by Rhys Ford
Table of Contents
Blurb
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
GLOSSARY
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
EPILOGUE
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Copyright
Black Dog Blues
By Rhys Ford
The Kai Gracen Series: Book One
Ever since being part of the pot in a high-stakes poker game, elfin outcast Kai Gracen figures he used up his good karma when Dempsey, a human Stalker, won the hand and took him in. Following the violent merge of Earth and Underhill, the human and elfin races are left with a messy, monster-ridden world, and Stalkers are the only cavalry willing to ride to someone’s rescue when something shadowy appears.
It’s a hard life but one Kai likes—filled with bounty, a few friends, and most importantly, no other elfin around to remind him of his past. And killing monsters is easy. Especially since he’s one himself.
But when a sidhe lord named Ryder arrives in San Diego, Kai is conscripted to do a job for Ryder’s fledgling Dawn Court. It’s supposed to be a simple run up the coast during dragon-mating season to retrieve a pregnant human woman seeking sanctuary. Easy, quick, and best of all, profitable. But Kai ends up in the middle of a deadly bloodline feud he has no hope of escaping.
No one ever got rich being a Stalker. But then few of them got old either and it doesn’t look like Kai will be the exception.
This one is for Elizabeth—who has given Kai a new home.
This book would be nothing without the Five. Tamm, Lea, Penn, and Jenn. As always. Also, my sisters in all but blood—Ree, Ren, and Lisa.
Haato and snookies to you all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SO MANY people to thank and where to begin? Let’s first start with Terese, Suzhang, Brooke, and Ericka, who have always wanted Kai to hit the pixel and page.
Major kudos to Elizabeth North because, really, this journey into print and pixel started with her and her reading Dirty Kiss… and liking Dirty Kiss. Thank you. So many thank-yous. And also to everyone at Dreamspinner who really make me look good.
Lastly but not leastly (yes, I am a writer), much love and gratitude goes out to the Dirty Ford Guinea Pigs who keep me sane… and insane. A select group of fantastical, wonderful people whom I am ever so thankful to know.
Oh, and thank you Metallica, Anthrax, Tool, and a number of other bands too numerous to mention for giving me music for this book as I wrote.
GLOSSARY
THE WORDS contained in Black Dog Blues have a base in current language and serve as representative words in Singlish, a polyglot common tongue spoken in the book. While many have retained their original meaning, some have experienced a lingual drift and have developed alternative definitions.
Áinle—multi-use word, can be hero, champion, angel or if used in certain context, wild cat (Gaelic)
Ainmhí dubh—black dog (Gaelic)
Ampulla—vial, blister; slang: piece of shit, waste of a person (Spanish)
Arracht—monster (Gaelic)
Bao—an Asian-centric bread, usually a soft white yeasty bread (Chinese origin word)
Bebé—baby (Spanish)
Bonito—handsome, masculine pretty (Spanish)
Chi wo de shi—slang: eat my shit, damn it (Mandarin)
Chikusho—slang: damn it, fuck, or crap (Japanese)
Deartháir—brother (Gaelic)
Diu nei ah seng—fuck your family (Singapore slang)
Gusano—worm (sometimes found in tequila) (Spanish)
Hibiki—resonance, echo (Japanese)
Hondashi—dried bonito (fish) flakes, mainly used for soup stock (Japanese)
Iesu—Jesus (Hawaiian)
Indios—indigenous Austronesian peoples living in the Southern California/Mexico regions
Jan-ken-po—rock, paper, and scissors (Hawaiian slang of Japanese phrase)
Kimchee—spicy cabbage pickles, national dish of Korea. Also spelled kim chi or kim chee. (Korean)
Kuso—crap (Japanese)
Malasadas—deep-fried yeast doughnuts rolled in granulated sugar (Portuguese)
Meata—gone bad, turned rotten (Gaelic)
Miso—soybean paste, commonly used in soup (Japanese)
Muirnín—beloved, sweetheart, darling (Gaelic)
Musang—wild cat, civet, feral cat (Filipino-Tagalog)
Nori—seaweed, usually pressed into sheets (Japanese)
Paho’eho’e—rough, crumbly lava (Hawaiian)
Peata—pet (Gaelic)
Pele—goddess of lava, volcanoes, passion and general badassery. Not someone to be fucked with. (Hawaiian)
Saimin—local Hawaiian word for noodle soup dish based on Japanese ramen, Filipino pancit, and other Asian noodles. Possibly based on Japanese word ramen/sōmen or Chinese words xì and miàn.
Shoyu—soy sauce (Japanese)
Siao liao—crazy, out of your mind, insane (Singpore slang)
Sidhe—fairy folk, also Seelie. Considered the “good” court of the Underhill faerie/elves. Pronounced she. (Gaelic)
Sláinte—health, salute (Gaelic)
Sucio—filth, dirty things (Spanish)
Tik-tik—bulbous triangular taxi cab, single-driver car with wide back to accommodate passengers, suspended above roadways by upper rails and trolley lines, resembles a rounder version of a 1976 Ford Pinto (word of Indian origin)
Unsidhe—fairy folk, also Unseelie. Considered the “evil” court of the Underhill faerie/elves. Pronounced un-she. (Gaelic)
CHAPTER ONE
IT WASN’T a great day to be me.
