Chapter 30 #2
Shaking a strand of hair back from her face, Luna focused on finishing her tea.
She scooped her ground-up mixture into a ball strainer, poured hot water into the pot, and set it to brew.
Then, fetching a fresh cup as she went, she carried the steaming pot back to the nook, where Mr. Grimm continued to sit where she’d left him.
Whatever he’d suffered tonight, combined with the strain of carrying her from the warehouse district, had quite done him in.
Judging by the color of his skin, she didn’t think he was in danger anymore, but how could she know for sure?
Luna poured the Saint Hylda’s tea then moved to kneel in front of him again.
As she did so, she noticed the shattered remains of the previous teacup and saucer.
She bit her lip, but decided she simply didn’t have it in her to deal with that right now.
Instead, she lifted the fresh tea to Mr. Grimm’s lips.
“Drink this,” she said, her hand quivering more than she liked, threatening to slosh hot liquid down his front. “Please.”
He obeyed, dully. With some persistence, she managed to get him to drink the whole cupful.
Then she set it aside, without so much as a glance at the leaves within.
Somehow, she couldn’t bear to look at any futures just now.
Something told her she would only see things she’d wish she hadn’t.
Sitting back on her heels, one hand still resting on his knee, Luna peered up into her employer’s face.
He looked so pale and drawn, and it nearly broke her heart.
“Such a ghoulish figure was he,” Lancelot Mortimer’s voice whispered in the back of her memory, “wreathed as he was in shrouds of anti-glitter, the blackness of the Void lodged deep in his eyes!”
A sharp pain gripped her chest. Luna dragged in a little half-sob. She didn’t want it to be true. She didn’t want any of it to be true. She wanted everything that man had said to be a damned lie!
But she had to find out. One way or another.
“Mr. Grimm,” she spoke softly. “Can you . . . can you answer a question for me?”
His eyes focused for a moment on her fingers. Slowly, dully, they lifted to her face. With the thaumatic light bulb behind him, she couldn’t see much of his expression, but the blue irises seemed strangely dark.
“Mr. Grimm,” she said, “is it true? That you are the Grimshade Lord?”
His eyes widened slightly. Some of the dullness vanished from his face, replaced with the sharp clarity of horror. “Did . . . did Mortimer tell you that?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
He huffed out a gust of air and turned away from her. His eyes shut, and the line of his cheek drew tense. She watched his jaw clench, watched the muscles in his throat constrict as he swallowed.
Then he nodded. Once.
“Oh.”
Luna sat back on her heels, her hand dropping from his knee. A storm seemed to rumble in the depths of her chest, distant for now but rolling in fast on high winds. She managed a little nod, opened her mouth to speak, but the only word to emerge was a second, even softer, “Oh.”
Mr. Grimm’s head turned sharply, his gaze fixing on her face.
He leaned forward and reached for her hand, but she wrenched away and would not look at him.
“Miss Talbot,” he said, his voice urgent, “I need you to believe me. I am . . . I am not that person anymore. I am ashamed of who I was. Of what I became. But I have put all that behind me. The Grimshade Lord is dead and buried. There is . . . there is only me left. Only Nigel Grimm.”
She looked up at him. Slowly, carefully.
As though afraid what she saw might damage her eyes.
He leaned toward her, his expression so raw and strange, his skin still stained with the purple severmist. He looked wild and unkempt and bizarrely unfamiliar, and yet the urge was still so strong in her to lean into him, to let him catch her in his arms, even as she saw he wanted to.
To let him pull her close, press her head to his chest. To let herself know the comfort of his beating heart and his strong embrace, and to simply believe what he said without question, without doubt.
Instead, she asked in a breathless whisper, “Who was Janet?”
Whatever color was left in his cheeks drained away, leaving him gray as death.
She could feel how desperately he wanted to turn away from her, to break her gaze.
But he didn’t. He held on. It was a stubborn choice, almost violent.
Almost cruel. “Janet was her real name,” he answered at last, his words devoid of expression. “Janet Thorpewillow.”
Luna nodded. She did not have to ask who he meant by her. She knew. Gods above and below smite her, she knew. “So when you told me the Shadowbane Lady had killed her, you meant . . . you meant . . .”
