Thanks to everyone who read and to M1ssUnd3rst4nd1ng and StyxxsOmega for reviewing.

A little bit of crossover with What Strange Creatures ch. 29, but not a lot, and both stories can be read separately.


"Dad, Nick's here," Barry called up the stairs as the doorbell rang.

"Be down in a minute!"

Barry nodded automatically even though there was no one to see it and then went to answer the door. "Hey."

"Hey," Nick returned, handing over a bottle of wine.

"Thanks. Come in, Dad'll be right down."

"Thanks," Nick echoed as Barry put the bottle on the counter. "How are you doing? I know last weekend was a little crazy."

"No kidding. Dad said that those Endezeichen guys were supposed to have died out like forever ago. Which, I mean, I guess they did, but..." He shook his head.

"It was pretty messed up. And I say that as someone who'd never even heard the term before last Friday. But you're both okay?"

"Oh, yeah, we're fine. It was creepy to see on TV and all, but it's not like anyone ever bothered us or anything."

Nick nodded. "Roddy said he was over here when Monroe called and ended up spending the weekend. You're getting along, I take it?"

"Yeah, sure. He wasn't exactly planning to get stuck here when he came over on Friday, but it was fine. We watched some movies, played some games, did some homework..." Barry shrugged and almost mentioned that Roddy was going to come over this weekend, too, but considering that the specific day depended on whether or not he was DJ'ing and he'd asked Barry not to tell Nick about that, Barry was probably safer keeping his mouth shut about the whole thing. "He likes math, but other than that he's cool."

"As I recall he said pretty much the same thing about you except that his objection was English class."

Barry scoffed, although the first part was kind of nice to hear even if he wasn't about to say so. But before he could come up with an appropriate reply, Dad came back downstairs.

"Hello," Dad said, offering a hand. "Sorry about that, I had to answer a few emails."

Nick shook his hand and waved off the apology. "No problem, I was just asking Barry how your weekend had gone given the whole Grimm mess. Even if he wasn't actually a Grimm."

"Whatever he was, it was certainly more excitement than I prefer to have in my day-to-day life," Dad said, and then gestured towards the table. "But please."

Barry had already set out plates and silverware and all of that so it only took a few minutes to pop and pour Nick's wine and get settled around the table.

"Thanks for keeping an eye on Roddy, too," Nick said as he took the plate of shells Barry offered and served himself a couple. "I know Monroe was worried."

"It was no trouble. He's a very polite boy."

It was a good thing that Barry hadn't gotten around to taking a bite when Dad said that, because there was no way that he'd have been able to let it pass without choking. Roddy was nice, sure, but polite was a whole different thing, even if he did try to watch his language around Dad. Fortunately neither Dad nor Nick seemed to notice his reaction.

"I know that you couldn't say much on the phone, but can I ask what happened?" Dad asked. "With the not-Grimm? The news was obviously necessarily light on the details."

"Sure, but when it comes right down to it, there's not actually all that much more to it, I'm afraid. A young woman from the local college was kidnapped early last week. You probably heard about that on the news. We had an early lead on a couple suspects, but it was barely enough to justify bringing them in for an interview never mind holding them or getting a search warrant or anything else. I knew they were Wesen about two minutes into the conversation, but that doesn't justify..." He shook his head and waved a hand vaguely.

Them being Wesen would have been enough for any of the Grimms in Barry's old storybooks to have hunted them down and chopped their heads off police procedures or no, and he had a feeling that Dad was thinking along those same lines, but Nick continued before either of them could say anything.

"We were all at the end of our ropes by Friday; no more leads and time pretty much run out. And then suddenly one of our suspects turns up dead in his basement, tortured all to hell, and we have a 911 recording with him confessing to the crime and the missing girl's location and everything else. I mean, given what he—Ryan—had done, I'm sure the guy would have said anything to make it stop so we took the recording with a whole lot of grains of salt, but when the captain sent a squad to the location specified, she was there."

"He was the first victim?" Dad asked, although it wasn't really much of a question.

"Yeah." Nick sighed. "I kind of thought that the worst was over at that point. Not that a vigilante running around Portland is a great addition, obviously, but we'd finally be able to go home, get more than two hours of sleep, and then Saturday morning we could officially arrest the kidnapper's accomplice and between him and whatever the CSI guys turned up at the crime scene get a lead on the killer. But then the captain showed that symbol during his press conference, and the next thing I know I've got Monroe on the phone more than a little upset and saying that we needed to get to his place pronto." A quick smile. "Monroe and a couple others, but he's more familiar with what I don't know than most."

"I can't say that I wouldn't have made a call as well if we'd seen the news," Dad admitted. "But we'd been watching movies up until Monroe called Roddy and completely unawares. And after I talked to Monroe—Roddy didn't seem to have quite the background or the German language skills to follow along with what Monroe was saying so he passed the phone to me—it was fairly obvious that he had as much if not more information than I did."

Technically Dad had mostly scared the heck out of a very obviously confused Roddy, even if it hadn't been intentional, but since it wasn't like Roddy hadn't offered his phone up on his own Barry wasn't going to mention that part if Dad didn't.

Nick grinned. "I'm impressed that you understood. Monroe's great, don't get me wrong, and I'd probably be dead a few dozen times over if it wasn't for his help, but his explanations can get a little convoluted even when he's not talking about horror stories from the Middle Ages. It certainly took Hank and I more than a few minutes to sort out what he was talking about."

"I would say that he and I have a bit more background than you," Dad pointed out. "But Hank as in Detective Griffin?"

"Yeah. He's finally getting caught up on the Grimm stuff."

Dad looked surprised, which made sense given what he'd said about Kehrsites the last time Nick had visited. "It hasn't been a problem for him?"

