Black Dog

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Leo went back to the bed and lay down, stubbing out his cigarette in a saucer next to the bed. “She gets a little territorial.”

  “She’d be less territorial if she pissed on you,” I said. Leo flashed me a grin.

  “I’m not into that. If you wanted me in your bed, why didn’t you say something downstairs?”

  I sat on the edge of Veronica’s mattress. Everything smelled like her, like them. Rose perfume and menthols mixed with sweat and musk. The bedstead was iron, covered in white sheets and shams. Everything in the room was white or pink or gold, satin and overstuffed. I felt like I was inside a very bright, very girlie coffin. “That is not something I need complicating my life right now.”

  Leo stretched one arm behind his head, leaning back against the avalanche of pillows. “Not now. But someday. You and I are too much alike not to at least try it on.”

  I dropped my gaze from his, noticing the bruises on his back and side had faded to at least five days old, and the swelling in his jaw was gone. “Veronica isn’t just a friend,” Leo said. “One of her sidelines is a blood seller.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “She looks pretty healthy to be laced with vamp venom.”

  “She sells to ­people like me,” Leo said. He held up his free arm so I could inspect it. Woven amid the almost wall-­to-­wall tattoos was a patch of rusty dried blood from an IV needle. “All better,” he said with a slow grin. “A little conjuring put me right as rain.”

  Now I knew why he was in such a good mood, and running his fingers up and down the bare, bruised skin of my thigh like he’d paid money for me and not Veronica. “Stop it,” I said, moving his hand. “You’re high.” Leo shook his head.

  “Just feeling right for the first time in a while. Willing human blood for healing and protection. Unwilling for black magic and cursing. The more you know.” He offered me a cigarette from the pack on the nightstand, and this time I took it, dragging deep. The unfiltered Russian tobacco, undoubtedly sprayed with some hideous Soviet-­era pesticide, burned all the way down. It felt about right for the shitty day I’d had so far.

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” I said in a rush. Leo waved me off.

  “Did the conjuring, had some vodka, fucked Veronica’s brains out . . . I told you I’d survived worse.”

  I stood up. “I was going to say sorry for getting your liver or spleen or whatever busted in the first place, but it looks like Veronica took care of that.”

  “Hey.” Leo grabbed my wrist, tilting his head. “Are you jealous?”

  I glared down at him. “That’s rich coming from the guy who’s been following me since Las Vegas for no good reason other than he might get laid. For your information, the angel in there has a better chance.” It was a shitty thing to say, but I was in a shitty mood.

  Leo dropped his grip on me, his eyes going wide. “Back up. Survivor Man in there is what?”

  “You heard me,” I said. I was tired now and wished I could just curl up in Veronica’s mind-­destroying cupcake nightmare of a bed and pass out for a week or so. How had I gone from being the least favorite of Gary’s hounds to the most wanted lapdog in all of Hell? Oh yeah, I thought, looking down at Leo. I let a human talk me into going against my fundamental nature, for him to dump me and get obliterated with his favorite whore the minute he got the chance.

  “He’s a Fallen angel,” I amended. “Lilith and him have some big feud that’s been going on lo these thousand years, or something. To be honest, I kind of blanked out on the more biblical aspects of his history lesson.”

  “Fuck, Ava.” Leo grabbed an almost empty bottle from the floor and uncapped it, pouring it into a souvenir glass painted with a picture of Mount Rushmore. He killed it in one swallow and refilled the glass in a single smooth motion. “So does Captain America in there have a flaming sword and all that crap?”

  “I dunno.” I shrugged. “He just said his name was Azrael and Lilith had it in for him.”

  “Jesus,” Leo muttered. He scrubbed a hand over his eyes. “You aren’t freaking out about this. Why?”

  “If we stick with him, maybe Lilith will think twice about punishing us for Gary,” I said. “And vis-­à-­vis the angel thing—­why not? I’m a hellhound and you raise monsters from the dead. Why can’t Clint have come from the good side of the tracks rather than the shit side?”

  “I guess if you’re gonna hang with an angel, go big or go home,” Leo said. When I didn’t reply he frowned. “When was the last time you perused a Bible?”

  “Seventy, eighty years,” I said. By the time I landed in Louisiana I was more interested in a good time than in my eternal soul.

