The Grimm Files Collection Boxed Set

by Selene Charles

  I glanced at my watch. I knew from our PD contacts that the fallen princess’s song had been the night before, which meant if they were going to move on Elle at any point, it would be very, very soon.

  Time was a commodity I no longer had an abundance of. My plan was simple: run in, find her, and steal her back if I had to.

  But Undine was an entire nation beneath the waves, and I doubted my plan would go off so simply, which was why I’d gotten one of the level-ten witches back at the precinct to set a tracer on the charm.

  When Crowley came for it, I would be able to trace him right back to her, or so I hoped. That was if he was indeed working as her ally, which I had serious doubts about.

  I took a deep fortifying breath. I’d done all I could to try and plan for all eventualities, but something was bound to go wrong—it always did. I just hoped that when it did, I would be ready and able to weather the storm.

  Glancing down at the trinket, I wet my lips and rubbed my thumb over the face of it. How am I supposed to summon Crowley? The witch had never said, or if he had, I’d been too distracted by his even being there that I’d completely forgotten.

  I glanced over my shoulder. The waystation was located in the one of the most derelict spots of Grimm, tucked away in one of the hundreds of abandoned and rotting buildings that housed little more than rats and the occasional transient looking for a semi-warm place to escape the rain and cold.

  The floorboards in the room I was in were split and riddled with weak spots—one misstep, and I could fall twenty floors to my death. It was a death trap, and yet the spot where the doorway was placed had recently been renovated. The flooring had been reinforced with a fresh batch of wood, and where there were mounds of dust throughout empty room, the section around the gateway was dust free. It was definitely a well-used doorway.

  I pressed my lips together, thinking of the countless crimes that had been committed by using this door. I should have blown it up, but it was my only way to gain access to Elle.

  “Dammit,” I spat. Swallowing my own hypocrisy with a shake of my head, I turned and walked out of the room, making sure to keep on the newly renovated bridge section. Once outside the small room, I closed the door behind me then called for Crowley: “Agent Crowley, I’m here. I’ve retrieved your device. Show yourself to me.”

  I wasn’t sure if it would do a damned thing. So far as I knew, Crowley had no inherent magick, and yet he’d somehow reached out to me. I waited in the cold, empty hallway, watching a lone bulb flicker at the end of a nest of exposed wires. The place was a firetrap in the making.

  On my walk there, I’d passed several muck-faced children playing in the filthy alleyways. I swallowed hard and balled my fists.

  “Listen, you bastard,” I snarled, my own impotence and impatience leaking through my usually calm façade, “you called out to me. So if you’re there, you need to answer me. Now!” I snarled at the empty space before me.

  My plan could not work if I couldn’t set the tracker on Crowley. The Undine was too vast a place for me to have any hope of locating Elle or her castle on my own. For all I knew, the doorway could toss me out into one of the deepest trenches of the deep, forcing me to walk for miles in every direction just to find the breadcrumb that would eventually lead me to her castle, thus using all my reserves of air before I ever even reached her. That could not happen.

  “I found your bloody trink—” Before I could finish the sentence, I felt the air shift, turn colder, and coalesce with paint streaks of color.

  And then, there he was, staring at me with his cold, red eyes. He stood before an unusually shaped stone archway, with a blue radiance gleaming at his back. “You have found the trinket? Let me see it?”

  No greeting or anything else—he was all business, and I sensed an urgency in him far more potent than the one I’d sensed even the other day. His movements were frantic, and whatever he was doing was just outside my field of vision.

  I held up the trinket. For a second, his shoulders stiffened, and then a flash of relief scrawled across his tight features. “Hand it to me. The tribunal meets in mere moments. There is no time left to spare.”

  I clenched my jaw. “How will this keep her or you safe? What is this thing? You never did say.”

  He grinned, showing nothing but teeth even as he hastily began to jerk golden fabric on over his arms. “No, I did not.”

