Thanks to everyone who read, and to Scififan33 for reviewing.
Buzzing startled Roddy, and he set his Latin book aside with a little bit of relief and dug his phone out of his pocket. "Hello?"
"Roddy? Did something happen to your other phone? I just tried, and it sounded like the line was disconnected."
"Hey, Monroe. I canceled the landline. Dad mostly just used it for his business anyway." And since Geiger Pest Control was officially out of business and the only people who might want to reach Roddy already had his pay-as-you-go number he hadn't seen any point in keeping it. Doubly so since canceling it had crossed a bill off his list. Roddy had gotten a letter agreeing that he qualified for government benefits until he turned nineteen, but thus far no actual checks had appeared, and the monthly bills were starting to come due. "Sorry, I should have told you last week."
Monroe blew out an audible sigh of relief. "No, no, it's fine. I'm just glad that I caught you."
His voice suddenly sounded odd, and Roddy tensed. "Why? What's wrong? Are you okay?"
"That is way to much to get into right now. I mean, yes, I'm fine, don't worry." There was a pause that didn't exactly reassure Roddy. "Look, I need you to listen to me, all right? You need to not come to my place tomorrow for practice, all right? In fact, you need to not go anywhere other than to school and straight back home again if you can avoid it. Stay inside, and don't draw any attention to yourself."
"What? Why?" Not that things typically went well for Reinigen who stood out, but Roddy didn't always have a choice, and Monroe was a seriously weird person to be giving an order like that. "What are you even talking about?"
"There's another Grimm in town. And not exactly Nick's kind of Grimm, if you get my drift."
Roddy swallowed hard. Reinigen were generally beneath the notice of most Grimms, but most Grimms weren't all Grimms. "Got it." The obvious occurred to him, and his felt his claws slip free despite himself. "Is he after you?" Blutbaden weren't beneath anyone's notice.
"No. Or at least I don't think so. I'm...it's long and complicated, and she and Nick have a history that I'm also not going to try to get into right now, but while she was about as happy to meet me as I was to meet her, we seem to have a truce of sorts at the moment. Rosalee too. But Juliette's in the hospital—"
"What? She's human!" He wasn't sure of a lot, but he was sure of that. "Why would he—she?—go after her?"
"It—that wasn't the Grimm. It was..." He trailed off. "God, this is all ridiculously complicated. Juliette got hurt because of a whole different thing, but it's sort of getting tied together with the other Grimm now, and..." Another pause. "I promise that I'll tell you what I can later, but right now I just need to know that you'll stay well clear. Home and school and that's it until you hear from me or Nick or Rosalee. Can you do that?"
Roddy started to shake his head. He didn't like this. He didn't like it at all. Monroe was his friend and Nick was sort of his friend and Rosalee and Juliette were kind of like friends too now, and all of that was completely insane, but somehow still true all the same. He didn't want to just sit around waiting for something to happen to any of them.
"Roddy? I know it's a mess, but this is important."
Well, duh, at least if another Grimm was involved. It was weird to think that less than a year ago Grimms as a category had just been mythical boogeymen.
"Can you please keep your head down?" Monroe pressed.
"Fine. Okay," Roddy agreed reluctantly. "But you have to promise to call if there's something that I can do to help." He might not be anywhere near the equivalent of a Blutbad or a Grimm, but he was a damn strong mesmer, and most people didn't have a clue what that really meant.
"All right. But until you hear from us, lay low. Be good, do your homework, and I'll talk to you again soon."
The line disconnected, and Roddy stared at the phone for a minute and then tossed it onto his dresser and flopped down onto his back on his bed. Do his homework? What the hell was he supposed to do with that?
Roddy poked at the lumps in the pot on the stove. They didn't look very appetizing, and they sure as hell didn't smell very appetizing, but he couldn't bring himself to throw away food. Especially since he'd been doing as Monroe had asked and keeping himself to home and school over the course of the past week.
He'd skipped the grocery store last weekend and still been okay—Monroe really had stocked the cabinets with a lot of shelf-stable stuff right after Dad had died—but soon enough he was going to have to make at least a quick trip because at this point everything that he knew how to deal with was gone, and even Google was having issues with what was left. The actual rats had turned up their noses at the wheat germ, and he didn't have the other ingredients that Google said were necessary to turn it into cookies or granola or anything reasonable.
And food aside, skipping walks along the river or over to the abandoned warehouses was starting to make him a little stir crazy. He could only practice and do homework for so many hours a day, especially on top of the hours he spent in his actual classes, and his internet connection wasn't good enough to stream consistently even if hours of random videos didn't sound boring too. Avoiding strangers wasn't really a problem for him, but he wasn't used to sitting around so much.
He had a message from Sammy on his phone that he was ninety-nine percent sure was about spinning either this coming weekend or next, and that he really needed to respond to, too. The cushion in Dad's-now-his bank account was going awfully fast and there were still no signs of any checks in the mail.
Selling Dad's truck would also help with his looming money problems if he could manage it, doubly so since it would shut up the insurance company that kept insisting that he had to pay them as long as he had it in his possession...he was almost certain that that was bullshit considering that it was still parked exactly where Dad had left it, and thus far he hadn't given them a penny, but he wasn't sure how to make the harassment stop, either. And selling it again required that human interaction thing.
