Grimm Awakening (10 page)

It was true. Jack tried to still the involuntary spasms triggered by the prospect of impending agony, but he was only marginally successful. He managed to suppress a whimper--barely.

The glowing tip of the cigarette moved a tiny, almost microscopic increment closer to the jittering orb. A piece of ash fell and dropped into his eye, making Jack flinch and gasp. The restrained eyelid spasmed in a desperate bid to blink away the bit of ash. Jack opened his mouth to say something, to perhaps utter his first plea of the evening, but then the glowing fireball retreated.

Mona was sitting upright again, smiling down at him in a smug way and exhaling smoke from the Lucky Strike. “Tell me, my darling prime stud--how close did we come to your breaking point just then?”

Jack looked at her broadening smile and averted his gaze.

He didn’t say anything.

“It’s not too late to switch sides, you know.”

The absurd comment brought Jack’s gaze helplessly back toward her. “What? Why the hell would I do that?”

Mona shrugged. “Because you’ll never be the good man you wish you could be. You’re too deeply flawed in too many ways.” She smiled. “You’re damned, Jack. Hell will be your home soon enough, anyway. Why not come over to the home team? Imagine how much easier your existence would become.”

“It’ll never happen.”

Mona arched an eyebrow at him. “Won’t it?”

Jack seethed. “You’re so fucking smug.”

“I’m smug for good reason.” Mona flipped away the butt end of the Lucky Strike and leaned closer to Jack. “I’m well aware of my power over you. I can feel your desire for me radiating off you like fever off a dying man. I’ll make you a deal, Jack.” The tip of a forefinger glided lightly up his inner thigh. “Tell me everything. Renounce your father and swear your loyalty to our side in a sacred rite. You’ll never be a free man again, but you could live forever as my slave.” Her hand closed around his scrotum, eliciting a jolt of pain from the tiny patch of flesh burned by the cigarette. “There must be much worse fates than that, right?”

Jack cursed his helpless libido as he became aroused again. This was just goddamn ridiculous. As a heterosexual male, the intimate touch of a beautiful woman tended to have the predictable effect on him. As long as he wasn’t too drunk, of course. But this was beyond silly. His life was in danger. Lucien was either dead or about to be dead. There was no cavalry on the way to rescue either of them. Yet here he was, as turned on as a virgin on his first trip to a whorehouse.

He thought of bodies piled in mass graves in third world countries, summoned images of fresh road-kill baking beneath midday sun. He remembered the starving children he’d seen in countless gimme-your-money commercials on late night television. And he thought of vomit and shit and of toxic waste dumps near superficially idyllic middle-class neighborhoods.

Fuck!

Mr. Stupid was still standing at attention.

Jack looked at Mona, who’d been studying his face with an amused smile. “Why don’t you do me a favor and cut that fucking thing off?”

Mona tilted her head and smiled again. “Don’t give me ideas, Jack. I’m nearly done playing nice, anyway.” There was a deeper level of coldness in her voice now. “Soon enough we
will
move on to cutting off pieces of you and cauterizing the open wounds with a blowtorch. But I’ll be doing that for fun, because I have a suspicion I’ll have broken you long before then.”

Jack reiterated what he’d said from the beginning: “You won’t break me. Not now. Not ever.”

But was that really true? The first inklings of doubt invaded Jack’s mind. He intended to withstand whatever was in her no-doubt-formidable arsenal of psychological and physical weaponry. He loved his father. He would not betray him. And there was the matter of redeeming his own Damned soul. Nothing meant more to him than that. It was the only way he would see Theodore Grimm again. The only way to avoid a literal eternity of torment. Yet, Mona clearly intended to take him to realms of agony beyond anything most men ever experienced. He knew her threats were not empty ones.

I’ll break. I will. I won’t be able to help it.

This was the voice of weakness and despair speaking. Jack rebelled against it, but it was insidious. The voice taunted him, whispering like a malevolent stranger in his head, telling him over and over to surrender. To just give up.

NO!

