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

to see all … this?” He gave a dismissive gesture toward the photographs. “These pretty pictures.”
    “Well—”
    “And especially now .” He frowned as he shook his head. “I have to say that your timing seems just a little suspicious. Given that tomorrow is the exact anniversary, to the day, of the sealing of our contract with each other.”
    “I thought that maybe…” The other’s voice was nothing but a hoarse whisper; he couldn’t look up, but kept his lowered gaze on the photos. Even if he couldn’t see them now. “Maybe we could work something out together … something else, I mean … about my end of the deal.”
    “Ah.” The Devil tapped a fingernail on the photograph of the man’s wife. “I see.”
    “Do you?” A hopeful gaze lifted toward him. “I mean … if you could…” The fat man spread his hands above the photos again. “Because it’d be a crime to just waste everything I’ve accomplished. Everything I’ve pulled together…”
    “A crime. Yes, of course.” He nodded slowly. “But let me show you something even more criminal.”
    The magnate cowered as the Devil leaned across the desk. The leonine features were contorted with a sudden rage.
    “You!” He jabbed a finger into the fat man’s chest. “You disgust me. We have a deal, you and I, a contract—and now you want to crawl out of it. And for what?” He slammed the flat of his hand down upon the desk. “For this trash? That slutty whore you like to call your wife? Your ugly pug-nosed children?” He swept his hand across the photographs. “And you dare say that this is what you’ve accomplished? Twenty years ago, you were nothing but a broken-down traveling salesman who had pawned his samples case for a bottle of cheap bourbon. And when the bottle was lying empty on the floor of your five-dollar-a-night motel room, you looped your belt over the water pipe in the bathroom and tied the other end around your neck. There would have been nothing left of you but another purple-faced corpse if I hadn’t arrived in that moment to offer you a way out.”
    “I…” The pudgy hands hurriedly pulled back the photos into a ragged pile. “I know. And I appreciate it. Really I do. But I’ve got a family now. And they love me…”
    “Do you really think that means anything to me?” The scorn in his face was more frightening than the anger had been. “What does a worm like you know of love, and things lost?” He raised the man’s tear-wet face with a fingertip under his chin. “Let me tell you a story, maggot. Once there was a creation, a being holier than any of your tribe could ever be, immaculate in a newborn universe. An archangel, the first to be molded by God’s hands, the first ever to have life breathed into his unstained heart. That archangel was given the duty of bringing light to all the worlds. And he was God’s favorite, until God created … Man.” The single word sounded like a curse on his lips. “And a thing like you, a thing of stinking flesh and callow, ignorant appetite, became God’s favorite.” His gaze turned away from the fat man on the chair, and locked onto a vision of millennia past. “Was I to thank him for that usurpation? No. Better I should rise up and rebel against my creator for the love He’d taken away.”
    Imbedded in the lava-stone desk, a series of arcane metal symbols appeared, turning incandescent with heat as the Devil spoke. The photos on top of the desk burst into flame, their edges charring black as the fat man scooped them up and held them against his heaving chest.
    “Do you see those?” He pointed to the swirling, interlaced symbols. “That’s the spell that God used to create me. And it is more a part of me than this.” One hand laid upon his chest. “This flesh is but earthly corruption, a prison. If you could decipher what is inscribed in that stone, you would know what happened at the beginning of the universe. You would see the beauty of it, and