Grim Tidings: Hellhound Chronicles

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I practically saw the cop’s eyes glaze over, and he reached for a pad to write down Tanner’s hotel address. “Knock yourself out,” he said, and went back to his newspaper. The headline blared in type almost as high as my thumbprint. HITCHHIKING HORROR. In smaller type, Has the Walking Man Returned to Kansas?

  “You have no idea,” I muttered, jogging outside to catch the taxi before he drove away.

  Another small town, this one almost on the Nebraska border rather than the Oklahoma one. At least this one had a train station, and somewhere to eat other than a greasy Automat.

  Tanner pushed a small white plate across the table when I sat down. “I ordered you some pie.”

  “You’re handling this pretty well,” I said, taking a polite bite. I wasn’t going to be tucking into any sweets. We’d been back on the trail for two weeks and there were twice as many bodies as of this morning, if you believed the cop’s paper.

  “Right back atcha,” Tanner said. “You look . . . healthy. Healthier than you’ve been in a while.” The first time Tanner had seen me after I’d crawled back out of the bottle, his face had told me exactly how bad I looked. For a cop, he was a bad liar. I’d gained back the weight, my scars had healed, and my skin was no longer the same shade of gray as the empty wheat fields. In contrast, Tanner had aged a decade in four years. His hair was going white at the temples and deep wrinkles that hadn’t existed when I met him creased beside his mouth. Sun and stress and smoke and bad food would do that to any heartland cop, and Tanner wasn’t special. Just different.

  I tapped my fork on the edge of my plate. “So what do you hear?”

  Tanner checked his watch. “There’s another body,” he said. “But that’s actually not why I wanted you to come in today.” He pushed back from the little cafe table. “I gotta make a call,” he said. “Hang tight.”

  I waited, watching the train I’d been on pull out of the station across the street. There was something hanging in the air here, like the smoke from the diesel engine. It vibrated under my feet the same as the cars picking up speed as the whistle blasted a goodbye.

  This was where I’d find the Walking Man again. This was where it’d finally end.

  “Sorry,” Tanner said, sliding back into his seat and picking up the remains of his Monte Cristo sandwich.

  “Who is she?” I said, finishing off the pie. It wasn’t half-bad.

  “Who?” Tanner feigned confusion.

  “Your wife,” I said. He turned a little pink around the edges.

  “That obvious, huh?”

  “Well, it hasn’t been long enough for a tan line on your ring finger,” I said. “But the desk guy back at your barracks did ask me if I was a side piece. Implying there’s a main piece somewhere.”

  Tanner snorted. “Six months, maybe a little more. Her name is Joyce. She’s a nurse.”

  “Good for you,” I said. “You need someone who’s around to do more than help you fight off the undead.”

  “She knows. About my . . . night job.” Tanner paid the check and handed me a photo as we walked out. It was the same mark, the little r and the tail, carved into the thigh of a blond woman. He did love blonds.

  “Still no luck,” I sighed. Seeing that thing burned me up. I was a hellhound. If there was a mystical symbol the Walking Man claimed as his own, I should know it. But it wasn’t a Hellspawn language. I’d shown it to a few warlocks I’d tracked down who seemed to have more than half a brain, and they didn’t recognize it either. It wasn’t like I could present the thing to Gary, or worse, to an actual demon. Tanner hadn’t had any more luck with the professors, ancient language experts—even the code breakers at the FBI came up with squat.

  “Hang in there, Ava,” Tanner said, unlocking the same rattletrap Ford he’d driven the night we met. “I have a feeling our luck is about to change.”

  “I got to thinking,” Tanner said as we turned south, bouncing along a road that wasn’t much more than two muddy ruts in the snow. “The Walking Man’s critters—not deadheads, not vampires. Little from column A, little from column B.”

  “Just like the man himself,” I murmured. “Where are we going?”

  “If he’s not the usual sort of monster,” Tanner continued, turning off onto an even more pitiful excuse for a road, “then the usual sort of professors and the usual sort of sources you can go to won’t be able to help us track him down.”