Well, that or he could call his relatives and they'd probably make it disappear real quick, but he doubted they'd pay him anything or do any of it legally so it wouldn't exactly be helpful.
The beets didn't seem to be getting any more appetizing as they boiled, and he poked at them again and then went to check the computer recipe for about the tenth time. Someone had thought that this recipe was appetizing, and he had most of the ingredients it required...maybe a month had been too long to have left them in the fridge?
A light tap at the door startled him, and Roddy froze for an instant before woging and taking a deep breath, trying not to choke on the smell of the beets. And then he nearly tripped over the computer cord in his haste to get to the door. "Monroe!"
"Hey," Monroe greeted, smiling.
Maybe it was vaguely suicidal to hug a Blutbad, but it had been over a week since Roddy had gotten that phone call about a new Grimm in town and Juliette in the hospital and oh, how he should do his homework and his nerves would be shot even if his dinner didn't look like the spawn of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
"Easy, cub," Monroe said, hugging him back and ruffling his hair lightly. "The scary Grimm is gone, everyone is in one piece—well, everyone who matters is in one piece—and Juliette should be getting out of the hospital shortly. It's fine."
"It is not fine!" Roddy pushed away and scowled up at him. "It's been a week! More than that, even!" And it wasn't like Roddy had a list of people he could call. It might have just been him and Dad before, but at least it had been him and Dad. Now he apparently just had a couple of lunatics passing as friends.
"I know." Monroe sighed. "Why don't you grab your stuff, and—what on Earth are you burning in there?"
"Beets."
He couldn't keep the disgust out of his voice, and Monroe grimaced and stepped past him and towards the stove. "What recipe are you using?"
Roddy shrugged and waved at the computer. "Whatever Google turned up that I had the other ingredients for."
Monroe took the pot off the burner, his grimace deepening as he peered inside again, and then he stuck the whole pot under the faucet and ran cold water into it. "Let that soak and then toss it, all right? It probably wouldn't kill you, but I can't imagine it'd be good."
When it came to ingestion even actual poison wasn't always enough kill a Reinigen, but if Monroe was here Roddy was likely to get some actual food tonight so he wasn't going to argue.
"Why don't you grab your stuff for school tomorrow, we head back to my place and find something a bit more edible for dinner, and I'll fill you in on what's been happening," Monroe offered. "At least where I can. Some of it isn't my story to tell."
Part of Roddy wanted to argue, but at this point it was kind of hard to know what he wanted to argue about so he nodded quickly and headed for his room to grab his violin and throw some stuff into his backpack. Monroe waited in the main room, apparently disinclined to start any conversations yet, and Roddy waited until they were in his car to ask. "So what the fuck happened?"
"Language."
Roddy rolled his eyes.
"A couple of things," Monroe said after a moment. "In order of...you know, I don't even know what they're in order of, but a relative of Nick's showed up a little over a week ago. That other Grimm that I mentioned. Nick didn't know that she was coming—Nick didn't even know that she was alive until she showed up in his living room—but a guy she was tracking crossed into Portland and ended up mixed up in one of Nick's cases, and from there things just got very complicated. Especially when he attacked Nick at home."
"Is that how Juliette got hurt?"
"No, that was a whole different thing. A woman brought a cat into her office, and she got scratched. I think you know that she's a vet?"
"Yeah, sure, but cats are always assholes. Since when does a scratch need hospitalization?"
Monroe's lips twitched. "Unfortunately in this case it wasn't just a cat, and it definitely wasn't just a scratch. The woman was a Hexenbiest with ties back to a couple other cases Nick worked earlier this year, and...you know, that part's kind of complicated too."
Roddy had a feeling that he was going to get really sick of hearing that. "Is she going to be okay?" he asked, cutting to the important part. "And is he going to be okay? Nick, I mean, and Juliette?" He didn't much care about the people who'd attacked them, and he didn't figure that Monroe did either.
"Well, Juliette was in a coma for a couple days. She's awake now, but she's still a little confused, and Nick says that the doctors want to keep her for another day or two for observation. Nick himself is more banged up than anything else since on top of Kimura he also managed to cross paths with a Mauvais Dentes passing through, but he's pretty hard to keep down, and while I gather that that somehow got him into some trouble with some federal agents—I'm not real clear on that part myself—they seem to have moved on as well."
Roddy nodded. "Are the bad guys...gone...now, too? This Mauvais Dentes and whatever a Kimura is? And the Hexenbiest that attacked Juliette?" Mauvais Dentes were almost higher than Grimms on a list of creatures that no Reinigen ever wanted to run into—reference cats and assholes, and they were big, vicious cats—and Hexenbiests were generally on his 'no thank you' list as well, not that he figured that any of them would ever bother to look twice at him.
"Kimura was the guy's name, not sure that Nick ever told me what kind of Wesen he was, but neither he nor the Mauvais Dentes are going to cause anyone any trouble again. Unfortunately Adalind is in the wind."
Adalind presumably being said Hexenbiest, and Monroe didn't look very happy about that, which was pretty understandable. "And what about the other Grimm?"
"Left town also, much to my relief." He blew out a breath. "Believe me, if I never have to drive across Portland with a Grimm who isn't Nick in my backseat again, it will still be too soon. Did you know that they actually had the Freemont Bridge closed for repairs for a day? That was a fun couple hours stuck in traffic, let me tell you."
