Grimm Awakening (28 page)

“Dammit, Mona, stop this. Please.”

She smiled. “I love it when you beg.”

Up on the stage Fitzsimmons slapped the girl. “Tell us your name!”

In a small, scared voice the girl stammered: “M-my name i-is E-Emily.” She sobbed. “Please don’t hurt me…please…”

Fitzsimmons grinned. “Oh, I won’t hurt you, sweet Emily.”

The girl looked at him with hopeful, shining eyes. “R-really?”

Fitzsimmons stroked her cheek with the back of a hand. “I give you my word.” Then he turned away from her and stalked to the edge of the stage, where he stood and looked directly at Jack Grimm. “However, my animals haven’t been fed all night. It isn’t really my fault if they find you...tempting.”

He spun about then and snapped the whip at the nearest tiger, catching it across the face. The animal shrank back marginally, hunched its back, and bared its fangs. The furious roar that erupted from its throat sent a chill through Jack. Fitzsimmons cracked the whip again, this time striking the floor in the general vicinity of young Emily.

The ringmaster screamed: “Zeus! Feed!”

Emily screamed and stumbled backward. Jack gritted his teeth and clutched his seat’s armrests as the animal sprang out of its crouch and pounced on the young girl. Zeus opened her abdomen with one swipe of a claw. Blood and bits of intestine spilled through the wide gashes as the girl dropped to the floor. Then Zeus was on top of her, sinking his fangs deep into her throat.

Jack’s eyes welled with moisture. “Goddamn you, Mona.”

Mona patted his knee. “Relax, Jack. We’re just getting warmed up.”

* * *

Lucien watched the grisly scene on the stage through eyes still bleary from the drugs coursing through his system. He shook his head and tried to turn his thoughts back to earlier in the evening. Back to his struggle with the kidnappers in the desert. How much time had elapsed between the ambush and the moment when he had been able to overcome the effects of the drug? Maybe an hour. Maybe two. It was impossible to gauge. More time, anyway, than had passed since this more recent drugging.

The murder of the innocent girl angered him, but a colder part of him welcomed the delay. Every moment Mona and her lackeys spent otherwise engaged brought him a moment closer to having full command of his faculties again. And only by having the drug purged from his system could he hope to fight and survive.

He turned away from the sight of the big cat Zeus tearing out the dead girl’s entrails and sagged against the bars of the cage. Andy and Siegel hadn’t been drugged, but they looked every bit as weary and out of it as Lucien felt. The old gangster sat on the floor of the cage with his head bowed. His hat, that Rainbolt talisman, was gone. Somehow Mona had sensed its significance and had disposed of it in the Royal Suite’s fireplace.

Andy was the only one who looked alert and calculating. He paced the cage, his gaze flicking rapidly from the girl’s savaged corpse to the smirking ringmaster and to the front row seats where Jack and Mona sat eating popcorn. He could almost hear the gears of the man’s mind whirring away, but Lucien, in his diminished state, couldn’t fathom one even remotely viable course of action.

Then the ringmaster was speaking again: “An impressive display of brute physical strength. These animals are truly among nature’s finest marvels. Such strength. Such beauty. Such grace.”

Lucien turned his head to stare at the stage again. The tiger who’d killed the girl, Zeus, sat licking blood from his paws. Fitzsimmons walked in a slow circle around the bloody corpse at center stage. “Of course, this was just a demonstration. This girl likely was little more than a tasty treat for mighty Zeus.” He chuckled. “We expect more, ah,
fireworks
as we begin the evening’s main event. Speaking of which--”

Fitzsimmons waved a hand at his assistant.

“Lana, would you do the honors?”

Lana executed a curtsy with surprising grace for someone in platform heels. Then she strutted over to the cage, swinging her hips in an exaggerated way and twirling the key’s thin gold chain on a forefinger. Lucien watched her approach, studying the mocking smile on her face as she drew nearer. The woman was beautiful on the outside, but there was something black and twisted within her. This was a good thing to know--it meant he wouldn’t hesitate to kill her just because she was a woman.

