by Rhys Ford
“They weren’t the flossy cotton-candy balls I’d read about, but the idea of them was there. I pulled over and got out while Dempsey grumbled that he was hungry or had to take a piss, but he understood because, hell… there were truffula all over the field.” The rain began, dappling the car’s windshield with a light kiss of water drops, but it wasn’t heavy enough for me to turn on the wipers. I did anyway, mostly to give me something to do where I didn’t have to look into Ryder’s too-open expression. “They’re flowers. Gomphrena. All different kinds of those, but they were truffula. I grabbed a handful of them and brought them back to the car, and you know what Dempsey said to me?”
“No,” Ryder murmured gently. “What?”
“He lit up his damned cigar and said, ‘Well, guess we’re moving to fucking San Diego, kid. Now that you’ve found your fricking truffula flowers.’” I did my best impression of his garrulous voice with its harsh smoke-and-bitters lilt. “See, the thing was, I never talked to him about the flowers, about how they fascinated me. And once I found out they were based on something real, I wanted to see one. I didn’t share any of that crap with him, but he knew. He knew how I felt like one of those damned things—halfway between real and imagined.”
“Those dried purple flowers on the bookcase. The ones in the green case. Is that them?”
“Not the ones I picked that day. Jonas’s goat ate them after it got into the truck, but those are the ones Dempsey gave me to replace them. They dry out nice. First thing he put up once I got the bookcases built. It sounds stupid but—”
“No, it sounds like home.” Ryder laid his hand on my thigh and squeezed my knee. “We should put some around the Court.”
“You’re not going to tell anyone I told you this shit, right?” I eyed him, liking the heat of his hand on my leg but not trusting the warmth in his voice. “Because….”
“No. Something just between us, Kai. Something just for you,” he assured me, giving me that smile he always had lurking somewhere, ready to gild me with its shine when I needed a lead out of the darkness I’d put myself in. “That way, whenever you see them, you know you’re finally home.”
Seven
A HINT of smoke drifted under the heavy scent of impending rain, probably a carryover from some distant wildfire eating through a nearby but unseen mesa. Hemmed in by thick threads of impervious black lava, the occasional erratic fires raged with intense heat, only to die off in mewling whimpers when their devastating flames met the paho‘eho‘e and a‘a swaths brought on by the Merge. For all the trouble the Underhill caused, it effectively put an end to the devastating wildfire seasons, although I could have done with less rain.
Especially when it looked like the gathering clouds would ripen into lightning storms and we were too close to dragon territory for my comfort. Despite the mountain range separating the coast from the inner corridor, coppers could smell the crackle of electricity in the air for miles around, and I kept one eye on the sky, looking for any sinuous metallic shapes.
Nothing gets a dragon hungrier than playing with fire or electricity, and a quick-moving red flash in the shape of a muscle car was pretty much a guaranteed takeout meal to tide one over until it could find something bigger to shove into its maw.
Alexa would kill me if I got her cousin chewed up by a dragon, no matter how much the idiotic Sidhe worshipped the damned lizards and the chaos they brought.
We’d needed to stop and stretch our legs. Or at least I did. But the automat wasn’t in the best location, sitting on a bend and perched on a jut overlooking a deep gulch. The passage wasn’t as tight as some we’d gone through earlier that day, but the steep, crenulated mountains loomed in, their sides thick with brush and boulders bigger than a full-grown elephant. The terrain wasn’t prone to slides, but I was still cautious. Who knew how long those massive stones had been sitting there, waiting for the right sparrow to land on a certain spot to send it tumbling down onto the highway below?
“What exactly is this?” Examining the coconut-marshmallow-covered cupcake I’d gotten out of the autoservers in the convenience stop, Ryder looked like he was about a second away from curling his nose up at the snack. He sniffed it, and apparently that was enough to wrinkle his senses. “It smells like hyped-up sugar.”
“This is one of my favorite things to eat, so if you don’t want it, feel free to pass it over. I’ll be glad to take it off your hands.” I carefully peeled off the marshmallow dome covering the cake bit, sighing contentedly when it came away in one piece. “Okay, seriously… either bite into it or eat those withered grapes you insisted I get you.”
