CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CLAY FACE

Lena smiled as she walked downstairs and smelled something really good coming from the kitchen. "Wow, that smells great."

"In the kitchen!" Nick called back.

She laughed as she met him at the stove. "Really? I thought you were cooking in the living room."

Nick laughed back, "Smart ass," as he spooned the food out of the frying pan and onto the serving dish.

"I didn't know you could make stir-fry," she commented, giving him a light kiss.

"We're still in the getting-to-know each other stages," Nick mentioned. "So, I get to impress you some before we get boring."

"With the way things are around here, we'll never get boring," Lena laughed.

Nick chuckled. "Well, dinner is ready when you are. Want to get Trubel?"

"Sure," she said, jogging back upstairs to Trubel's room. "Trubel? Dinner!" She knocked on the door and waited a bit but heard nothing. Frowning, she opened the door to see the room completely empty. No books or machete or bag either. Lena rushed into the room, checking the wardrobe and drawers to see it all empty. "Nick! Get up here, Trubel's gone!"

"What?" his voice called as he ran upstairs and saw the empty room too. "Where is she?"

Lena tried to keep her breathing even. "She's just gone. She took her stuff with her."

"Did she say anything to you?" Nick asked, getting worried.

"No, anything to you?" Lena asked, looking around for some kind of clue.

Nick clenched his jaw. "No. I can't believe this. Something must have happened. She wouldn't have just left without saying anything."

"Wait," Lena said, noticing the knight chess piece on the dresser. She picked it up by the little chain she had attached to it. "She wouldn't have left this behind. This is a message."

Nick took the piece from her, inspecting it. "You're right. Maybe the trailer?"

"Find her, Nick," Lena said fiercely. "We have to make sure she's safe."

"I'll check the trailer now," Nick told her. "You stay here in case she comes back."

"Okay," Lena sighed, a deep frown embedded into her face.

"Hey," Nick took her shoulders into his hands, so she faced him. "I swear I'll find her. I'm sure she's okay. She can handle herself."

"I know but it's different when she runs off and we have no idea where she is or why she left," Lena whispered. "I've been on the other sides of these situations. Only the people I ran away from didn't give a damn for anything than missing out on the government check."

"I'm going to find her," he said. "I'll call you when I do."

Lena shakily nodded and accepted his warm kiss before he left the house.

Nick quickly drove out to the trailer and rushed inside. He let out a deep sigh of relief when he saw Trubel's bag on the table. "Thank God she's here." He looked around the otherwise empty trailer when the door suddenly opened. He twisted around and only relaxed when he saw Trubel coming in. "Don't do that."

"I had to make sure you weren't followed," she said.

"You don't think I know what I'm doing?" he asked her, mildly offended, and still irritated that she'd snuck out.

"Yeah, you don't know everything." Trubel sighed. "That's why I'm here. I didn't tell you something."

"Yeah, that you were leaving," he pointed out at her bag.

"That's why I left my black knight, so you'd know I was here," Trubel told him. "I was trying to be safe. You know that FBI agent, I think her name's Chavez? She's wesen."

"You saw her woge?" he questioned.

"Yeah, when she kidnapped me." Trubel frowned, looking worried and scared. And a little guilty.

"What are you talking about?" Nick asked her.

"I wasn't supposed to tell anybody. It was sort of like a threat against me and you, which is why I'm here," Trubel revealed.

"Why would the FBI want to kidnap you?" It didn't make sense to him.

Trubel shook her head. "No, she said it had nothing to do with the FBI. There were three guys with her. They grabbed me off the street when I was riding Lena's bike, put a bag over my head, and took me to some old warehouse, and then she woged right in my face. She wanted to see if I was a Grimm, Nick. Did she come and see you?"

Nick thought back. Jessie had told him about Chavez coming to the precinct to apparently talk to him. But she'd gotten a feeling to stop it and ended up spilling coffee all over the FBI Agent. "She wanted to, but Jessie intervened. What did you say to her?"

"Nothing, but, Nick, she said there were people that were very interested in my services, said that being able to identify and destroy wesen influence in society was, like, a very valuable gift. She wanted me to be a part of some group. And she told me to think about it and not to tell anyone, otherwise..." she trailed of. "They'd, you know, have to kill us or whatever."

"She didn't say anything else about who this group was or where they were?" Nick questioned her.

"No, she just said she'd be in contact with me. I was hoping you'd know who they were," Trubel frowned.

"I have no idea."

Trubel sagged. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I was afraid they'd hurt you and Lena."

"I think you should come back home," Nick said with little room for argument.

"Nick..." she started to protest.

