First Post

Okay, so I'm kinda new at this whole blog thing, but I figure I'd give it a try. Maybe it'll help me sort out all this stuff in my head.

My name is Nick Burckhardt and I'm a police detective in Portland, Oregon. Things are getting weird around here.

I’ve been seeing these faces – terrible and horrifying faces – morphing from normal human faces. It doesn’t happen to every face I see, just to some of them – like Adalind Schade! I saw, or, thought I saw, her face change into some twisted zombie-like monstrosity, but I’m not sure if its real or I’m imagining it. I thought it was just pre-proposal jitters. (Hope Juliette doesn't find this!)

My partner, Hank, and I went to a call today out in the woods. It looked like someone had been mauled by a bear or some other cuddly forest animal, but the only track the rangers found was a boot print.

After looking over the crime scene for a bit, I heard music playing in the distance. Turns out, the victim was a jogger and had lost her iPod (and a pink Nike). Hank noticed it was the Eurithmics, and I noticed he could sing, jokingly of course.

We went back to the station to do some more digging, when I saw another face. It was some punk kid sitting at another officer's desk. He glanced at me, and then...he looked like a lizard! At this point, I had to be hallucinating. The face of a lizard? Get a grip.

At this point, I didn't have anything to go off of, none of my searches had turned up anything, but Hank had gotten a hit in missing persons on a student who went jogging this morning and never came back.

After talking to the roommate, we got a positive ID on Sylvie Oster. Hard to believe that was the girl we had seen that morning. Hank and I called it quits and we went our ways.

I came home to an eerily quiet house, but Juliette was just in the kitchen. I was surprised to find my Aunt Marie in town, sitting at the table, especially when I had planned on proposing to Juliette tonight, but I wasn't upset, since she'd been kind enough to entertain Juliette with the dead frog in the microwave story!

She needs to talk to me about something. I hope its not more weird stuff. More to come after dinner.

After Dinner

Holy Mother of God, things are worse than I imagined. Short version is that Marie and I were attacked on our walk after dinner tonight and she's now in the hospital.

The longer version goes something like this: Aunt Marie and I were talking about her cancer when she became very serious and told me that there were things about our family that I didn't know. Then she asked me if I'd been seeing strange things and then she started rambling about how it was all starting too fast and how it was when it happened to her - I was extremely confused.

"The misfortune of our family is already passing to you," she said. I had no idea what she was talking about. Then she told me to end my relationship with Juliette if I wanted her to be safe.

But then everything got very still. She said that he was there and I could barely ask who he was before she pulled a dagger out of her cane. "Hulda," she said to me, and then we proceeded to be attacked by a man with a scythe.

The man struggled with Marie for a while, but I knocked him down and when he got up to go after Marie, I shot him. Many times. The first time I ever shot a man, he was attacking the only family I had left. And he had the face of, I don't even know what kind of face. After I shot him, the face went away to reveal the face of a man, just like the faces I saw before.

I ran over to check on Aunt Marie, who was laying on the ground. She asked me if I'd killed him and told me she had thought she'd lost him a long time ago. "They're after me," she said. Then she took her necklace off and told me never to lose it, guard it with my life because they'll be looking for it. And on top of all of this, Marie told me that my parents hadn't died in a car crash - they'd been killed.

This was all so much to take in, I didn't know what to do.

Juliette had called the cops when she heard gunfire, so the blue and whites showed up soon after, along with an ambulance for Marie. I told the story to Hank and told him that I had no choice but to shoot the guy and Hank said he'd take care of it while I went to the hospital with Aunt Marie.

When she was finally conscious, she asked me if I saw who Hulda really was, and I wasn't really sure. Aunt Marie then went on to tell me how we have the ability to see things that nobody else can, we see them for what they really are. I told her she needed some rest and she looked me dead in the eye and said that the stories were real. I am one of the last Grimms.

She wished she had more time, but she said everything was in her trailer - which I didn't even know she owned - and that there was still so much I didn't know. I tried to ask her about my parents, but all she said was that I was vulnerable now, that I needed to be careful, and to never lose what she gave me.

I'm assuming she meant the necklace she handed me after the attack. I took a closer look at it as I was leaving the hospital, and it looked like it might be a small key.

I returned to the precinct and went to work on translating the inscription on the scythe that Hulda used to attack Marie. I couldn't stop thinking about the things I had been seeing, the faces that kept appearing when Hank clapped me on the back and asked me about my progress. It said "Reapers of the Grimms."

Hank then told me what he'd dug up on Hulda. He was wanted, under a different name, for assault, rape, and murder in Chicago, with warrants in Florida and Alabama. I wasn't so sure. "Don't let the comb-over throw you, this was a bad guy," said Hank.

The Captain wants me to see the police psychologist because of my first shooting. Maybe I need to see him for more than just that with all this Grimm stuff going on...

Midnight

I woke up in the middle of the night from a nightmare. Sylvie Oster, the victim from the murder yesterday, was running through the forest in a red dress when suddenly, a man with a wolf-like face went to attack her.

