Death's Apprentice: A Grimm City Novel (17 page)

Hank got out of there as quickly as possible once he had the information. But picking his way through that mass of humanity, with its mingled atmosphere of despair and desperation, had been weirdly easier than escaping the second crowd he’d had to push through. That had been when he had gotten down to street level, and the crowded garden square. The people were still packed into the space, despite the pounding rain that continually threatened to extinguish the uplifted candles. Shouldering his way among them, he had barely glimpsed from the corner of his eye how large the swelling fruit on the pear tree had become.

Those people, the ones in the garden—their sense of hope was real. Something that had always been in short supply in this city. But somehow it had risen among them, as though the tree’s roots had broken open a wellspring below the cracked pavement. The excitement was palpable among the crowd, brighter in its crackling electricity than the streaks of lighting that stitched the dark clouds hanging above their heads. A few of the murmuring voices broke into louder, wordless, enraptured cries. Hank passed by others, speaking unabashedly to anyone who would listen, heedless of consequence—their words spoke of revolution, hated despots being overthrown, new days dawning. They turned from one another and cast tightly smiling glances at the tower next to the garden, as if they could already envision it crumbling apart, a vertical chasm tearing it from top to bottom.

*   *   *

Just enough light slid in from the back door for Hank to make out the interior’s dim outlines. The woman in the Devil’s waiting room had told him that the town house was one of the oldest buildings in the city, and it smelled like it, too, the enclosed air rank with mold and mildew. As Hank’s vision adjusted, he could discern a bit more. From what he could tell, the town house hadn’t been lived in before it had been boarded up and left derelict. The wood floors were bare, the carpets still rolled up along the baseboards, with customs duty tags hanging from their raw jute bindings. The chandeliers were still bagged in canvas, like enormous, grey bats sleeping above stacked and shrouded furniture.

It’s some kind of a con job,
thought Hank as he looked about himself.
Like a false front
. Somebody, a long time ago, had set it all up to convey the impression that the town house had been inhabited. But the decanters on the grime-shrouded tables had never been unstopped and filled, and the wicks of the candles in the tarnish-blackened candelabras had been left unlit, no fires ever kindled in the empty fireplaces. The town house’s only residents were the spiders who had draped the cornices with their dust-thickened cobwebs.

He fashioned a torch from a chair leg, its splintered end wrapped with a tattered sofa cushion. Once the fabric had been set ablaze, he stepped farther into the town house’s shuttered rooms. Sleek rats pattered away at his steps.

Passing through what had evidently been intended to be a sitting room and a parlor, he found himself in the town house’s library. Most of the mahogany shelves were bare, the volumes intended for them still piled up on the floor. A draft fluttered the torch’s flame; he peered closer at the nearest bookcase and spotted a thin opening along one end. He managed to dig his fingertips into the space, then pulled. The bookcase pivoted, revealing a hidden passageway.

Stepping cautiously forward, he followed the passage to the chamber at its end. That room’s dimensions were of a perfect square, the walls bare and unadorned. Each of the four walls showed a doorway leading to another part of the town house. At the room’s center, a rickety staircase stretched downward. Leaning in with the torch, Hank was unable to see the bottom of the spiraling steps. The stairs might have been a mineshaft to the center of the earth.

He squeezed past the side of the bookcase and set his foot on the first of the steps; it groaned beneath his weight. But he heard something else as well. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw shadows approaching one of the other open doorways, human figures silhouetted by the dim light behind them. Two men stepped into the room.

They stared at him in surprise equal to his own. One of them looked like some kind of beggar, with long, matted dreadlocks trailing to the shoulders of a filthy, stitched-together overcoat; the other was younger, no more than a teenager, wearing a black leather jacket.

He raised the torch higher, so he could get a better look at the pair. He figured the grime-encrusted one was just some poor homeless bastard; the city was full of them. “If you’re looking for some place to sleep, I’d advise going somewhere else. This place is—”

Suddenly, he felt the heat of something burning in his own coat pocket. Puzzled, he reached in with his other hand and pulled out the diamond flask that the Devil had given him. The thick, magmalike fluid in the vessel now churned and bubbled, as though boiling in fury.

