Grim Tidings Read online

  “I understand nothing,” I said, “including where I am, who you are, or who told you that tie was a flattering color.”

  He touched the bright blue and gold striped silk reflexively, and favored me with a look like he’d just smelled garbage on a hot day. “Gary always said you were a handful.”

  “Gary’s dead,” I snapped. “You here to get payback? If you are can you just go ahead with the waterboarding and the car batteries or whatever and save the preamble?”

  While we’d been having our chat I’d been testing out the chains. They were stronger than I was, and wrapped around an I-beam that was equally strong. The room was empty except for a few old desks and chairs piled in a corner and a grimy safety poster dated 1967 hanging next to the huge round hatch that led to the innards of the boiler.

  “I’m not supposed to do anything but talk to you,” the reaper said. He tilted his head slightly. “I’m Owen. Can we clear up a few things?”

  “Where’s Leo?” I said, trying to keep my feet on the floor.

  “Careful,” Owen said, indicating a ring of black dust around my prison with a shiny patent leather shoe. “Those are black iron shavings.”

  I sighed. “That supposed to mean something?”

  A smile chased over his thin mouth before he straightened his tie again. “I forgot that Gary liked to keep his dogs . . . insulated, shall we say.” He toed the pile with his other foot. “Black iron shavings repel hellhounds and other types that were, shall we say, formerly human. Stay in your electric fence and we won’t have a problem.”

  “Oh, you already have a problem,” I said, rattling the chain for good measure. “Bigger than you know.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Owen said.

  “Why am I here?” I said. “Where am I?”

  “You’re at Headquarters,” Owen said, and the way his slick Trust-Me-I’m-Important voice dropped I could hear the capital H. “Minneapolis. As to why, you know why. You and that fellow you ride with have been making some big claims. Claims you have no business making, and it’s my job to get to the bottom of all this nonsense.”

  I shut my eyes and inhaled, the smell in the air almost making me choke. “I’m not the one that’s been saying anything. This isn’t Leo’s fault either.”

  Owen reached up and patted my face. I thought about biting him. “It’s adorable that you’re defending him. He hasn’t been nearly that complimentary about you. In fact, he’s barely spoken.”

  He went to the door and opened it, showing me a glimpse of dank hallway. From far away, wavering through the low-ceilinged corridors, I heard a scream. Owen cocked his head. “Looks like he’s got something to say now, though. Think about what I’ve said, dog, and you may save yourself some pain.”

  “You need to let me go,” I blurted. “You don’t know what’s going on here and you’re gonna make things really bad.”

  “Good doggy,” Owen said grinning as he pulled the door shut. “Stay.”

  “Come on,” I breathed as I was plunged into the dark again. “Stupid bastard,” I said to nothing as I tugged hard at the chain. Owen was like all the reapers—arrogant enough to think nothing could hurt them and dumb enough to believe that was actually true.

  I wrapped one fist around the chain and took a deep breath. Even though I was what you’d call durable, I was hardly invincible, and this part always sucked. I held my breath and jammed the base of my left thumb hard against the chain, pushing until I saw stars and the joint popped out of true. I bit down hard as I folded my thumb under my other four fingers and slid the whole mess free of the chain. I bent double as I pushed my thumb back where it should be and managed to only let out a tiny, ladylike scream.

  And then I did it with my other hand.

  I didn’t move any further, since I didn’t want to get shocked to shit by some magical fire line that Gary had never bothered to tell me about. I tried to quiet myself, to think like Leo. He’d know what to do if he was in this room, and not somewhere down the hall getting screams yanked out of him one fingernail at a time.

  He wouldn’t panic, because Leo never panicked. He never showed fear. I took a shaky breath and made myself stand up and work the cramps out of my arms and back from being hung up in the chain. I didn’t need Leo to save me. I’d survived this long, survived Lilith, survived Gary. I could get us both out of here.

  If I could just get past this damn barrier.

  “Watching you try to think is painful,” a voice said, and a small flame flared in the dark, sparking the end of a cigarette. Uriel exhaled and approached the line, grinning at me.