“At least the grapes don’t look like they are made out of pure chemicals.” He handed me the cupcake, pinching its wrapper closed with his fingers.
“Considering they stock this place probably once a week, there’s no telling how long those grapes have been there. For all you know, they started off as raisins, and at some point during their incarceration, they absorbed enough condensation to plump themselves up.” I stood strong against his disgusted glare. Rattling the package at him, I said, “At least these won’t give you food poisoning. Best thing about processed foods? They taste the same no matter if it’s day one or a hundred years from now.”
“I’m not sure that’s something you should brag about,” he drawled. “Especially since you can’t even guarantee that you would’ve digested it after a hundred years.”
“Just remember, you eat those grapes and something happens to your guts, I’m just going to stop on the side of the road and let you out. No looking for bathrooms or anything,” I warned. “There’s not much between here and New Vegas on this stretch, so choose wisely.”
He said nothing for a long moment, staring at the long rectangular building I’d pulled the Mustang up in front of. Despite my precautions, he peeled back the plastic wrap on the grapes’ container and poked at their slightly wrinkled shapes. “There’s a lot of food in there. In that… what did you call it?”
“An automat.” It was hard to talk around the gummy marshmallow, but I didn’t think Ryder was going to dock me manners points. He knew who raised me. Speaking with my mouth full was the least of my faults. “They used to be extinct, but after the Merge, places like these popped up along the roads. Easier than having someone work a counter. Just have a couple of trucks make the route a few times a week to stock up the place, and it runs itself.”
The storm teased and licked at the mountaintops, but I so far hadn’t spotted anything reptilian playing in its depths. Since the automat was pretty much a rectangular tin box with vending machines lining the outer walls and a few low aisles in the middle, we could ride out a hard storm if we needed to, but I’d rather be on the road with the storm behind us, leaving any potential to ending up as a dragon snack in the dust.
“Isn’t it kind of… foolhardy?” Ryder smirked, probably satisfied he’d dug up that chestnut from his Singlish vocabulary to throw my way. “Reckless? To leave all of this without an attendant? What’s to stop someone from cracking open the machines and taking everything?”
“No,” I replied, peeling off the coconut fluff from the second ball in the package. “Any sign of someone messing with the machines, the box locks down and, well, sort of depressurizes. Seals up like a nun’s chastity belt, and then knock-out gas is pumped through the vents. Takes about thirty seconds for the person locked inside to pass out. Sometimes less. An alarm goes off somewhere, and they send someone out to look at the place.”
“Suppose the gas kills them?” The look of horror on his face was comical, because when it was all said and done, Ryder was an innocent babe in the woods compared to… well, an actual babe in the woods. “The food in there isn’t worth someone’s life.”
“A lot of people would disagree with that. Besides, place is easy enough to blow a hole through the ceiling if you go in armed with enough shot and you’re good enough to concentrate on a single spot. All you need is an open hole, and then you’ve got all the time in the
world to pick through what you want.” I nodded down at the stretch of highway awaiting us. “Most places like this are a good hour before someone gets here. You can clean a place out in less than ten minutes and be broken out before a guard even reaches the halfway point.”
“And you know this how?” The grapes were forgotten, the one between Ryder’s fingers smashed nearly to juice.
“’Cause humans can’t hold their breath as long as we can. You and I can probably go for a good five minutes past the point they give up and have to suck in some air. Four or five shotgun blasts will tear open that box quick enough, and then it’s just a matter of waiting for the gas to clear out.” I shrugged, sucking the spongy remains of the cupcake’s shell from my fingers. “Sometimes you’ve got to eat and you’ve got nothing in your credit bank but starving moths and wishes. Shotgun shells are easy enough to pack. A couple of drops in the bucket when there’s a lake you can drink from if you only spill it.”
“And Dempsey knew you did this?” He blindly took the napkin I offered him for his wet fingers and tucked the grape into its folds. “I mean, he knew you were… stealing? And he let you?”