"If they find out that you just suddenly left, they might think that you told me. You and I have to remain very close, at least until we can figure out who Chavez is and what it is we're dealing with," he insisted. "Now, if she contacts you again..."

"Trust me, I'm telling you," Trubel agreed.

Nick gathered Trubel, her bag, and Lena's bike in his car and drove them back to the house. As they came inside, Lena was off the couch and tightly hugging Trubel to her like a momma bear. "First, you get attacked by an octopus wesen you were tailing even when Nick and Hank told you to back off, then you get involved in some bull wesen boxing ring case, and now you sneak out in the middle of the night and worry us half to death?"

"I'm sorry," Trubel said. "I was trying to protect you and Nick."

"We protect you," Lena insisted. "Not the other way around. If you pull something like this again – either the lying, keeping secrets, or running off – you are grounded, Teresa."

Trubel could have protested. She was in her twenties and not their child or anything. But it deeply touched Trubel that Nick and Lena had been so worried and cared so much. She had structure and boundaries and accountability here.

"I'm sorry I worried you," she said, hugging Lena back.

Lena was called by one of her patient's husbands that her patient was in the ER with abdominal pain overnight and resting in the hospital. She was told she was fine by the ER doctors, but she still wanted to see Lena, just for a little checkup. Lena quickly grabbed her bag and began to leave when she got another call.

"Hello?"

There was silence on the other end. And a little static.

"Hello?"

No one said anything. Lena wondered if the person got the wrong number and was too embarrassed to speak or if she'd been butt dialed. But she could hear a light breathing on the other end. Someone was there. It reminded her of the weird phone call she'd gotten the other day from the person calling for Karolina. Maybe she should talk to Nick about it.

"Hello?"

When she heard nothing but the deep breathing, she just hung up and carried on to the hospital. It was a quick checkup with her patient. She just had some normal cramping that the first-time mom panicked over. She pushed up her next checkup for her peace of mind and made her way out. Where she bumped into Nick, Hank, and Trubel.

"Hey, what are you guys doing here?" she asked.

"What we're always doing," Hank said. "We've got a case. Found a body outside the house of a patient here. After what seems to be a domestic disturbance."

"Oh no," Lena frowned.

"Seems wesen too," Nick said. "He was drowned in clay."

"Clay?" Lena repeated, puzzled. Hank and Nick made their way closer to a hospital room, but Lena grabbed Nick's arm to stop him. "Nick, can I talk to you after you're done here?"

Nick nodded, frowning. "Is everything okay?"

Lena shrugged weakly. "I'm not sure. I'm probably just being paranoid. I can wait out here."

"Okay, we won't be long," Nick said, following Hank into the hospital room. Lena and Trubel hovered outside in the hallway and could hear what was being said inside.

"Sara Fisher?"

"Yeah," the woman in the hospital bed answered.

"I'm Detective Burkhardt. This is my partner, Detective Griffin. We've just come from your home."

"This about Keith?" a man at her bedside asked.

"Your name, sir?" Hank asked.

"Oh, I'm Ben Fisher. I'm Sara's brother."

"Did... did you arrest Keith?" Sara asked, hopeful and fearful.

She heard Hank ask, "This your son?"

"Yes, that's David."

Nick caught her eye and gestured her over. "It's probably best if David waits outside with our friends Lena and Teresa while we speak with you and your brother."

Sara weakly nodded and turned to her son. "Hey, David. David, can you go outside with Lena and Teresa while your Uncle and I talk to these men?"

Lena looked in the corner and saw a little boy fiddling with a monster action figure. Lena approached him and crouched in front of him. "Hi, David. I'm Lena. Would you like to show me and my friend here your action figures?"

The boy numbly nodded and followed Lena outside. "We'll be right here," she told Sara, gesturing to a table with children's toys in the hallway. Teresa sat down with him, watching him play for a moment. She noticed the splint on his wrist. "How'd you hurt your wrist?"

"I fell," he whispered. He was playing with his action figures. The big bulky one was hitting the smaller guy on the ground.

"Whoa, looks like the bad guy's winning," Teresa said.

"He always does," David murmured.

"That doesn't seem right. Why don't you let the good guy win?" Teresa asked.

"Because he doesn't," David said, almost sadly.

"Have you seen the bad guy in real life, David?" Lena asked as gently as she could, crouching down next to him.

David didn't meet her eyes, but nodded and hummed, "Mm-hmm."

Lena lightly gestured to his splinted wrist. "The bad guy hurt you, didn't he?"

"Yeah…" David murmured.

"Your dad?" she questioned.

"My stepdad. When he gets mad, the monster comes out," David whispered.

Teresa and Lena shared a look. The younger woman asked the boy, "You mean, like, maybe there's a monster inside him?"