  “It took you fucking long enough,” I snapped, massaging my thumbs. Uriel glanced up and the light came back on, casting its sickly, gout-colored light. It did nothing to diminish the glow that always seemed to wrap around the angel, even in the darkest, most filthy places on Earth.

  “Looks like you and I have more to talk about,” he said, gesturing with his cigarette.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Like you’re an angel who smokes.”

  “I like smoking,” Uriel said. “It helps with the smell in places like this. As to this little tableau, I don’t think you want that idiot with the bad tie knowing you have an angel in your pocket. I’m only here because I need you to not die until our business is complete.”

  “I can take care of Owen,” I said. “But I can’t get out of this room, so how about you flap your wings and turn around three times or whatever it is you do and break this spell?”

  Uriel laughed and then reached into the inside pocket of his suit, tossing me a lighter. “Ava, these reapers have been cut off from the Pit for over a century, thanks to Lilith and your old buddy Gary. Do you really think if you could repel hellhounds with something you can find on the floor of a metal shop nobody would know about it?”

  I hung my head, glad the angel couldn’t see my face turn red. Uriel watched me step over the line of iron filings on the floor and smiled approvingly. “What’s the lighter for?” I asked. He exhaled smoke from his nose and smiled.

  “Consider it divine intervention.”

  The lightbulb hissed again and Uriel was gone. I tested the door, which wasn’t locked. That was reapers for you—so convinced they were better than the hounds they didn’t even bother to think we could figure out doorknobs.

  I stepped out into the hallway, easing the doors shut with a soft click. No reason to make myself an even easier target for Owen and his buddies.

  The screaming had stopped, and I felt a twist in my stomach. I didn’t know if Leo could be dead again, and I didn’t want to find out.

  Thick metal doors like what I’d been locked behind were recessed into even thicker walls as the hall went on, each door marked with the symbol for a fallout shelter, the yellow faded to almost white. Knocking steam pipes ran along the ceiling over my head and water swished through thin copper lines, like I was inside some kind of vast circulatory system, the belly of a living, breathing beast.

  Footsteps rang out and I shrank myself into one of the doorways, hunching up against the cement. A female reaper wearing a deep red dress and shoes with heels sharp enough to puncture whatever neck she was standing on opened the next door, giving me a brief glimpse of a white-tiled shower room, at least four more reapers milling around, and a figure strapped into a chair in the middle of the floor. Leo’s shirt had been pulled open to show a swath of his heavily tattooed chest, and his face was swollen and bruised on one side.

  I fell back again as the door slammed shut. How the hell was I supposed to take out five reapers in an enclosed space? I’d barely managed to get the jump on Gary, and I’d had help. I’d also had fangs and claws on my side and that wasn’t happening while I was running on no sleep and had what felt like a gallon of horse tranquilizer working its way out of my system.

  I wanted to punch the door I was standing against, but breaking my fist wouldn’t help me, or Leo. I squeezed Uriel’s lighter hard enough to leave an imprint on my palm, letting the sting
even me out and make me focus. The door was marked BUILDING MANAGER, and I tried it. This place was ancient, but maybe there would at least be a broom handle or something in there I could arm myself with, since the reapers had taken everything from my knife to my hairbrush.

  The office was just as dusty and gross as the rest of the basement, but the rusted metal shelves were a treasure trove for a hellhound disarmed and down on her luck. I swept the ancient lightbulbs and a stack of nudie mags off the shelves as I fumbled through the tool kit. I grabbed the longest screwdriver and shoved it up my sleeve and tucked a box cutter in my back pocket. An old metal thermos sat next to the toolbox and I grabbed it and an armload of sloshing chemical bottles.

  People are scared of reapers and things like them. It’s a survival instinct as old as walking upright—steer clear of the things in the dark. They’re hungry and strong and they can’t be hurt. But if you’re already in the dark, if you have to live there too, you learn that monsters can bleed just like the rest of us.

