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In hindsight, following Nick into Forest Park is never a good idea.
Following him into Forest at eleven thirty at night in the middle of one of the worst snowstorms Portland has ever seen—yeah, not the greatest idea Monroe has ever had.
But that stupid goddamned Grimm was going to find a child-eater of a Hexenbeist with or without Monroe, he’d said, so Monroe had thrown on his coat and stuffed his feet into his shoes and followed him out the door. He can barely see on the way there; snow is coming down thick and hard, and it’ll be gorgeous in the morning but right now it’s nothing but a pain in the ass.
“Come on,” Nick says, voice taut, and he’s opening the door before Monroe can even shut the car off.
“Nick,” he calls, and his voice is lost in the swirling snow. He has to run to catch up to him, and yeah, Blutbaden are built to run but not through a good seven inches of snow. He catches up to him, of course; Nick is moving slower than him, forcing his way through snow in his wildly inconvenient shoes, breath billowing out like dragon’s breath in front of him. Monroe wants a cigarette. He’s wanted a cigarette since he met this guy.
“We are sticking together,” he says firmly, one hand on Nick’s upper arm, pulling him to a stop. Nick’s heart is beating hard and loud, and he feels warm under Monroe’s hand. “Okay? You are not running off without me, dude.”
“Fine,” Nick says. He’s got that determined set to his jaw, the one that Monroe immediately associates with trouble, nowadays, but it’s tempered with the sharp bite of fear the Monroe tastes every time he inhales. Nick is worried; four kids have gone missing over the last three weeks, all elementary-aged. The cops found a child’s pink-soled sneaker and a femur on the hills that border the Willamette. Another two are gone, reported missing this afternoon.
It sounds like a Kindsmörder to Monroe. He’d gone to a Hexenbeist he’s known for a while—she goes by Julia these days, and he doesn’t make a habit of fraternizing with her but trusts enough to take her word when she tells him to let this one go. There have been rumors of a Kindsmörder in the area for months—she supposedly took a child down south of Corvallis in July, although she only ate the lower half of him and it was passed off as an animal attack. Julia had grudgingly told him that she allegedly lived in Forest, back behind the hills in her den.
He’d told Nick what he knew about Kindsmörder, mostly that they’re nasty pieces of work; they like pain and suffering more than Geier, and they like to position themselves close to the families after the kids go missing. Nick had looked into social workers and counselors, but hadn’t come up with much. Finally Monroe had told him about going to see Julia, and what she’d told him about Forest.
They’re running on borrowed time, now. Monroe doesn’t want to say it, but he really doubts the kids are alive; Kindsmörder don’t play with their food. One of them might still be—she might have taken two because she knew she wouldn’t be able to leave after the snowfall, and wanted one to tide her over until roads were clearer.
(But God, Monroe thinks. The one that’s still alive is never going to be alive again, not after watching someone their age get torn apart while they were still alive and screaming. If they’re lucky, they went into shock. A dissociative fugue. Maybe they won’t remember anything.)
They’re parked close to the hills, and it’s not much of a walk, or at least it wouldn’t be if it wasn’t below zero and snowing like hell. Monroe uses it to clear his head a little bit, form a plan of attack; there’s not much to do with Kindsmörder, no way to reason with them—they’re savage, mindless, when they’ve got a steaming kill in mind. He’s never seen one in person, thank God, but he’s seen plenty of drawings, and his parents described them enough when he was young, trying to scare the pups into going to sleep—claws long like hawk-talons, teeth sharp like knives, sharper even than Mama’s, stronger hands than Papa’s for holding down disobedient pups and biting, ripping, devouring.
Most people that see a Kindsmörder don’t live to tell about it, funnily enough.
“You’ve got your gun, right,” Nick says, and startles him out of his reverie. His voice seems loud, even though Monroe knows he’s taking care to be quiet; the sounds of the forest are nonexistent on a night like this, everything taking as much shelter as it can. Jesus, he hopes they can find her den.
“Of course,” he says, and checks, just to make sure. He does, a handgun of some sort; he doesn’t like them, and he knows how to turn the safety off and shoot it. That’s all he cares to know.
“Good.” They’re going around the hills instead of over them, which on a normal day would take too long but tonight is perfectly reasonable. Monroe has his ears pricked to full attention, like he’s going to hear her crunching bones.
(They do that—it’s not often there’s a body left. They bury the clothes and shoes and eat them down to the bones, down to the hair.)
Monroe shudders, and passes it off as a chill.
--
“There,” Nick breathes ten minutes later, and Monroe berates himself for letting a Grimm see what his wolf-eyes couldn’t. “By the birches.”
Monroe isn’t surprised that she chose here. Kindsmörder are legendarily attracted to birch trees—the first of their kind, the Baba Yaga, had a broom made of birch, according to stories.