Mona seemed to sense his inner struggle. “I don’t think you believe that, Jack. Not really. Not deep down in your stinking, booze-poisoned gut. But no matter.” Her shoulders lifted in a little shrug. “What you think isn’t important. Before we resume the ruination of your body, I have another trial for you to endure.”

Jack frowned. Something in her tone bothered him. It was too light, too airy. It was...disingenuous. But he again feigned nonchalance: “Whatever.”

Mona raised her voice to say, “Bring in the subject.”

Jack’s eyes crinkled. “Who’re you talking to, you fucking whack-job?”

Mona only smiled.

The question was answered within moments. A door opened somewhere to the left of the bed and two burly men clad only in loincloths and black hoods entered the room. The hooded men dragged a nude teenage girl into the room with them. The girl was very pretty. Slim and blond, but with full hips and breasts.

But that wasn’t the worst element in this new wrinkle. Because he recognized the girl. She was the one Andy O’Day had sent him to hell to find.
Ostensibly
sent him to find, anyway. The last time Jack had seen her she’d been tied to a torture wheel in the cellar of a nightclub in hell. She looked at him now with vacant eyes and the emptiest smile he’d ever seen.

The two men pushed her to her knees. Mona walked to the table where Jack’s clothes and meager personal effects were arranged in a neat pile. But there was something else on the table, something he hadn’t noticed before.

A very large--and very sharp--knife.

She smiled brightly at Jack as she came back toward the bed. The hooded men stepped away from the girl as Mona moved in behind her. She gripped a handful of the girl’s hair, tugged her head back, and placed the blade against her narrow, tender neck.

Jack tensed. “Please don’t. She’s just a kid, Mona.”

The girl’s lips parted and her soft, lilting voice emerged as a deceptively ethereal whisper from a cave: “But I want this. More than anything.”

Mona stroked the girl’s cheek with the edge of the knife blade. “She tells the truth, Jack. This pretty young thing is willing to give up her precious life in exchange for a place of honor and power in hell. It’s what she wants more than anything else...but you have the power to deprive her of it.”

Jack’s eyes narrowed. “Do I?”

Mona nodded. “You do. All you have to do is tell me where to find your father. And what his plans are, of course.”

“You evil, evil bitch. You demonic she-cunt from hell.”

Mona chuckled. “Such creative profanity. Pay attention, Jack. This is the part you need to really think about. You can keep saying what you’ve been saying and consign her to her fate. You see, what the little one doesn’t know is that her place in hell’s upper echelon will only be granted if you tell us what we want to know. If you refuse, her time there will instead be an eternity of torment. Of never-ending agony and regret. Either way, she dies. But her quality-of-afterlife depends on you.”

Jack watched the girl’s face slowly change as understanding dawned. The look of terror in her eyes was like a knife to his heart. She tried to rise, but Mona returned the knife to her throat, pressing hard enough this time to draw a trickle of blood. Shaking, the girl remained on her knees--only now there was a heart-rending plea in her eyes.

The satisfaction in Mona’s voice made Jack’s gut churn: “Well, Jack...what’s it to be for our bad little girl? Transcendence--or torment?”

Jack said nothing.

Mona arched an eyebrow. “Think about it, Jack. You can change everything for her with just a few simple words.”

Jack held the girl’s gaze a terrible moment longer.

Then he looked into Mona’s eyes. “I’m not telling you a goddamn thing.” The words came out of him in a hard burst. “Not now. Not fucking ever.”

“Very well.”

The girl opened her mouth to scream.

Blood came out of it instead.

Jack closed his eyes.

He flinched when he heard the body hit the floor and twitch.

5.

“So, where exactly are we going?”

Andy stared out the open shotgun seat window at the dark and desolate desert landscape. “Our ultimate destination is the Maverick Hotel and Casino, a mob-affiliated operation that also doubles as Hell’s headquarters in this geographic sector.” Andy turned his head to look at Lucien. “But we’ve got somewhere else to go first.”