That's when I awoke, and decided to go looking in Aunt Marie's trailer with a flashlight. She had weapons, charts, maps, and books abound in this little space. In this one book, there were drawings of the different faces, one of which I recognized. I'd been in there for a bit when Juliette startled me, wondering how long I had been looking at things. I wasn't sure what it all was nor what to tell her, so I decided we should go back to bed.

Juliette asked if I had lived in the trailer when I was a kid with Marie, but I hadn't even known she owned it until she came into town yesterday. What is all of this for anyway?

Well, back to sleep.

The Park

When I came into work today, the lab wasn't sure if the DNA was human or animal for the attack on Sylvie Oster yesterday. Luckily, Hank came back with a match on the boot print we found.

Later in the day, I went to see Marie in the hospital, but she had fallen into a deep coma, so I was unable to ask her any of my questions. All I hoped was that she would come out of it. The doctor told me that Marie had many scars on her body, probably knife wounds. This woman was a librarian!

I got a phone call from Hank about a little girl who had gone missing just hours beforehand, and I was on my way. She was on her way to her grandfather's house from school and she never showed up. I asked if the grandfather was clear, but the guys on the scene didn't know for sure. That's when they handed us a photo of the girl.

The chief held a briefing immediately afterwards about the missing girl, splitting us up into teams to canvass the area between the house and the school. He stated that she was wearing a red sweatshirt, and I remembered that Sylvie, from yesterday, was also wearing a red jacket, or what was left of one. I mentioned it to the chief and he only hoped that it wasn't the same guy. For the littler girl's sake, I hope it wasn't either.

Hank and I began to comb the area and I mapped out the route the girl was supposed to take, with very specific instructions from her mother. When I described the route, Hank said he would have cut through the park, because her grandfather's house was immediately on the other side of the park. The mother explicitly told her daughter not to go through the park. "Right, kids always do what their moms tell them to do. I know I did," he replied with a grin.

We went into the park, and split up. Hank spotted her backpack in the bushes before I found anything, but from there I found boot prints leading away from that spot. I followed them through the trees to the other side of the park and the street, where I watched a man come out for his mail and saw his face change. It was a wolf-like face this time. I shouted to Hank and then I chased the man into his house and pinned him to the floor, screaming "Where is she?" repeatedly.

When backup arrived we searched the place, with no sign of her. We let him go and left the scene because I couldn't charge him for anything, as hard as that was for me to do.

Stealth

I went out to the trailer again tonight, looking for more answers in the book of drawings when I saw his face. The face of the guy whose house I practically invaded.

I went back to the area in the night, back to his house and I waited. And I watched. Eventually he came outside. I followed him around to the back of his house, and as I looked around the corner, I saw that he was urinating along his fence. Not just on it, along the fence line. Then he sniffed at the air, like he knew I was there.

He finished up, zipped up, went back in his house and shut off the lights. I crept along in the yard alongside the house when out of nowhere he burst through a window, tackled me, threw me against his house and growled "You shouldn't have come back," with his wolf-face baring down on me.

Then the wolf part retracted, somehow, and with half a laugh the guy said, "Lighten up. I'm just making a point. Come on. Let's grab a brew. And by the way, you're paying for that window."

I was stunned! This guy, this thing, was about to rip my head off and now he's offering me a beer. And why do I have to pay for his broken window? What is going on?! Apparently, I'm going to find out.

Blutbad

When I was in his house, he handed me a beer and told me he'd never seen one of my kind before, a Grimm, and he looked at me like I was some sort of novelty. He'd been told about Grimms all his life, like Grimms were scary bedtime stories, but he had never actually seen one until he met me. I was amazed that he knew who, or what, I was.

He said I seemed kind of new and asked if anyone in the family had died. Marie was in a coma, and he said that explained it. When I said her name, a look of fear and anger came across his face. "I heard of her," he said gravely. He didn't want any more trouble, that he wasn't that kind of Blutbad and that he didn't kill anymore, not in years. Apparently, the Blutbad are what most people nowadays know as the "Big Bad Wolf," a fact by which he seemed disgusted. He claimed that he stayed "good" with a strict regimen of diet, drugs, and pilates, that he's a reformed or "wiener blutbad."

He knew about the books that Marie had because he said that my "people" had started profiling them over 200 years ago. All of the creatures know about the books, so I was told. It was all so much to take in. I couldn't believe that what Aunt Marie had told me was really happening to me. I thought I had to stop it, all of it, but he said, "You can't stop it, its who you are."

I started to press him about the little girl, but he said he didn't know where she was, going off again about his strict regimen. I asked him if he knew how many Blutbaden were out there (I was corrected for saying blutbads), but he didn't know. They don't socialize much because bad things happen if they get into a pack and especially when they see red.

That triggered something in my head. If he didn't take her and he was marking his territory, that must mean that there were others in the area. I figured he had to have some idea who was keeping the girl, and after a little intimidation, he drove me out to the other Blutbad's place.

I don't know what we're in for here, but it doesn't look good.