Death's Apprentice: A Grimm City Novel by Gareth Jefferson Jones K. W. Jeter Page A

took more direct action.
    Children were the worst. Their parents might throw curses in his direction, but the kids used stones. Blake felt a couple of fist-sized rocks strike him in the back; he turned and glared at the little bastards, but the sight of his grime-darkened face didn’t scare them away. Instead, the next rock hit him just below the eye, drawing another leak of his body’s rapidly dwindling resources. He watched as a couple of adults came up behind the kids, putting hands on their shoulders, as though defending them from him. Too weak for a confrontation, he turned and stumbled on.
    He managed to leave the crowd behind him, at least far enough to slip into the hiding place of an unlit alley. Sinking against the wall’s base, he tried to recover his strength, one ragged breath after another. The blood dripping from underneath his coat made a darkly shining pool beneath him. He pressed his hand against his side. There were things that he needed to do, things he had come to this stinking city for—but the chances of pulling all that off were nonexistent if he didn’t get the wound sewn up.
    For a moment, he thought that the loss of blood had sunk him into delusion: somehow, he could hear animals whining from somewhere nearby. But when he raised his head and looked around, he couldn’t see dogs or any other creature. He was still alone in the alley.
    The whining continued, sharp and persistent. It sounded as though the animals, wherever they might be, were in pain. He spotted a courtyard at the far end of the alley, with some kind of shabby warehouse building at the rear of the space. The noises seemed to come from there. Blake got to his feet and stumbled toward the building. Maybe there would be some corner that he could creep into unobserved, where he could curl up and rest.
    A row of windows along the ground floor had been whitewashed to keep anybody from peering in. But one with a broken latch was slightly ajar, letting the whimpering animal sounds escape from inside. Blake pulled the window open farther, enough for him to get a look at whatever was happening.
    He saw a surgical table, but not one big enough for a human being. The sheet covering it was soaked with nearly as much blood as his own tattered overcoat. Under a glaring fluorescent light, a balding figure in a red-spattered lab coat was hunched over a mongrel dog, its neck and haunches held down with leather straps. The fur and skin over the dog’s ribs had been peeled back, revealing the pulsing organs beneath. The red mess eerily resembled the wound under Blake’s overcoat.
    The man in the lab coat was some kind of veterinarian, Blake figured—but not the kind that made animals better, or eased their pain. He watched as a scalpel dug around this dog’s pinkish lungs, then dropped on to the table when the veterinarian picked up a portable dictation recorder in one latex-gloved hand.
    “Considerable indications of advanced pulmonary necrosis present in test subject.” Unaware of the man watching from the window behind, the vet bent down to peer into the animal’s exposed thoracic cavity. “Increase in dosage of the experimental formulation appears to have had negative effects, with likelihood of eventual fatality.…”
    It was some kind of vivisection going on—Blake mulled over the scene he watched. Must be running tests, he figured, for some kind of drug company . Technically illegal but the law was never enforced, at least as long as the grisly procedures were kept out of sight in a place like this. The Dumpster at the side of the building was probably piled high with eviscerated animal corpses.
    But where there was a doctor, any kind of doctor, there would be needles and suture threads. The kind with which torn, bleeding flesh could be stitched back up. He pushed himself away from the window and stumbled toward the door a few yards away.
    Pounding his fist on the door took nearly the last of his strength. He had to lean his shoulder