doubted that man would ever become my ally. His obsession with bringing me down was as strong—possibly even more so—as it had ever been in the beginning.

  “If you think,” he hissed, now all serious, his starkly handsome features looking twisted with barely checked anger, “that your father wasn’t behind it, then it’s you that’s the fool, not me. Wake up, princess.”

  He tapped me on the forehead with his finger, and I snapped, swatting at his hand angrily, but he’d already pulled it back to his side.

  “I will always have my eye on you, Princess Arielle. And someday, you will be in cuffs. I vow it.”

  With those last words he turned on his heel and walked angrily off, fading into the deep shadows of the night.

  There was a roaring of water off in the distance. The golden triangle. We were close. Soon, we would be sailing through the deep, defying the conventions of science and order as we headed toward a destiny that was increasingly making me queasy.

  I should turn in. It would take us several hours at least to get there. Nowhere was exactly where the name implied, literally nowhere. An island unto itself. So far removed from the realms of Grimm, it was almost an afterthought. I could finally get the sleep my body so desperately craved and needed.

  But now that I had the time to do it, I couldn’t turn my fecking brain off. All I could think about was the damned case and how strange and weird it all was: Lord Humpty’s broken body; the stolen slipper; the senseless deaths; the possibility that the sea witch might actually come back in some way, shape, or form; and Hook.

  Where was he? What was he doing? Why was he even a part of all of it? I’d watched him fade to sea foam. Why bring him back? Why him? Of all the dead that could have been resurrected, why him?

  I smelled darkness, and my body grew tense. I gripped the railing so hard that I felt the groan of its wood beneath my fingers.

  “What are y— ”

  “Don’t turn around, I… I just need you to listen to me, Arielle.”

  I shivered, hearing the delicious burr of Hook’s rum-soaked voice in the darkness. I closed my eyes, trembling all over as I felt the blanket of his heat press up against my flesh.

  “What are you doing here, Hook? You should be below deck. You should— ”

  “Crowley released me,” he said slowly.

  I sucked in a sharp breath. “What? But he… he can’t do that.”

  Hook’s rumble of laughter was so familiar and titillating that I felt my nipples grow hard and my thighs weak. I shuddered.

  “We’re out here in the middle of nowhere, Ellie. Who could stop him?”

  I groaned. Hearing the sound of his pet name for me on his tongue was bringing it all back, the highs and the lows of our relationship. What Hook and I had, it had been so damned forbidden, and I’d known it.

  Sirens never mated with humans. Not ever. It was my father’s one sacred law, never to be broken, not even by his own flesh and blood. To do so would incur his everlasting wrath and swift and brutal punishment. My sisters had been smart enough to never fall for a human, but I’d never had enough sense in my head to keep away from danger. Somehow, I always seemed to run headlong into it.

  “What are… what are you doing here?” I whispered.

  “You don’t trust me anymore?” he asked silkily, softly.

  I clutched at my lower stomach. For days, I’d been doing everything I could to ignore the giant elephant in the room, keeping busy, running from one realm to another, drinking coffees so heavily spelled to make me numb, all so that I could pretend this man was not real, not here, not a ghost sent to haunt me again and again and again.

  Heat burned my eyes, and my throat was clogged and thick with a giant lump that no amount of swallowing seemed to get rid of. “No, I don’t trust you. I don’t know you.”

  “But you do, Arielle. You do know me.”

  I growled, unable to keep from looking at him another second.

  The tiny scar above his cupid’s bow that I used to kiss with wild abandon whenever I could. The ever-present dusting of a black beard that shaded the sharply cut lines of his bold square jaw that I used to always touch whenever I wanted to. The intensity in his dark-brown eyes, which only looked at me the way they looked at me now.

  A sound tore from my lips, came crashing out of me, mortifying but also brutally honest.

  He shivered, dark eyes growing deep with shadow.

  “Am I so off putting to you now, lass? Is that what this is?”

  Looking at him hurt so damn badly. Peering into his eyes felt a lot like slipping deep into his soul all over again and giving him access to mine. Once, it had felt honest and real between us, but now… it fecking hurt like hells. So I cast my eyes down at his booted feet and shook my head.

  “Ellie, gods,” he murmured. “We canna pretend we don’t know one another. Not after everything we’ve been through together.”

  My head snapped up at that, and I didn’t know what happened, but suddenly, I was the one unleashing the demons inside of me. Tears, thick and blinding, came pouring out of me.

  “I left you! Don’t you fecking get it? To look at you physically hurts me. To see you, it makes me remember. Remember everything. How it felt to be with you, how it felt to be touched by you. Gods above, I can’t do this. I can’t— ”

  I turned on my heel, desperate to get away, desperate to find my room. He gave cha
se, and if I’d really wanted to, I could have made him leave me alone. I could have blasted him with water, shoved him into the oceans below us. I could have gotten away, but I didn’t stop him.

  Instead, I ran and listened with all my heart and soul as he ran just behind me. When I opened my door and slipped through, I didn’t close it behind me.

  It softly shut with a snick just a second later, and there he was, breathing heavily, sharing my oxygen, in my dark, cramped quarters, with only low dancing fairy light hovering above us, creating deep hollows and shadows in his face, making him look like the devil come to snatch my soul, and my body thrummed with power and energy.

  His dark eyes roved up and down my trembling body. “I missed you, Ellie, every second of every day, every minute I was forced to breathe and you weren’t there with me. Deep in my soul, I could never forget you.”

  I shoved my hand into my mouth, biting down on the tip of my pinky finger until it burned with a red-hot flash of pain as my fang pierced through and a drop of my liquid essence sizzled upon my tongue.

  “I still love you, lass,” he murmured tenderly with that wonderful dark burr of his that never failed to make me weak in the knees.

  He started walking toward me, but I held up my hand.

  “Stop.”

  My command was weak, but he did stop.

  I shook my head. “Why are you doing this? You need to go.”

  He flinched as though I’d physically slapped him, but my words came out pinched and tight. I didn’t mean it. I also knew that whatever this was, it was a bad idea. A very bad idea.

  “If that’s what you really want, then I’ll go, Ellie. But if you think you don’t know me, then you’re only lying to yourself.”

  Latching onto my anger was as easy as breathing, and since that was all I had right now, that was what I did. “You died! I saw his lightning tear through your side.”

  He flinched. “Aye, it tore right through me, split me right down the middle, lifted my soul from my body, and I gasped in your arms, silently roaring at you that I loved you, that I would find my way back to you, that I’d promised you fecking forever and godsdamnit it, I would do it, some way, somehow. That’s why I think Anne could bring me back—because I was willing. I wanted this, Ellie. I wanted you, one last time.”