Excerpt: The Children of Grimm - End Game

Sarah Morris was going mad.

No ifs, no ands, no buts about it. She was going right out of her head. A head that, for some reason, throbbed continuously, like her skull wasn’t big enough for her brain and it was determined to get out, even if it meant beating its way out through her sinus cavity.

She told herself, as she stayed shrouded in the dark of semi-consciousness, that the second she opened her eyes she’d be back in her bed in the dorm with nothing more unusual or sinister in front of her than an anatomy term paper she should’ve started a week ago. Told herself that she was imagining the grass tickling the back of her neck, the twig she could feel poking into her back, even the bird that chirped softly somewhere to her left. It was all part of a dream; pieces of a hallucination brought on by too much caffeine or not enough sleep or something funny someone slipped in her drink when she wasn’t looking. If she would just open her eyes, there would be a pillow under her head and her favorite blanket twisted around her. It would all be normal if she could just open her eyes.

Open her eyes.

“Sarah, open your eyes.”

When Sarah pried open first one eye, then the other, and saw a canopy of leaves hanging overhead, she sighed. Then she groaned as the throb in her temples started up again, reminding her that her brain was trying to escape through her ears. Or her pores. Or maybe it was going to drain out slowly through her tear ducts. Whichever route it took, it was doing it as painfully as it could and the hard ground under her head wasn’t helping.

She sat up slowly. Her body felt oddly stiff and detached. When she was almost sitting upright her head began to spin and things threatened to go dark again. A hand quickly braced her, a warm and steady pressure between her shoulder blades, and stayed there. She leaned into it, grateful for the tether.

Until the voice from a moment before really made it past the fuzziness and the pain battering her skull.

Eddie.

Then a rush of words, rush of images, all flew by without care for the ache in her head: Eddie. Wolf. Cliff. Eva. Dead man. Blood. Howl. Fuck!

She jerked away from the hand at her back and pushed herself to her feet. Would’ve run, too, if the world hadn’t turned upside down. Didn’t even get to scream “No!” at the fuzzy approaching figure before everything went black again.

When Sarah opened her eyes again, she was propped against something and knew it because instead of sun-dappled leaves and broken slices of sky peeking between them there was a tree trunk in front of her, and ground, and grass sticking up out of that. And she knew it was someone, not something she was propped against because there was an arm across her chest and she could feel her support breathing behind her. Every exhale puffed against her cheek and blew past her nose. Every single one of them was laced with the unmistakable coppery scent of blood.

Now she remembered why she was going to scream.

“Easy,” Eddie said from behind her as she started to squirm in his grip. “Just relax for a second. Crossing the breech the first time can be a little disorienting.”

“Relax? Are you crazy?” Sarah tried to wiggle loose from the arm around her but every time she moved, it tightened. If he squeezed her much more, she wouldn’t be able to breathe. “Let me go!”

“It’s really not to your advantage or mine for you to keep acting this way, Sarah.”

“It’s really not to your advantage to have me screaming bloody murder, either! We couldn’t have gotten that far and they’ll hear me and then you’ll be…”

The chest pressed against her back started to shake. It wasn’t until a low baritone sound reached her ears that she realized he was laughing. Laughing at her, even. His arm loosened and fell to the side and Sarah scrambled up from the ground. First to hands and knees, then just to knees, then more or less to her feet, though they felt about as steady under her as ice skates on a half frozen pond. She backed up slowly all the same, backed away until she stumbled into the trunk of the tree she’d been watching a moment ago. The bark felt scratchy through her shirt, but she didn’t care. Scratched more as she slid down the tree to sit on a thick, exposed root at the base, but she didn’t care about that either, not even when she heard the quiet give of the material as it tore.

Eddie was still sitting across from her, and he was still laughing. The dark shadows that had been under his eyes in the car, the sunken droop of his cheeks were gone. He looked…normal. Looked like the professor she’d started dating a week into the semester just to drive her sister, Eva, crazy. And he was laughing.

“I’ll do it, you know,” she said, arms crossed over her chest in what she hoped looked like defiance instead of petulance. “I’ll scream and scream until every person within a mile of this place comes running. We passed enough houses on the way here, I know someone’ll hear me.”

Eddie shook his head, tawny hair falling across his forehead at the movement. His eyes weren’t wild anymore, but they still didn’t quite look human. Didn’t look anywhere close. “Nobody will hear you,” he said, once he’d stopped laughing enough to speak. He pushed himself up to his feet with both hands braced on the ground and shook his head as he rose. “You really don’t get it at all, do you?”

“What the hell am I supposed to get?”

“Look around,” he said, wiping the dust from the ground off against the thighs of his jeans. “Really look around, and tell me what you see.”

Sarah pressed back into the trunk as Eddie got to his feet, but he didn’t step closer. Didn’t make a single move in her direction once he was upright. So she stood slowly, using the tree at her back to help her to her feet. Her head still ached, still swam as she struggled upright, but it had eased some. Enough that, when she pushed away from the stiff bark she thought her knees might hold her up. Braced with that knowledge, she stepped away from the tree and slowly turned, taking in the landscape surrounding her. There were trees on all sides, grouped or standing separate, but all of them tall and thick-trunked as if they’d been there for decades. The foliage they’d passed on the way up looked new in comparison, thin and wind-bent. These trees had never met a wind strong enough to twist their branches or scrape the bark from their trunks. The leaves were still small and waxy, as newly green as if they were fresh from the bud, and without the slightest hint of fall lingering in them, waiting to turn them brown and brittle. The leaves had been thick and lush and ready for the change in the seasons before.

It was when she saw the mountain peak poking through the canopy straight ahead, tall and majestic and reaching for the sky, that she really knew. Still standing where she’d left him, Eddie saw the dawning realization cross Sarah’s face and grinned.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy,” he said. Sarah saw the sun glint briefly off the elongated point of one of Eddie’s canine’s and felt her stomach lurch.

Maybe she wasn’t going mad after all. Maybe she was already there.