He didn't answer.

Lena softly tilted his head up, so that he met her eyes. "What does your bad guy look like?"

David looked fearful as he said. "Real bad and scary."

Lena gave Teresa a pointed look, nodding towards David.

Teresa leaned closer and spoke softly to the boy. "Hey, you know, when I was a kid, I saw some real scary monsters too. Some of them had big, black eyes, big, yellow teeth. Others were really hairy, and you know what?"

"What?" David asked. The further she got into her descriptions, the more he looked at her and not his action figures.

Teresa grinned. "Some of 'em stunk so bad, I couldn't even breathe."

Lena smiled as they both laughed.

"Wow. Did they hurt you?"

Teresa nodded. "They tried."

"What did you do?" David asked eagerly.

"I fought back," Teresa said.

"Did you kill any of them?"

Teresa hesitated before she nodded again. "One or two."

"How?" David asked her in awe.

"I guess by believing I could," Teresa told him. "That scares them, you know? I bet you could scare some bad guys too."

Lena reached forward to tuck some of David's hair back and gave him a smile. "I'm sure you could hold your own against a bad guy or two."

"Yeah, a strong guy like you," Teresa added.

David blushed a bit and smiled shyly as Nick and Hank came out of hospital room. "We're done."

"Okay," Lena said lightly, standing and helping David out of his seat. She ruffled his hair and said, "Bye, David."

"Bye, David," Teresa parroted.

"Bye, Lena, bye Teresa," he said as he rejoined his mother.

Lena turned to Nick and Hank with a serious expression. "David said that when his stepdad gets mad, he turns into a monster. Was the stepdad the body you found?"

Nick nodded. "Yeah, so it's too late to figure out what kind of wesen he was."

"Maybe Sara knows?" Lena asked.

"I'm not sure I know how to ask that question right now. If she saw something, she might just think she's crazy," Nick said.

"I hear that," Hank agreed.

"But if David's stepdad was wesen, what killed him?" Nick asked aloud.

"Something worse," Hank shuddered. "I'll get the car. We'll head to the trailer."

Nick opted to ride behind Hank in Lena's car in order to talk to her about what she wanted to talk to him about.

"I might just be paranoid," she said. "But with everything that's been going on since I got here, I figured it's smart to at least tell the cop I'm living with that I've gotten a couple weird phone calls from unknown numbers."

"Weird how?" Nick asked, frowning in his cop-face as Lena called it.

"Well, after Scott and Jessie left, I got a call from a number I didn't recognize, but I answered and it was a woman asking for someone called Karolina," Lena explained. "I told her she had the wrong number, but she insisted that she didn't. I hung up and forgot about it. But today, before I met with my patient at the hospital, I got another call, number withheld. When I answered, no one said anything on the other end, but I could hear them breathing. I hung up and then I bumped into you on my way out."

"Was there a number attached to the first call?" Nick asked.

Lena nodded and she turned when Hank turned. "Yeah, but I didn't recognize it."

"Well, write it down for me, and I'll run it. See what I can find out," he said. "And tell me if you get anymore weird calls."

"Trust me, I will," Lena sighed as they drove. She parked next to Hank once they got to the trailer.

"Wesen case that uses clay to kill," Hank quipped and the four of them piled in to dig into the books and see if they could find out what kind of wesen killed Keith Harrow. Time ticked by and they found nothing. Lena huffed as she moved onto another book. "I'm not finding anything close to what we're looking for."

"I'm not finding anything with Clay as its M.O either," Hank said. He looked up at her and Nick, "Maybe what killed him wasn't wesen, like a volcanalis or that ghost lady."

"Ghost lady?" Lena and Trubel asked in unison.

"Long story," Nick said as Hank's cell phone rang.

"Detective Griffin." He gave Nick a cop-look as he said, "Mr. Fisher.—Where are you?—Okay, stay there. We'll come over." He hung up and said, "That was Sara's brother, Ben. He's interested in confessing to the murder of Keith Harrow."

"Well, hopefully he tells you how he did it," Lena mused.

Of all places Mr. Fisher wanted to make his grand confession, it was a synagogue. When the detectives arrived, they pushed the doors open and found him praying in a pew.

He sighed in relief when they greeted him. "Thank you for coming."

"Not every day someone wants to confess," Hank said. "You killed Keith Harrow?"

Ben nodded solemnly. "I did."

"Want to tell us how?" Nick asked.

He nodded again and then looked off briefly in thought. "There's something I need to show you, in my study. Please, this way."

As they followed him towards an office of sorts, Hank asked, "You're a rabbi?"