  I cocked my head, waiting for him to say more. But he didn’t. “How do I know you’re not deceiving me?”

  His smile was ruthless. “You do not. But I did not lie to you. She will be kept safe.”

  “Where are you? Where is she?” I had to try anything to help narrow my own search.

  He shook his head. “It matters not. You could not come to where we are, anyway. Good day, Detective.”

  Then the image vanished, and I was standing in an empty hallway, staring into the yawning blackness with a curious frown gathering my brows. I stared at my palm. I’d never handed it to him, but I knew before I looked that it would not be there anymore. Somehow, someway, he’d called it to him.

  I was right. My palm was empty.

  But it was not the device that caused me such consternation. Last time, I’d been too emotional to realize that when he’d spoken to me, he’d done so in a manner that was not at all reminiscent of the detective. His words had been far too eloquent, learned, scholarly. He’d spoken without the use of a single contraction.

  I thought of Crowley, the real Crowley. He was gruff and hard, and he spoke in the style of the streets.

  My heart raced as I scanned the empty floorboard before me, seeing not the dust streaked everywhere but rather hearing the Tinkerer’s voice, her caution that the agent was evil and not to be trusted. I’d assumed that she’d meant Crowley—I’d had no reason not to. What if the agent isn’t Crowley at all, rather a mage in disguise? It has to be, right? Crowley had no magick. I’d known that all along.

  I doubted B.S. had access to the kind of magick that had literally pulled the timepiece from my palm through a magickal ley line directly to him. I knew enough of witches and wizards to know that what I’d just seen was high-level craft.

  The Sea Witch hadn’t been caught.

  Ichabod had assured us that the battle between Elle and the Sea Witch had to have weakened her enough so that she was not a threat for the time being and that she would be forced to lay low to recover before she could engage us further. He’d said that she was a null piece on the board. But he could have been wrong. What if she’d merely been biding her time? What if the Sea Witch had been down there with Elle the entire time?

  My pulse jerked, and before I knew what I was doing I was racing for the waystation. Running as fast as I could, reaching into my inner jacket pocket at the same time and swiped the card through the keypad just a moment later.

  The door thrust open, and the water world beckoned to me. Sea kelp wrapped like living vines out the watery doorway. A blue phosphorescence like the one that’d been at Crowley’s back glowed from within.

  I waited to feel the first faint pulse of the targeting magick Layla had slyly embedded within the timepiece itself. I hadn’t worried about Crowley finding the tracker because he was not a mage. But I no longer believed I was dealing with Crowley, and if I wasn’t, that meant whoever had taken the charm from me was powerful enough to spot the tracker.

  I waited and waited, but no telltale pulse came to me.

  “No,” I whispered, shaking my head forcefully. “No. Elle… Arielle, where are you?”

  I gripped the doorway with both hands, bracing my legs and craning my neck as far as I could, hoping and praying against all odds that I just needed to be more patient. But nothing happened.

  My fires began to roil within me. The sizzle of water meeting flame created steam that began to billow around my ankles and up to my knees.

  I could find her another way.

  I wet my lips.

  I’d sworn to the agency that I would never use
my powers in that way, that I would never step outside the carefully governed bounds of what I was allowed to do.

  A thing—a creature like me letting loose could be a dangerous thing. But it was Elle, my Elle, and I would be damned if I would let anything happen to her.

  I chuckled. “You’re already damned anyway, Maddox. Not like you have any more to lose.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. I had a lot to lose. I had everything to lose.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. If I let myself do what I was about to do, the hunger to be as I was born to be would rise in me again. I’d spent a lifetime quelling that madness, and I hated to think what would happen if I wasn’t strong enough to put that genie back in the bottle when it was all said and done.

  Steam hissed all around me as I clenched tighter onto the doorway.

  There was no other choice. I had to find her. I would not lose her too. If I did, I would go truly mad, and no one in the twin hells or on Grimm would be safe from my wrath.