She slid the big key into the lock.

She leaned close to the bars to whisper to him: “Fitzsimmons has a gun in his coat.” She turned the key in the lock and turned her back to the front of the stage as she pulled the gate open. “Kill him and get me out of here. Please.”

Lucien managed to keep his expression stoic. But he was thinking,
She’s an even better actress than Madeleine Faust.

Then Lana jabbed the tip of the cattle prod against his chest and sent a shock through his body.

Her face contorted as she screeched at him. “Out of the cage, hellscum!”

Behind her, the big cats growled hungrily.

* * *

Raven Rainbolt clung to the strand of concentrated magical energy she’d reflexively summoned in the moment when she went sailing over the Royal Suite’s balcony railing. The energy cord stretched from the Royal Suite balcony to some two and a half floors below, where Raven dangled in midair. The energy that had come shooting out of her body in that moment of crisis was powerful stuff. As a descendent of a branch of the powerful Sylvain clan, she had the ability to manipulate matter and minds. Jack Grimm’s friends wouldn’t have understood the concept, so she’d seen to it that their minds had seen the energy cords as rope ladders. These were handy abilities to have, but right now Raven was unimpressed with herself.

The problem was simple. She needed to climb the cord back up to the Royal Suite. Normally this would be an easily accomplished task. But she was so weakened by the thrashing meted out by Mona that it was requiring every bit of willpower at her disposal to keep the cord from fizzling out.

She gritted her teeth and cleared her mind of everything but the need to overcome her current predicament. For several frustrating moments there was no change. Then, at last, she felt a tingling throughout her body.

YES!

Feeling stronger by the moment, she focused her concentration and felt the energy building inside her. Powerful light pulsed from within her body, rendering her pale skin almost translucent. The wounds inflicted by Mona’s boot heels scabbed over and healed within seconds.

Raven smiled.

I’m coming to get you, you devil.

Then she shot straight up like a rocket and landed on the Royal Suite’s balcony. She went into the suite, had a look around, and set out to find her uncle and Jack Grimm.

* * *

Jack watched Lucien stumble out of the cage and fall to his knees. For a moment, it looked as if he would just topple over completely. But he somehow managed to rally and get to his feet. He wobbled like a palooka after fifteen rounds of pummeling from the heavyweight champion of the world. Unfortunately for the drugged-up hellhound, this sure to be short-lived fight was just about to begin.

Jack shook his head. “He can barely stand up. You must be very afraid of Lucien to dope him up like that.”

Mona closed a hand over one of his and squeezed a little harder than necessary, sending fresh bolts of pain through his broken fingers. “I fear nothing.”

Jack gritted his teeth. “Right. Sure. Okay.”

Mona released his hand and draped an arm over his shoulders. “I will admit that the traitor--as we must label one who betrays his own kind--would make a worthy adversary for anyone but myself. And perhaps it would be entertaining to watch him fight the cats as a hound. But I haven’t the time. I’ve been called back to hell and will be departing as soon as they’re all dead.”

Jack almost smiled. “I bet your boss is gonna be pissed when he finds out how little you’ve accomplished.”

Mona lifted her forearm and ran her fingers through the hair at the back of his head. “You should know that I’ve changed my mind about something. I’ve decided to keep you alive and take you back to hell with me.”

Jack sighed. “So you can torture me for all eternity, right?”

Mona leaned in to plant a soft kiss on his cheek. “I enjoy you, Jack, despite your more pitiful qualities. I’ve liked having you around again, I can admit it now that the game’s nearly over. You’ll be my pet. My plaything. Doesn’t that sound lovely?”

Jack mulled over a number of possible scathing replies, but he remained silent as he began to perceive that something odd and inexplicable was happening on the stage.

Mona shot up out of her seat and screamed at the stage: “No! That can’t be!”

