Death's Apprentice: A Grimm City Novel (12 page)

With every concern taken care of, Ling returned to her office with the district attorney, immersing herself once again in all the subpoenaed grand jury investigations that had stacked up while she had been gone. She might have preferred to have been at home taking care of Ren-Lei herself, but a lifestyle such as the one she had created for the two of them, and for the baby’s grandparents, did not come cheap. There were bills to pay. But as long as Ren-Lei thrived in Anna’s care, then all the little family’s days passed happily enough.…

Until this morning. When Ling woke up and went into the nursery, and found the crib empty—and a note on top of the rumpled pink blanket. The roughly scrawled words read,
Your debt’s paid—I’ve taken what’s mine
. There was no signature at the bottom of the note, just a star-shaped symbol, crudely drawn by the same angry hand:

Frantic, Ling pulled the hidden video camera down from the shelf, the other toys scattering around the floor. On the LCD screen that the teddy bear opened to reveal, Ling watched as her trusted nanny escorted an ugly little man into the room. The digits in the corner showed that it all had taken place after midnight, when Ling had been sound asleep in her bedroom. The horrid figure that she remembered from five years ago had been too short to reach into the crib. Instead, Anna took the baby and placed it in his arms, then dropped the note he gave her onto the blanket. They left together, the nursery now empty and silent.

A flood of memories surged through Ling’s mind. Weeks before, when she had watched the nanny settling the baby down for a nap, Anna’s long hair had swept down over one shoulder, leaving the back of her neck exposed. Right at the nape, a tattoo no bigger than the woman’s thumb, in plain blue-black ink—and exactly the same symbol as the one on the bottom of the note.

*   *   *

“I couldn’t go to the authorities.” Kneeling on the other side of the carved grillwork, Ling kept her head bowed. It was obvious she still believed she was talking to the Mountain Master. “By then, I’d seen the same symbol on the DA’s ring as well. And on an amulet around the police chief’s neck. The dwarf must have people working for him all over this city. People he’s helped, who owe him favors.”

Concealed from her sight, Hank gave a monosyllabic grunt.

Ling raised her face, damp with tears. “I went back to my office, master. And I did everything I could to find the dwarf myself. I’ve been through every file I can lay my hands on, trying to find out who he is. But it’s like he doesn’t even exist. I haven’t found any clues about him anywhere. Not a name, or an address, or anything else, despite how weird he looks.”

Hank gave another grunt, affirming that he understood all that she had told him. He remembered the dwarf in the limousine.
It has to be the same guy …

“Master, you and the triad are the only ones I can turn to now. I’ll give you whatever you ask for. But you have to help me! For the sake of Ren-Lei!” She laid her hand on the grillwork, a fraction of an inch from Hank’s face. “I’m so frightened for her. And I know … I know it’s all my fault…”

He felt as though his heart were breaking. Something more than the woman’s beauty captivated him.

“I will help you.” Hank couldn’t stop himself from speaking aloud. “I’ll kill the dwarf for you, and bring your baby back.” He put his own hand against the grillwork, one fingertip just able to touch hers through the perforated metal. “I swear—”

She leapt back, crouched as though to strike, the fury in her eyes showing past her upraised fists. “You’re not the master!”

His voice had betrayed him.

“Who are you? Show yourself!”

Hank stood up and stepped out from behind the grillwork. The woman’s eyes widened as she beheld his towering form.

“I’m a friend,” he said simply. “You don’t know me yet … but it’s true. I can help you … Listen to me, and I’ll—”

“There’s blood. All over you.” Her eyes widened, as though she were struck with a sudden realization. Ling ran to the door leading to the restaurant, opened it, and beheld the silenced wreckage beyond. She stared at the shattered tables and chairs, and the lifeless bodies, red pooling across the tiles. “You killed them … all of them…” That was when she spotted the Mountain Master, his corpse floating in the aquarium tank in the distance, sightless eyes gazing through the glass at her.

“The master…” Her hate-filled gaze turned back toward him. “You killed him … you killed my only hope.”

Hank shook his head. “No. Like I said, I can help you, too…”

“And why should I trust you?” She looked at his reddened hands. “A murderer. A killer. That’s all you are.” Her eyes locked on his. “Now … now there’s no one…”

She turned and ran. All he could do was reach, trembling, toward the empty space where she had been. He heard the back door slam open, then her racing footsteps disappear into the lightless silence.

“Wait—” Hank knew he had to go after her. To protect her. With a deity’s stern regard, Guan Yu watched as he pushed aside a stack of chairs and headed for the alley, too. He collided with the garbage cans, knocking them over onto the wet cobblestones. “Don’t go—” He ran after the woman, barely visible through the slanting rain.

*   *   *

“You blew it.” Nathaniel’s voice was filled with contempt. “What the hell were you thinking?”

He stood near the carved screen. Invisible to them, he had been able to watch everything, hear everything, that had gone on between the woman and the hit man.

Through the room’s doorway, he caught sight of himself in one of the restaurant’s mirrors that had been left unshattered by the battle with the Mountain Master’s students. He could see the expression of concern on his face’s reflection. “These people don’t mean anything to you,” he told himself. It was the rule that Death, his own master, would have quoted to him, if that pale, emotionless entity had been there. “Don’t get involved.”

It was a good rule—the best rule—and a person didn’t need millennia of cold experience to know it.

He picked up one of the chairs and set it upright. He sat down, folding his arms across the back of the chair. Tired—for the last few hours, he had been following the trail of death through the city, just as his master had instructed him to do. Given what had just gone down here with that seven-foot-tall killing machine, he figured he had pretty much found the epicenter of the night’s fatalities. Just observing—he had arrived at the restaurant while the fight had been in full swing—had worn him out. It seemed ironic to have returned at last to the world of the living, only to see that many people get iced.

