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

another blow. It caught him on his ear and one side of his jaw; he could feel the rebound against his skull as he toppled onto his back.
    Another skinhead planted knees on his chest and a choking hand at his throat. A nasty little short-bladed knife drove toward his ribs.
    He avoided the knife by rolling onto his shoulder, shoving aside the rags and cardboard box. The blade missed his chest, driving through the front and back of his overcoat instead, the sharp metal point pinning the grime-darkened cloth to a crack in the platform.
    With the last of his strength, Blake lurched forward onto his knees. The pain and blood from before was nothing to what happened next. The skin over his rib cage ripped away, the raw muscles beneath clenching in torment.
    The two skinheads backed up, gazing wide-eyed at the sight before them. The rod dropped clanging onto the platform.
    With the sound of ripping gristle, Blake staggered to his feet. Still pinned to the concrete, the red-drenched overcoat tore from his shoulder and dangling arm, revealing how it and the raw flesh beneath were fastened together, as though some demented surgeon had imagined himself a tailor, combining skin and cloth into a garment that could never be shed.
    The pain wiped out all of Blake’s thoughts. He might have stopped before, when the gangs had run away—but not now. Now it was too late.
    His blood-spattered hand shot forward, grabbing one skinhead by the throat. He squeezed until he could feel the cartilage grinding and snapping, then slung the dead body like a club, knocking the other figure to the ground. He ground his boot into the second one’s face, until the hands stopped clawing at his leg and dropped away, lifeless.
    Blake slumped down onto his knees, in the widening pool of his own blood. He had just enough strength left to tug the overcoat free from the knife, then wrap the joined cloth and flesh tighter about himself, his fist clenched just above the pounding of his heart.
    He let his head drop, eyes fluttering closed. The groan of pain and despair from his whitening lips was all that was needed to damn the curse that had made him this way.

 
    3.
    Only a madman would tend a garden in weather such as this.
    The dark storm clouds hung low in the sky, filling every direction visible to the naked eye, from one horizon beyond the city’s tall office towers to the masses of craggy hills that ranged even farther in the distance. Rain pelted down, hammering the streets as well as the people and cars on them. The gutters ran like rivers, swift and engulfing, the muddied waters sloshing across the sidewalks and into the doorsteps of the grey buildings. Yet somehow there were never enough streaming torrents to wash away all of the city’s filth and grime. The rain sluiced down along the buildings, leaving them just as filthy and blackened with soot as before.
    The madman was so lost in the swirling tatters of his thoughts that he might not even have felt the lash of the rain upon his bent back. Through close-shaven stubble, his scalp shone pale and wet as he scrabbled through the contents of the frayed gunnysack at his feet.
    With elaborate, methodical care, the madman set out the elements of his rituals. From the sack, he took out a child’s toy, a plastic action figure, worn and scuffed. Something that he had rescued from a rubbish can set out at the curb. The broken ends of a wooden toothpick had been stuck to the doll’s forehead, giving it what might have been horns. The plastic skin of the toy’s face had been painstakingly colored red with a marker. One of its feet had been snapped off and replaced with the cloven hoof of a farm-toy goat. The madman knelt down and set the ugly figure in place, digging its plastic feet into the wet ground so it would stand menacingly upright.
    There was still more to be set out for the madman’s devotions to be complete. He dug more small figures from the sack, then knelt down with them at one side of a massive