Black Dog

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Wilson smirked as I struggled, pinned to the table like a science experiment. I decided as soon as I could move again I was going to kick him, just to vent some frustration.

  Usually reapers shared blood with their hounds and transferred the soul through the resulting connection. It worked when I used my own knife on someone who owed, the small blade working as an extension of Gary’s Scythe with a fraction of its power.

  Not when I drank the soul whole, though. This was the only way.

  Gary withdrew his Scythe, wiping it on a silk cloth before tucking it into his jacket. I fell back against the booth, the cords of pain cut. All I could do for the moment was breathe and concentrate on not throwing up.

  Gary made a note in his ledger, raising his eyebrow. “Come on, now. It wasn’t that bad.”

  I knew what I was supposed to say, and that anything else would just aggravate his clearly rotten mood, so I shook my head. “No, sir.”

  Gary turned over a ­couple of pages. “Wilson, go start the car.”

  Wilson grunted, his lip peeling back from his teeth. “But—­”

  “Did I ask you or tell you?”

  I was just glad I wasn’t the one on the receiving end of Gary’s glare this time. Wilson huffed a little air, but he limped out of the diner, slamming the door so hard the bell echoed over everything else.

  “Ugly bastard, isn’t he?” Gary said. I blinked, genuinely surprised. Gary wasn’t what you’d call the chatty type, at least not with his employees.

  “I don’t think he likes me very much,” I ventured. That was a nice way of saying Wilson would snap my neck like a twig if he ever got the chance. The scars and the limp were bad enough, but to have a parade of other hounds, hounds who could still go out and perform the duty we were bred for, clearly cut him to the core. Why he reserved his actual aggression for me, I’d never know.

  “He was stupid,” Gary said. “He paid the price. Crying about it just makes him look weak. Sooner or later something is going to take him up on the offer and then I suppose I’ll have to train a new driver.”

  This was downright strange. Not to mention wrong. Wilson had been jumped by a pack of shifters—­mostly wolves, some dogs and big cats mixed in. All outlaws, castoffs from various clans. Trying to set up a protection racket on Gary’s turf, promising human warlocks and other small-­timers like vampires and deadheads that they’d keep the Hellspawn off their asses.

  Gary hadn’t liked that, and Wilson had been his big stick at the time, but one hound, no matter how big and bad, was no match for twenty pissed-­off shifters.

  Wilson had been mauled and left for dead, and he’d not only recovered, but enough to walk and talk again. He couldn’t run, and even when he shifted he came up lame, but the fact that he was alive should be enough to spread his legend far and wide, as far as I was concerned. Too bad he was such a jackass.

  “Am I supposed to be learning some valuable lesson from all this?” I said.

  Gary spun the ledger around so I could read the name at the top of the blank page. “You’re going to the desert,” he said. His finger slid along the type, highlighting his fussy accountant’s penmanship. Gary’s hand was soft and pale as the rest of him. Hounds sometimes said that reapers didn’t really look human, that they were something else under the skin just like us, but I could never imagine Gary as anything but a tweedy dude with a bad attitude.

  I read the name—­ALEX IVANOF. I nodded, because the only thing you could do was obey when a reaper gave you orders, no matter how tired or hungry or hurt you were. “He’s past due?”

  “No,” Gary said. “You’ll get the download when you get to the safe house, but the short version is there’s been a swing in the deadhead activity around Ivanof’s neck of the woods, and the boss would dearly love to know what’s going on.”

  He shut the ledger and tucked it away. “And when I went to visit dear old Alex, he’d done a rabbit. So now, Ava, you get to go do what you do best.”

  “And what’s that?” I asked, not at all sure I’d like the answer.

  Gary stood and grinned at me, a perfect white grin like a blade against my throat.

  “Fetch.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Storms rolled east with me as I pushed the Harley down I-­10. My hand still ached every time I squeezed the throttle, and my chest got tight every time I thought about Gary. I watched lightning fork back and forth between the anvil-­shaped clouds, even though the land had turned from forest to desert around me.