Nick rocked a hand. "It was a little touch and go at first, especially when his Coyotl goddaughter had a panic attack when she met me in the middle of a case—just the usual 'he's going to kill me' stuff, but it was pretty horrible timing given everything else going on right then—but at this point he's solid."

"A Coyotl?" Barry asked. They were another species that Mom hadn't said much about beyond a derisive sniff. 'Uncouth pack animals' he thought he remembered, although they were at least predators which ranked them considerably higher than Reinigen.

"Yeah. Nice kid, and her father and Hank have been friends since they were in high school which helped. Although I can't say that I think too much of the extended family." A pause. "Sorry, I guess that's not really relevant to the current discussion."

"My fault, I'm the one who asked," Dad said. "So Monroe caught you and Detective Griffin up on the Wesen side of the story, but what happened with your case?"

"Right. Well, even with what Monroe told us there really wasn't anything we could do that night, but we brought in the guy's accomplice the next day, and he promptly had an incredibly explosive reaction when he saw me. Under the circumstances I guess it was kind of understandable, although it didn't exactly make things easier, and once we had his van it shouldn't have mattered anyway. But while we thought he was safely locked in one of the interrogation rooms, he slipped out, and the next thing we knew there was a 911 call from his address and a repeat of what we found on Friday."

"He escaped a police station?" Dad asked. "That wasn't in any report that I saw."

"It was less an escape and more that he was let out, and it was assistance that he'd have been better off not taking since the guy who did it was our intern slash Labensauger slash insane-wanna-be-Grimm. One of the sergeants managed to pull Ryan's picture off the security video after we'd gotten back from the crime scene, and right after I'd finished talking to a friend of mine who'd come down to the station to talk about the situation. Bud's a good guy—Eisbieber—but he's also not the calmest person you'll ever meet, which put him on Ryan's radar." Nick shook his head. "Although it may have been that Ryan was so far gone by that point that it wouldn't have mattered, I don't know. It was closer than anyone would have preferred before Hank and I found them, but Bud is fine, and Ryan is in custody, and that's about the best ending that we were going to get."

Both Eisbiber and Lebensauger were also headings under vermin as Barry recalled, although Eisbibers were marginally less vermin-like than some, and Barry was starting to wonder if maybe he ought to take another look through those books in Dad's office that weren't Jagerbar histories instead of just going along with what Mom had told him.

Dad's and Nick's conversation turned to pleas and sentencing after that, things that Barry didn't really want to think about given his own experiences, so he concentrated on his tacos and only responded when one of them spoke to him. Which wasn't often since apparently they also had plenty of mutual complaints about the Records department of the Portland police, and that led into another discussion of upcoming legislation, and Barry was trying to figure out if he could excuse himself and go lift weights or something because talk about dull when suddenly classes were mentioned and both sets of eyes were on him. So much for that.

"So what are you thinking about taking?" Nick asked, and Barry kind of suspected that it was a variation on a question that Barry had already missed.

"Right now I'm just going to try to get some of the standard stuff out of the way," he said, rather than attempting any excuses. "The things that I don't expect to need more classes in later. So probably another math course," as much as he was not looking forward to that, "or maybe one of the sciences if I can find something with a lab that works. Or both. And probably another writing class too, since it looks like those can be used for credits in a lot of places." Well, that and he needed something to keep him sane. "Dad says that for admissions law schools will look more at the classes I take at a regular university, so I was going to save most of my main English classes for that."

Nick nodded. "Going in with a plan is smart."

"What did you go to school for?" It didn't occur to Barry that Nick might not even have gone to college until the words were out of his mouth, but Nick just grinned.

"I did not go in with a plan, so officially General Studies."

"Seriously?" Barry hadn't even known that that was a thing.

He shrugged. "I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do when I graduated high school, and after I'd bounced around for a year my aunt finally insisted that I take a couple classes and see if I could find something that suited me better than pizza delivery. We were out here for one of her jobs at the time—she was a traveling librarian with a focus on ancient languages so she had translation contracts all across the US—which is how I ended up at a Portland school, and while I'm still not sure how much good the classes themselves did me, I stumbled into a recruiting booth for the Portland PD at a job fair after my first year. It took me another year and a half to qualify given the age and credit requirements, and at that point I was far enough along in my classes that it seemed pointless not to finish the degree so I joined the department and stretched out night classes over the next couple years until it was done."

It was kind of nice to hear that Barry wasn't the only one who didn't—hadn't—had a clue, at least, although the idea of ending up anywhere near the police department...yeah, no. Not that he'd qualify anyway, but definitely not his thing.

"You're planning on law school then? And I guess English would be your undergrad major before that?" Nick asked.

"Yeah, I guess."


Barry hummed along to the radio, tapping his fingers lightly against the steering wheel. The weather was decent for once, at least at the moment, but there was still no sense in Roddy having to walk all the way up the driveway. Besides, he wanted to hear how the rave had gone last night, and since Dad didn't seem to be locked in his room working today, it'd be safer to talk about that while they were out of the house. Well, unless he'd been serious about going to meet a client somewhere...Mom hadn't liked it when he'd scheduled with clients on the weekends, but it had still happened now and again.

Barry was just starting to wonder if Roddy had gotten held up by something since even in wet weather it didn't usually take him more than ten or fifteen minutes to make it here from the shopping plaza when a familiar figure reached the top of the hill, and he grinned and waved in greeting.

Roddy returned it, but something was wrong with how he was moving, and Barry frowned as he realized that he was limping. And...

Barry felt his claws start to drop down when Roddy got a little closer and he realized that one of Roddy's eyes was most definitely darker than the other.