Showing posts with label grimm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grimm. Show all posts
Thursday, February 23, 2017
Grimm the Chopping Block by John Passarella
Grimm the Chopping Block by John Passarella
Meanwhile missing persons cases in Portland seem to be on the increase.
As more bones are discovered, Portland homicide Detective Nick Burkhardt and his partner Hank Griffin investigate - but there seems to be no connection between the victims...
A brand-new original story set in the Grimm universe.
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Download Links for the Ebook
- Free Download Grimm: the Chopping Block by John Passarella EPUB ibook [OneDrive]
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An Excerpt from Grimm: the Chopping Block by John Passarella Ebook
Brian Mathis wondered if he’d made a mistake bringing Tyler, his twelve-year-old son, to Claremont Park. Their little adventure had been fun and cheerful and full of father-son-bonding promise until they left behind the paved path and picnic tables, and wandered into the woods on a course prescribed by the virtual compass in the GPS app on Brian’s smartphone. The overnight rainfall had turned what would have been a reasonable hiking path into a treacherous endeavor. Lagging behind his father, Tyler had already fallen twice on gentle inclines slick with mud. And now the boy was coated with the stuff?hands, knees, shoes, and a caked spot on his chin he’d rubbed the same moment his patience had expired.
Victim of his own clumsy misadventure, Brian proceeded on a twisted ankle?which continued to throb in counterpoint to his heartbeat?and reminded himself to take his eyes off the compass now and then to pay attention to his footing. Minutes later, head down and cursing under his breath, he walked right into a low-hanging branch. Hell of an example he was setting for his kid.
“You said we were close, Dad,” Tyler groaned, prefacing that indictment with a prolonged sigh.
“We are close,” Brian said. “But I told you before. The coordinates aren’t exact.”
“So what’s the point?” Tyler hurled a rock the size of a ping-pong ball at the nearest tree trunk. The thwock of the impact startled a squirrel, which scampered along one branch, jumped to another nearby and scurried out of sight.
“Don’t throw rocks.”
“Nothing else to do.”
Ignoring the boy’s complaint, Brian explained, “The coordinates take us to the general vicinity, then we look around until we find it.”
“Why?”
“Because… it’s like searching for buried treasure.”
“I’m keeping it.”
“No,” Brian said. “We sign the logbook and leave the container where we found it. The honor system. If we take it, the next person will go through all this trouble for nothing.”
“You said I could take something,” Tyler reminded him.
“Swap something,” Brian said. This particular geocache supposedly contained small toys. If you took something, you were supposed to leave behind an object of equal value. “You brought a soldier?”
“Yeah,” Tyler said, rolling his eyes at his father.
It had been years since Tyler played with toy soldiers, which was why he had no qualms about leaving one behind. Tyler hoped for an upgrade, maybe a used video game or something equally unlikely. So his father had spent most of the car ride to the park trying to quash those expectations.
“The search is the fun part, not the prize at the end.”
“Some fun,” Tyler grumbled loud enough for his father to hear.
Secretly, Brian regretted not selecting a cache with the lowest level of difficulty for their first attempt. Instead, he’d chosen a cache closer to home, but with the next highest level of difficulty. A cache with toys, even cheap toys, he’d thought, would appeal to the boy. Brian’s second mistake was misjudging the rapid pace of Tyler’s maturity. At his current age, things transitioned from “cool” to “lame” in a hurry. Since the divorce, Brian saw his son less than he would have liked. The boy’s growth spurts took place in the uncompromising strobe light of his meager custody schedule.
As a bank of rain clouds passed overhead, the woods became prematurely dark. Shadows deepened like an ink spill soaking the ground around them. The odor of moist earth rose like a clinging mist, enveloping them.
Brian stopped, rubbed the back of his forearm across his damp forehead and said, “We’re here.”
Tyler stood beside him, turned in a circle and shrugged. “Nothing.”
“It’s here somewhere,” Brian assured him, but worried somebody before them might have removed the cache in violation of the honor system. If they left the park without finding anything, his son would never let him forget it. “Remember that time you dragged me through the woods in waist-deep mud for nothing?” Because exaggeration would become a key component in this particular trip down memory lane.
“What about the clue?” Tyler asked.