  “So I ask again, where are we?” I said, as Tanner pulled to a stop in front of a field. A few dozen yards away, a collection of tents and camper trailers made a tight little circle against the sleet that had started to come down on our drive out here.

  “To speak with someone who you’ve already met,” he said. “That night.”

  My chest tightened as I thought of the redhead, all flying hair, bleeding face, and telling Tanner to let me die.

  She hadn’t been wrong. Tanner had just been too reckless to listen.

  “Is that why you brought me here?” I demanded, following him out of the car and almost turning my ankle as my heel sank into a muddy furrow left by a trailer tire.

  “She threatened to shoot me if she ever saw me again. I basically needed a human shield,” Tanner said. “I was gonna make her the same offer my Joyce accepted, and when I realized it wasn’t going to work out, that we were too similar . . .” He cleared his throat and turned around.

  “Funny,” I muttered as Don walked up to the nearest trailer and rapped on the door.

  The redhead threw it open. She’d aged better than Tanner, hair straight now rather than coiffed, flipped at the ends, tied off with a smart green scarf. Her eyes filled with pure hatred as Tanner took his hat off and smiled. “Good morning, Valentine.”

  “You got a short memory, Tanner,” the woman snarled. “You’re lucky I don’t want to get blood all over my trim.” She started to slam the door and I stuck my foot in it, wincing as the metal edge caught my toes. “You crazy?” she shouted at me. “I said get lost!”

  “We just want to talk,” Tanner said. “Come on, Val.”

  “You lost the right to call me that when you stepped out on me with your damn night nurse,” she snapped. “And you . . . why are you wasting time with this piece of highway litter? I thought you were smarter than that.”

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, when he leaves you alone at a drive-in movie concession, takes the car, and rides away into the night, don’t come crying to me,” Valentine spat.

  Tanner rolled his eyes upward. “I don’t know what you have against crying, you insufferable harpy. I imagine that’s all anyone ever wants to do when you open your mouth.”

  “Fuck you, Donald Tanner!” Valentine spat. “Fuck you and your whole shifty pack of Irish miscreants back to the beginning!”

  She shoved me back, to dislodge my foot, and then slammed the door so hard the glass inside it cracked. Tanner sighed.

  “You ever spend time with these people? Travelers?”

  I shook my head. “They came through here and there when I was a girl. Bear Hollow didn’t get a lot of new people. Once, the mining company came through and installed road signs. People talked about that for years.” I looked at the trailer, which wasn’t so much red as rusty with a few silver patches left. Despite looking like a banged-up can of ham, it had new whitewalls and crisp curtains hanging in the little windows. “You shouldn’t judge. We didn’t live any better. Our shack just didn’t have wheels.”

  “Who said anything about judging?” Tanner said, knocking again. “I didn’t exactly grow up sipping on champagne and having butlers massage my feet at night.”

  This time Valentine opened the door with the barrel of a Winchester. “I’m serious, Don. No more. No more showing up, no more favors. You don’t get to ask those sorts of things of me. Not after everything.”

  “I asked him to,” I blurted. She grimaced, but the gun barrel lowered an inch.

  “He’s no good for either of us, Ava. I don’t know you that we
ll, but you look like you’re on a better path now and he’ll yank you right off it.”

  “Please just help us and you’ll never see either of us again,” I said. Don, mercifully, stayed quiet.

  Valentine sighed. “I highly doubt that.” She put up the shotgun and shoved the door wider. “You made me break my goddamn door,” she told Tanner as we stepped inside. “Add it to the list of things you broke that belong to me.”

  I cast a glance back at Tanner. Whatever I’d missed while I’d been off being a good little hellhound had been ugly and it was still a gaping wound.

  I turned my attention back to Valentine. It wasn’t any of my business. Anytime I cared about a human, all I got was more bad dreams to add to the roster.

  Valentine sat on the pile of cushions against the far wall of her trailer and gestured to a pair of folding chairs. The place wasn’t half-bad—if you didn’t look outside you could imagine you were tucked inside some little room in a jazz club or a hotel suite some place like Morocco or Algeria—someplace I’d never seen, and would probably never see. With some scarves, some velvet, and a lot of thrift shop afghans, the place had been made almost cozy.

