Must Love Hellhounds

by Harris, Charlaine

  “Marl, take them to the cells,” Lucifer instructed the wolfman, and draped his arm across Crick’s shoulders to lead Crick away.

  Batanya heard him say, “Love, I’ve gotten some new toys since you were here last,” and then the wolfman snarled at her. When he could see he had her attention, he jerked his shaggy head northward. The two Britlingens surrendered their weapons to two quadrupedal net-throwers, then trudged off, following the wolfman’s lead. The crowd of Lucifer’s hirelings surrounded them, but aside from an occasional poke or prod or gobbet of spit didn’t offer them harm. Batanya didn’t like being spit on, but then again, no one had ever died of it, unless you counted the acid-spitting lizards she’d encountered on a previous job. She cast an uneasy look through the crowd and didn’t spot any.

  “Well,” she said to Clovache, “We’ve been in worse spots.”

  “Right,” Clovache said, with some effort. Batanya could tell Clovache’s stomach was still acting up. “This is an evening at the Pooka Palace compared to some of the places we’ve been.”

  Batanya almost smiled, to the astonishment of the crowd.

  Jail in Hell was about what you’d expect. They passed through the guardroom, with weapons hung on the walls that even Batanya had never seen, and many that she had. The weapons ranged from full-tech guns to your basic swords and spears and clubs. The guards were your basic hostile and contemptuous louts. A snakeman flicked his forked tongue out to touch Clovache’s cheek as she passed him, and he laughed in a hissing kind of way at her expression of disgust. The wolfman growled, “Keep your tongue to yourself, Sha,” and Sha snapped to attention, or at least as close to that as a curved spine like his could manage.

  Clovache and Batanya had to strip under all eyes, because they couldn’t remain in their armor; they had expected that, but it wasn’t pleasant, of course. They donned the drawstring pants and shapeless tunics they were given, along with pairs of thick socks with padded soles. Then Marl, who appeared to be the shift captain, unlocked a heavy door with a peephole in the middle, and held it open for the prisoners to pass through.

  The cells were rough-floored, having been hewn out of the rock instead of being created by the tunneling slugs, and the dimensions were roomy since occasionally they had to house creatures much larger than humans. Batanya assessed hers in one quick look. There was a latrine in one corner, which was quite an odd shape since all species don’t poop the same way, and there was a cot, twice as wide as Batanya’s bed in Spauling, to accommodate a variety of creatures. Clovache’s cell was right by hers, and there were bars from floor to ceiling in between, spaced a little less than the breadth of a hand apart. In the same manner, the front of the cells were also barred from floor to ceiling, so the prisoners were always in view of their fellow prisoners and whoever happened to be in the jail block. There were only six cells. The first cell on each side was empty. The last one on the left became Batanya’s, and the one next to it, Clovache’s.

  The two cells directly across from theirs were also occupied by humans. Opposite Batanya, a young man was sitting on his cot. He jumped up eagerly while the guards were locking up Batanya. He was wearing the same prisoners’ outfit, but on him it looked good.

  The youth was slender, ethereally lovely, and very pleased to have some company. “People who can talk to me!” he said in a melodic voice. “Am I not beautiful? Do I not deserve to be admired?”

  Since Batanya was busy pulling down the tunic and tightening the drawstring on the pants, she didn’t answer immediately. When she’d gotten herself arranged and the guards were occupied with Clovache, she turned to give him an examination. “Oh, yes, you’re pretty as a picture,” she said politely. “Why are you here instead of in Lucifer’s bed?” If Lucifer was hooked on men, she couldn’t imagine him turning down such a choice morsel. The rich chestnut of the youth’s hair, his wide green eyes, his smooth-as-silk tan skin . . . Well, it was enough to make your mouth water, if you’d been in any mood for fun and games. Batanya wasn’t.

  “Oh, I was for a while,” he said. Even his voice was pleasant; just deep enough to be masculine, formed by a smiling mouth. “He was so incredibly lucky to have me! I shone in his bed like a star in the night sky! Not that I’ve seen the night sky in many ages. But I do remember it,” he added wistfully. He pulled his own tunic off over his head and doffed his trousers in a second graceful gesture. “Do you notice how lovely my ass is? Is not my cock perfect? And my legs—so straight, so well formed.”