The beggar stepped closer, circling around the staircase toward him. As he did so, the flask in Hank’s grasp exploded. The bright, searing fluid spattered across his chest like molten iron.

He’s one of them
— Hank’s eyes widened as he looked at the filthy specter before him. One of the three that he had been recruited to find; one of those men that the dwarf had said could harm Hank, and bring him fear. Shards of the diamond flask were still clenched in his fist, the sharp edges protruding from between his fingers like a multibladed weapon. He dove toward the beggar, his arm sweeping in a level arc to bring the shards across the man’s throat.

With an upraised forearm, Blake blocked Hank’s attack. The impact snapped into Hank’s chest, a shock wave as solid as though he had struck a wall of granite. With his greater mass and the speed of his rushing leap, he should have been able to barrel over the beggar, flattening the dirt-encrusted figure onto the floor. Instead, the beggar had vaulted over him, eluding Hank’s blow like a seagull spiraling above an ocean’s crashing wave. He felt one of the beggar’s black-grimed hands seize him by the throat; still in midair, the beggar thrust his arms straight, toppling Hank backward.

Hank’s shoulder brushed the edge of the central stairwell as he sensed himself falling into the opening. He caught a vertiginous glimpse of the spiraling stairs beneath him, with nothing but darkness at their bottom. Just before he collided with the staircase’s curving rail, he rolled to one side, his knee catching the beggar under the chin with enough force to throw him against one of the chamber’s walls. The stench of the grimy overcoat filled Hank’s nostrils as the beggar lithely rebounded, leaping forward in a low, horizontal arc. The fingertips of one of Blake’s hands touched the floor for a split second, enabling him to pivot his entire body around with even greater speed. His muddy boot caught Hank straight on the side of his head, hard enough to blur his vision. All he could do was blindly grapple the other man around the waist as he toppled backward. Both men landed entwined on the steps of the staircase, their combined force splintering the wooden treads beneath them.

Pounding a fist into the beggar’s chin, Hank felt the staircase begin to disintegrate. Scraps of ancient plaster spotted his face as the bolts that held the central support to the ceiling were yanked free. The rail pulled loose from the steps and swung about, beating into the walls of the narrow space. Any of the blows he landed would have knocked another man unconscious, but instead Hank found himself gasping for breath as the other’s knee slammed into his gut.

This bastard should be out of it
—

The single thought lit up the inside of Hank’s head, like a match dropped down a well. Adrenaline surged through his veins, not just from the stress of the fight, but from the realization that he had found at last who he had been looking for. What he had been promised. The butt of the beggar’s palm slammed under the corner of Hank’s jaw, blocking his carotid artery, pulsing stars and grey fog welling up in his skull.
This is the one,
he told himself. His heart sped, pushed by something he had never felt before. The one he couldn’t beat, the one who could beat him, could kill him, anything was possible now, everything …

He managed to shove the beggar’s hand away from his throat, a sudden tide of his own heated blood washing through his brain. The staircase yawed sickeningly in the darkness, more of its splintered fragments, broken steps, and rail segments pelting across his face and the beggar’s shoulders.

His knuckles ached and leaked blood as he tried to pound more blows into the face of his opponent. But his fist swept through empty air more times than it hit flesh, the beggar ducking and weaving as though he could see every strike before it was launched. He managed to connect a few times, leaving the beggar’s matted hair and beard glistening with red, the skin beneath scraped raw by Hank’s knuckles. But for every blow he landed, as their bodies crashed through section after section of the staircase, the beggar came back with a quicker flurry, blinding and dizzying him.

Can’t beat him to death—he’s too fast
—

There had to be another way, some weakness, an opening. Hank sucked his breath in through clenched teeth, his fragmented thoughts flailing from one side of his skull to the other.

Then he saw it. The corner of one elbow had dug under the lapel of the beggar’s filthy overcoat, ripping apart the neat stitches and peeling back the crusted fabric. Revealed underneath wasn’t skin and dirt, but raw flesh and shimmering lungs, as though all that held the beggar together was the spidered cage of his ribs.

