The Grimm Chronicles, Vol.1 (15 page)

But we still had fun. It was a good diversion. Tricia and I hadn’t talked much about her embarrassing night at the beach, which was fine by me. I wanted to avoid as much drama as I could this summer. I knew senior year wasn’t going to be easy … without Edward as my boyfriend, there was no telling how my classmates would treat me. It made me nervous when I started thinking about how the last year of high school was going to play out.

Thankfully, I had a way-
awesome
diversion: terrifying rats plaguing my dreams.

My parents came home just as Seth and Tricia were leaving. Mom hassled both of them about school and college applications. Dad hassled Seth about baseball and asked Seth why the Milwaukee Brewers weren’t doing better. Seth had no satisfactory answers and so Dad just nodded and said they were all bums but they’d pick it up after the All-Star break.

Whatever
that
meant.

Seth talked their ears off, like he always did. He liked my parents. His parents weren’t the greatest parents in the world by any measure. His mom smoked a lot of cigarettes—that didn’t make her a bad mom, but the fact that she just sat at the kitchen table all day smoking … well, it could get a little awkward. And smoky. His dad work third shift at the nuclear power plant, which meant he was usually asleep when Seth was home. And he got really, really mad if someone woke him up when he slept. It was understandable, but I got the feeling Seth would have liked it if his dad wanted to actually do
something
during the one hour when their schedules overlapped.

So he spent a lot of time over at my house. Once, during middle school, we even took him camping with us. I hated every minute of it. My parents were being totally embarrassing at every point, but Seth didn’t seem to notice at all. In fact, it almost seemed like he was having
fun
being around them. Imagine that!

I went upstairs, forgetting completely about Briar until I saw him sitting at the desk. “You’re still on the computer? What are you looking up?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m looking up.” He rolled my desk chair back and motioned me closer with his paw. “It’s a map of Chicago.”

I stepped closer and leaned in. It
was
a map of Chicago, with little green pins clumped together in one little section of the city near Wrigleyville, the neighborhood near the Chicago Cubs baseball stadium. “Impressive. What does it all mean?”

“These little pins are the mysterious murders,” he explained. “Now look at this.” He clicked the mouse. The colorful map disappeared, replaced by a much more confusing series of gray lines. The pins were still in place, though.

“What is this?” I asked.

“This,” he said, “is the sewer system. See anything interesting?”

I leaned in closer, studying the pins. “They’re all in the same sewer system.”

“Correct! And look.” He pointed with his paw.

“Look at what? That gray tube there?”

“No.” He sighed. “OK, so my paw is too fat to point. Here. Put your finger right here.” He put my finger over one of the sewer tunnels. “Now watch.” He switched back to the map.

“An apartment building,” I said, “Right underneath that sewer tunnel. Excellent job, rabbit. I’m impressed.”

He leaned back in the chair, clearly satisfied with himself. “Well, I’ve always been quite the fast learner. Now all we need to do is head on down to Chicago and nip this in the bud.”

“Sure, sure.” I sat on the bed, pulling off my socks. “Hmmmmm …”

Briar absently scratched one ear. It was cute, in a “lovable bunny” sort of way. “I take it your mother will let you borrow the car for a day. Hopefully that’s all we’ll need. Of course, we’ll have to do some investigating to figure out who this particular Corrupted is.”

“Yup, yup. So … we could take a train down to Chicago, right?”

“A train? Why would we take a train?”

“Because … I can’t drive?”

“What?!”

There was a knock at the door. “Honey?” Mom’s voice came through. “Can you talk on the phone a little quieter? Your father and I are going to bed.”

“OK,” I called out. I turned back to Briar. “I don’t have a driver’s license,” I said quietly.

Briar gasped, wide-eyed.

“How is this a surprise?” I asked in a whisper. “I mean, I’ve never driven anywhere!”

“I just assumed you loved the earth or something!” he said, waving his arms around wildly. “How are we supposed to save the world if you can’t drive?”