  The guards hardly gave the prisoner a glance as they exited. Presumably they’d seen the show before. Batanya was pleased to see that Clovache was regarding the young man with interest. He rotated slowly so that both newcomers could get a comprehensive look at his assets.

  “Yes, very nice,” Batanya said, which was not nearly enough for the youth.

  “You can’t have seen anything like me before,” he said to Clovache, coaxingly.

  “That’s for damn sure,” she agreed, cocking an eyebrow.

  “Yes, one of kind,” he said proudly. He couldn’t seem to speak of himself any other way. “It’s simply inexplicable that Lucifer could prefer anyone else to me. Though some of the things he liked to do hurt me and bruised my fair flesh,” he added, looking a little sad. “However,” he said, brightening, “the blue tint did look fascinating against my normal skin tone.”

  The two Britlingens tried hard not to look at each other.

  “You can put your clothes back on,” Batanya said. “You’re certainly very attractive, but we have more urgent things to think of. What is your name, handsome?”

  “Narcissus,” he said. “Isn’t that beautiful?”

  “Yes,” Clovache said, with every appearance of sincerity. “We’ve heard of you.” She turned to Batanya and winked. Batanya was relieved her junior was feeling well enough to react to the young man.

  “Oh, my fame has spread even to . . . wherever it is you come from?” This idea made him very cheerful. He picked up a small mirror and began examining his own face in it.

  “I guess the guards let him have a mirror so he’d shut up,” Batanya muttered. Narcissus, totally involved in his reflection, didn’t seem to notice his fellow prisoners anymore.

  “Excuse me,” called the woman across from Clovache.

  The two Britlingens went to the front of their cells. “Can I help you?” Clovache asked. It was a ridiculous question, but it would start the conversational ball rolling.

  “Can you tell me what year it is?” the woman asked.

  “That depends on what dimension you inhabit,” Batanya said. “And what planet you live on.”

  The woman sighed. She appeared to be in her forties. She had short brownish hair, straight white teeth with a marked gap in front, and a pleasant face. “I hear things like that here all the time, and I’m not sure what to make of it,” she said. She was wearing tailored pants and a blouse with funny dots down the front. Batanya realized, after a moment’s study, that these round objects were the means of holding the shirt closed. Buttons, that was what they were called. There was a heavy jacket with big lapels and a hat and goggles hanging on a peg on the wall, the only place in the cell to hang possessions.

  “You’re not wearing the prison outfit,” Clovache said. “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know. I landed on an island in the Pacific, after the longest flight I’ve ever had.” The handsome woman looked momentarily confused. “I don’t know exactly where we were when our plane began to falter. And my navigator didn’t survive the landing.” She was silent for a long moment. “When I got out of the plane, I was stumbling around, and I went between two palm trees, and suddenly I was here. I was caught right away by some of those spidery things, and they brought me down to show me to the handsome gentleman. Is his name really Lucifer? Have I gone to Hell?”

  “You landed on Hell. Now we’re below the surface, of course. What country are you from?” There was something oddly out of place about this woman.

  “I�
�m from the United States of America,” she said. “I’m an aviatrix.”

  Clovache looked over at Batanya, who shrugged. “I don’t know what that is,” she said.

  “I fly airplanes,” the woman said with simple pride.

  “I’m afraid you’re not on Earth any longer,” Batanya said. “At least . . . you’re not in the same dimension as Earth. We were just there a few weeks ago.”

  “I figured that I couldn’t be back home. And I am surely not in the Pacific.” The woman sat on the cot, as if her knees had simply given out. “I don’t know how long . . . What year is it? I left in 1937.”

  “The year here wouldn’t be the same as the year it was when you left,” Clovache said. “We are Britlingens.”

  The woman’s face stayed blank.

  Batanya said, “You seem to have been caught up in some event, or some magic, unknown to us.”