“Who the hell do you think put me up to it?” I bit into the last of the nearly stale chocolate cake, sucking on the distinct chemical taste of the cream hiding in it. “Either finish the grapes or toss them, lordling. We’ve got a long ways to go, and you’ve got to get that off your hands before you get into my car. There’s some water bottles in the back. Wash up and let’s get going.”
I learned paranoia early on in my Stalker career. It saved my ass more than a few times over the years, and right now, I was paranoid as hell about the heavy rains and the heavy rocks stuck precariously into a dirt mountain soaked through to the bones.
So when I heard something odd coming up from the gulch behind us, my hackles didn’t have to go very far to be on alert.
I couldn’t identify the sounds—a faint scrabbling growing progressively louder and then the telltale crackle of something, or many somethings, working through the damp but unforgiving brush. Wiping my hands on my jeans, I jerked my head toward the Mustang, then growled at Ryder as I reached in through the open passenger-side window for the shotgun strapped into a sling behind the front seats.
“Get in. Now. Something’s—” The noise grew louder, a rushing scrabble up the gulch, and the brush growing up around the guardrail behind the automat erupted with movement. A grinding engine sound joined in—a whining, choking broken melody at odds with the snap and crackle from the brush. “Ryder! Get in!”
The gulch vomited up its chaos onto the bend, branches and weeds snapping as what looked like thousands of jackalopes crested over the rise. With cat-sized bodies heavy with muscle and plump with a growing winter pelt, they were a furry wave, cheeping and chittering in high distress, their antlers clacking together as they fled. Tiny claws scraped and tore at the ground in a mad rush to break away from whatever followed, and we were surrounded by the furry tide before I could bring the shotgun around. I fought to stay upright, nearly knocked over when one after another struck my legs. A few antler points dug into my jeans, but my boots kept most of my flesh safe from being torn open. One caught on a seam and its head nearly turned around, but it shook loose quickly, disengaging with a twist of its body.
“Here!” Ryder tossed me the leather belt Dempsey had modified for me to hold shotgun shells. “I’ll grab the Glock you gave me.”
“You’ll shoot your damned fool head off,” I retorted, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to stop him. “Stupid stubborn lordling.”
Leaning against the Mustang to support myself against the barrage of small bodies striking me, I fastened the belt quickly, letting it ride low on my hips, then braced to face whatever else was going to come up over the ridge. The spurt of a struggling motor grew louder, and the jackalopes didn’t seem to be thinning out. I was about to dismiss the whole thing as the wild-eyed mutant rabbits being chased by a bike or perhaps an anemic dune vehicle, but then came a roar, a sickly, blood-curdling scream filled with a rage and hunger I knew deep down into my bones, and my guts twisted in on themselves, caught on the seam of my life just as the jackalope had been trapped on my jeans.
An ainmhi dubh.
Both the bane of my existence and the source of a lot of my income, the damned black dogs seemed to be everywhere lately, and it was harder and harder to discredit Dempsey’s warning that they were hunting for me. Still, they’d hunted in packs or as loners long before I took up Stalking and had been the stuff of unleashed Unsidhe nightmares for an eternity, so I took Dempsey’s sharp words with more than a grain of salt—more like a whole deer lick with a Dead Sea chaser.
And there was now one coming our way, chasing a sea of jackalopes and some idiot trying to outrun it on something that didn’t sound up to the job.
“Hear that?” Ryder asked. “Can we get into the car and outpace it?”
“We can, but there’s someone in front of it.” The whining grew louder, choking and throttling on either the steep incline or a failing engine. “Get on the other side of the car. Shoot over the hood when the dog comes over the rise. And whatever you do, do not scratch the paint. Just got the damned thing back.”
“Well then you shouldn’t have brought it on the run,” he snapped back, but my glare hit the back of his head as he ran around the front of the Mustang to put a bit of cover between him and the ainmhi dubh. “Don’t get killed.”
“You’ll be fine. Keys are in the car. I go down, you get out of here.”
There wasn’t time to say anything more. Not when, still knee-deep in furiously scampering horned rabbits, a beat-up dirt bike broke over the lip of the gorge, its back wheel kicking up spurts of gravel and soil, then slammed into the thick metal guardrail running behind the automat’s pullover pad. The motorbike came to a shuddering, complete stop.