  Las Vegas lit up the belly of the storm, casting the scaly thunderheads in sharp relief. The spotlight on top of the Luxor pierced the storm, and like the desert knew I was coming, thunder cracked and rain blanketed the highway.

  I pulled into a ser­vice station off the interstate and took off my helmet, feeling the water stream through my hair. Where I came from this would be hurricane weather, the sky the color of a bruise while the earth shook in time with the rolling thunder.

  The rain passed after a few minutes as the storm scudded on past Vegas and out into the Mojave. I took off my gloves and swiped the water off my face, wincing at the deep red mark the Scythe had left on me. It was my own fault—­I should have run down Bob Dobkins and cut out his soul like I was supposed to, not gone after him as a hound. I knew Gary had a temper and that he liked to take it out on his hounds. So what had I been expecting, exactly? It was like I wanted to piss him off.

  There had been a time when that was true. But Gary had broken me a long time ago. I was his hound, and I would be until my contract was up. Or way more likely, until I was ripped apart by something higher up the Hellspawn food chain. No hound I’d ever known had survived the full term of a reaper’s contract and gotten out.

  We all died, messy and violent and in pain. It was just a question of when.

  I got back on the bike and kicked the starter, wondering what exactly about this Alex Ivanof was so bad that Gary would send me. My boss wasn’t the type who kept ­people around if they couldn’t handle a ­couple of extra deadheads on their turf.

  I kept my helmet off, feeling the desert wind smooth the last of the rain off my face, and wondered exactly what type of shitstorm I was walking into blind as I raced toward Vegas.

  When I pulled up, 1073 Buena Vista Drive didn’t look like much. A blinking sign with half the neon gone sat in the parking lot. The cartoon atomic blast rising from the top of the low building was mostly bare plywood, paint gone and riddled with buckshot.

  The Mushroom Cloud Motel had a vacancy, according to the sign. If I said I was shocked, I’d be lying.

  I parked the Harley next to a Jeep with a pot leaf sticker on the fender. There were only two other cars in the lot—­a Dodge Dakota that had a trash bag for a back window, and a new Lexus with the motor running. I watched the drug dealer that went with the Lexus jaunt out of room 114, jump in, and squeal out of the lot. After that, there was nothing but highway noise and coyotes yipping in the distance.

  The guy in the front office looked me up and down when I came through the door, turning down the volume on his game show. He put the stench of fur and fresh blood into the musty air, and his top lip curled back to show teeth.

  I don’t like shifters. I think there’s some natural lycanthrope/hellhound adversity bred into us, a survival instinct for both sides. Lycanthropes are pack animals, though, and this one was alone. Judging by the scars on his face, the gang tats, and the general stench, there was a reason for that. Shifters who go mad dog and hunt indiscriminately draw way too much attention from humans and Hellspawn alike. They end up either working for the Hellspawn they pissed off as a debt or serving as doggie chow for their pals when they’re expelled from the pack, a fun little party where all your friends beat you until you shift and then chase down your wounded, exhausted ass and tear you to shreds.

  “I’m Ava,” I said. “Gary sent m
e.”

  The shifter sucked on his gums. “You’re late.”

  I folded my arms. My leather jacket creaked over the buzzing of a half-­dozen fans and the rusty beer fridge plugged in behind the desk. “And you are?” I might have to play nice with Gary, but if he expected me to smile pretty for some asshole he caught poaching homeless guys on the Strip, he could bite me.

  “Santa Claus. You were supposed to be in Vegas by sunset.”

  “Sorry, but did you miss the animals floating two by two down the I-­10?”

  He showed his teeth again. He’d hunted recently, probably tonight, and his blood was still up. “I don’t like excuses, bitch.”

  I didn’t flinch. He didn’t mean the insult the way humans understood the word anyway. He wasn’t calling me an uppity woman, he was calling me a dog. To shifters who’d never seen one up close, that’s what hounds were. Lapdogs of reapers and demons, no free will, no spine.