I fell back on the bed. “I failed my driver’s test last year. I haven’t gotten in a car since. I didn’t need to for any reason. I had Edward driving me places. I walk to the library.”

The rabbit was quiet for once.

“I guess I could take the driver’s test again. I just … I really can’t parallel park.”

“Well. We’re in trouble.”

I took a deep breath, staring up at my ceiling and thinking. “I guess …”

“What? What is it?”

“I could …” I swallowed hard. “I could ask my parents to take me down for a night. They’ve been talking about getting out of town for a couple months now, and they’ve been threatening to drag me along anyway.”

“Brilliant! So what’s the problem?”

“The problem,” I said, “is they might just drive me insane.”

Chapter 4

That night, the dreams got worse. Clearer, too. This time I was clearly in a sewer, floating above a little stream of murky water sitting at the base of the tunnel, following dozens and dozens of big brown disgusting rats.

There were voices, too. A man’s voice and a woman’s voice, echoing from far deeper within the dark concrete tunnel. There was a single light up ahead, coming from an orange-yellow light bulb affixed to the wall. The rats moved toward it and I followed, winding around a bend in the tunnel.

The voices grew louder.

“I’m not jealous,” came a man’s voice. “I just want you to work regular hours so you can get a good night’s rest.”

“I can’t!” came a woman’s voice. “I work all hours, whenever they need me. I can’t tell them when I want to work!”

“Then maybe you should look for another job,” he responded. “You deserve better.”

The rats moved closer. The couple’s voices were louder now and with the light behind us, the tunnel had begun to darken again. I could barely see where we were going, and more rats seemed to be sneaking out of cracks in the curved concrete walls. There were hundreds of them now, the darkness closing in around us like a blanket.

The voices grew louder.

“I can’t quit!” the woman said. “Cleaning is the only thing I’m good at. It’s all I know how to do.”

“You don’t have to quit. Just look for another job. One that lets us be together.”

“I can’t get another job! I’m a house cleaner. That’s all I’ll be.”

Suddenly, the rats seemed to cry out as one, as if they were yelling with the woman. There was an opening up ahead and a light shining down into the tunnel. The ceiling of the tunnel had been broken open and a mound of garbage and dirt sat beneath it, pressed up against the wall. The rats clawed their way up the mound and through the opening, biting each other with their nasty little teeth, their tails whipping left and right.

I followed them up. We were in a closet of some kind, and as the rats packed in, they cried out in frustration. I felt claustrophobic and tried to scream again but nothing came out. The rats continued piling in, crying louder and louder until the closet door opened and they all came tumbling out into a bright room.

A living room. There was an old blue couch in one corner and an old tube TV and a little bookshelf near the opening that led into a little kitchen. The carpeting was old and brown and shredded in places.

A man stood in the center of the room, surrounded by the rats. The man was tall and middle-aged, his face a pale white and his mouth open in horror. A woman was standing next to the closet door, her hand still on the knob. She was plain, but beautiful, too—she wore a red bandana to keep her blonde hair away from her smooth, angular face. She had on tight jeans and an old gray sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her tiny fingers slowly clenched into a fist.

She didn’t look horrified at all.

“We need to get out of here,” the man said desperately. He held out his hand. The rats were circling him, keeping their distance as if testing their prey. They spread across the floor and the furniture like a brown tide of fur.

“We fight too much,” the woman said sadly. “I’m sorry. This just isn’t going to work out, Bradley.”

The man ran a hand through his hair, his mouth fumbling for words. “Cindy … we can work this out …”

The rats pounced, a hundred little snapping jaws. They knocked him over and he screamed a blood-curdling scream. It only took a few quick breaths before they were covering him completely, rolling over each other in a desperate attempt to get at the flesh.

Cindy stood, watching. One of the rats landed on her foot. She reached down and picked it up. It was small and thin and familiar … had I followed it in a previous dream?

“Why can’t you just leave me be?” Cindy asked it.

