Page 21 of Looking Grimm

Have you seen Fitch?

Ripley thrust the cell toward me. “Call him,” he said. “Poor bloke’s got enough troubles without fretting overyou.”

Peeling myself off of Maggie, I took the offered phone and stumbled into the bathroom. With the door closed, I slumped to the floor beside the counter and sat, cradling the cell in both hands. I stared at the message, read and reread it while my eyes filmed with fresh tears.

But I didn’t call.

One of Ripley’s conditions for my stay was that I couldn’t leave the hotel. For anything. For days. It reminded me of the rules I’d placed on Donovan, limiting him to the confines of the houseboat waiting for my infrequent visits. As easily as I’d justified myself then, being on the receiving end of house arrest was another matter entirely. And knowing my efforts had failed to save my brother in the end gave me little hope for this scheme to work any better.

The morning after I arrived, a bag of my clothes and a burner phone were left outside the hotel room door, crowned with a Post-it note that read: Call me. Please. - N

I kept the phone, an old brick of a thing with Nash’s number programmed into it, in case I’d had any doubts about who left the care package. But I didn’t call and, per Ripley’s strict instructions, didn’t stray from the chronically dark and frankly depressing hotel room for the next seventy-two hours.

Ripley was not much of a talker, and Maggie was verifiably mute, which made for the longest silent treatmentof my life. The two of them were quite an odd pair, lazing about in one bed or the other, sharing earbuds and listening to music, watching television for hours on end, and bustling about in the kitchenette prepping kettle after kettle of tea.

I made conversation when I could and indulged Maggie in card games and fingernail painting. Thankfully, I didn’t cry on her again, even when she caught me awake after a nightmare staring out into the parking lot in the dead of night.

Similarly, Grimm and the gang had been quiet. No more dead investigators; no news to speak of outside of the widely-publicized manhunt with my name attached.

On the evening of the fourth day, I decided the boredom would kill me before the Hex did and told Ripley as much. He was halfway through a carton of delivery Chinese food. Noodles dangled from a pair of chopsticks inches from his mouth.

“Go, then,” he said. “Don’t come back.”

My sweet and sour chicken remained unopened on the coffee table, ignored despite my grumbling stomach. I stood from the padded chair and scowled at the sullen teen as I said, “I can’t sit around and wait for the Hex or the Capitol to turn over this particular rock, Rip. Besides, if they find me, they find you and Mags, too, and I don’t want that shit on my conscience.”

He blinked and chewed, his expression impassive. “Shall I show you the door, or can you find it on your own?”

Maggie curled up beside him, channel-surfing the TV. Color and light flashed across her and Ripley as they reposed. It made the scars on Ripley’s throat gleam silver and seemed to illuminate something else in him: fear. This was his refugeas much as it was mine. Neither he nor Maggie had strayed outside these four walls since I’d arrived. It made me wonder.

“Is this how you want to spend your life?” I gestured to the zombie girl, then the room around us. “You’re as scared as I am. Sticking your head in the goddamn sand.”

Ripley stabbed his chopsticks into the paper container. “Go on,” he mumbled. “Get it all out.”

“We were gonna take down the gang,” I countered. “What’s stopping us?”

Driving the chopsticks deep into the nest of noodles, he pushed the container onto the coffee table, then sat back and tilted his head to meet my gaze. “Lack of planning? Firepower? The Capitol papering the whole bloody city with your wanted posters?”

“Fuck them.”

He sniffed. “Eloquent as always.”

Maggie reached for her plate, which contained an uncooked slab of steak pulled from the dorm-sized fridge’s tiny freezer. She ripped off a chunk of the red meat with her bare hands, then swallowed it whole. Watery blood slicked her fingers and the remote she held. I cringed at the sight.

“So, you’re determined to kick the hornet’s nest?” Ripley asked me. “You saw what happened last time. They’re setting you up, mate, and you’re playing right into their hands.”

I nodded. “I have to find Grimm. Maybe that’s the way to do it.”

“And if the Capitol catches you first?” He crossed his arms.

That gave me pause. I couldn’t deny the possibility, even the likelihood, that I would be found, reported by some do-gooder citizen, or maybe the investigators would prove more adept at finding rogue criminals than abducted little boys. They cornered me once before, at Jacoby Thatcher’s house, but I’d gone willingly then. For Donovan and Grimm. This time, I had no such compulsions.

“I won’t let them take me alive,” I replied.

Ripley nodded slowly. “Do us both a favor and don’t go out looking like that.” He made a sweeping gesture toward me.

I was due for a shower, and I hadn’t bothered to fix my hair in days. That, combined with the fact that I only had a few articles of clothing to cycle through and hadn’t been allowed to visit the laundry facility, made for a stale, wrinkled state of being.

“You think I should dress up?” I gave the front of my thermal shirt a tug. “Save the mortician the trouble of making me a pretty corpse?”

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