“That’s it,” he says, very quietly, so quietly he’s a little surprised when Nick nods. It’s a textbook example of a Kindsmörder den—burrowed far back between the trees, half-covered in snow, like a big elaborate lean-to. It’s the kind of thing that can be abandoned in a flash, regarded later as a squatter’s dwelling by anybody that finds it. Nobody will go digging around underneath.
For half a selfish second, Monroe hopes it’s abandoned.
It’s not. He hears the low hissing before Nick does, and grips his arm. He’s not totally sure he’s breathing.
“Look out,” he says, not bothering to keep his voice down, and jerks Nick closer to him, landing on the snow with the Grimm on top of him. The Kindsmörder, carried by her own momentum, ends up a few feet away.
“Grimm,” she says. Her voice is wet and scratchy, and Monroe can smell her fetid breath, sweet and stomach-turning like something that’s been rotting for a long time.
But beyond that, he can smell fresh blood. He can’t hear anything, but he tells himself that it doesn’t mean anything—the kid might still be alive, just hidden, or maybe he’s too wired up to focus right.
“He might still be alive,” Monroe breathes, lips brushing Nick’s ear—he doesn’t know if she can hear him or not but he’s not going to chance it. “Whenever you get the chance, you have to get him, and get him out of here.”
Nick draws his gun, making his way to his feet, even though Monroe can smell a dull ache and wonders for just a second where he hurt him—his hip might’ve hit the ground, because snow doesn’t make much of a cushion. Monroe stands, too, watching her with wary eyes.
The Kindsmörder is staring at them, and Nick’s eyes widen a little bit—he recognizes her, even with her needle teeth and knife-nails, with her hair long and straggly to her waist. She’s old, but not ancient, not like some of them—it’s rare to come upon a young Kindsmörder, because the young ones don’t often get caught. They can kill for fifty years and no one will ever know; they’re born, not raised, and sometimes the little girl down the street is the reason cats go missing, not your neighbor’s dog.
Then again, they aren’t usually as ambitious as this one. If they all were, it would be a hell of a lot easier to catch them, maybe kill them when they’re only eating neighborhood pets instead of children.
“Six kids in a month,” he says loudly, and her gaze snaps to him. They’re single-minded, he’d told Nick, focused on the kill, savage, and Nick edges towards her den.
She attacks faster than Monroe anticipates—they aren’t the kind of Wesen (although he’s loathe to call them Wesen at all) that are given to witty banter, but he’d expected at least a couple of words. But no, she’s coming at him with bared claws, and he’s mistaken when he thinks his coat will protect him even a little bit.
Shit. He really likes this coat, too.
He can feel himself changing, even though he doesn’t tell his body to do it—Blutbaden instincts are good like that, sometimes, and he takes a vicious swipe at her face. She draws first blood, but he draws more with his hit—it’d be enough to break her neck if she was a human, but it clearly doesn’t even daze her.
He’s on the ground a second later, flat on his back and breathless in the snow, both of her hands under his coat. She’s breathing cold and rank into his face, dragging her claws down his ribs, and he hits her with a devastating blow to the underside of her jaw—he hears her neck pop, he fucking hears it, but she doesn’t even budge, just digs her nails in harder.
Oh fuck, that hurts. Fuck.
He says something unflattering and hits her again, scratching across her face, trying to go for her eyes. The stories his parents told him weren’t lies; her teeth go right through the shoulder of his coat, through leather and cotton and skin and muscle, jaw locked, and if he didn’t finally manage to get out his gun her teeth would be crunching through bone. He does, though, he puts three bullets through her shoulder, and she tears away, dragging blood and skin with her—fuck, fuck, fuck fuck fuck—to scream her displeasure to the woods and cold.
He shoots again, twice, and misses, feels her claws scrape against his sternum, looking for soft organs to drag out, to lie steaming in the snow so she can have her fill—
He empties the chamber as she opens up the skin and muscle of his left side, barrel pressed tight above her left ear, and nine shots turn her head into nothing recognizable. Kindsmörder are hard to kill, but nine bullets through a brain is enough to kill anything, and she’s very, very dead by the time the gun falls from Monroe’s shaking hand.
“Monroe,” Nick shouts. “Monroe!”
Nick is on his knees next to him, and Monroe thinks for just a second that he’s going to freeze to death, the idiot, he didn’t wear anything but jeans and that stupid leather jacket and a hoodie. Monroe’s hoodie, the gray one.
He pulls the Kindsmörder off of him, tosses her body—she looks small in death, and she changes back to what she was before, head reforming as well as it can, grey curls and soft, small hands. A teacher, Monroe thinks dimly, or a librarian. Nick has his phone out, talking to someone—calm and female and professional, an emergency dispatcher.
“She’s dead,” Nick says, once he hangs up. “The girl. She was dead when I got there. They both were.”
“Jesus,” Monroe says, “fuck, Nick, I’m sorry,” and tries to stand, pushes his hands against the bloody snow.
He can’t.
