Page 79 of Looking Grimm

At the edge of my vision, Grimm beckoned to the executioner. “Now.”

My body tensed, and my eyes squeezed shut. Thoughts raced in every direction while avoiding the well of terror that opened like a sinkhole in my mind. It grew faster than I could think, threatening to swallow everything else.

I heard the lever rock forward. Felt the guillotine frame shudder.

One cuff unlocked, and I yanked my hands apart. I reached for the piece of wood notched around my neck while flinging a stopping force upward. Unnecessarily. The blade halted in its track before my magic touched it.

There was no time to celebrate or even breathe relief as I shoved the top half of the stocks roughly upward and lurched back. My knees dragged across the stage as I sent mental probes into the collar next. No need to bother with the lock on that; I could snap it open at the hinge.

It swung open, and I yanked it off and threw it as the sound of explosions split the air. That was Nash’s job, creating a distraction to draw Grimm’s lackeys to where Ripley would be waiting with a knockout gas surprise.

My head whipped toward where Holland and Maximus had been waiting on death row. Both father and daughter were gone, and their bodyguards turned confused circles like dogs chasing their tails. Felix must have been pushing his luck not to have had to kill them. But damn. It was working. The plan was actually working.

Gunfire rattled as Bloody Hex recruits fired wildly into the crowd. Casualties were unavoidable. That was a truth Tobin and Felix had been reluctant to accept. I regretted the loss of innocent life, but I understood it as a necessary trade. To accomplish something good, we had to allow a bit of bad.

I scrambled to my feet as the executioner lunged at mewith his arms spread, intending to tackle me to the ground. I caught him around the middle and flung him as far and wide as I could. His body sailed into the crowd that had surged into a panic while explosions continued to echo off the buildings around them.

The guillotine blade sang through the air, striking near my feet with a snapping clack. The breeze from its descent washed across my sweaty cheeks, and I sucked a sharp breath. Damn thing passed so close it nearly circumcised me a second time. Only seconds had passed, not as much time as I needed to pivot to the next task. Something was wrong.

I glanced across the stage to where Grimm and Vinton had stood. If all went well, they would have been caught in Tobin’s time-stop bubble, trapped and waiting for me to finish them off. Vinton was where I expected to find him, red-faced and snarling with a shock collar remote in his hand. He was perfectly posed, unmoving… and alone.

Fuck.

My eyes darted across the platform in search of Grimm’s retreating form. The Hex members had given up looking for Maximus and Holland and turned their attention to me, but I didn’t have time to deal with the rabble.

A flash of motion caught my gaze. Wavy brown hair fluttered as someone leaped off the front of the stage and into the chaos below. Grimm’s illusion powers made him no kind of combatant in a battle, but he was a hell of a strategist, and the obvious strategy in a mob was to disappear.

I wouldn’t allow that.

Vinton seemed to gnash his teeth at me from inside the time bubble. He was helpless, but I had been, too, as recently as yesterday when he beat me bloody on the bathroom floor.Like Avery, he deserved to die. They all did.

Bolting forward, I stretched my hand toward the necromancer. I hoped he saw it coming. I hoped he felt my mental claws dig into the meat around his spine seconds before I yanked it free. Bones exploded out of his back in a gruesome string. It hovered in the air, suspended long after I let go.

I didn’t wait to see him collapse and his fluids rush out before I sprinted to the edge of the platform and dove into the tangle of bodies. Civilians scurried this way and that, ready to trample anyone who dared stand still. I couldn’t see through them but, even if I could, I wasn’t certain who I was looking for. Grimm could have been any one of these scrambling schmucks, masking his true face like the coward I knew him to be.

“Grimm!” I shouted, my voice a roar.

My blood ran hot, fueling the magic that coursed out of me as I swung my hands in broad, sweeping gestures. The handcuffs still attached to my right wrist rattled through every motion. Civilians were knocked aside and brushed away to clear a path toward—I looked up long enough to see the direction I was headed—the Capitol building.

Screams resonated near my ears, and I gritted my teeth, forging through the opening I’d created.

In the near distance, gray-green smoke clouds rolled in, chased by all-consuming quiet. Ripley was on the job and outdoing himself, by the looks of it. The creeping haze stoked the panic of the people around me, all of them frantic to avoid the gaseous cloud as it advanced.

“Grimm!” I yelled again.

Another group of people were sent crashing into theirpeers like a receding wave. I squinted through the throng, watching for anything out of place.

At the back of the retreating swarm, a young woman paused. Her ponytail swished across her shoulders as she gaped back at me with her blue eyes wide. The flavor of her fear was different. It ran deeper, seeming to seize her whole body as she drew a pistol from the holster on her hip.

Not an investigator, but she held an investigator’s gun.

“There you are.” The words slipped out of me in a growl.

I reached for her, clawing with mental talons meant to grab and reel her in. The line was cast but not yet set when a barrel-chested man crashed into me. I staggered into a wall of people, barely keeping my feet under me so I didn’t get pulled into the undertow. The bulldozer of a man plowed on past, parting the crowd and dragging his petite wife along behind.

When I spun around to where I’d last seen Grimm’s illusioned form, the schooling strangers had closed the gap and blanked her from my view.

Ripley’s poison crept closer. If it got to me before I got to Grimm, it would mean game over. At best, I would fall unconscious, rendered useless, and every bit the fuckup Grimm claimed I was. At worst, the old man would take the chance to put a bullet in my brain.

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