Its rider, however, did not.
He was all fractured limbs and keening, tumbling in the air toward the Mustang. The angle of his arc was high, a wide bit of air any snowboarder or skate kid would admire if only he had a board beneath him. And wasn’t screaming in terror. He smelled of blood and fear, curling up over my head, and I let him go, focused on the gulch and what he’d brought to our feet. I heard him land a bit behind me, an impressive feat considering I was yards away from the guardrail, but other than wincing at the sound of his body hitting the gravel-and-tar-patched asphalt, I didn’t give him another thought.
“Kai?” Ryder shouted over the screams of whatever was coming up the cliff behind the unfortunate biker. “What do I do?”
“Stay there and shoot at whatever pokes its head up!” I yelled back. “He’s not our problem right now.”
The bike rider had on a helmet, and from the corner of my eye I could see him moving, slowly and painfully but still at least writhing enough to assure me he was alive. Honestly, he was the least of my worries. We had to survive whatever he’d brought with him, and as the jackalope wave diminished, we were going to be the creature’s nearest source of food. I wasn’t going to pick the guy up and toss him at the monster he’d woken up, but neither was I going to bend over and kiss his boo-boos, leaving my ass open to get munched on.
He was either going to die or live long enough for us to take him to a medical center. Either way, I couldn’t spare him the time. I was too busy trying not to get us all killed.
I felt the ainmhi dubh before I saw it. Normally a black dog’s stench permeated the air before it made its appearance, but this one was different. Or least different from the ones I’d hunted down for bounties, turning their pelts in to the Post for cash. I intimately knew its malevolent aura, tasting it in the marrow of my bones and at the back of my throat. When its magic-shaped bulk finally clawed its way up the side of the gulch, I was ready for it.
Because while an ainmhi dubh was a perversion of nature, the thing coming toward us was nothing more than a pure abomination brought to life by Valin cuid Anbhás, my father’s
disgraced apprentice and my older brother.
Ainmhi dubh were hungry—always hungry. Forged from magic and bits of flesh, they were the stuff of nightmares and the Unsidhe’s greatest weapon. Their powerful bodies were usually reptilian, patched with bits of fur and scale, with horns and wings, but most of all, armed with evil natures and mouths bristling with sharp teeth. Their insatiable hunger drove them to hunt, and only their creators’ will kept them in check. The more powerful the mage, the more powerful the ainmhi dubh, but there was a fine balance between pouring a lot of magic into a nearly uncontrollable simulacrum and being able to control it. The ainmhi dubh—the black dogs of the Unsidhe—fought against the restraints, eager to consume anything in their path, and all too often, they broke away from their creators, given too much power and not bound as tightly as they should be.
There were a lot of black dogs roaming the Western regions, their original hunts breaking free from their creators either from lack of control or because their master was killed during a conflict. They bred indiscriminately until the magic firing their blood died out, the litters getting weaker and weaker the further they got from the original creation.
What was stalking toward us was definitely not from a litter. I could see Valin’s hand in its creation, feel his warped intelligence and twisted magic holding it together. I’d faced one of his ainmhi dubh before, standing shoulder to shoulder with an Unsidhe Lord, and while it seemed as if Valin was getting better at cobbling together his monsters, it didn’t appear as if he had gained any control over holding them.
He must’ve been using whatever creatures’ flesh he could find down by the border between SoCal and Mexico. The ainmhi dubh was mostly feline, or at least at one time had been perhaps a mountain lion, but its grace and elegance were long gone, burned away by the disjointed lengthening of its legs and the armor plating covering the joints. Its head was elongated, almost equine except for the curled-up and acid-dripping smile wrinkling its flaccid ash-gray flesh. Speckled with black patches, its body absorbed the uneven sunlight breaking through the thickening clouds, but the array of eyes scattered across its forehead gleamed red when it spotted me, and it took a step toward me, chuckling with low coughs, the turnoff’s asphalt smoking where its spit hit the ground.