Page 43 of Looking Grimm

Ripley was cursing and muttering something aboutcoughing up the vilest poison he could come up with when Ethan twisted away and bolted out into the open.

Swearing again, Ripley recoiled and held his wrist. We both looked after the retreating man.

“Where’s he going, you think?” I asked while shoving Ezrah headfirst into the Bronco’s hatch.

“Fuck if I know,” Ripley replied. “I doubt he does, either.”

With a grunt, I fished out the remotes and held one in each hand. There was no sense trying to guess which went to which twin, so I hit both stun buttons simultaneously.

Behind me, Ezrah shrieked as his body lurched with the current of electric shock. Before me, Ethan dropped, unable to stop himself with his hands bound behind his back so he hit the pavement and skidded to a stop.

“Hate these fucking things,” I said, setting the remotes on the lowered tailgate and starting the walk toward Ethan Everett’s crumpled form.

By the time I reached him, he’d stopped twitching and was working his way onto his knees. I grabbed a clump of his blond hair and hauled him up enough that I could drag him behind me. I loaded him unceremoniously into the hatch alongside his brother, who was sprawled out and sucking air through the cloth stuffed in his mouth.

“Hate this, too,” I muttered, lifting the tailgate and then closing the back glass.

Ripley was waiting in the passenger seat when I climbed into the car. His seatbelt was buckled, and his nose was buried in a mobile game that lit his face with neon.

“I’m going alone, Rip,” I told him.

“You don’t have to.” He paused his game and glancedover at me in an act that was so uncharacteristic I was momentarily speechless.

“No, I do,” I said when I’d recovered myself. I thrust out my hand to shake his. “Thanks for everything. I mean it.”

Clicking the power off on his phone, he pocketed it and took my hand for a tight squeeze. Then he opened the door and slid out onto the ground, standing while gripping the frame.

I turned Donovan’s keys in the ignition, starting the engine with a rumble. Grasping the gearshift, I waited until Ripley’s voice drew my attention.

“Hey, Farrow?”

I glanced over.

“Don’t be a stranger,” he said.

Setting my jaw, I nodded.

Ripley closed the door, and I pulled slowly away.

I drove without beingsure where I was headed. Ethan and Ezrah grunted and whined in the hatch until I cranked the stereo loud enough to drown them out.

It had taken a day of sobering up to come to grips with the situation in which I found myself. I’d believed sparing the Everett twins might save Vesper and Felix, but I’d been wrong. I was wrong about a lot of things, and it was getting real fucking old.

One thing the raucous music couldn’t overpower was my own thoughts. I wondered how Briggs felt about what must have seemed like a kick in the teeth. He came to bring me back into the Capitol’s fold, and I’d convinced him I could do what was necessary to fix all the broken things in our shitty little town. Or Holland, who’d given me police equipment for exacting vigilante justice, and now believed I’d viciously turned against her and her team. I was willing to be a villain, but not like this.

The Bronco seemed to know the way along the lonely,two-lane highway toward the cemetery outside town. There, I parked the car and then hopped the fence with Donovan’s keys clutched in one hand and the burner phone I’d finally moved off the bathroom counter in the other. I wandered to the back corner of the property to my parents’ graves. To Donovan’s.

The turned dirt had yet to sprout grass, leaving a barren brown patch on the ground. My body felt heavy as I stood at the foot of it, staring at the headstone etched with my brother’s name.

“This is about right for me, huh?” I asked the emptiness. “Showing up unannounced and unprepared. Didn’t bring flowers or anything.”

A sigh seemed to ream all the air and feeling out of me, leaving me cold. I dropped to my knees, then rolled onto my back between Donovan’s grave and our mother’s, staring up at the star-speckled sky.

This was the longest I’d been apart from Donnie since he was born. I didn’t remember it well, but enough to recall that the energy in our home shifted. I went from spoiled only child to responsible older brother overnight, and that sense of obligation had grown as we did.

Our dad never meant for Donovan’s well-being to hang like an albatross around my neck. It wasn’t meant to be a burden. But, God, if it didn’t weigh me down. Now that Donnie was gone, I felt lighter but full of guilt because of it.

“I borrowed your car,” I muttered, sweeping my fingers through the patchy grass. “Hope you don’t mind.”

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