Death's Apprentice: A Grimm City Novel Read Online Free Page B

“This one’s name is Courage !” His hand moved to the next. “And this is Self-Sacrifice !”
    “And the last one?” The sneer in the watching figure’s voice had hardened to contempt. “What is he called?”
    “That’s the one the Devil fears the most!” The madman nodded slowly. “His name is Resolve .”
    Goaded into a flurry of action, the madman dragged more objects out of his tattered gunnysack. With the rain sluicing down his upraised face, he hung three more action figures on the lowest of the dead tree’s branches. They slowly turned about as they dangled there, with crude cut-out paper wings taped to their shoulders.
    “It’ll bloom—” The madman muttered low to himself as he draped the leafless branches with salvaged holiday tinsel. “I know … I know it will!” He stepped back from the tree, looking at everything with which he had adorned it. The effect was of a handmade shrine, a place of single-minded devotion. “There’ll be leaves … and fruit! Like you’ve never seen! And on the day that it blooms, there’ll be an army, too…”
    He drew out handfuls of other, smaller plastic figurines from the sack. Toy soldiers molded from dark green plastic—he carefully arrayed them in the grass at the tree’s base, surrounding the three action figures with their twig weapons raised above the one toppled over, with its red-painted face and toothpick horns.
    “Just … just like that!” He looked over at the figure watching from the shadowed bench. “But the secret is, this army, it’s invincible! It’s so tough that no one can beat it. Not even him!”
    “Is that so?”
    “Yes!” The madman stood up from his crouch, shivering in excited certainty. “When they come out to fight him, then you’ll see. Because then it’ll be all over!” He pointed to the dark office tower. “Over for him!”
    “You seem very sure of yourself.” The watching figure tilted his head to one side, studying the madman. “How do you know all this?”
    “Because the archangels told me!” The madman pointed to the winged action figures dangling from the branches. “They know everything! They planned it all.” His voice turned hushed and reverent. “They planted the tree, you see. To bring hope. To the people … to everyone…”
    He didn’t wait for any more words from the figure sitting on the bench. More objects came out of the gunnysack as the madman knelt down. Candle stubs, with burnt-black wicks at the center of the pale wax. With a half-empty book of matches, he managed to light them, their small flames wavering in the storm’s cold wind. He leaned back where he knelt in the wet grass, delighting in the effect of the trembling glow, then glancing over his shoulder to see if the watching figure had noted it as well.
    Just as he did so, a car passed by on the street beyond, the beam of its headlights sweeping through the garden. That was enough to illuminate the figure sitting on the bench. The madman drew back, his eyes widening at what he saw.
    A man—but something more than that. Tall and powerfully built, in the full strength of his early fifties. That was what the figure looked like. Garbed in an expensive cashmere coat that was somehow not dampened by the rain that drenched the garden square, and with a leonine, tawny hue to his skin and hair, as though descended from the ancient kings of Persia. The hard, chiseled planes of his face spoke of a barely bridled virility, the kind possessed by those sharp-clawed predators at the top of the world’s food chain.
    The headlights swung off into the darkness, the garden square falling back into the night’s deep shadows.
    Cowering back against the dead tree, the madman kept his wary gaze upon the watching figure. In the chaos of his thoughts, a dreadful realization was forming.
    “What else,” the figure said slowly, “do you know?”
    “There … there’ll be a battle.” As though hypnotized, the madman couldn’t stop himself