  “Not this time,” I growled. I slammed back the algae tablet, and with a quick prayer, I stepped through the doorway.

  CHAPTER 49

  ELLE

  WHEN I AWOKE the next morning, I knew before there’d even been a knock on my door that they would be coming for me.

  So I’d gotten dressed and waited for them. My hair was in disarray—I’d never bothered to unpin it before bed. I was still wearing the funeral dress from the night before.

  I glanced over to where Crowley should have been, but all that was left was his imprint. I touched the edge of his pillow, frowning as I stared at the wrinkles in it.

  He was already gone, probably back to his room before the summons. I wasn’t sure why he’d left me without a word, not that it mattered. Last night hadn’t meant anything. It’d just been a way for both of us to release the tension and anxiety looming over both our heads.

  The knock sounded again, more forcefully this time.

  I sighed and got up.

  When I opened the door, I was met by the royal guard. Barathanous was in the lead, a wicked grin tipping the corner of his lips. “Arielle, disgraced Princess ”—his voice dripped with contempt at that bit—“of the Undine. You have been summoned by a jury of your peers to see to— ”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I muttered angrily, glowering at him. “Just get on with it already, dick for brains.”

  I probably shouldn’t have said that part, but I was pissed. I was surly, and I didn’t think right when I didn’t get my morning cup of java.

  Rough hands latched onto my shoulders, turning me so forcefully that I stumbled, and then my arms were yanked behind me in a punishing grip before even more iron was clamped to my wrists.

  I snarled. But I’d asked for it too, so I didn’t say anything else—it would only be worse for me if I did. He merely had to summon me to the tribunal. There was nothing saying I had to arrive in any shape other than still breathing.

  I bit my tongue as he jerked my bonds and force me ahead of the vanguard. The way I saw it, I had two options. I could hang my head in shame and let those gathering like a small school of fish around me gossip and whisper and say whatever the hells they pleased while I pathetically just accepted it all. Or I could let them gossip and whisper as I stared cold, defiant death at all of them. I went for option two.

  The walk seemed to take forever, and as I went, the citizens began to throw things at me: first fruit, then spoiled fruit, then more painful things, such as pointed coral and sharp-edged rocks. I bit my lip, saying nothing. I would let them take their pound of flesh out of me, enduring the injustice of allowing them to touch me, slap me, kick at me. To take my gown into their hands and rip it off of me, exposing my legs to them.

  Their vitriol became more heated after that. I wasn’t one of them any longer. That point could not have been made clearer.

  My nostrils flared, and heat stung my eyes.

  I endured the labyrinth of shame that I was forced to walk with whatever scraps of pride I still had left. I’d known how it would go down because I’d been forced to suffer it once before.

  But the first time it hadn’t been so hateful, so personal.

  It didn’t matter that I didn’t physically kill my sister or gravely wound my father. In their eyes, I was a traitor, and I always had been.

  Then a young boy swam in front of my eyes, and I saw his beautiful, perfect face with those electric-purple eyes so like Anders’s that my heart skittered in my chest.

  He threw a tiny projectile at me with such force that when it struck my temple, my head swam and stars danced in front of my eyes. I felt the warm slick of blood sliding down my cheek when I finally became lucid again. It must have been Anders’s grandson—I’d known it the first second I’d seen him. Beautiful just like his devil of a grandsire had been.

  I’m sure in those stories, I was the monster, but the boy would never know how Anders had raped me, how he’d held me down as he heaped one humiliation after another upon my body.

  In fact, no one other than Anahita and Father had known. Father had told me to just accept it and make my peace with it. Anders came from a vaunted and respected line, and if I knew what was good for me, I would shut up and play the game.

  Anahita had wanted to kill him. She’d wanted to torture him. Her rage had been such that she would have torched his entire house to make it right again, so I’d killed him instead. I’d saved my sister’s reputation. And I’d gotten my own revenge. First, I’d cut off his cock and balls. Then I’d forced him to watch as I’d fed them to the eels. After that, I’d sunk my blade into the soft meat of his belly and had played with his organs until the light was extinguished from his beautiful, cold eyes.