"For ten years," Ben said proudly. "I was a grad student in linguistics. My thesis was translating ancient kabbalistic texts. Eventually, I read myself into a new calling." He led them into the office and stepped around a table with a rolled-up scroll on it. "What I'm about to tell you will be hard for you to understand, let alone believe."

Nick and Hank shared a look. "Try us."

Ben clapped his hands together. "All right. In the 16th century, several rabbinical sources recorded Rabbi Yehuda Loew, the Maharal of Prague, raising a golem from Clay, using this scroll." He unrolled it carefully to show them the inscriptions within.

"Golem is Jewish folklore, right?" Hank asked.

Ben inclined his head. "Exactly. It's an anthropomorphic creature that's supposed to protect its people from the holy Roman emperor, Rudolf II, only it proved too dangerous to wield. Now, the remains of the golem were supposed to be kept in the attic of the Alt-Neu Shul in Prague, the synagogue, but... the remains were reported missing in 1984 when a documentary film crew went looking for it."

Nick eyes the off-white jar with blue decoration that Ben produced from a shelf and removed the lid. "Are you telling us that this jar contained the remains of a golem?"

"Well, I didn't really think so," Ben said. "The rabbi before me, Meisel, he brought it over with several other artifacts when he emigrated from Moravia. I didn't think it would do anything, but I was desperate, so I prayed." His teeth clenched as he passionately told them, "I prayed because I was so angry. This man was destroying my family."

"So you read that scroll and called up a golem to kill Keith Harrow?" Nick asked, to clarify.

Ben solemnly nodded again. Resigned to his confession. "I did."

"And you believe your prayers were answered," Hank said.

Ben looked at him pointedly. "I know they were."

"We appreciate you wanting to confess," Hank said, "but we can't arrest you for praying for someone to die."

Ben argued. "Yeah, but I'm telling you the truth, and you don't believe me."

"Doesn't matter what we believe," Nick said. "It's what we can prove. Praying isn't a crime."

"I'm telling you, this is what happened," Ben insisted.

"We'll take the jar and test the residue," Hank offered. "If it's the same Clay that killed Keith Harrow, our lab will verify it."

"And if they do?" Ben asked as he carefully deposited the jar into Nick's hands.

Nick and Hank shared another look. "We'll start believing."

"What's the status?" Nick asked once they reached Sara's Fisher's house. Hank had gotten the results that the clay Ben had given them matched what was on the victim's body. But how were they supposed to arrest Ben for praying for a golem? How could they put 'golem' down as cause of death? But before they could figure that out, a uniform informed them that Sara had reported an attack at her home.

"Suspect is the brother-in-law of the victim, Sara Fisher. She's inside with her brother and son," another uniform told them on the scene.

"What about the suspect?" Nick asked.

"Left the scene before we got here."

"You want to tell us what happened?" Hank asked the small family in the living room.

Sara was huddled on the couch with her son tucked into her side. "Keith's brother Nate was here when we got home."

"He thinks we have something to do with Keith's death," Ben said. They could see his eye starting to bruise.

"And he hit you?" Nick asked.

"Yeah, that doesn't matter," Ben insisted. "He threatened Sara and David."

"Do you know where he lives?" Hank asked.

"Off Germantown road," Sara said.

"We're gonna leave officers here until we make sure that we've got him," Nick assured them.

Sara was still frowning, worried like a mother worries. But she whispered, "Okay, thank you," gratefully.

"I should go with you, 'cause it's very remote," Ben offered, following Hank out.

"Okay. Be out in a second," Nick told them before sitting on the cushioned chair Ben just left. He looked between the mother and little boy. "How you doing, David?"

"He was mean, like my stepdad," Ben whispered, eyes on his lap.

"Well, I want you to know that nobody should do that to you," Nick swore.

"Where's Teresa? And Lena?" he asked suddenly.

Nick smiled softly. "Teresa's at home. Lena is working. Why?"

"Can Teresa come over then? She sees the monsters too," Ben asked in a small voice.

"I can give her a call," Nick offered.

Lena sniffled a little over dinner while she tossed a salad while Trubel and Nick regaled her of their adventures getting rid of the Golem guarding little David.

"Of all the things, a Golem," she mumbled in awe while Teresa helped Nick set the table. "That feels like something somebody should be shouting from a mountain."

"If David hadn't turned on his protector, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now," Nick said. Lena sneezed and rubbed at her nose. Nick frowned at her. "Are you getting sick?" He checked her forehead to feel for a fever with the back of his hand.

Lena smiled at his concern but moved his hand away. "Just allergies. I still think it was a pretty traumatizing plan for the kid. But I guess it worked out for him. He got to take on the bad guy and win."

"Yeah, he was pretty brave," Teresa said with a smile as they sat down to eat.