Death's Apprentice: A Grimm City Novel (2 page)

Behind him, he could hear the body jolting against the side of the stall. And a smaller, sharper noise, as one by one the pins, which had held the divine and unsullied essence prisoner inside the corrupted flesh, snapped. The last one broke apart, and Nathaniel could sense the light slowly gathering itself into the air.

The soul floated free for a moment, caught between Death’s waxen hands. Then, with a whispered incantation, Death lifted it further into the air and released it from the mortal world forever—sending it away to the distant realm of Purgatory, where its sins would be judged and its eternal fate pronounced.

The brilliance faded; soon enough, the pain Nathaniel had endured would diminish as well. He turned around again and saw the lifeless, blank-eyed corpse slumped between the toilet and the side of the stall. He tried to slow his own racing pulse, taking one deep breath after another. This part of the job was over.

Something had gone wrong. The pain filling his chest—it didn’t pass, as it always had before. It sharpened, as though his heart were seized in a steel-taloned fist, tighter and tighter. A new fear, dark and unrecognizable, coiled around his spine.

Dizzied by his own unfamiliar panic, he gripped the stall’s door to keep from falling. He could hear Death’s musing words.

“Why are they always surprised?” Death sounded almost puzzled, even though it was the same question he had asked so many times before. “By something they know will come. From the moment they are born—they know.”

Nathaniel tried to answer. But couldn’t. The knifelike pain—blazing as it was sharp—had stabbed him when he had felt the fiery ball rising from the man’s chest. Now it grew as large as the world, annihilating every thought. He screamed in agony, and the floor swung toward his face.

“Nathaniel…”

As consciousness faded, he was dimly aware of Death standing above him.

“What has happened to you?”

Through the bathroom’s one small window, he could see the frozen lightning, caught as it streaked across the night sky. Somewhere, out beyond the rain and the stars, the gears of Time started up again. But not inside Nathaniel. In there, it was just blackness and silence …

Then nothing.

2.

Blake’s worn-out boots hit the ground exactly as the lightning flash divided the night into jagged halves. Rain-soaked cracks and gouges in the ancient leather mirrored the white electricity above. The rumbling sky was the only sound; the broken soles seemed to make no impact at all on the cargo depot’s sodden concrete.

Anyone watching might have thought he was just another ragged beggar—the city was full of them. But beggars—real ones—moved slow, one leaden shuffle after another. And this one moved fast. Glimpsed, then gone before the darkness filled up the crack that the lightning had rent through the night sky.

The wooden train carriage was empty and silent now, as though nothing more than a ghost had departed from it. A few damp splinters, brushed free by Blake’s hands, drifted onto the oily gravel at the platform’s edge; the freight door might have opened on its own accord as the train had slowed, so quick had been the man’s touch upon it. His matted dreadlocks had trailed behind his head as he darted to the ground. Up ahead, the diesel locomotive gasped out its final sulphurous exhaust, winding to a stop.

The rain barely touched his face, deep mahogany beneath the dirt and grease smudged on it. Crouching on one knee where he had landed, he quickly scanned the freight platform, then sprang to his feet.

Yard Bulls, the private cops hired to keep drifters off the railway’s rolling stock, glared at Blake as he slipped past the stenciled crates crowding the platform. The Bulls’ eyes tightened as water trickled from the drooping brims of their hats onto the upturned collars of their rain-heavy coats—but they didn’t pull their shotguns out from beneath and yell at him to stop. Any other time, the man’s appearance—his long, matted hair, his grime-blackened hands, and the crudely stitched-up tears in his fraying overcoat—would have given the Bulls perfect license to splay him out, their boot heels pinning his wrists to the concrete. But the way the Rottweilers cringed and tugged at the leash chains grasped in the Bull’s black-gloved hands, paws scrabbling at the wet concrete to put as much distance as possible between themselves and this spectral intruder—that gave their masters enough sullen wisdom to let the man disappear from view. These days, there were plenty of other, slower vagrants to bully. There would at least be a chance of catching ones like that.

