“I’ve never seen anyone like you…
well, I mean, I’ve heard the stories my whole life, but I never thought I’d actually be standing in a room with a real-life Grimm.
Wow.
It’s like watching a childhood nightmare step right out of the dark.”
Monroe handed Nick an unopened bottle of domestic beer, a complex blend of caution, intense curiosity, and a lingering trace of primal fear painted across his face.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nick said, taking the bottle but setting it unopened on the coffee table.
He kept his posture relaxed, yet strictly maintained a tactical safe distance between them.
“Let’s start from the beginning.
Explain what you mean by ‘Grimm.'”
Monroe’s brown eyes widened, staring at Nick’s face as if inspecting a rare, dangerous specimen.
“Are you joking with me?
My generation grew up hearing bedtime horror stories about your kind.
Look, I was just a kid back then, okay?
It scared the hell out of me.
When did your eyes awaken?
Why were you acting like such a complete amateur in my hallway earlier?”
To this guy, Nick realized, a Grimm wasn’t a heroic figure—it was the bogeyman used by parents to keep misbehaving children in line.
“I’m not joking,” Nick replied, his voice firm and steady.
“I don’t know what a ‘Grimm’ is, and I don’t know what you are.
Start from square one.”
Monroe leaned closer, studying Nick’s eyes to see if he was being mocked.
Finding only dead seriousness, a sudden look of shock washed over his face.
“Wait…
are you an orphan?”
“More or less,” Nick said.
“My parents died when I was seven.
My aunt raised me, but she left Portland a few years ago, traveling around the country.”
“And her name is…?” Monroe drew out the question, his eyes narrowing slightly.
The moment the name left Nick’s lips, Monroe’s face went chalk-white.
His eyes darted toward the hallway as if expecting an armed assassin to burst through the door.
“Oh boy,” Monroe muttered under his breath, taking a slow step backward.
“Oh man…
that name is legendary.
She’s a reaper with a scarf.”
“Are you playing games with me?” Nick pressed, his brows knitting together.
Monroe’s reactions were so animated, so outwardly dramatic, that it was hard to tell where the fear ended and the theatricality began.
“Aunt Marie was a librarian.”
Monroe stared at Nick for three long seconds.
His hips had barely touched the cushion of the armchair before he bolted back up to his feet, holding his hands out in a polite gesture of dismissal.
“Okay!
Look, since you genuinely don’t know anything, I don’t want any trouble, alright?
I’m not like the old-school Blutbaden.
I reformed years ago.
I stick to a strict regimen—diet, exercise, vegetarianism, Pilates, clock repair!
I don’t participate in the hunting anymore!”
“Sit down,” Nick said, his tone dropping several degrees.
He had no intention of letting Monroe run the conversation.
Reaching into his jacket, he pulled his newly issued Sig Sauer P226 from its holster and set it down with a heavy, deliberate clack on the glass coffee table.
“No more dodging.
You answer my questions.
What is a ‘Grimm’?
And what is a ‘Blutbad’?”
Blutbad was a German term—literally translating to ‘bloodbath.’ It certainly didn’t portend anything peaceful.
Monroe threw his hands into the air.
“Are you kidding me right now?
Didn’t your aunt give you the books?
The one who ate Little Red Riding Hood!”
Nick’s heart gave a sudden, heavy thud.
A long-buried memory—one he had pushed into the deep recesses of his mind for twenty years—surfaced with terrifying clarity.
In his previous life, before entering military service, Nick had been an avid reader, gamer, and pop-culture enthusiast.
He had consumed endless media: procedural crime shows like Bones, CSI, and Chicago P.D., which had inspired his career path as a law enforcement officer in this life.
Shortly before his deployment and eventual reincarnation into this reality, his interest had briefly pivoted toward supernatural television.
After finishing a season of Supernatural, he had downloaded a new series called Grimm.
Before he could watch a single episode, his unit had been mobilized for emergency wildfire suppression, where an accident had cut his previous life short.
Twenty years in this body had dimmed those memories.
He had buried the idea of pop-culture tropes, treating his recent visual glitches as a neurological anomaly.
Now, sitting across from a living, talking wolf-man in a suburban Portland living room, the pieces locked together into a terrifying whole.
The show’s core premise flooded back to him: hidden beneath the surface of modern society was a secret world of supernatural creatures—known collectively as Wesen.
And for centuries, these creatures had been hunted by a bloodline of human warriors who possessed the innate ability to see through their human disguises.
The authors of Grimms’ Fairy Tales hadn’t been fiction writers; they were hunters documenting real-world encounters with predatory Wesen.
Nick searched his memory fragments, asking cautiously, “The books you mentioned…
you don’t mean the published fairy tales, do you?”
Monroe gave him an incredulous look.
“Those fairy tales were sanitized warnings your ancestors left for the general public so kids wouldn’t wander into the woods alone!
Nobody knows how they got turned into children’s stories—probably because the real stuff was too graphic for print.
I’m talking about the family journals!
The handwritten logs recording centuries of execution records!
Did Marie Kessler seriously teach you nothing?”
“I thought she was a retired librarian,” Nick said honestly, adopting the posture of an investigator piecing together a case file.
“And this word you used…
Wesen?
That’s the collective term for your kind?”
“Yeah, Wesen covers the whole spectrum,” Monroe explained, settling reluctantly back onto the edge of his sofa.
“Though we don’t usually call ourselves that when talking among our own species.
My kind are Blutbaden.
‘Werewolves’, ‘Wolf-men’, ‘Big Bad Wolves’—those are just slurs and labels other Wesen and your ancestors slapped on us over the centuries.”