  “I’m no more of a bitch right now than you,” I said. “You’re bigger than me, and I know you’d love to hurt me, but we both work for Gary, and if you touch me, he’ll turn you into a floor stain. So why don’t you tuck it back in your pants and tell your boss I’m here?”

  The shifter started to laugh. He slapped the counter and then lowered his head, muscles under his wife beater rippling. His whole body changed, hair sprouting and gang tats vanishing, until he’d lost three inches and probably sixty pounds. When he looked up, rather than a bulky gangbanger, a skinny kid with pimples and straggly orange hair grinned at me.

  “Man,” the shifter said. “I’ve never seen a hound IRL. You’re pretty intense.”

  I expected that a long time ago, my mouth probably would have hung open, but I’d learned how to stay impassive in the face of most anything violent, gory, or just plain weird.

  The kid stuck out his hand. “Sorry about that. It’s just easier to deal with the crackheads looking like a badass motherfucker than it is as myself.”

  I didn’t take it. “I still don’t like being called a bitch.”

  “Oh come on,” he said. “I was just messin’ with you. Have a sense of humor.”

  He came around the desk and clapped me on the shoulder. “I’m Martin. Martin Skelling.”

  “You like your fingers, Marty?” I asked. He moved the hand without needing any more encouragement.

  “Anyway, I know you’ve got a lot of questions. Like, how I did that thing just now.”

  “I don’t really . . .” I started, but there was no stopping Marty. He reminded me of one of those toys where you pulled a cord and just had to put up with it until it wound down, no matter how loud and obnoxious it was.

  “I’m a metathrope,” Marty announced. He shoved open the door marked OFFICE and gestured me inside. I heard the whir of dozens more fans and saw a bank of servers sitting against the far wall, hooked up to monitors on top of a desk littered with Coke cans, food wrappers, and something that smelled like it might have been a chimichanga in a previous life.

  I pasted a smile on my face in an effort to keep from gagging, which Marty interpreted as “Please, keep talking until we both die of old age.” I gritted my teeth under my smile.

  “Metathropes can shift into any shape,” Marty announced. “Even other ­people. See, lycanthropes are locked into one shape, and they have to take conservation of mass into account. My muscles are ten times denser than a lycanthrope, so I can express ten times as much mass. So I can be a grizzly bear, or I can shrink it down and be a ten-­year-­old girl.”

  “You do that often?” I said. “Go out in public as a ten-­year-­old girl?”

  “Anyway, you’re not here for that,” Marty said. He pushed a stack of porn mags and chip bags off a spare chair and gestured. I would have rather stuck a hot poker straight into my thigh than sat in that thing, so I shook my head.

  “Did you know that there are over ten thousand cameras on the Strip alone?” Marty said. “Casinos, mostly. I watch things for Gary. Vampires love this city—­where else can you find twenty-­four/seven everything and an all-­you-­can-­eat tourist buffet?”

  “Gary said something about deadheads,” I said, sensing we might be in spitting distance of a point.

  “I’m getting to that,” Marty said. He punched up a grainy image. “Deadheads like the desert too—­dry, they stay preserved. But Gary has a strict no-­necromancer policy on his turf.”

  I knew Gary’s hatred of warlocks in general, and particularly necromancers. If one of them was working in Vegas, he or she was one brave asshole.

  Marty played the footage. I saw a drunk and a girl in a tight dress come out of a club—­hardly notable for a city like this. What got my attention was the deadhead who surged out of the alley—­just a pool of black on video—­and jumped the guy, ripping into him like he was a Double-­Double from In-­N-­Out Burger.

  “Sucks to be him,” I said. I still didn’t see why this was so important to Gary.

  “See, I thought so too,” said Marty. “Never a good night when you get mauled by a free-­range deadhead. But watch.”

  As fast as he’d come, the deadhead stopped and took off running.

