Happy Valentine's Slay ( A Grimm Diaries Prequel 10.5 ) (2 page)

“Yikes!” Jack said. “Gotta get out of here,” he climbed down the beanstalk with a fistful of beans in his hands, remembering the crazy story of how he got them but had never told anyone about.

At night, he retreated back up there in the clouds among the beanstalks, when the giant had gone again, preferring to stay alone, watching the imposter moon and wondering if she were the girl he had met, and if she would ever come back one day. Adjusting his hat, Jack wondered if she died, or if something bad happened to her. But if something bad had happened, the necklace would have given her a new life and a new body.
It should’ve kept her safe. He laughed when he remembered telling the Moongirl that there was a cow up in the moon. She had gotten very angry, and now he was so sorry he had said it. He would’ve given anything in the world to meet her again, even his precious hat – which has an even more bizarre story by the way.

In the midst of his romantic moment talking to the moon up in the sky, a nagging voice summoned him from below.

“Jack! Jack!” a girl’s voice called. “It’s me. Marmalade.”

Jack puffed and pursed his lips. “Can’t she ever leave me alone?” he sighed, getting off his hemlock. “What?” he yelled back. “I am showering. I am naked. It’s not a good time, Marmalade.”

“You rarely, shower, Jack,” she called. “And you did see me naked before, so we’re even.”

“I saw you half-naked, that’s not naked! And it was because you like to sit half-naked by the shore, combing your hair. It’s not my fault. I don’t like anyone seeing
me
naked.”

“It’s a mermaid’s thing. You don’t understand,” she yelled.

“Well, mine is a Jack thing, mermaids don’t understand.”

“Let me up,” she demanded. “Or do you have someone with you? Is it that tanned girl with the beautiful dreadlocks we saw yesterday?”

Marmalade was getting on Jack’s nerves lately. She was always jealous he could be with another girl up there, and she never left him alone. Jack didn’t have anything against her, though. He considered her a good friend but she wanted more, and he was lonely, so he relented spending time with her while he really wanted to be with the Moongirl.

It puzzled him why he was sure the girl he had met was the moon. Why did he have this feeling? Or was he just daydreaming, persuading himself that she was the moon, only to overcome the truth that she didn’t care for him and that he will never see her again? Maybe she was just a normal girl and she is now gone with the wind.

Marmalade wasn’t that bad, Jack thought. She was beautiful, a mermaid, and was too funny to be true. She had the most amazing twinkle in her eyes when she laughed. It almost made him think he had known her for a very long time. Well, she did walk around semi-naked sometimes. But hell, she was a mermaid. She couldn’t help it, and it didn’t mean too much to her. She didn’t understand when people looked.

In Jack’s mind, what was nagging about Marmalade was one thing: she wasn’t the girl with the bright halo shining from underneath her black cloak; the girl he liked so much and simply disappeared.

“I am not with someone else,” he mumbled, throwing her a couple of beans down the beanstalk so she could plant them and get up. Marmalade had asked for some of those beans repeatedly, but Jack refused. It was like giving your not-so-sure girlfriend the keys to the house.

Once Marmalade got up, she kissed Jack, wrapping her arms around him. Jack stood as stiff as a witch’s broom. She always did that. She was a touchy person. She loved to hold hands, cuddle and hug, and kiss too much. He never understood that but he didn’t mind. Although she was nagging, she was different from all the other girls he’d known. He knew she’d do anything for him, even die for him, which he didn’t really like. After all, he was never sure about them being together. Yes, his grandmother Madly said had predicted he’d end up with a girl called Marmalade, but he still questioned her sanity, and actually meeting Marmalade was too much of a coincidence. Jack was a free soul. He refused to be bound by foretold destinies. What was the fun in that? It was like telling him he will be caught by the Queen of Sorrow stealing her most precious artifact.

Marmalade on the other hand was dying on the inside when she had to be away from him. She didn’t know many people out there in Sorrow, and always got into trouble, even when she was not naked and dressed properly. She was living here, trying her best to get Jack to love her while he loved someone else, who ironically was herself, too. She just couldn’t tell him, or they’d both died as the curse had implied.

Sometimes, she wondered about how long it’d take them to die after she’d tell him. What if it took a day before they died? That would be enough, right? One day together as lovers was better than a lifetime trying to make him love you, pretending you’re someone else or trying to please him. But was there enough time if she told him? What if they died instantly?