That’s how
—

Wood splinters and ancient dust bellowed around Hank as his weight, combined with the beggar’s, shattered another section of stairs, his back plummeting through the broken pieces. Desperate, he didn’t block the beggar’s next punch, but let it crack like a boulder against his cheek as he plunged his own hand through the bloodied skin and into the beggar’s wet, red chest. His fingers clawed past the pulsing fist of the heart, straining to reach the spinal column behind. He knew instinctively that that was the only way to defeat him, to snap the linked bones and the nerve fibers they held—

Just as Hank’s fingertips grazed the vertebrae, his hand and forearm went numb. Rearing his head back, he could see the bloodied edges of the beggar’s overcoat seizing tight upon his arm, like a pit bull furiously clamping its jaws upon another beast’s neck. Panic, never experienced before, erupted inside Hank; he futilely struggled to pull his captured hand free. It felt as though the combined force of the coat and the beggar’s raw flesh were about to snap his forearm like a bundle of dry twigs.

Suddenly, a harder blow hammered up through Hank’s back and shoulders, leaving him stunned and without breath. Dizzied, he was just able to perceive that he and the beggar had struck the solid stone floor at the base of the disintegrating staircase. A cloud of dust rose around them, obscuring the nearby walls. Broken segments of wood cascaded across his face and upraised forearm—that was when he realized the force of the impact had dazed the beggar as well, enough that his arm had yanked free from the grisly trap in which it had been caught.

Hank staggered to his feet. Through the dust roiling around him and the blood streaming across his eyes, he could barely discern the beggar splayed on his back amidst the staircase’s wreckage, slowly shaking his head. Hank knew he had only seconds before the beggar regained enough consciousness to launch another leaping attack upon him.

They seemed to have landed in a cellar chamber with an arched stone ceiling only a couple of inches above Hank’s head. He looked around and spotted a section of the stairs’ railing that was long and straight enough to use as a spear, one end broken sharp. Snatching up the wood segment, he raised it above his head in both hands, bracing himself to plunge its point into the beggar’s chest.

The beggar’s vision cleared enough for him to see Hank rearing above him. Just as he raised his hand in a futile effort to ward off the blow—

A baby cried.

They both heard it. The thin, wailing sound echoed from the chamber’s curved walls. Hank turned his head, as did the beggar, both looking toward the limits of the dark, from where the crying came.

“Ren-Lei…”

Hank said the child’s name aloud. At the exact same time that another voice called out.

He looked down at the filth-encrusted beggar. Who stared up at him in equal astonishment. It was his voice that had also spoken the child’s name.

14.

The sounds of the fighting had gone on for a long time.

Holding on to what was left of the stair rail, Nathaniel peered down into the darkness. When Blake and the gargantuan hit man, fists pummeling each other, had tumbled into the space, the first thing their combined impact had broken away, with a screech of rusted metal, had been the staircase’s vertical support. That had started the complete disintegration of the stairs, every piece of the steps and the curved rail snapping free of the rest, as Blake and the giant Hank had struck them shoulder-first or with the straining muscles of their backs. Nathaniel had instinctively reached to grab Blake’s arm, to try and pull him back to the room, but it had been too late. The two battlers had already fallen beyond rescue, their conjoined descent barely slowed by the wreckage splintering around them.

There was silence now, though.

“Blake!” He cupped his other hand to the side of his mouth and shouted. “You there?”

No answer came. He wasn’t surprised. If the fall hadn’t killed Blake, or stunned him into unconsciousness, then he would likely have succumbed to Hank’s greater strength and mass. The question now was whether either one of them was still alive.

Only one way to find out, he knew. The staircase spiraling downward might be gone now, but that wasn’t going to stop him from investigating. Nathaniel pulled his hand back and folded his arms across his chest. He closed his eyes, letting the darkness from below seep inside him, extinguishing his thoughts …

*   *   *

The baby’s cry had stopped. For a moment, there was silence in the close-ceilinged stone chamber. Then both men heard a name called out from far in the distance above them.