Grimm: The Killing Time (29 page)

The Wechselbalg put on a surprising burst of speed and spun around in the opposite direction. Halfway through the maneuver, he took a two-handed grip on the talwar to put more power into his strike. Nick was equally as fast, though, and he dropped to a crouching position. The sword blade cut through the air above his head, and the Wechselbalg—not anticipating the lack of resistance—became unbalanced once more. Nick swept his left leg out and knocked the Wechselbalg’s legs out from under him. The Wechselbalg crashed to the ground, but he managed to maintain his grip on the sword. Nick rose to his feet and brought the flat of the axe down, intending to give the Wechselbalg a solid enough blow to the head to knock him out. But the Wechselbalg rolled away as the axe came down, and the only thing Nick managed to strike was a patch of grass-covered earth.

That’s exactly what I would’ve done
, he thought.

The Wechselbalg might not have been an exact copy of him, especially when it came to personality, but in terms of reflexes and fighting skill, it was like he was battling himself. How could he get an advantage over a being who could match his speed and strength?

By exploiting his one weakness, Nick realized.

The Wechselbalg came out of his roll and rose to his feet in a single graceful move. He spun around to face Nick, talwar brandished to defend against the next attack. But Nick made no move toward the Wechselbalg. Instead, he spoke.

“You’re sweating a hell of a lot. Are you all right?”

The Wechselbalg frowned, and his gaze became calculating. When he didn’t reply, Nick went on.

“Me, I feel fine. I’m barely winded, in fact. I could keep on going like this for hours.”

The Wechselbalg glared at him and ground his teeth.

“But I suppose that’s because I’m a Grimm. A
real
one.”

The Wechselbalg bared his teeth and let out a savage snarl that was more animal than human.

“And you’re…” He trailed off, frowning. “What is it you are again?”

“I’m. Nick.
Burkhardt!
”

The Wechselbalg’s voice rose to a scream. He dropped the talwar and came running toward Nick, spines extending from his fingers. He let out an inarticulate cry as he ran, and the bright light of madness blazed in his eyes. Sweat poured off of him like water, and Nick wouldn’t have been surprised if the creature’s entire body liquefied and splashed to the ground where it would be absorbed by the soil.

Nick had no idea if the Wechselbalg would be able to complete the duplication process if he managed to sink those spines into his flesh again, but he wasn’t going to give the creature the chance to find out.

He waited until the Wechselbalg was almost upon him, and then he sidestepped and swung his axe. Once more, he used the flat of the blade, and he struck the shapeshifter on the side of the head. The Wechselbalg’s momentum kept him running several more feet before he veered to the right and collapsed. The Wechselbalg, blinded by rage and pain, hadn’t noticed he’d been headed toward one of the campfires, and as he fell, his right hand landed directly in the flames. Nick thought he had hit the Wechselbalg hard enough to render him unconscious, but the pain from his burning hand must’ve shocked him instantly back to full awareness. He shrieked, yanked his hand out of the fire, moved into a sitting position, and cradled the damaged hand to his chest, as if to protect it from further injury.

The Wechselbalg threw Nick a hate-filled look.

“What have you done to me?” he demanded, his voice low and surprisingly calm. He then slowly held up his hand to examine it, and Nick saw that it had become a charred, blackened lump. Not only had the finger spines been burned away, but the fingers themselves had been reduced to uneven nubs.

Nick didn’t understand. The Wechselbalg’s hand had only been in the fire for a split second. Sure, he should be burned, seriously so, but there was no way he could’ve sustained that amount of damage. He looked toward Juliette, and she also seemed puzzled. But then her expression brightened.

“The Wechselbalg’s body is made up almost entirely of woge hormone,” she said.

“Yes!” Rosalee said. “He’s mostly liquid.”

Nick thought of how hard the shapeshifter had been sweating during their fight. He hadn’t been perspiring. He’d been losing a portion of the fluid that made up his body. And that was the reason his ancestors advised burning a Wechselbalg’s body after killing it: its chemical make-up was highly reactive to flame. Nick knew then what he had to do.