“Monroe,” Nick says, and puts a hand on his shoulder. When he pulls it back, it’s dripping.
“Nick,” Monroe says, “I don’t think I can get up.” His voice is raspy to even his own ears, and he can taste Nick’s fear on the cold, sharp air as well as if he’d sunk his teeth into a palpable thing. He’s cold, a different kind of cold than when they walked out here.
He must say that out loud, or at least part of it, because Nick is saying I know, running his hands down over Monroe’s arms, over his sides, because it’s too dark to see well and he’s got to run on touch. Monroe knows these things in some small pain-hidden part of his brain, knows, too, that he’s bleeding out, and not slowly. “I know, it’s cold, I know, but you have to stay with me—”
Exhaustion hits Monroe then, hard and inescapable like a blow to the chest. Is he in shock? He’s not sure. He can’t think.
“Let me sleep,” Monroe says, tries to move away from Nick’s hands, because he’s touching the gaping bleeding wound on his left side and if Monroe was in his right mind he’d be roaring in pain.
But he’s not. He’s so tired. He’s so tired, all of a sudden.
“Please just let me sleep,” he says, and lets out a shuddery breath. It hurts to breathe, like something sharp is pressing into the deep muscles of his chest.
“Monroe,” Nick says, and fear bleeds into his voice. “Please stay awake, you have to stay awake,” and touches Monroe’s face with shaking, bloody hands. Monroe can hear ambulances, far off in the distance, too far for Nick to hear yet. He can taste blood on his teeth, sharp and bittersweet on his tongue.
“Where,” Nick starts, and Monroe takes a shallow breath.
“Side,” he says, “and shoulder, right one, and my chest.” His cheekbone is broken, too, and it hurts to move his face to talk, but there’s no sense saying anything about that right now. Blood is hot and slick on his lips.
“Do not die on me,” Nick says firmly, and Monroe can feel his hand shaking.
“If I do,” he says, “I—I’m really sorry,” and Nick looks away, blinking hard.
“Fuck,” he says. “Monroe, don’t you fucking dare, don’t do this to me.”
Nick brushes hair away from Monroe’s eyes, which is stupid, because Monroe can see him just fine. He’s not looking away, not for anything, because if he dies, the last thing he wants to see is this stupid Grimm, God help him.
“I don’t want to,” he says, very quietly. His voice is shaking. It hurts so bad, so bad. “Nick, I really, really don’t want to.”
--
He doesn’t die.
Which, you know, is good.
But he’s in the hospital for what feels like a year—in actuality, it’s four days, which is five thousand, seven hundred and sixty minutes, and Monroe counts every single one of them down. Well, not really, because he’s all hopped up on painkillers for the first two days (it turns out that he’s got three broken ribs, along with his broken cheekbone, as well as a hundred plus stitches), but after those two days he’s sort of miserable.
It’s made a little more bearable by the fact that Nick literally will not leave him alone. Normally Monroe would be annoyed by constant hovering, but almost losing some vital organs to a Kindsmörder has shaken them both up.
No one can come up with a reasonable explanation as to how Miriam Whitewood, fifty-eight, children’s librarian, managed to beat the living hell out of a thirty-five-year-old man in excellent physical shape. Just like they can’t come up with a reasonable explanation for why Trayton Phillips was found half-eaten and Irina Chaney was found whole but dead in a shelter that had several items of her clothing in it, or why her stomach contained partially digested human flesh.
Monroe gets the feeling that no one is going to think about it very hard. He’s certainly not. One run-in with a Kindsmörder is more than enough contact for him; he doesn’t need to obsess over her, too.
Nick, surprisingly, is clearly feeling the same way. Monroe is sure it’s bothering him, the fact that the kids died—it helps, a little, that the girl had been dead for hours before they got there. But he isn’t talking about it, and Monroe’s not going to push.
“I’m really glad you didn’t die,” Nick says the day Monroe is released. He tries to help Monroe into the car and gets a pretty intense Blutbad glare for his efforts. Monroe is slightly mollified a few minutes later when Nick casually reaches over and scratches an inch or two behind his ear. He’d discovered that particular trick while Monroe was helpless against him in the hospital bed, the bastard.
“Me too,” Monroe says, and glances at him. Nick is looking out of the window.
“I don’t know what I would do without you,” he says quietly.
Monroe bites back his instinctive response—find another Wesen to bother—because he knows, after he thinks about it for just a second, it’s not true.
He settles with putting his hand on top of the one Nick has resting on his own knee. Nick doesn’t do anything for a second, then turns his hand palm-up, tangling their fingers together.
“I told you a while ago that I’m not gonna run,” Monroe says. “I don’t plan on dying, either. I’m not gonna leave you.”
“You’d better not,” Nick says, and looks at him. Monroe doesn’t think that kissing him would be totally out of the realm of possibility. They’re holding hands, after all.
He’s right. It’s not.