  Valentine lit a cigarette in a long holder and offered me one. I shook my head. Don accepted and leaned over to light it. “So how have you been keeping yourself?”

  Valentine exhaled a vicious spurt of smoke. “In a trailer, next to my mother’s trailer. It’s been exquisite.” She raised one thin auburn brow. “What do you want from me, Don? Let’s get it over with.”

  Tanner pulled the photo from his jacket. “I didn’t show you this before. It’s a detail we never released to the public, but you’re my last resort. I always figured it was a symbol, but now I just don’t know.”

  Valentine accepted the photo but didn’t look at it. She splayed her slim fingers against the cardboard backing and shut her eyes, letting her cigarette smolder in her free hand. “A girl,” she said at last. “He prefers to start with a girl. But we all know that.”

  I shifted, starting to get angry with Tanner. He was wasting time with his ex-squeeze while the Walking Man was out there, waiting for me.

  “I’d think you of all of God’s creatures would have a little more patience with my abilities,” Valentine murmured. She opened her eyes and fixed me with a look of even less warmth than she’d bestowed on Tanner. “But then again, you’re not one of God’s creatures, are you?”

  “And what exactly are you going to do about that?” I said, fixing her with the same stare. If she wanted me to blink she was going to be disappointed.

  “It’s not my place to do something,” she said primly, opening the file. “It’s yours to hold your head up and refuse to do every little thing Gary asks of you.”

  “Gary?” Tanner ashed his cigarette into the tray at Valentine’s elbow. “Who the hell is Gary?”

  I folded my arms tight across my chest. She already knew I didn’t like her—at least I didn’t have to let her see she’d rattled me. “Can you tell us about this symbol or not?”

  She studied the photo closely, squinting at it through her glasses, and then passed her fingers over it softly before putting it back in the file. “Do you read the Bible?”

  “More than I ever wanted to,” I said. Tanner shook his head at the same time.

  Valentine put out her cigarette. “I know full well you’re a heathen, Don. Poor girl,” she said in the same breath. “She was so frightened and she died too soon.” She looked back at me and sighed. “I don’t like what I’m able to do. I didn’t like it the night I saved you and I don’t like it now. I choose to believe it comes from a decent place, but to be honest I don’t know.” She handed the photo back, not to Tanner but to me, holding on to the opposite edge as I accepted it. She wasn’t taking my measure anymore. She was scared. “What I do know is that because of my ability I’ve seen a lot of monsters. A lot of evil, both man-made and not. Vampires. Walking corpses. People like me who don’t make use of their ability like I do, people who only want to stand on others’ necks to rise up higher.”

  When she did let go of the photo I started a bit, dropping it on the floor. The symbol stared up at me from the dead girl’s flesh in stark black and white.

  “There are two men,” Valentine whispered, her eyelids starting to flutter. “Two men standing. Screaming. Fighting. It’s so long ago. The world was different. Even the air tastes different, that’s how long it’s been. And the man, he strikes his brother down. He stands above him, and he feels . . .” She shuddered, head dipping. When she raised her head again her eyes had rolled to expose the white and her cheeks flushed pink.

  “He feels as he’s never felt before. He touches the wound he’s inflicted. He drinks the blood of the man he’s slain. He can’t think about what he’s done. All he can think is that he wants more.”

  She sucked in another shuddering breath. Her eyes slowly rolled back to the pupils. “It’s not just like the Bible, but you get where I’m going with this, don’t you?”

  I thought of the smell, the rich burning smell, like ashes and incense and rotting flowers, that had overwhelmed me at the camp. The Walking Man’s implacable gaze, the way he just kept coming, like a storm or a tidal wave—nothing any living thing could hope to stop.

  “You know the story,” Valentine said. She picked up the photo from the floor. “You know what this sign really means.”

  “You really think I wouldn’t have heard of this by now?” I said. “Of him? If he were real?”