  I stepped out of the building manager’s office, holding the thermos in one hand and Uriel’s lighter in the other. I carried the rusty bucket I’d found in the corner, flipped it over, and stood on it, flicking the wheel until a flame sprouted. Holding it to the star-shaped head of the sprinkler, I really hoped that the city of Minneapolis was on top of their fire safety inspections.

  For a sick heartbeat, nothing happened. Then I was rewarded with a spurt of water in my face and the tired honking of a fire alarm somewhere on an upper floor of whatever Cold War rock pile I was in.

  The first reaper to come out the door was a pudgy guy in a polo shirt and jeans. He could have been someone’s dad on the way to pick them up from practice, except for the dead-eyed fury on his face. I slipped the screwdriver from my sleeve and popped him on the bridge of the nose with the handle as he lunged at me. While he was moaning and grabbing at his crushed face I flipped the screwdriver around and jammed it into his shoulder, slipping it under the collarbone and taking his arm out of commission when I hit the tendon.

  Dad Reaper’s buddy was fast on his heels, and I grabbed up the bucket as the water streamed around us, swinging it in a wide arc. He threw up an arm to block me, but the water pooling around our feet made him slip and I didn’t miss again. The rusty metal left a nasty gash in his temple. “Hope you got your shots,” I muttered as I shoved open the door to the shower room. “Leo, hold your breath!” I shouted into the chaos inside, and then tossed the thermos at the feet of a trio of shocked reapers.

  Stick around for almost a century, and you learn a lot. Like how some of the most noxious stuff on earth can be mixed up with just a few household cleaners. The woman in the dress came first, choking and swiping at her eyes and mouth as she stumbled into the hall. Greasy fingers of smoke warred with the sprinklers in the hall. I pulled up the rag I’d found in the building manager’s office around my nose and mouth and dove into the mess inside the shower room.

  Leo was sitting with his chin tucked against his chest, trying not to breathe. His eyes were watering and the line around his lips was turning white. I pulled out the box cutter and sliced at the thick layer of tape holding his wrists and ankles in place. It was getting hard for me to see now, and every time I tried to breathe it felt like a small but very angry horse kicking me in the chest.

  “What did you do?” Leo wheezed as I helped him up. He leaned on me hard as we stumbled through the gathering water toward a blurry red square that I really hoped was an exit sign.

  “Saved your ass,” I said as we shouldered through a heavy door and into a blast of air that was both breathable and so cold I felt the sweat and sprinkler water on my face crystallize. “You’re welcome, by the way.” Outside, we both collapsed in a dirty snowbank. Gotta love Minneapolis in the dead of winter. Cars swept by in two fast lanes throwing up sand and more snow. We were in one of those industrial wastelands where nothing except warehouses, strip clubs, and bodegas stays in business. One of each sat across the street, complimentary neon offering a place to get a payday advance and a gaggle of XXX GIRLS to blow it on.

  Leo coughed, and then leaned over and vomited into the snow, flopping back with a low moan when he was done. “What the hell, Ava? I lie down at that motel hoping for a nap, maybe a little vodka and a hand job to ease the pain of going through a fiery car wreck, and I wake up tied to a chair in Satan’s locker room.”

  “You’re pushing it with the hand job,” I said. “And at least you didn’t wake up hanging from the ceiling being yapped at by the Hellspawn’s answer to Gordon Gekko.”

  Leo’s face hardened, underneath the bruises and the crescent-shaped cut beside his eyebrow where someone wearing a ring had hit him. Owen was wearing a big crop of chintzy gold rings, I remembered.

  “Did they hurt you?” Leo asked. I shrugged.

  “Nothing a few dozen Valium, a hot bath, and a bourbon won’t cure.”

  He shook his head, nostrils flaring. “I’m going to kill every last motherfucker in that place. This was my favorite shirt.”

  I stood up, brushing wet snow off my legs and butt, and offered a hand to Leo. “You have a dozen white shirts.”

  “Yeah,” he said, accepting my hand. “And this one was my favorite.”