Farther in from the tracks, the iron overhang cast the platform into nocturnal shadows, their edges rendered hard by the halogens crudely mounted above, power cables looped from one arching girder to the next. The raw, wooden flanks of unclaimed freight containers had been pried open by those desperate enough to risk sneaking past the station’s guards. The cheap splendor of Asian toys, spilling from the broken crates, had been imbedded into the concrete like a slurried mosaic of bright-colored plastic, the tiny fragments still sharp enough to draw blood from incautious fingertips. As the beggar moved catlike past the decaying freight, his momentary step raised no dust from the shards.

Another crackle of lightning broke across the night; Blake’s narrow shadow leapt across the crates. He halted and looked behind himself, the grimy dreadlocks tracing across his shoulders.

A shift in wind blew the rain beneath the overhang and closer to his face. He could feel soot-blackened rivulets crawling beneath the rag knotted at his throat. The muscles of his chest and spine, tightened from days of hard jostling as he had slumped in the corner of an empty freight car, now began to ease. This place looked like hell—which he had known it would—but he was still oddly relieved to have reached it at last.

Wanted to come here
 … A frown tugged at Blake’s mouth, the rain collecting in one downturned corner.
Why?
That was what puzzled him. Why would anybody want to drag their sorry ass to this dump? Even somebody who had been born here, the way he had—nobody ever got homesick for this. A guy would need to be a glutton for punishment to have managed to claw his way out, and then make his way back here again.

A fragment of the answer came into his consciousness, the dark ebbing from a corner of his memory, as though the freight platform’s searing halogen beams had managed to penetrate his skull. He had come back here to kill somebody—that much he could remember. Which was enough for now. The knowledge comforted him. Now all he had to do was find someplace to sleep off the weariness of his long traveling, and the rest would come to him in the morning. It always did.

Shouts and yelling broke into his thoughts. From somewhere farther down the platform, where there weren’t any lights, just the shadows of crates and boxes that had been plundered and abandoned so long ago that they slouched together like damp straw huts in a moonless forest. The shouts weren’t the fun kind but instead shrieked with panic.

He swiveled around to look. For a moment, it seemed to him as though the storm itself had come onto the platform, its wind rolling across the concrete. A torrent of fluttering rags surged between the freight containers, heading toward him. It took another second for him to see the fear-contorted faces, and realize that the cries came from their mouths.

“They’re cleaning us out!” The rags were men, or what had been men, but were now just the homeless creatures who found what shelter they could in the station’s unlit tunnels and corners. “Tons of ’em!” The nearest, his running gimped by an improvised crutch under his skinny bare arm, locked a panicked stare into Blake’s eyes. “Run! Go!”

A tide of other homeless men crashed over the emaciated figure; their rag-swaddled feet trampled over his back. Blake let them sweep by, then looked down to see what they had left behind. The cripple, facedown, was still breathing, red leaking from his mouth and bubbling with each panting gasp. Blake reached down and pulled the broken figure to his feet. The wet sounds from the homeless man’s mouth were no longer words; he clawed himself away from Blake’s chest, and flopped birdlike after the rest of the ragged pack.

Blake peered into the darkness from which the homeless had burst into view. The platform was quiet again, but he knew they were still around, probably cowering under the freight carriages and peeking out at him, to see what he would do. Which was to turn and step into that dark, just to see what had spooked them all so bad.

It was still a mystery, even when he stood in the middle of the homeless men’s abandoned encampment. Water leaked through the soot and grime of the tunnel’s low roof, pattering like soft finger touches on the cobbled-together shelters, the cardboard boxes with nests of rags inside, the sleeping bags so begrimed with filth and the sweat of bad dreams that they shone in the trace of light like cocoons of black silk. Food rubbish, plastic bags, and little Styrofoam boxes scavenged out of the city’s alley Dumpsters drifted to his ankles as he stepped through the crowded space. A cooking fire smoldered in the center of the boxes, a mold-spotted potato skewed on a length of rebar propped above it.

Blake heard more shouts coming from farther down the tunnel. These running steps were hard-soled, though, and the shouts rang with the fierce pleasure that came with clenched fists and truncheons snapping bones.

“There’s one! Get the filthy bastard!”

He saw another pack of men, younger, not yet broken by time and the world, running toward him. Their shaved heads shone as bright as the knobbed toes of their cherry-red bovver boots, khaki fatigues tucked inside the tight, shin-high laces. Spittle flecked their yelling mouths, and their wide-open, excited eyes glistened with the joy of anticipated carnage.