The rat sat in her open palm, sniffing with its little nose. It glanced over its shoulder to its brothers and sisters who were still chomping on their lunch. She set it down, but it didn’t move toward the feast. Instead, it sat on the floor, watching.

I started awake in a cold sweat. It was morning. My alarm was buzzing on the nightstand and I reached over to shut it off. “Whew,” I muttered.

“Whew?”

I turned. Briar was
still
sitting at the computer.

“Have you been at that all night?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep. Did you know there are only three thousand tigers left in the world? That’s outrageous! Why, it feels as if just yesterday they were positively
thriving
. What happened? No, don’t tell me … I’ll look it up.”

I got out of bed, stretching and glancing at the computer monitor. “I see you’ve discovered Wikipedia.”

“And so much more! I’ve been looking up some histories of German princes in the general area of where the Brothers Grimm lived. I’ve found some interesting coincidences that we should check out at some point.”

I yawned. “Such as?”

“Well, it appears that a number of royalty were regularly marrying their cousins. It was a fairly common way to
protecting the bloodline
, so to speak, but it would also have been a great way to hide Corruption as well.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Think about it,” Briar said, tapping his paw on the desk. “If you’re a royal prince or princess who can never die, you must pretend to be someone new at some point so the locals don’t start asking questions. Pretending to have a child with your cousin is a good excuse for why, say, Prince George I looks an awful lot like Prince George II.”

“Oh, I get it. So the Corrupted prince pretends to have a child and keeps the child out of the public eye, then pretends to die. The next day, the fully grown child who looks just like the Corrupted prince takes over. It’s brilliant.”

“Brilliant if you’re a Corrupted prince,” Briar said. “Not so much if you’re a princess. They didn’t have the best of lives back then.”

“How so?”

“Well.” Briar cleared his throat. “They were treated more like currency than anything else. You gave away your daughter’s hand in marriage to make a truce with a rival. Or you married off a daughter to expand your land holdings.”

“Well, what charming young lady wouldn’t want to be a part of that?” I asked bitterly. “Did any of these princesses have a fondness for rats?”

He turned, swiveling in the chair. The tips of his furry toes barely reached the floor. “Why? Did you have another dream?”

I nodded. My stomach lurched at the memory of the rats. “Someone died … a guy named Bradley. Eaten alive by rats.”

Briar flinched. “Oh my. Positively disgusting. Anything else?”

“A woman named Cindy,” I said. “She was standing there, watching it all.”

“Cindy … Cindy …” he began pecking away at the keyboard with his paw, a seemingly impossible feat. I guess he’d been practicing a good 8 hours or so during the night. “OK, well, it doesn’t look like there’s anyone named Cindy in the general area. Anyone listed in the address directories, at least.”

“What? Let me see that.” I leaned over the computer, scanning a list of names and addresses. “Hey, this is a
paid
site! How did you pay to access this?”

His whiskers twitched. “I may have used your credit card at some point during the night.”

“What?!”

He shrugged. “To be fair, your wallet was laying out. I didn’t go through your purse.”

“Oh. Great,” I muttered, grabbing my wallet and stuffing it in my purse. “Why did my alarm go off? What day is it?”

“Thursday,” the rabbit answered.

“Oh gawd!” I ran to my closet. “Stay turned around,” I ordered, tearing away my nightshirt and pajamas and quickly grabbing a pair of jeans and a dark green button-down blouse. “I have a half day at the library. Are you sticking around here?”

“Of course,” Briar said. “I have more investigating to do.”

“OK.” I walked back to the desk, grabbed the fountain pen and stuffed it in my pocket. At the door, I stopped and turned around. I felt a sudden weirdness wash over me: there was a giant rabbit sitting at my desk, playing around on my computer, searching for a mysterious woman who shouldn’t exist. I still wasn’t completely grasping this, but at least my mind hadn’t completely shut down. At least I was thinking through things. “Will you please not use my credit card?”

“I promise,” said the rabbit.