  I’d been found half mad with bloodlust, covered in his gore. I’d been labeled a monster then and banished for my crime, but not before I’d taken down the first wave of guards who’d come to take me in. I’d butchered them all, singing them into enough of a stupor that it’d been so, so easy to carve them up too.

  I swallowed hard.

  I had gone mad with grief and shame and horror at the bloody awful things I’d been able to do. And after I’d been banished, the killings hadn’t stopped. I’d hunted down all the dogs who’d ever wronged my Hook. That’s how Crowley had known me once. I had been the monster of the sea, the mistress of the dark. He hadn’t lied when he’d said it.

  The young boy had tears streaming down his cheeks, and his hand was open. A tiny seahorse carved of pewter rested in his palm. He must have thrown one of his toys at me, landing a once in a lifetime hit that’d bled me like a stuck pig.

  I blinked hard, wishing I could look away from his agonized glare but knowing that I had to take it. I had to see it, and I had to remember it. Because though his grandsire was the spawn of the devil, that boy had clearly never heard that. I’d been in a dark place then, a very, very dark place. That didn’t make it right, but it made it understandable. I could never slide like that again. The things I’d done to myself, to others... I could never be that again. So I let him direct his hate at me. I gave him a target because sometimes that’s what people needed so that they didn’t spiral like I had.

  Barathanous growled in my ear. “He is Anders’s grandson. All our boys are raised knowing what kind of a monster you truly are. You deserve that and more, Arielle. So you live with it. C’mon.” He shoved me between the shoulder blades, forcing me to stumble forward.

  By the time I arrived at the tribunal, my shame was complete.

  I was covered in rotting meats, fruits, and even waste. My dress was torn, my flesh shredded.

  My sister’s eyes flinched from her central spot at the council table. But she said nothing, only breathed slowly and deeply.

  I caught sight of Crowley shackled to the wall from my periphery. His look was hard, almost angry. But I couldn’t look back at him. I couldn’t take his censure or his pity, and I didn’t care to figure out which one it would be.

  I glanced at the four males sittin
g arrogantly on the dais just below my sister’s, openly and hostilely glaring down at me. The five noble houses were represented, and I knew I was in deep shite when I saw who they’d sent as their delegates: members from the families of males I’d killed.

  I huffed beneath my breath. It was never going to be fair, and I’d known it all along, so seeing the evidence of that truth shouldn’t have affected me at all, but it did. My knees felt weak, and it actually hurt to breathe, though I knew my sister hadn’t taken her favor off of me yet.

  Jacamoe stood, dressed in the ceremonial golden garb of court. He held up a decree before him and spoke in a loud, authoritarian voice, “Arielle, princess of Seren and the Undine, has been charged with the death of Princess Aquata and the grievous injury to her father, King Triton. How does the defendant plea?”

  I could feel the glide of displaced water and, the amphitheater filled with more and more sirens come to see my trial. Why does this feel so rushed? Why aren’t they waiting for the courtroom to be gated and sealed? There were rumblings amongst the tribunal, and even Anahita was openly glaring at Jacamoe. I clearly wasn’t the only one wondering at the rush.

  I swallowed.

  “How do you plead?” He pressed harder with a sharper edge to his words that had me cocking my head in curiosity. Why is Jacamoe acting this way? It went beyond the bounds of decorum.

  I’d known the day was coming since the moment I’d arrived in Undine, but I still felt overwhelmed and unprepared for the events.

  I glanced over to where Crowley was chained. His look was cold, hard. But he wasn’t staring at me. He was glaring daggers at Jacamoe. There was a look in his eyes that I recognized, and it shook me.

  He was looking at Jacamoe as he’d looked at me when he’d been on my scent and I’d been insane with vengeance and grief. He was looking at Jacamoe as though he was guilty.