Marmalade had been searching high and low for a cure to this curse, but no one could help her. She even thought of digging up grandmother Madly from her grave to ask her.

All she could do was swim back to that lake next to the Goblin Market and get the necklace. As she searched for the necklace she found that there were many children who had been drowned in that lake. It was something that disturbed her a lot, but she thought she’d investigate that later. She wanted to know who killed those children at the bottom of the lake, and why?

Another thing that troubled Marmalade was that she didn’t have friends. She dove in the ocean and the sea, but didn’t find any other mermaids. It left her feeling that she was alone in this world when she wasn’t around Jack.

One day she found two girly creatures who looked like her in a far away ocean. When she approached them, they tried to hurt her so she swam away. Was it because she wasn’t born a mermaid that they disliked her?

She later discovered they were sirens, the darker side of mermaids.

Marmalade had no one but Jack, and although she loved him dearly, he was difficult to live with sometimes. A bit moody, too. There was also something about him that he had kept secret and never spoke about. She knew that because sometimes he woke up screaming at night. She never dared to ask him about his dark dreams.

Sometimes, she gazed up at the imposter moon and wondered who that was. Did the creators simply substitute her, or was there another dark force controlling the moon? The second thought sounded just about right because the creatures of the night were spreading everywhere, and the moon did nothing about them.

In short, Marmalade was an outcast, almost a sinner who didn’t do her job right, transformed into a new life-form she didn’t know anything about, all except she was hopelessly in love with Jack Madly, and that he didn’t love her.

“I’ll tell you what,” Jack offered to Marmalade. “Let’s get down for a while. Let’s enjoy time with the other little friends we have.”

“You mean you want to go out?” Marmalade was happy. Jack was the biggest introvert. An unexpected trait for a thief who silently slipped into people’s houses everyday. Maybe it was the dark secrets he had learned about people from the houses that made him prefer loneliness over socializing. Or maybe it was the dark secret in his dreams that made him rarely want to mingle with others.

“I heard Wolfy opened a bar,” Jack said. “Or a food place or something.”

“Yes,” Marmalade shook her head eagerly. “It’s called the Belly and the Beast.”

“Catchy name for a bookish boy who is always hungry,” Jack laughed.

Minutes later, they climbed down then started walking toward the Belly and the Beast.

Down there, some miles away, by the edge of the forest, was the ramshackle bar Wolfy called the Belly and the Beast. Wolfy had opened it for two reasons. One, because he was always hungry. Cooking and serving food and drinks kept his mind from thinking about killing and eating people – he still had a hard time controlling his urges on full moon nights, but that was another story.

The second reason was that Wolfy, guess what, was always
hungrrryyy
, and he wanted to eat Ladle Rat so much. He didn’t want to eat her because he was a big bad wolf. Well, he might have been bad, but he was a young boy and he was not that big. Before he’d met Ladle, the other wolves in his tribe always bullied him because he didn’t want to hurt people and loved to learn the Anguish Language instead. A wolf, wearing glasses with a book in his hand didn’t really fit the image of the wolves’ tribe.

Wolfy also didn’t want to eat Ladle because he wanted to hurt her. He wanted to eat her because he thought she’d be exceptionally delicious. Since he had met her in the forest, he was torn from inside. She was so lovely – a bit too wacky, he admitted, if not totally off her rocker – but he liked her the way he had never liked food … ahem…  a lovely girl before.

She also had turned out to be Death itself, and she saved his ass from the
witchy granma
. In other words, she was the perfect girl for him. Badass, quirky, and could relate to a boy who transformed unwillingly into a horrible wolf when the moon was full. What else could a wolf ask for?

But it was only these dark urges he felt inside from time to time. It was his nature, eating, gorging; gulping was all he was raised to do. When he was a baby Wolfy, his big brothers made him eat rabbits, only to sharpen his fangs. Delicious rabbits, Wolfy thought a couple of days ago while servicing his customers with food and drinks.
How about a big turkey, non-cooked, one that is actually alive when I eat it?