“The Shadowbane Lady destroyed everything that once was Janet Thorpewillow when she became Jastira. When she became the darkest version of herself.”
A sob threatened to rise from the depths of her gut. Luna wrinkled up her entire face in an effort to keep it at bay. Clenching her jaw tight, she sniffed hard. “And you were her lover.”
Still he would not let himself look away from her. He swallowed hard, audibly. Then he nodded.
“Did you . . .” Luna paused, gathered herself. “Did you know?”
“Know what?”
Luna made herself look at him then. Made herself look into his eyes when she gave voice to the question. “What she was? What she was doing? All those . . . those people?”
His eyes shimmered for a moment before suddenly two streams of dampness poured out and ran down his cheeks.
It was horrible. Horrible because, at the sight, Luna found herself longing all over again to reach out to him.
This time to catch him by the head, to draw him down to her breast, giving him a soft place to weep.
But she couldn’t. She held herself very still and strong, even as she knelt before him.
“She killed so many people,” she heard her own voice speaking, the words dull and heavy in her ears.
“They say that in the dungeons of her tower there were . . . there were . . .” She couldn’t finish.
She couldn’t repeat the stories she’d heard.
Dark, horrible stories, which had rippled throughout Plym following the fall of the Shadowbane Lady, reaching even as far as remote Crimble.
Stories of tortures and monstrosities discovered in the depths of the evil sorceress’s lair.
Stories so overblown and hideous, Luna had thought at the time they must be more fiction than fact.
Only now, looking into Mr. Grimm’s face, she wasn’t so sure.
“I didn’t know,” he said at last. He blinked once, and more tears issured forth.
But when he opened his eyelids, he continued to meet her gaze.
“Not at first. She kept it from me, for years. But then I began to suspect and . . . and I . . . didn’t do anything.
Because I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want it to be true. ”
“Because you loved her?”
“Yes.”
He loved a monster. A fiend. The nightmarish, demonic villainess, who haunted the dreams of every man, woman, and child of a generation, here and across the world.
“You were her consort.”
He swallowed again, painfully. “Yes.”
“My lovely, lithe, lusty Jastira was seduced by a younger man.”
“Oh!” Luna gasped, Mortimer’s voice ringing painfully in her head. She got to her feet and backed away, her hips hitting the cold stove. Shuddering, she braced herself there, her heart beating like a caged animal.
Mr. Grimm got to his feet as well, moving slowly so as not to startle her. But his body shook violently, whether with emotion or the after-effects of poison, Luna could not say. “Please, Miss Talbot,” he said, “I am not that man anymore—”
“Why didn’t you stop her?” Luna demanded. “Why did you let her . . . let her do those things?”
“I did stop her.” He stretched out both hands, pleading, but did not touch her. His fingers trembled in the shadowed space between them. “I destroyed her utterly and completely.”
“But only after she’d killed all those people! Only after she’d killed your father!”
Mr. Grimm nodded. He dragged in a rough breath, and she heard the sob catching in his throat.
“I was afraid. I was afraid to face the truth, to let myself acknowledge that . . . that I loved a monster. Had loved a monster, for years. That I’d devoted my life, my skill, my power, my very heart, to someone whose wickedness ran so deep.
I didn’t want it to be true, and I thought, somehow, if I loved her well enough, I could make it not be true.
” His gaze sought hers again, and she watched the tears pouring down his cheeks unchecked.
“I was such a coward,” he admitted. “I couldn’t face what I’d become.
What I’d made myself into, trying to please her.
I always told myself that we could both come back from it.
That there was still time for redemption.
But I didn’t realize how deep she’d gone.
I didn’t realize how deep I’d gone, trying to keep up with her. ”
“Did you . . .” Luna stopped. She wasn’t certain she could bear to learn the answer to this question. But she had to ask. She had to know. “Did you drain people’s lives to feed your spells?”
“No,” he answered at once and with such finality of tone that she believed him.
But then his face cracked, and he rolled his head to one side.
“But I may have caused a number of deaths even so. I drained life from the land itself. I brought famine to Plym, channeling so much of the lifeforce of the land through the Dire to feed my spells. I told myself the risk was worth it, that what I was going to create would make up for any little inconveniences along the way. And I refused to look. Refused to acknowledge what I was doing.”