  “Ava,” she said. “If you’re already a monster, would you want to admit the boogeyman exists? Never mind that he’s gotten inside your mind once, and made you his possession.” Her gaze met mine and I felt like we were both sinking into a pool of cold water, neither of us willing to let go. I felt her page through the album of my memories, like tiny scratches behind my eyes. “You’re afraid of him,” she said. “And I don’t blame you. But pretending he’s not what he really is won’t make him go away.”

  “I’m lost,” Tanner said. “Do you know what the symbol means or not, Val?”

  “Not what,” Valentine said, never breaking my gaze. “Who. It is not a symbol. It’s a brand. A name. A mark that means these souls belong to him, have been fed to his insatiable need.”

  I wanted to deny her, but she wasn’t wrong. I was terrified of the Walking Man. He’d made me wish for death in a way nothing ever had—not since I’d actually died. I knew all it would take was one slip, one time when Tanner and I weren’t in the right place at the right time to put down those diseased things he bred, and the world would be in ashes. A whole world like what I’d witnessed in the camps.

  The terror struck so deep inside me it felt like my own spine. I nodded in agreement with Valentine. “It is a mark. It’s the Mark of Cain.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  THE MIDWEST

  NOW

  Ronnie’s screaming woke me up. I’d slept in my clothes, and at an angle that made every part of my body complain at top volume as I rolled off the bed. My head throbbed in time with Ronnie’s tirade of curse words.

  “Swear to Christ, Mom, I’m going to come in that shit heap you call a trailer one day and chop your head off. Then I can stick it on top of the Christmas tree in my pad and have a happy fuckin’ holiday!”

  I picked up my boots and stepped out of my room, leaving the key in the lock. “Dude,” I said to Ronnie when he spun to look at me. “Family therapy. Seriously.”

  He squawked when I reached out and snatched his car keys from his front pocket. “What the fuck!”Staring into his eyes without blinking, I showed him my knife. “The keys to the land whale are in my room. I think it needs a new fan belt. Leaks oil, too.” If anyone was tracking me—or Viv’s car—I didn’t have to make it too easy for them.

  Ronnie didn’t try to stop me when I got into his truck and cranked the engine. Maybe he wasn’t as dumb as he looked.

  The SUV at least had a working radio and heater, and by the tim
e I got to Kansas City I even felt mostly awake, the sharp edges of the last few days without sleep or rest chased away by the last threads of my Percocet coma.

  I’d hoped the deep sleep would induce another connection with whoever was broadcasting from KC, but all I’d gotten were dreams that belonged buried, like the corpses they were. No clues to who wanted me to drive all this way. I did think it was awfully convenient that Uriel and this nameless psychic were both pushing me toward the Walking Man, like it was a blind date.

  Since I was pretty sure you couldn’t stick your psychic fingers into an angel’s brain and work him like a puppet, I had to think that the dream I’d had was a lure, the Walking Man’s latest gambit to worm his way back into my line of sight. Not even seven decades in Tartarus had dimmed his urge to stalk me. That was dedication, of the craziest variety.

  Now to top it all off, I was thinking of Valentine. I hadn’t thought about her in years. Crazy little witch that she was, and she’d been more right about me than anyone before or since.

  That was what I hadn’t wanted to betray to Uriel back in that shitty bar. I didn’t know how much he knew about what Cain had done to me, how he’d made me ride with him for all those months. I’d told myself—and Tanner had told me—over and over that I wasn’t responsible for the deaths. I’d been as under his spell as any of the victims. But I’d never really believed it. That was the sole benefit of being betrayed and murdered and raised as a hellhound. You stopped being prey and got to be the hunter, for once.

  I’d tried as hard as I could to forget that whole period of my life—Tanner, the dead people, the Walking Man.

  I wasn’t surprised he was back. What surprised me was that he’d ended up in Tartarus in the first place. I wasn’t sure he could die, never mind be locked snugly away in Hell’s supermax, a place meant only for human souls.

  Which technically, his had been, I guessed. Long ago.

  I’d just been so glad he was gone, that I was free, when it all ended back then, that I hadn’t looked too closely. Hadn’t wanted to. And now he was back, and he was coming for me. He thought we belonged together. Both unique monsters—the hellhound who remembered she was human once and the man who remembered he was a monster.