But before he could put his plan into motion, the Wechselbalg sprang to his feet and came rushing toward him, arms extended. His right hand might’ve been a charred ruin, but the fingers on his left—and the spines extending from them—were just fine. The creature came at him with truly inhuman speed, faster than Nick could move, faster than he’d ever seen any Wesen move. It was as if he were propelled by a combination of hatred and desperation to survive. The Wechselbalg blurred toward him, and it was only out of instinct that he was able to raise and swing the axe before the shapeshifter reached him. He didn’t have time to aim, and all the axe blade did was shear off the tips of the Wechselbalg’s last two fingers. Nick barely registered this before the Wechselbalg slammed into him. The impact caused him to lose his grip on the axe, and the two of them fell to the ground. The Wechselbalg still had three finger spines remaining, and he jabbed them toward Nick’s unprotected throat. Nick grabbed hold of the Wechselbalg’s wrist with both hands to keep the spines from plunging into his neck. But the Wechselbalg was oozing clear liquid from every pore now, and it was almost impossible to maintain a grip on his slick flesh.

The shapeshifter’s features began to deform, as if he were a melting wax statue, and when he spoke, his voice was thick and gurgly.

“Give me what’s mine!”

Nick struggled to keep hold of the Wechselbalg’s wrist. He could feel the flesh and bone give slightly beneath his grip, as if the shapeshifter was on the verge of complete structural collapse. But the Wechselbalg’s finger-spines seemed unaffected by his worsening condition, and despite Nick’s best efforts, he managed to push them forward inch by inch, until Nick could feel their sharp points dimple his skin.

He looked into the Wechselbalg’s eyes and saw madness and hate, and more than a little fear.

“I’m sorry,” Nick said.

He rocked back, drew his legs up beneath the Wechselbalg, planted his feet solidly on the shapeshifter’s midsection, and shoved as hard as he could. The creature flew backward through the air, arms and legs flailing, only to land upon the same campfire in which he’d burned his hand.

The Wechselbalg’s screams filled the Hafen. He thrashed within the fire, body wreathed in flame, skin blackening, as he struggled to pull himself free. A horrible nauseating stench filled the air, foul beyond anything Nick had ever experienced. Hot bile splashed the back of his throat, and a number of Wesen possessed of a highly developed sense of smell, including Monroe and Rosalee, moaned and gagged as the stink of burning Wechselbalg suffused the clearing.

The shapeshifter managed to crawl out of the fire, but it was too late. The damage had been done. He had become a featureless charred mass that possessed only the most rudimentary resemblance to a human form. As he crawled, smoldering bits and pieces of his body broke off and fell to the ground, where they collapsed into small mounds of black ash.

The Wechselbalg continued to shed bits of itself as it crawled toward Nick, losing mass until its body was no larger than that of a small child. When the Wechselbalg was within several feet of Nick, it raised a featureless black face to him, and reached out with a fingerless stump of a hand. A dry, whispering voice emerged from what was left of its throat, the sound like two autumn leaves being rubbed together.

“I am… I am…”

It continued reaching, reaching, before finally falling away to ash completely.

Nick stared at the black mound that was all that remained of the Wechselbalg. The Hafen was totally silent, save for the soft crackling of the campfires. And then, one by one, the Wesen gathered there began to cheer.

The cheering continued as Juliette joined Nick, and he slipped his arm around her, grateful for her comforting presence. Part of him—the part he thought of as Nick Burkhardt—regretted the loss of the Wechselbalg’s life and wished he’d been able to find another way to stop him. But another part—the
Grimm
part—felt a cold, steely satisfaction at having rid the world of another monster. In that moment, he knew there was, in some ways at least, not much difference between himself and the shapeshifter, and the realization caused him to draw Juliette closer. As if sensing his inner conflict, she wrapped her arms around him and held him tight.

The others soon joined them, and the cheering died away. Nick was glad for that. Hearing the Wesen cheer was better than hearing them howl for his blood, but he didn’t feel like a hero at the moment. Not in the slightest.

Hank clapped him on the shoulder, and Renard gave him a nod and said, “Nice work.”

Nick nodded back to acknowledge the Captain’s words. Although Renard was a good man—at least, Nick thought he was—he could be a cold pragmatist at times. Nick looked once more at the Wechselbalg’s ashes, and he wondered if one day he would be as cold as Renard. He hoped not.

“Man, that looked like touch and go for a while there,” Monroe said. “There were a couple times I didn’t think you were going to make it.”