“Oh?right! The clue.” In his growing paternal anxiety, Brian had almost forgotten about the clue associated with the cache. He checked his phone. “It says, ‘Fall up the hill.’”
They both cast expectant gazes around, as if expecting a hillside to magically rise from the surrounding forest, crowned with a glowing treasure chest like a reward in one of Tyler’s video games.
“That hill?” Tyler finally asked, pointing straight ahead. Brian looked behind them, then straight ahead. They had been following an incline for a bit, something he might have noticed if he hadn’t been mesmerized by the compass on his cell phone. Ahead of them marked the top of the rise, surrounded by an irregular ring of deciduous trees in various states of decay.
“Must be it,” Brian acknowledged. “So how do we ‘fall up’?”
We both figured out the falling down part easily enough, he thought, with a chagrined shake of his head.
Tyler scrambled up the slope, littered with broken branches, twigs, and clumps of dead leaves well on their way to mulch that nevertheless rustled underfoot. He slipped once and caught himself on both hands before his knees touched the muddy ground again.
“Careful,” Brian said, making his own way upward, mindful of his tender ankle.
Tyler picked up a stout branch the length of a cane and swung it around to disperse the leaf mounds. When he reached down to flip over a football-sized rock, Brian caught his shoulder.
“Watch out for snakes,” he cautioned.
The possibility of encountering a snake, poisonous or otherwise, seemed to excite the boy’s imagination, but he took extra care as he grabbed the edge of the rock and flipped it over, poised to spring away to avoid the threat of fangs. Instead, he grunted in obvious disappointment as several freshly exposed worms coiled in the dirt.
Tyler circled to the left, poking and sweeping with his branch, while Brian wandered into a tangle of dried brush and broken tree limbs at the edge of the clearing. Brushing away twigs and dried leaves, he discovered a jagged tree stump and, angling away from it, on the far side of the rise, the decaying length of the entire tree trunk, which retained only a few scattered branches.
“A deadfall,” Brian whispered, then again, louder. “A deadfall.”
“What?” Tyler called, glancing briefly over his shoulder.
“This downed tree,” Brian called to his son. “It’s a deadfall.”
“So?” Tyler replied, more preoccupied with a section of tangled underbrush and loose mounds of dirt?excavated, no doubt, by some burrowing woodland creature?than his father’s pronouncement.
“Don’t you get it?” Brian asked. “The clue: ‘Fall up the hill.’ It’s a deadfall?on this hill.”
“You found it?”
“Not yet…” Brian pocketed his phone and swept both hands across the brittle and decaying debris piled around the deadfall. He omitted telling Tyler that this was a more likely spot for a hidden snake than the underside of a rock. Besides, if Brian had unraveled the clue to the cache’s location, he wanted to find it before leading the boy to yet another disappointment. Once he unearthed it, he’d call Tyler over to claim the prize. He might just salvage the day after all.
Crouching, Brian caught a glint of color in the natural pocket formed between the tree stump and its fallen trunk; something metallic, painted bright red. Gotcha! he thought in an unexpectedly strong moment of satisfaction.
Before calling his son over to claim the small square tin, he leaned forward to examine the shadowy depression. He swept the ground with the beam of his keychain flashlight. Though he doubted he’d find broken glass or rusty nails or even an irritable snake, he wanted to be sure, lest their excursion end on a sour note?or a trip to the emergency room.
“Tyler, come here,” Brian said. “Think I found something.”
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Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Grimm the Icy Touch by John Shirley
Grimm the Icy Touch by John Shirley
The first original novel to tie-in with the hit US show inspired by the Grimm Brothers classic fairy tales.
There once was a man who lived a life so strange, it had to be true. Only he could see what no one else can: the darkness inside, the real monster within. And he’s the one who must stop them..
This is his calling. This is his duty. This is the life of a Grimm.
When a torched body is found in an underground tunnel, Portland Police Captain Sean Renard takes one look at the victim’s burned claws and assigns the case to homicide detectives Nick Burkhardt and Hank Griffin. They soon discover that a international crime cartel named Le Touche Givre (The Icy Touch) is threatening Wesen into joining their illegal drug-smuggling operation, and brutally murdering those who refuse.