Wolfy never understood why humans had to cook food, adorn it, and eat from plates. Let alone say prayers and wiping their mouths after every bite. What was that crap all about? Where were the days when he used to snatch a big gazelle with his brothers, each one of them sticking their fangs in it and pulling it apart from all sides. Where were the days when part of the eating fun was to hunt the prey down? What’s with humans buying food from a shop? Where is the fun in that?

He remembered when he and his brothers used to sneak into the King of Sorrow castle’s kitchen. They used to eat everything they got their paws on. Then when full, they would throw meat at each other for fun. A sausage once stuck in Wolfy’s throat and his brothers laughed at him as he chocked. He threw raw meat back at them. It stuck on their face like a troll’s wicked slap. They ended up pouring some brown sauce and sugary syrup on each other’s fur, and then gulped whiskey from a barrel before the Queen’s terrible Bloody Mary came and scared them out of the place. Wolfy never gulped whisky. He had always loved milk, and that was why his brothers were mad at him. He’d always been on the soft side somehow, especially since he discovered marshmallows in the Queen’s kitchen. There had always been crazy food in the castle’s basement kitchen that no one had ever heard of before, but marshmallows blew Wolfy’s mind away.

One day, sneaking into the endless castle, he found a library. It was a strange library. It had long dark corridors that seemed like they were endless. Even worse, if you padded the corridors long enough, the library itself disappeared, and it was as if you had entered another realm. It was no secret that the King and Queen’s enchanting castle was a mysterious place. What Wolfy gained out of this experience was that he was introduced to books.

Even though no one in his tribe had ever read much of anything, somehow books blew his mind. The only kind of books his brothers read were the death pamphlets, which were like the local newspapers in Sorrow to keep track of the deceased. It had hand-drawn pictures of dead people and animals in case someone recognized them and wanted to give them a proper burial. Wolfy’s brothers liked those because of the drawings: smashed skulls, men hung on the noose, and all the gory images you’d expect. It made him laugh hysterically. There were no comic books in his time, but the pamphlets were even better. No one had the right to ban or confiscate them.

Still, Wolfy loved books.

In the beginning, he loved books about animals, which he considered food. Scratching his long sideburns, he wanted to know if there were yummy animals out there that he hadn’t tried before. After all, his hunger was unquenchable.

Wolfy found a book called Anguish Language, where every tale was rewritten in words that somehow sounded the same but never made sense. In that book, there was the story of Ladle Rat Rotten Hut. Wolfy drooled, and wondered if that yummy young girl was for real. She looked tasty and had a quirky smile that he thought was amazing. He knew it was the kind of smile that got you kicked around in school, taunted by your teachers, and probably thought of as an outcast. It was an innocent smile, yet totally wicked.

In the pictures, Ladle was portrayed with cake and wine. It was said that on her 16
^th
birthday something strange would happen to her in the woods. It was as if the book was a prophecy of some kind.

“Yummy,” Wolfy had licked his lips. “If I find her I can eat her, and then follow with the wine and cake.”

Wolfy had never eaten cake before. He had tasted a number of humans, but he thought they tasted like something awful. They were neither salty, nor sweet. Neither hot, nor cold. Neither fury or smoothly skinned. Even though he walked around in human form, unless he turned into a real wolf when he needed to, humans were just unnecessary horrid creatures. But not Ladle. There was something about Ladle.

But all that was in the past.

Now, Wolfy cleaned his Belly and the Beast bar and waited for his first customers of the night. He and Ladle were starting something, and he had to grow up and become a man. Well, not a man
man
, but a boy man, more of a wolf slash boy slash man slash whatever. It was all because he liked that quirky girl in the red hood, and had to take care of her, and persuade her mother he was good for her.

Wolfy shrugged, cleaning the glasses in his bar. The girl he liked was Death.

“Way to go, Wolfy,” he mumbled to himself. “Of all girls in the world.”

But there was nothing he could do about it. He was crazy about her, his fur strengthened when she was near him. Although she was Death, he was always worried about her when she came back late to visit him in the bar. Her mother didn’t approve of the relationship so they only met in the bar behind her back. Ladle slaughtered those which the Tree of Life chose, Wolfy worked hard, cooking and serving in his bar, and they met late at night before the clock struck midnight and Ladle had to go back home. She had to go to sleep early to and wake up early. She didn’t go to school, and she slayed people everyday. Her job wasn’t easy, and it was by no means appreciated, so he knew she needed the emotional support.