Blake didn’t move, just watched impassively as the skinheads charged toward him.

“Mess him up, Charlie!”

The first one’s suspenders tightened over his sleeveless T-shirt as he skidded to a stop less than a yard away, braced himself, then swung a dented baseball bat in a flat arc toward Blake’s ribs.

“God-
damn
—” The skinhead’s eyes widened farther as he gawped in amazement. The blow hadn’t hit its mark, but had been stopped instead by the palm of Blake’s outstretched hand. The force of the impact traveled back up the bat, hard enough to nearly throw the skinhead off his feet.

“Whuddaya screwing around for?” One of the skinhead’s companions shrieked in fury. “Get him!”

Blake plucked the bat from the skinhead’s white-knuckled fists as easily as pulling a twig from a shoulder-high tree. He swung the big end up and set it between the skinhead’s goggling eyes. A short, fast jab sent the thug toppling backward, blood streaming down from the crushed bridge of his pug nose.

It seemed sad to Blake that these kids didn’t have as much sense as the Yard Bulls, who had at least known when to leave well enough alone. If they had turned tail and run, either dragging their buddy with them or leaving him where he lay, they might have had a better evening of it.

Instead, their howls rang louder and more outraged against the bricks of the tunnel’s roof. Eyes reddened, the tight pack clawed and scrabbled at each other’s tangling arms in their haste to throw themselves on him.

More shouts sounded, coming from another direction. He turned his head and saw another tunnel branching off from this one, filled with another churning pack, their weapons waved above their bald heads as they ran to join the party.

He brought his gaze back around in time to lay his forearm across the mouth of the first one to reach him, breaking the yellow teeth to stumps and sending the skinhead staggering back against the others, gagging on his own blood and ripped tongue. Blake’s hand shot up, grabbing the nail-studded slat swinging down toward his skull. He wrenched it from another skinhead’s grasp and brought it around hard across two of their faces, tearing open one’s jaw before imbedding the bloodied nail into the other’s neck.

That didn’t slow down the rest; he hadn’t thought it would. It never did. The second pack was racing toward him now. Their shouts were mingled with giddy laughter.

“We got ya now, asshole!”

True enough—they had spread out across the width of the platform as they ran, pushing and kicking aside the smaller crates, swarming houndlike over the bigger ones. Their black-nailed hands clawed toward him—

But caught nothing. Stupefied, the skinheads gaped as the beggar ran up the tunnel wall, the ragged hem of his overcoat fluttering behind him. Before they could react, he had already grabbed two by their necks, cracking their skulls against each other. As they dropped, a spinning kick, launched higher than Blake’s own head, smashed bloody the faces of another pair.

The others finally reacted—but not before Blake was able to dive past their outstretched arms. He landed yards away, poised for only a split second on his fingertips and the balls of his feet, then leapt from the concrete’s edge and onto the iron tracks. A solid wall of freight train loomed ahead, trapping him as the combined packs rushed close behind him—

Blake didn’t slow. Instead, he dove shoulder-first toward the sharp-edged wheels, swinging his cracked leather boots above his own head with enough velocity to set him in a horizontal run across the locked carriage door. Rain fell in the skinheads’ faces as they stared up at him. He bent his knees and kicked himself away from the carriage, hurtling above the shaved heads and landing in a crouch behind them.

They didn’t have time enough to turn around. He grabbed the necks of the two at the rear of the pack, hard enough to hear bone crack like thick-shelled eggs. That gave him enough room to launch a roundhouse kick, dropping another pair. A steel rod swept toward his knees, missing him by inches as he sprang upward. The rod clanged on the platform as he dove forward, catching the attacker with a forearm under the chin and crushing his trachea. He dropped the gagging body in time to whip his elbow into the next one’s face, a blossom of red bursting from where the nose and mouth had been.

One of the remaining skins snatched up the steel rod and drove its end toward Blake’s gut. He fell backward to avoid the rod, then spun onto his side as it arced down, grazing the back of his skull before its tip sent shards flying from the concrete. He rolled back onto his spine and grabbed the rod, yanking the skinhead off his feet and catching him with a heel to the gut. Red vomit spattered Blake’s ragged trouser leg, the skinhead’s eyes rolling blank as he dropped like a punctured balloon.