The nick below the tip of my right ear itched, and when I scratched at it, the itch fled, traveling down my stomach and into my crotch. I willed it to go away, and after annoying me for a few seconds, it disappeared. I was cold, stinking of blood from the three elfin shadow dogs I’d already killed, and grumpy because there was still a live one out there I had to hunt down.
I smelled the last dog before I saw it. Nothing can mask the stench of an unsidhe cur. They reek like a week-old herring rolled in the juices of a bloated corpse left out in the sun. I checked the thunder gray sky for rain and sniffed for any water. Wet black dog could make a dead man vomit, and the smell would soak through the metal bed of my truck.
“Come to Kai, baby.” I snuck a peek at the thing, peering around the tree I’d hidden behind. “I need some groceries.”
The black dog looked like a mange-infested mastiff that’d fallen into an iguana’s gene pool and was about twice the girth of the others I’d already taken down. It appeared to be male, but gender didn’t matter if a dog got a lot of meat to eat, and this one looked like it ate well. Its long lizard tail doubled as a weed-whacker when i
t stomped through the brush, taking out huge arcs of grass with each step, and its belly dragged on the ground, a fat, happy lizard-dog bastard out for an afternoon snack.
Even though it was close to me, its forehead and short snout wove in and out of view behind boulders along the hillside’s slope, keeping me from a kill shot. The coarse ebony fur on its body ran to thick, wrinkled gray flesh on its legs, long claws growing out of its reptilian paws. One of its smaller back horns was broken, probably from a mating fight, but from what I could see as it opened its maw to scent the air on its tongue, all its finger-length teeth were intact.
Good thing, because I wouldn’t want to be only half-chewed when the damned thing ate me alive.
I pulled up my shotgun, cracking it open one last time to check its slugs. With the hound coming around the trees, I would have to wait for a clear shot. Dempsey liked a knife or a bow. Stalker should hunt like a man, he grumbled in my head. I liked having a sawed-off shotgun or a pair of Glocks I could reload.
“Fucking Dempsey and his crossbows. I’d have to shoot the damned thing five times with a bow when a damned slug can do it in one or two.” When it came down to it, I’d rather be alive with gunpowder on my skin than have my picture hanging up on the Post’s tribute wall to the manly Stalkers who died taking something down. “Crossbows are shit.”
“God, that thing stinks.” My eyes watered from the smell. Resisting the urge to check my ammo again, I waited as the wind shifted and sent a brief thanks to the slaughtered god when my nose cleared of black dog.
The dog was almost in full view, and the change in wind direction helped me more than the hound as the breeze stole my scent away. Its broad chest vibrated as it laid its head back and howled, the piercing keen of its eerie song echoing across the area as it called for the others in its pack. If I had any luck, it would soon be joining their dead bodies in the back of my truck.
The thing was going to be a bitch to drag down to the road. Bounty laws said I couldn’t leave the body behind, mostly to protect wildlife from eating a black dog’s acidic meat, so I’d have to drag out every pound of its dead body to the truck after I killed it. Carry out what you kill, Dempsey beat into me.
“Or find some stupid elfin kid to do it for you.” I snorted.
The hound didn’t have to worry about dragging me off the mountain. If it got me, it would eat me on the spot, probably spitting out the zipper of my jeans and my earring when it was done. With luck, I’d get the chance to pee myself first, because my bladder began complaining loudly, and the itch returned to my bits.
It turned, and a flicker of a red eye gleamed in the black of its face. Holding its head lower than its massive shoulders, it skulked across the ground, hitting on my scent. I couldn’t hide from its nose. Damned things could track prey over anything.
The dog snagged my trail, growling as it moved its head back and forth to scent. I held my breath, letting the scent-trail draw it closer. It crept quickly over the forest floor, making a slithering sound through the leaves. If it wouldn’t have given the dog the drop on me, I would have laughed. The thing was nearly as large as a tik-tik cab. The only way it could hide was if a lorry dropped down in front of it.
With its sloping body tucked down, the black dog stilled; its wide nostrils sniffed at the air. A curl of its tongue lapped around the brush of teeth, long strands of milky saliva roping down to cover a clutch of weeds. The leaves shriveled and burned when the hound’s spit struck, tiny wisps of smoke rising around the black dog’s head as the acid ate through the greens. The wind shifted again and caught my scent, carrying it to the dog. It turned, found me staring at it, and leaped straight for me.
Singlish is really an ugly language. It has its toes in many lingual puddles, from old Britain to Cantonese with hot dashes of wasabi Japanese, but there were times when only the ugly gutter back street Nippon would do.
This was definitely one of those times.
“Kuso!” I brought the shotgun down as the black dog barreled toward my hiding spot. The wind shift carried something of me on it, and the creature found me as easily as if I’d jumped out into the open and waved my arms around.
The hound smelled the death of its pack on me, and it was pissed.