Good enough for me. I went downstairs, surprised to see both my parents sitting at the kitchen table.

“Oh,” I said.

“Once again, you seem surprised we’re in our own house,” Dad murmured, sipping his cup of coffee. He was using his favorite Green Bay Packers mug.

“No, no, I just thought you guys might be golfing is all.”

“Your mother has to go in to work for a few hours,” he said with more than a little annoyance in his voice. “You’d think after thirty years of work, she’d have a few sick day excuses lined up.”

Mom sighed. “If someone else contributed a little more to the retirement account, I wouldn’t have to take on so many ad campaigns and I could sit around in my pajamas all day.”

“OK, OK,” I interrupted, before their little mock-argument could really take off. “Listen, I think we should go down to Chicago this weekend.”

Mom raised an eyebrow. She had a plate of half-eaten toast and Sunnyside-up eggs sitting in front of her that looked awfully tempting. “What brought this up?”

I shrugged. Think, Alice! They’re never going to believe their hormone-imbalanced kid wants to spend time with them! “I just … really, really want to see the aquarium. And this might be the only weekend I’ll have off from the library all summer because … because they’re doing a new reading group on Saturdays which means more books to put away.”

It was true. Technically. OK, so maybe I wouldn’t get stuck working Saturdays at the library, but it was
possible
!

Mom glanced at Dad. Dad sipped his coffee, humming thoughtfully. Finally, he said, “I wouldn’t mind taking in a Cubs game.”

Mom smiled. “We haven’t been to Wrigley Field in ages. Is there a game? Check your phone, dear.”

I reached into my pocket and used my smart phone to check. An ad popped up for a game called
Castle Cats
but I X’d it out. “There’s a game Sunday afternoon.”

“Well,” Mom said, “I guess that settles it. We can go Sunday morning.”

“No!” I nearly shouted. “I mean, why not go Saturday so we can all check out the aquarium?”

They exchanged looks. Did they know something was up? Are parents
really
that perceptive?

Finally, Dad shrugged. “As long as I get a Chicago-style hot dog somewhere along the way, I’ll be happy.”

“Great! Mom, find a hotel. I’ll be back from the library early this afternoon.”

“Yes, ma’am. Any other orders?” she called out before I could reach the front door and make my escape.

“Don’t forget to take out the garbage!” I said, shutting the door behind me.

It was a dreary, cool day. Dark clouds covered the sky and the concrete sidewalks were still wet in places from an early rain. Perfect indoor weather. Perfect weather to sit on a soft cushion with a good book and a hot cup of cocoa. Heck, why not re-shelve some library books for a few hours?

Because Fran the meany was the librarian on shift again, that’s why. It was hard to get a good idea of what she was really, really about. Was she just in a bad mood, or did she not realize that so many of the things she said were so mean? She didn’t even smile at the people checking out books. She wore her glasses tight up against her nose and she seemed to always be frowning, her thin little penciled-in eyebrows scrunching together at the bridge of her nose.

I decided to jog to the library even though I was wearing my pair of thin-soled blue slippers. If there was one thing the encounter with that Frog Prince taught me, it was that I should probably be prepared at any time. Whatever Corrupted ended up coming at me next probably wasn’t going to wait for me to change into a more comfortable pair of pants and shoes. I fought through the pain in my heels, bouncing off the curb at each intersection and clutching my purse in one hand.

When I reached the library, I wasn’t even out of breath. My endurance was definitely getting better.

Inside, it was dry and cool. A couple young kids laughed somewhere on the floor above, followed by a sharp “Shhh!” from an adult. On the first floor, a handful of middle-aged people were browsing the fiction shelves. A college-age boy with long hair walked down the History section, running a finger down book spines as he read them.

Fran, as always, sat behind the checkout desk with a stern look on her face. “Lots of young adult books,” she said without so much as a hello.

I went around the desk, set my purse on the floor of the little shared librarians’ office, then grabbed the stack of recently returned titles, sifting through them to weed out all the books that belonged on the first floor.