The corners of Jack’s mouth crinkled in amusement.

“Oh, but it is.”

* * *

Lucien stared at the stage floor and tried to make sense of what he was seeing. At first he thought the dope flowing through his blood was causing him to hallucinate, because his eyes were trying to make him believe that a section of the floor had vanished--taking Victor Fitzsimmons with it.

What he was seeing was just a blank space, nothingness, a hole in the world. But there was something familiar about this nothingness, something...and then he had it. His memory of the journey through the reality gaps emerged through the drug fog in the same moment that Raven Rainbolt emerged from the nothingness.

Raven--who ought to be a bloody smear on the sidewalk--stood at center stage, showing no signs of the apparent mortal wounds inflicted upon her a short while ago. Victor Fitzsimmons was back again, lying in a fetal ball at her feet, shivering and whimpering like an animal left out in the cold. The floor appeared to knit itself back together beneath them.

Raven held a broadsword in one hand and a round ball of some sort in the other. But…no…that was no ball…that was…

“THE EYE OF SYLVAIN!
”

Lucien saw Mona Faust making her way through the orchestra pit. Jack was hurrying after her. And the Black Guild assassins had abandoned their perimeter positions and were converging on the stage. Frustration burned within him as he tried to imagine fighting off so many adversaries in his present condition. The sad bottom line was all too apparent--he would be of no use in the big showdown that was moments away from occurring. He took a staggering step in Raven’s direction and saw that her gaze was locked on him. She smiled when they made eye contact. Funny, for a tiny woman facing down snarling wild animals, a she-demon, and an army of machete-wielding assassins she didn’t look all that worried.

Her smile broadened a bit before she said, “Catch.”

Then the Eye was floating through the air. In the glare of the stage lights it appeared to have an almost elastic quality that made it look like a beachball. Lucien watched the Eye as it began to descend toward him.

Mona Faust screamed again: “
NO!
”

Lucien held his hands out to receive Raven’s gift.

* * *

Mona tripped over her high-heeled boots as she reached the stage. She was up on her feet again in an instant, but that brief delay gave Jack all the time he needed to catch up to her. He scrambled up to the stage, assessed the situation in a heartbeat, and realized that at last he had an opportunity to make a difference. He dove and tackled Mona, driving her to the stage floor a nanosecond before she would have stepped in front of Lucien and snagged the Eye for herself.

He looked up and saw Lucien catch the shimmering silver ball. Then he hellhound was shaking like a condemned man taking a ride on Ol’ Sparky. His nostrils flared and the hair on his head stood on end, making him look like a refugee from an old Looney Tunes cartoon. Then the seizure abruptly ended and there was a sharpness in Lucien’s eyes that hadn’t been there a moment earlier.

Jack rolled away from Mona and got to his feet. One of the tigers--Zeus, the one that had already tasted human blood--was coming at him. Jack froze like an escaping convict pinned by searchlights. Zeus hunched down and prepared to leap. The beast would have torn out his throat had Lucien not intervened. Whatever had happened to him a moment ago had negated the effects of Mona’s drugs, allowing him to go to hound mode. Stunned, Jack watched as the transformed hellhound tore the big cat apart.

Lucien flipped the dead animal off the stage and turned his attention to Mona, who was watching him with wide-eyed incredulity. Jack’s gaze darted everywhere. At Raven, who somehow had the so-called Eye of Sylvain in her hands again. At the remaining big cat. At Andy and Ben, who were just now emerging from the cage. A panicky glance behind him at the army of black-clad men surging through the orchestra pit. They would be swarming the stage within moments and likely vanquishing the daring uprising staged by Raven Rainbolt. In the next moments, however, he learned again how unwise it was to underestimate the odd young woman. She moved to the front of the stage, held out her hands, opened her mouth wide, and unleashed a sound that made Mona’s dungeon screams of outrage seem like the breathiest of sultry whispers.