But there had been more to it than that. It had been listening to the woman’s story; that had taken something out of him as well. Her name was Ling; he knew that much about her. And her baby had been taken from her. That was the story she had told, through her anguished tears, to the giant hit man. Ren-Lei; probably a cute kid, if she took after her mother. Nathaniel figured the baby probably did. A sad story, but he had heard ones just as sad before. His life so far had been full of sad stories.

But this one had hit him hard for some reason. He laid his chin down on his arms and thought about it. At last, it came to him.
She’s looking for her baby,
thought Nathaniel.
She’ll go on searching, forever. She’ll never stop
. That’s what his own mother would have done—he knew it, he absolutely knew it—if she had still been alive when his drunken father had given him to Death. She would have come and found him. No matter what it took.

He got up from the chair and went over to the shrine. He looked down and saw the little drops of water, dark on the tiles below the screen. Those were her tears, he knew. He knelt down and touched a fingertip to one. Then he touched his chest. The pain was still there. It would never go away.

“You really are an idiot,” he softly told himself. But if the injury he had sustained, the weakening of the sacred pins that held his own soul inside himself, made it impossible to help anyone whom fate had drawn to his master’s world, the realm of the dead …

Then maybe he should help someone here. In the realm of the living.

He stood up. He closed his eyes as he brought his wet fingertip to his mouth.

And tasted the salt of a mother’s tears.

8.

The Devil stood at the window of the office tower, gazing down at the garden below.

His thoughts moved with a slow, vicious solemnity. At that moment, if all of the city’s humanity had but a single throat, he would have seized it in his sharply nailed fist and squeezed until the last bubble of red had burst.

There were the usual supplicants cluttering up the lobby—but it wasn’t their whining and begging that had turned his dark meditations even more bloody-minded than before. Desperate people were always scrabbling for his attention, as if he cared about their petty little lives and how badly they wanted him to let them out of the contracts they all had once been so eager to sign. He would deal with the humanity yammering at his elbows when he felt like it. Right now, he needed time to ponder all that was happening at the foot of his glistening tower.

His gaze turned even more incendiary as he contemplated the distant garden. Even as the rain continued pelting down, the peach tree stood in full bloom, the wet blossoms scattered throughout the lush green of its leaves. The sight infuriated him, as it had since the moment when the tree had been struck by lightning. His anger mounted higher as he suddenly realized that this must be what it felt like to be concerned about the passage of time. Human beings feared the approach of some final day, when payment for all their bargains came due; a page ripped from a calendar, or even the ticking of the clock upon a mantelpiece, must send their hearts racing with terror. A sensation like that had been unknown to him through all the millennia of his existence on earth. Yet nevertheless, here he was, brooding about what even the next few hours might bring.

Other creatures seemed happier, though.
Idiots
— He seethed with disdain when he spotted them. A dozen or so of the city’s residents, tending the garden. As if their pleasure in doing so was protection enough from the rain. Simple souls, even by human standards, who had not been so foolish as to let their greed and vanity entice them into diabolic contracts. Happy enough to be there, pulling up the garden square’s dead, sodden weeds, clearing away the undergrowth that had tangled around the once-dead peach tree, doing what was within their meager, mortal powers to transform this small portion of the world into something pleasant and enjoyable. The Devil despised them—and soon enough, he would take their wishes and dreams and crumple them like scrap paper inside his fists.

Dreams—and something that infuriated him even more. Even from here, he could see hope in the people’s eyes, especially those lifted in adoration toward the tree’s branches. Some stood there in amazed witness of the miracle happening before them; others knelt down and scooped up the wet dirt from the base of the trunk, rubbing it over themselves as though it were a sovereign charm against evil.

Even as the Devil watched, more people streamed into the garden square, bearing candle-lit lanterns and lengths of colored ribbon to hang amidst the glossy green leaves. Bit by bit, the tree was becoming the shrine that the dead lunatic had envisioned.

Darting past the worshipper’s legs, a couple of children tossed a rubber ball back and forth, while their parents troweled the wet dirt at the side of the garden and planted a row of daylilies. The ball got away from the kids, and bounced off the back of a man sweeping up the discarded plastic bags and other rubbish cluttering the square. From his vantage point high above, the Devil watched in revulsion as the man cheerfully accepted the parents’ apology. Leaning on the handle of his rake, the man went on chatting with the others, all of them laughing and looking each other straight in the eye.

“That’s not good,” the Devil muttered to himself. It wouldn’t have been too long ago that even a trivial incident such as that would have ended with the father and the other man first trading snarled insults at each other, then blows. And for the city’s residents to look each other in the face, instead of slinking past each other, eyes averted, the way they used to … nothing else could have indicated so clearly how the gears of Time had begun meshing and turning. Instead of being frozen in the eternal ice of abandoned hopes.

Eyes narrowing, he shook his head. If little things like that were happening—it meant that other, bigger things were as well. That enraged him a lot more than just people being so sickeningly
nice
to each other.

They’re out there somewhere,
he thought. The three heroes that he had dispatched so many assassins to find and eliminate. And still no sign of them, let alone their corpses laid out on the street for him to approve. He had expected far better results—especially from that last one the dwarf had recruited, the giant killing machine named Hank.

And what if his hirelings failed to find the heroes? Then what? In the workings of Time, there were even more things to be confronted. Such as those three heroes, whoever and wherever they might be, assembling that great army of which prophecy had spoken. An invincible army, with the heroes as its generals, leading its ranks as they marched toward the Devil’s headquarters.