Lucien’s gaze flicked away from the long ribbon of dark road ahead to Andy. “You’ve been emphasizing a need for speed. Shouldn’t we go straight to Jack?”

Andy took a nip from the flask of whiskey. “Speed is important, yes, but getting to Jack and liberating him from the Maverick will be a daunting task. We may not succeed. We certainly won’t succeed if we don’t get some help.”

Lucien looked at him again. “What sort of help? And, hell, if we’re in such a fucking hurry, why don’t you just open another portal? We could be there in a flash.”

“It’s not that simple, friend.”

“Don’t call me friend. I don’t know you well enough yet.”

Andy grinned. “Oh, you’ll come to know me very well, Lucien. We’re going to be working very closely for a long time to come. As for the portals, opening them takes a lot out of me. There’s no way I could do it again tonight.”

Lucien frowned. “What are you? You’re a man, I can sense that, but you’re something more, too. Are you a human/demon hybrid? A wizard? Something else?”

“I’m Theodore Grimm’s first protege. Mr. Grimm recognized some innate abilities within me when Jack and I were kids. He took me under his wing and schooled me in the ways of…well, magic, for the lack of a better word.”

Lucien looked at the road and considered this. He’d been the closest thing to a confidante Theodore Grimm had in hell, but he’d heard nothing of a child protege--or anything at all about Andy O’Day, for that matter. It disturbed him somewhat, but he knew the elder Mr. Grimm didn’t share everything he knew with everyone. That would be too dangerous. And anyway, he didn’t get the sense that Andy was lying. And detecting lies was a thing he was very good at, a skill that was an enduring legacy of his time with the hellpack.

“How much does Jack know about this?”

“He knows some of it.” Andy drank again from the flask, a much bigger swallow this time. “I think he has a vague sense that the old man was teaching me things. Jack didn’t know his father was a wizard or that his life as a university professor existed solely to conceal his true role in the scheme of things. But Jack is smart. He knew his dad was something more than a normal man. And even back then he was always trying to figure things out. I always knew he’d become an investigator. However, he never pushed his father for explanations, never confronted him in any way, or demanded to know the truth about his life.”

Lucien grunted. “Why not?”

Andy shrugged. “Some kind of instinct. I think he sensed some things about his dad fell under the category of Things I Am Not Meant To Know.

Lucien watched Jack’s friend drain more whiskey from the flask. “Was sure that thing was empty.”

Andy chuckled. “It was.”

“So what the fuck?”

Andy smiled. “Magic” He raised the flask to peer at the bottom. “Really. There’s an inscription here. It was my college graduation gift from Mr. Grimm. I know my share of spells and charms, but this thing operates via a vein of magic that’s a mystery even to me. You drank the remainder of what it contained at the time, but this beauty’s never truly empty. You drain it dry, recap it, and open it a moment later to find it full to the brim again.”

Lucien made a grunt of appreciation. “Fucking hell. I need one of those.”

“No shit, right? I haven’t bought Jameson’s from a store in years.”

Lucien was feeling better about Andy now. He wondered whether Jack’s friend was ever this open about his secrets with him and he thought the answer was probably no. He also thought that would be changing soon (assuming they did manage to rescue Jack, and Lucien had no intention of allowing any other outcome). Too much had changed in the last few days, too many secrets had been revealed. He would want to know everything now, every detail of Theodore Grimm’s secret life and of the man’s relationship with his best friend.

“So tell me about this help we supposedly need to get Jack back. Because I’m not convinced it’s necessary, whatever it is. Those dead motherfuckers back there got the jump on me. I won’t let that happen again. And when I’m in hound mode there’s not a thing in this world that can stand between me and what I want.”

Andy pulled a pack of Marlboros from an inner pocket of his jacket. He punched in the Caprice’s cigarette lighter and looked at Lucien. “Look, I share your confidence in your ass-kicking abilities. And it’s true, no normal force in this world could hope to stand against you. But I assure you the security in place at the Maverick is as formidable as anything in that wretched place you come from. So, yeah, we need help.”