“Not me,” Bud said, grinning to reveal his two large square front teeth. “I knew he’d come through okay. Well… I
mostly
knew. Okay, I
hoped
, but that’s kind of the same thing as knowing, right?”

Nick continued staring at the Wechselbalg’s ashes and felt a growing sense of defeat.

“I was supposed to avoid killing him if I could. Rosalee said she needed some of his substance to make the cure for the
Ewig Woge
.” He sighed. “It doesn’t look like there’s much of him left.”

“Maybe she can use the ashes,” Monroe said, although he sounded doubtful.

“No, the ashes won’t work,” Rosalee said. She hadn’t joined the others earlier, but she came walking toward them now. “But this just might.” She smiled as she held up a small pink object. It took Nick a second to realize what he was looking at: the severed tip of one of the Wechselbalg’s fingers.

* * *

Rosalee set up a makeshift kitchen-cum-lab next to a campfire, different from the one that had killed the Wechselbalg. With Monroe and Juliette’s help, she mixed ingredients in a metal pan and then, using a small towel as a potholder, she held the pan over the fire. While the others worked on the cure, Nick, Hank, and Renard worked on distributing endorphin-enhancer to the rest of the Wesen in the Hafen. They were still in the grip of the
Ewig Woge
, and it was important to do everything possible to keep them calm and relaxed until Rosalee had finished her work.

Not all of the Wesen were happy to receive the paste from a Grimm, a Zauberbiest, or a human, but accept it they did. By the time Rosalee announced, “I think it’s ready,” everyone in the Hafen was inhaling the mingled scents of vanilla and lavender.

Juliette slowly poured the contents of the pan into a large mug and carried it over to Nick. Juliette and Monroe accompanied her.

Nick frowned when the saw the mug. “That’s all?”

“What are you going to do?” Hank asked. “Dispense it with an eyedropper?”

“Not quite,” Rosalee said. “The
Ewig Woge
is caused when Grimm physiology tries to shed woge hormone, setting off a reaction in any nearby Wesen.”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “So?”

“So we have to cure it in a similar way,” Rosalee said. She held out the mug to Nick. “Bottoms up.”

Nick took the mug from her and examined the contents. The liquid looked thick as tar and had a greasy film on the surface. And it smelled like something that had crawled into a sewer to die. He looked up at Rosalee.

“You’ve got to be kidding.” He thought for a moment. “You said you needed the Wechselbalg alive to make this. Isn’t a severed fingertip technically dead?”

“It was alive enough,” she said. “Let’s hope so, anyway.”

Hank leaned close to Nick.

“Since she used part of the Wechselbalg to make that stuff, if you drink it, does that mean you’re a cannibal?”

Nick’s stomach gave a queasy gurgle.

“Do me a favor, Hank?”

“Sure thing.”

“Shut up.”

Hank unsuccessfully tried to stifle a grin. “Shutting up.”

It took Nick several minutes to get the entire mugful down, and a few more until he was fairly certain he was going to keep it down. There was a lumpy residue at the bottom of the mug, but he wisely avoided looking too closely at it.

“How long until it starts working?” Nick asked.

“Not long,” Rosalee said.

“So what do I do?”

“Touch anyone who’s affected,” she said. “A handshake might do the trick, but a hug would probably be best.”

Nick glanced at the crowd of Wesen. While Rosalee had been working, most had stood or sat quietly watching. Now all eyes were on him. Some of them had fear in their gazes, some anger and resentment. But some—far more than Nick would’ve expected—looked at him with hope.

He couldn’t help smiling as he wondered what his ancestors would think of that.

“All right then,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

“Me first!” Bud hurried forward, wrapped his arms around Nick, closed his eyes, and hugged him tight.

Feeling awkward, Nick returned the hug and tried to ignore his friends’ amused smiles.

* * *

The first light of dawn tinted the sky by the time the last affected Wesen approached Nick. The campfires had been extinguished, the tents taken down and the sleeping bags rolled up. The Wesen, including Bud and his family, had departed as they were cured, and now the only ones remaining in the Hafen were Nick, Juliette, Hank, Monroe, Rosalee, and Renard—the latter three relieved of the
Ewig Woge
and looking quite human once more. And, of course, there was the final Wesen Nick needed to cure.