As they close in on the cartel, Nick begins to realise that their charismatic and dangerous leader is just as intent on tracking him down...
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An excerpt from Grimm - the Icy Touch by John Shirley ebook
On a cold dawn, on March 1, 1815, six ships arrived together on the Mediterranean coast of France. The flagship of this small fleet was the brig Inconstant, carrying the exiled Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and his retinue. The vessels dropped anchor in the Golfe-Juan, near the Cape of Antibes, just a 147 miles north of Corsica, where, not much more than forty years earlier, the Emperor’s destiny had begun to unfold.
Johann Kessler waited in the launch for the return of the Emperor of France. Kessler’s tanned, dark-eyed face was impassive, but his heart was troubled because amongst the other seven men waiting in the gently rocking boat with him was one Alberle Denswoz?and Kessler was sitting beside him. The irony fairly tingled in the air: Denswoz was Hundjager Wesen, after all. Kessler had only recently discovered the man’s Wesen nature when Denswoz let down his guard, briefly revealing his true bestial form.
Not so long before, the old folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm?tales of witches, wolf-men, dragons, and many others?had become enormously popular. Few readers knew that the creatures described by the Grimms actually existed. The brothers themselves had assumed they were only mythology.
But in the dark heart of each fairy tale was something true; something fantastic yet real: the Wesen. Some were essentially beast-men, and women, disguised as human; some were more monstrous.
Another ancient line of beings, both human and more than human, sought out the more dangerous Wesen and destroyed them. Lately, in sardonic homage to the compilers of the fairy tales, these secretive hunters were called... Grimms.
As far as Kessler knew, Denswoz was unaware that one of these almost superhuman beings was seated next to him.
Now, the Emperor climbed lithely down to the boat that would take him ashore. Colonel Mallet helped the great man into the stern sheets.
The Emperor was a compact, pale, slightly plump, long-nosed man with deep-set eyes and black hair. He was wearing a long black overcoat, and a white weskit over which slanted his sash; his famous bicorn hat adorned his head. He peered through the streamers of mist rising from a sea the color of his gray-blue eyes; he strove to see if anyone awaited them on the shore. Napoleon would have preferred to take a place in the bow, but Colonel Mallet had begged him to sit in the stern, for fear of hostile sharpshooters awaiting them on the beach. They had escaped easily from Elba, with almost 1,100 grenadiers, while the British and Bourbon ships were away; but the journey to the French coast had been tediously dragged out by contrary winds, so that the Emperor joked that Inconstant had lived up to its name. In that time, word may have reached France of the Emperor’s impending return. Enemies could be waiting.
Kessler was half expecting to see Bourbon soldiers on the shore, perhaps a detachment from one of the hostile garrisons in Provence, training cannon on the launch. He had no wish to die in a cannon fusillade, nor did he wish Napoleon’s death. But the Emperor’s own scouts stepped into view on the beach to wave the all clear. Kessler’s spirits rose?and though it was a chill daybreak on a cold sea, everyone in the boat was smiling, their eyes bright. They were back in France after ten months of exile on the island of Elba. La France!
Johann Kessler was German, but had become a French citizen under Napoleon; Denswoz was Austrian but when Austria had been annexed by Napoleon, he had eagerly sought to advise the Emperor?only recently had he been accepted, on sailing to Elba. In fact, Kessler suspected that Denswoz was in part the cause of the Emperor’s decision to return to France. Denswoz?and the coins. Kessler had only caught a glimpse of the large, curious Greek coins that the Emperor kept in his coat pocket; that he took out from time to time; that seemed to transfer their ancient shine to those gray-blue eyes...
If Kessler’s theory was confirmed, these were no ordinary coins. They were strange and powerful artifacts, created on an island of Greece centuries ago?they’d passed through many hands: Caligula had clasped them lovingly; Nero had caressed them. They had vanished into China, last seen in the Han Dynasty. If they’d reappeared, and if the dark Wesen had given them to the Emperor, it might be that Kessler’s true, secret cause was hopeless.
The coxswain directed the sailors to begin rowing, and the launch set off, as the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte turned to speak to Colonel Mallet.
“Yonder is an olive orchard, Colonel,” he said. “Let us bivouac there until everyone is ashore and organized for the march.”
“Very good, my Emperor.”
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