  I understood now why Gary had sent me. A deadhead who’s raised by accident, or who starts as a vamp and goes feral from a mutated strain of the virus that makes vamps crave blood and fear tanning booths, will kill until their body gives out or until someone like me shows up, rips off their head, and turns their corpse into firewood. A deadhead raised on purpose, by a necromancer, can be controlled, used like a much more sophisticated and terrifying version of a tire iron. Blunt but effective when you wanted to fuck somebody up beyond repair.

  “You think this Alex Ivanof has started dabbling in necro­mancy?” I said.

  “Hell no,” Marty said. “Alex was my blood guy. He did most of the trade with the vamps, interfaced with the hospitals, shit like that. I haven’t heard from him since the day before this video.”

  He cued up more clips. “There’s more like that,” he said. “Dude walks outside, gets chewed into hamburger, and the deadhead takes off without feeding. Between Alex disappearing and this, I called Gary right away.”

  His hands trembled a little when he said Gary’s name. He might be irritating as fuck, but Marty wasn’t dumb. He’d been right to call in the cavalry.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll look into it.”

  I pointed at the frozen screen. The girl in the tight dress was backed up against the wall, but she wasn’t freaking out like anyone sensible would have when a guy tries to eat your date raw. “Where is that?”

  “Uh . . .” Marty pushed a few buttons. “The Switchback Lounge. Strip joint out on Sahara. You want the address?”

  My heart was already beating a little faster. I might not always like what I did, or for that matter what I was, but I was a hound. I was made to hunt. It was all I was meant to do, the only reason my heart beat and my lungs expanded and contracted.

  I deliberately kicked over a stack of Marty’s weirdo nerd porn on my way out. “I’ll let you know what I find.”

  I walked out to the bike and put my helmet back on, pointing it toward the Strip. I didn’t know why a necromancer had set up in Vegas, and I didn’t care. That wasn’t my part of things.

  My part was to track him down and kill him. Always had been, always would be. I was a hound. That was all I was good for.

  CHAPTER

  4

  I used to love the night. I loved lights, I loved the smell of warm earth meeting cool dark air. I loved the snatches of music that would spill out of gin joints and jazz clubs, the ring of heels on brick when you were alone, walking down a darkened street.

  That was before. Now night was just a means to an end like anything else, a cover for shifting into a hound or an opportunity to slip in the back door of a crappy strip club.

  I waited until a dancer ca
me out wrapped in a robe, tapping her pack of cigarettes against the heel of her hand. She didn’t even look at me, and I slipped inside. More dancers crossed my path, made up and dressed on their way to the stage or sweaty and smeared on the way off, glitter clinging to their tits and makeup running down their faces.

  I passed a bouncer who also paid me no attention and through a slimy nylon curtain into the main club, nearly pitch-­dark and encased in the throbbing bass beat of the club’s sound system.

  I liked dark places. I was even more invisible than usual. Low light didn’t bother me—­I could see just fine, better than I’d like in a place like this. The carpet was covered in burn marks, the main stage curtains were peppered with runs and holes, and the dancers working it weren’t in much better shape. I’d seen fewer tracks in a rail yard.

  Marty’s video hadn’t really been much help. I was looking for a tall blonde in a leopard skin dress, which described half the strippers in Vegas.

  If she’d even stuck around. How many working girls would jump back in after they’d had a john turned into a chew toy?

  A pack of fat guys in cheap suits and convention badges elbowed me out of the way, heading for the stage, and the dancers circling the tables converged on them like thong-­wearing piranhas, all except for one.

  She swayed in place, on the side stage, holding the pole like she really needed it to stay up. Her eyes were red and lifeless as the buzzing neon sign back at the motel. Vacancy.

  I got closer, staying at the edge of the pool of light from her spot. She was the blonde, all right. And she was bombed out of her mind. I’d seen it before. She wasn’t doped—­there were no needle marks on her, and she didn’t have the violent flush of a speed freak or the loopy, uneven pupils of an oxy popper. In fact, she was so pale that under the spot she was almost corpse-­colored.

  “Hey.” I reached forward and tapped the toe of her shoe. She gave one long, slow blink, pupils uneven, and then crouched down.