My first blast hit it between the eyes, jerking its head around. I took the recoil, easier for me than a human, but the gun bead shook, and I had to resight. For a long scary moment, I thought the shot went wide. The black dog kept coming, its earflaps laid back and its mouth opened wide enough to pop my head off with a single bite, but a trail of black gore spit up behind its head. It was hit, but not enough to bring it down.
Bringing the shotgun back around, I let loose the second round, aiming for one of its eyes. Its head jerked back again, and its cheek shattered, the eye popping into a wet mess, but the damned thing kept coming. I dropped the gun and grabbed for the Glock lying in the grass as the black dog’s paws dug into the ground in front of me.
It went over me just as my hand closed on the grip. Twisting to get another shot off, I ate dirt when the black dog’s weight shoved me into the ground. It hit hard, and I choked on my wind, coughing to pull enough air into my chest to inflate my lungs. Flipping over, I couldn’t breathe. At nearly five hundred pounds and as fragrant as whale puke, the hound covered my legs and torso, pinning me against a bed of pine needles.
My brain told me the thing was dead, but my mind wasn’t what needed convincing. The dog’s mouth snapped and tore at the air near my head and shoulders as its body twitched frantically. Lines of foam polluted its pink-rimmed lips, acidic ropes of spit that burned my skin, and I placed the barrel against the creature’s flat skull and pulled the trigger.
Bone chips stung my cheek, and I tasted powder before I could get my mouth closed. The blast blossomed out of the dog’s head, and its skull spat out furred chunks and scaly skin. I fought to breathe as its spasms slowed, its legs stiffening out behind its body. Slowly, the glow in its eyes dimmed, turning the vivid red lights to a dull gray. It twitched once more, then went still, as dead as the rocks digging into my back.
“About time you died, damned thing.” Exhaling with relief, I tried squirming out, but the dog’s weight settled hard on my shins, trapping me against the forest floor.
Leaning back into a bed of dried pine needles, I stared up at the sky and sighed. “Ah, fuck me. Oh no, we’re not doing this shit.” Growling at the shattered head, I kicked the thing in its belly. “I am not going to lie here like some fricking bed of cabbage under sashimi. You are getting the hell off me.”
It was a strain to bend forward, but I reached behind my legs to scoop out handfuls of needles from behind my knees, hoping I could give myself enough wiggle room to slide out. The ground sloped up sharply behind my shoulders, and I kept hitting my head against forest debris when I tried to get leverage. A few flailing tries and I cursed the damned thing again. The dog had me pinned, and the not-so-great day went straight to shitty when one of its enormous paws dug straight into my already strained bladder.
“Hey, mister, why’d you shoot that dog?”
It sounded like a kid, and from the silhouette I could make out when I twisted my head to the side, it looked kid-shaped. It moved into the light, and the shadowy thing turned into a dirty-faced child wearing a pair of white briefs and a thin T-shirt. Like most children under knee level, I couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy, especially since it was wearing what looked like generations-old hand-me-downs.
“Hi. You’re not out here alone, are you?” I smiled, keeping my elfin canines hidden. Sharp incisors do not a warm, welcoming smile make. I hoped the kid hadn’t wandered off from some campsite. The last thing I needed was to have a lost bawler to deal with as I dragged the dog back to my truck—if I figured out a way to get out from under it. “There’s a mommy or daddy around, right? Please tell me you come with someone bigger attached to you.”
“Yeah, we live right there.” S/he pointed behind us, up the ridge. “All of us. Mama, Daddy,
and everyone.”
“Is someone home right now? Maybe someone really big who can help get the big dog off me?” Someone once told me to talk to kids like I was excited to see them, told me it was easier to convince them to do things if children heard the things in a happy voice. Every kid I’d ever met had always made me a liar, but I was using as happy a voice as I had. I’d buy the kid anything it wanted, but it looked too young to bribe.
“Daddy’s big!” The runty human studied me. “Bigger than you. Stronger!”
“Good,” I replied. I’d be glad to lose in a size-pissing contest if it would help me get the feeling back in my feet. “Can you go get Daddy?”
“Jaime! Where did you get off to?”
Craning my neck to stare up the slope, I sent a belated thanks to Iesu and Buddha when the short cliff above me suddenly sprouted another person, taller and definitely a woman.
I kept the happy voice up, but by now it was less happy and more badly-needing-to-pee. “Who’s that? Someone you know?”
“That’s Mama!” The child beamed, waving its arms above its head to get the woman’s attention. “Mama! It’s one of those pointy-eared people! Can I keep him? He can sleep next to my turtle!”
“YOU KNOW what I miss, boy? The blood,” Dempsey said around the cigar stump in his mouth. “I miss the blood the most.”
Up to my elbows in said blood, I spared the human who raised me a look and offered him my knife. Isolated, Dempsey’s place was a good spot to dispose of black dogs’ bodies, and laying down a slab table with runnels to catch the gore into a cistern made the job even easier. “If you want to, I can leave this to you. That leg of yours is bad, but your hands still work.”
“You’re not too big for me to wipe my ass with.” Spitting a chunk of loose tobacco off his tongue, he hitched himself up onto the bed of the truck. “And the moment you say that’s because I have a big ass is the second I break that pretty face of yours with a backhand.”