It was, of course, a trap. An anonymous tip-off about a late-night meet in—of all things—an abandoned fairground. It was never going to end well. But they were investigating a series of missing teenage girls, and weeks of solid police work with Hank had provided them with precisely no leads; in truth, Nick was getting desperate. Desperate, but not foolhardy. Hank was at the other end of the state, interviewing the friends and family of a couple of the missing girls, and Nick hand-on-heart suspected Wesen involvement, so with only minimal hesitation he headed over to Monroe's place. With rather more guilt, he ignored the Blutbad's good-natured grumbles about spending the evening with a fine Chablis and the latest edition of Clock Repair Quarterly, and then his incredulous yelps about their intended destination ("Jeez, dude, have you never *seen* a horror movie?"), and the two of them headed off to what Monroe insisted on calling the Spooky Fairground of Death.

Nick scoffed at these fears, but he was too good a cop—and too attuned a Grimm—not to recognise the likelihood of a set-up. So he wasn't exactly surprised when they rounded a corner to be faced with at least a dozen Wesen thugs whose social skills were on a par with their personal grooming. The fight was as ugly as their opponents, and a lot shorter, since the heavies apparently weren't going to abide by the Queensbury rules. Not for the first time, Nick wished that real-life fights were more like their cinematic equivalent. In films, you can be outnumbered ten to one (or 12 to two) and still win, because your opponents will only ever attack you one at a time. In your average Portland brawl, not so much. He and Monroe had discussed this before—and really, when had these chats become so important for his mental equilibrium—and he was fairly sure that Monroe would also be making comments about decorum, were the Blutbad not trying to fight off his own set of attackers.

Attackers who must be at least part-ogre, he thought, because nothing seemed to stop them. Not Monroe wolfing out, not Nick firing, first to disable and then, desperately, to kill. One of the attackers knocked the gun from his hand and, mere seconds later, Nick took a solid blow to the back of the head. He didn't even have time to calculate how much this sucked before he collapsed unconscious to the ground.

...

His senses returned gradually, and that was the first surprise. He wasn't dead. He wasn't beaten to a pulp or even tied up. He'd walked straight into a trap, been knocked out by a bunch of Wesen and they had just...left him. He could almost feel insulted, but he was too busy trying not to panic at the implications. However, he gave up that particular struggle when he finally tottered to his feet and realized that, as he'd feared, there was no sign of Monroe.

In sum, he was now dealing with a series of missing teenage girls, a missing Blutbad and a burgeoning headache that had little to do with the recent blow to his skull.