  The woman took a deep, shuddering breath. “What year was it when you were last on Earth?” she asked, as if not quite certain she wanted to know the answer.

  “Ah . . . well past your time,” Clovache said. She glanced across Narcissus’s cell to Batanya. “After 2000, anyway, though I’m not sure I ever noticed what year it was.” She shrugged. “We knew we weren’t going to be there long.”

  “It was in the 2000s,” Batanya agreed.

  “I can’t understand this,” the woman said quietly. “I must be insane.”

  “What’s your name?” Batanya asked. Maybe a change of topic would break the woman’s black mood.

  “Amelia Earhart.” She glanced from Batanya to Clovache as if, despite everything, she thought they might recognize her name. She and Narcissus had that in common, anyway.

  When Amelia saw that the two Britlingens hadn’t heard of her, she shrugged. Then her whole posture stiffened as the prisoners all heard a sound approaching the big door that was supposed to seal off the cells, though the guards had left it open. It was a sort of scratchy, snuffly sound. “Ah, the dogs,” Amelia said. “It must be almost dinnertime.”

  “Dogs?” Batanya said hoarsely, at almost the same moment that Clovache said, “What kind of dogs?”

  “They’re large,” Narcissus said. He was taking a break from staring at his reflection. He was polishing his mirror with the hem of his tunic.

  “Large!” Amelia laughed, the first normal sound they’d heard in this place. “They’re giants!”

  Two huge black hounds came through the doorway and began sniffing down the corridor. They had short, shining fur, pointed ears, and long, thin tails. Their mouths were open and their long pink tongues were lolling out, providing a sharp color contrast to their sharp white fangs and their glowing red eyes.

  Batanya pressed herself as far back in her cell as she could go, unless she could gouge a niche in the stone wall. She managed to say, “Do they let the dogs come into the cells?” Dogs! It would be dogs! Why couldn’t the prison level be guarded by hydras, or gargoyles? Anything besides dogs.

  “No,” Narcissus said. The dogs swung their heads toward him and took a tentative step closer to the bars of his cell. With a complete disregard for the long, sharp teeth and the demonic eyes, Narcissus moved to the front of the cell and stretched his hand between the bars. The fearsome beasts took a big sniff, and the one nearer Narcissus let the young man scratch his head.

  The three women stared at this, and Narcissus smiled. “Even dogs are attracted to me,” he said happily. “But you know, I love them, too.”

  Batanya shuddered when she thought of some of the things she’d seen in her travels. She hoped the bars remained in place, for Narcissus’s sake. “Attracted” could translate in many ways.

  After a moment, the hounds seemed to lose interest in Narcissus and resumed their prowl down the corridor. The red eyes fixed on each prisoner in turn, and a growl began rumbling through their chests as they came to Batanya’s cell. Her face was set in the clenched expression of someone completely determined not to show what she was feeling, but she was pale and sweating.

  “Just stay back from the bars,” Clovache said, keeping her voice smooth and calm with a huge effort. “They can’t get you. They’re just reacting to your . . .” Clovache couldn’t bring herself to say the word in connection to her senior.

  Batanya understood her, though, and she said it herself. “Yes, they smell my fear.” She hated this, hated herself for feeling it. Hated having a weakness. You’re a warrior, she told herself. That was years ago. You’re too old to feel this, now.

  Both the hounds thrust their heads against the bars of her cell, and they began to bay. It was like nothing she’d ever heard. It took every ounce of grit she had to keep her knees stiff. Two human guards came rushing down the corridor to check out the hounds’ agitation. The hounds were by now so excited that they wheeled and leaped toward the guards, who were completely taken by surprise. Both men were armed with a form of gun, but before the stocky man on the left could draw his from its holster, the nearest hound had leaped upon him and taken out his neck with one huge bite. The guard’s head, its expression still startled, rolled grotesquely across the floor, coming to stop at Amelia Earhart’s cell. The other man was faster and steadier. He was ready to fire before the second hound was on him. His finger tightened on the trigger and the first bullet thudded into the beast leaping for him. The hound landed short, whimpering, and its decapitating buddy swung his head toward the attacking guard and growled.