  Leo’s weight almost knocked me back into the snowbank. He grunted when he leaned on me, and I could tell a couple of his ribs were broken. “We can’t stay out here,” I said. The wind cutting between the dark buildings around us made my teeth rattle. I aimed Leo at the intersection, punching the crosswalk button with my free hand.

  “I’m fine,” he insisted. “Just give me a minute to get myself together.”

  “Freezing to death for the second time in two days is not going to help us,” I said. “Now get your stubborn ass indoors.”

  Leo grinned at me. “Yes ma’am,” he said. Even with the bloody mess the reapers had made of his face, I felt myself smiling back.

  I was headed for the strip club—at least they had booze in there—when a beater pulled up to the curb, spewing black smoke and Motown. The driver threw open the passenger door. “Get in!” she shouted.

  Across the highway, I saw the first signs of movement outside the big gray box that the reapers called home. I nodded at Leo and helped him onto the big front seat. The inside of the car was as wide and plush as a champagne booth in the strip joint behind us, and I barely got the door shut before the driver hit the gas.

  “You don’t want to be standing there when they get their act together,” she said. “Trust me.”

  “They would be . . .” I said, trying to gauge whose car we’d just gotten into.

  “Reapers, stupid.” The driver pressed her foot down to the floor, roaring through corridors of snow punctuated by streetlights and burned-out warehouses. Aside from the eye shine of the occasional bum or very, very determined hooker, we were alone in the blackout. “Well, some of the reapers. Who d’you think?”

  “The Easter Bunny, maybe,” I said, and she shot me a glare.

  “Guess you think you’re pretty funny.”

  I returned the look. “Guess I do.”

  “Ladies,” Leo muttered, his voice gravelly with pain. “Can we keep it down to a dull roar?”

  The driver shook her head, dislodging a few pitch-colored strands from her short Mohawk. They fell in her face and she huffed angrily. “Typical. I risk my ass to get you out of there and y’all are just as pathetic as the rest of us.”

  “The only thing you’re risking now is a busted axle.” I winced as the car bounced over a mound of dirty ice cast off a truck tire.

  “You just hush until I make sure none of those suits is following us,” she snapped. We drove around for another twenty minutes, taking random turns through the wasteland and finally getting on the interstate, heading north.

  “Are we being kidnapped?” I said. “Surprise party? Where are you taking us?”

  “He’s the one, right?” the driver said. Her eyes never left the road, and her knuckles w
ere so tight on the wheel I could see the bones. “The new Grim Reaper?”

  “I sure hope so,” I said, watching as the speedometer climbed past 70. She showed me her teeth in that masking smile that never really hides fear.

  “Me too.”

  “So where are we going?” I asked again, trying for a softer approach. She was so twigged I was half-scared we’d go flying off the shoulder and end up in a snowbank until some unfortunate state trooper found us come spring.

  “Safe house,” she said. “The empty suits at Headquarters might not have been happy to see you, but we are.” She turned her eyes to me, and there was white all the way around. “We all are.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP

  DECEMBER 1944

  Jacob was the one who finally moved, pulling the door in a swift motion and hopping back. A sobbing man fell into the room, blood splashing the front of his brown uniform like a sash on a beauty queen.

  I didn’t move until Jacob slammed and locked the door again; then I nudged the sobbing man with my foot. “You know him?”

  Jacob nodded. “He’s a soldier. He’s a bad soldier. That’s why they keep him here sitting at a little desk signing the party members in and out.”

  I kicked the soldier again. “Stop crying!”

  He clearly didn’t speak English, but the kick got the message across. He gulped and looked up at me, looked to Jacob. “Wer ist sie?”

  “All right,” I said, going back to my search of the drawers and cabinets for anything I could use against what was happening outside. “What’s with those people outside? The short version.”

  Jacob was bent over, examining the man in the uniform. He wasn’t really a man, I saw as he sat shaking, his close-cropped head in his hands. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen. A couple of months ago he’d probably been happily heiling his way through a Hitler Youth meeting, with no idea that the Fatherland was being crushed around him like a tin can in a vise.