  But the tall, brawny fellow was not going to back down. “I’ll shoot you down!” he screamed, and the dogs seemed to think better about attacking someone as aggressive as they were. The one that had been shot was healing already. A gout of black blood spattered on the stone was the only reminder of the wound.

  “They’re not going to die,” Batanya said. She and Clovache noticed at the same moment that the black blood on the stone was beginning to hiss, and a cloud of smoke was rising from the place where it had lain. When the smoke dispersed, there was a miniature crater in the floor of the corridor.

  “God almighty,” said Amelia Earhart.

  Narcissus crooned to the dog, “Did the nasty man want to shoot you?” and the hound that had been shot snuffled the hand that Narcissus extended through the bars. Even the guard watched incredulously.

  The hound licked Narcissus’s hand.

  Clovache’s mouth fell open and they all waited to see what would happen. But Narcissus didn’t scream and fall on the ground in pain. He stood regarding the huge beast with self-centered benevolence, and the huge tongue, long and thin and somehow obscene, slathered the beautiful pale hands with dog spit. Only the blood was corrosive.

  “Hmmm.” Batanya was calmer now. She was ashamed of her display of fear, and she’d begun thinking. The hounds padded off the way they’d come, the guard watching them cautiously and keeping his gun drawn. Only when they’d left the room and he’d watched them exit the guardroom beyond did he squat down to get a grip on his former colleague’s ankles. He tugged. Leaving an unpleasant swath of body fluids in its wake, the corpse began moving. Finally, it vanished from sight. After a moment or two, the guard came back for the head. He didn’t speak to the prisoners, and the prisoners didn’t say a word.

  After he was gone, Clovache said, “I’m guessing the guards are chosen among the unpopular and the incompetent.”

  Narcissus smiled. “Yes, the guards don’t last long. For a while, I got special concessions when I told them that since the dogs liked me, they’d be less likely to attack the ones who gave me things that made me happy. That worked for while; I got the mirror, and some extra food, and even a hairbrush. But then the bigger hound got angry with the female guard, one of those insectlike ones, and snapped off her foreleg. I didn’t get any extras after that.”

  “How’d she walk without the foreleg?” Clovache asked.

  “Not very well. In fact, I had to laugh,” Narcissus said.

  Batanya looked at him. He was quite heartless, she decided, unless the pity and sympathy were
directed at him. But he wasn’t useless.

  “How often do the hellhounds come around?” she asked Amelia.

  “Twice a day, at least that’s what they did yesterday,” Amelia said briskly. “I think this is morning, and this was their first visit. Do you know what time it is?”

  Batanya shrugged. “I lost track.”

  “I guess they’re let loose for regular patrols. Or maybe they’re controlled some other way. I haven’t seen a handler. They get to do what they want, as you saw.”

  Batanya sat on her bed and began to think. At least she and Clovache were side by side. There was no point in counting on any help from Narcissus. At any moment, his mirror could distract him, and his only concern was himself. At any moment, he could decide that his own comfort and pleasure were better served by inaction than action. But Amelia seemed plucky.

  Perhaps Narcissus, a mythological character known even in Spauling’s literature, could be considered timeless. Maybe he was even immortal. But Amelia Earhart, according to her own testimony, was a complete human, tied to a specific time line in Earth’s history. Somehow, she’d time-traveled successfully, a fact that the magicians and technicians who powered the Britlingen Collective would find extremely interesting. Not that they had any business tampering with time; in fact, the possibility gave Batanya deep misgivings. But returning with Amelia, if that was possible, would make up for having let their client Crick get captured. Plus, Amelia seemed like a sensible woman, and she didn’t seem to have any idea of how to return to her own time and place in the world, whatever that might have been.

  “Listen, Amelia, Clovache,” Batanya said. She didn’t like that Narcissus could overhear, but she had no option. She had no writing materials, and she wasn’t telepathic, and she didn’t know sign language. When I get back, she thought, I’ll ask the teachers to put sign language on the curriculum. She smiled. It was extremely unlikely they’d live to do that, but she could tell her survival sense had decreed that she should plan on it.