  And even if I had believed, it wouldn’t have done me a damn bit of good.

  “I suffered through an Orthodox ser­vice every Saturday for fourteen years,” Leo said. “They never actually mention him by name, but Azrael is one of the heavies in the Old Testament. There’s this book called the Zohar that all the weird old guys at temple loved to talk about, the mystical shit. Azrael is a big deal to them.”

  “I’m not exactly a fangirl of religion,” I said. “What’s the big deal about him supposedly?”

  Leo took the cigarette from my fingers and dragged on it. “He’s the angel of death.”

  I dropped my chin to my chest, squeezing my eyes shut. A headache clamped down on my skull like a vise. “Of course he is.”

  Leo shrugged. “Could all be crap, but if he is who he says he is, he’s not fuckin’ around.”

  “And neither is Lilith,” I said. “So I’d rather keep the Old Testament hit man close than piss him off.”

  “I don’t know, Ava.” Leo sighed. “The idea of a heavy like that breathing down my neck is killing my buzz with a fucking hammer, I’ll tell you that much.”

  I spread my hands. “What’s to know? He can help us out, so if it takes a few hundred awkward miles crammed into his truck, small price to pay.”

  “Or you could just tell Lilith where he is, and let the two of them duke it out,” Leo said. “You’re punching way above your weight with this guy, Ava. Sell him out and get Hell’s very own bunny-­boiling bitch off your tail, is my advice.”

  “And I need your advice, yeah, because I’m so weak and helpless,” I snapped. Usually I was better at reining in my temper, or at least keeping my thoughts to myself. It was easier to avoid getting smacked if you were quiet.

  Leo reached for me but I jerked my hand away, scrambling off the bed. The room was way too hot, and the stench of Veronica’s perfume suddenly stank like an open sewer full of flowers. “I didn’t mean it,” he said quietly. “Calm down.”

  “Clint saved your life,” I said. “And you ruined mine, so do me a favor: stick your dick back into your BFF Veronica and I’ll handle keeping us alive.”

  “Your life can’t have been that great,” Leo drawled. Only his eyes gave away anything, and they were dark and hard as stone. “You agreed to help me liquidate Gary. I didn’t even have to hurt you that much.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “I’m leaving in the morning. Free advice—­quit pretending like you’re my friend before I get disappointed enough to stick a blade in some part of you that’s important.”

  I stormed back to my room, pushing past Veronica in the hall. Her full lips parted as she bumped into the wall, and I held up my hand. “He’s all yours. You can pull your fangs back in.”

  I slammed the door behind me, threw the bolt, and curled up on the faded bed. It had been years—­decades—­since I’d cried more than a few tears. Pressing the musty feather pillow against my face, I sobbed until I thought my chest would crack open. It wasn’t because of Veronica, or Clint, or even because of Lilith. I hadn’t realized until this moment that I was alone, and I’d been stupid to ever think anything else.

  The moment I’d closed my jaws around Gary’s throat, I’d consigned myself to the loneliest e
xistence I could imagine. Even hounds had other hounds, their reaper. There was order and structure, even if the flip side was punishment and a violent, pointless death when your luck finally trickled out the ass-­end of the hourglass.

  Now I was nothing. I’d let myself pretend that Leo would stick with me, that his disobeying his father was the same as my killing Gary. I’d let myself drop my guard around literally one human in a hundred years, and I was screwed. Leo wasn’t in the same boat. He was safe on shore, watching me drown. He’d deserted me as soon as he’d remembered he belonged among humans. Not that I blamed him. I wouldn’t pick me over Veronica.

  He was right about Clint too. I should do what Lilith asked and be done with all of this. Get busy with the endless stretch of empty highway that was the rest of my unending life.

  Finally, my throat was ragged and my eyes too swollen to cry anymore. I watched the snow and the streetlight blur as I drifted finally into the sort of sleep that only comes to the profoundly exhausted. The full weight of what I’d done was slowly crushing me, but that didn’t mean I’d feed Clint to Lilith just to prolong my existence. My existence wasn’t worth it. I might be a traitor, but I wasn’t a coward. Lilith couldn’t do anything to me that would be half as painful as the simple fact I was still alive.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Louisiana, 1919

  There was no real land in the heart of the swamp, and no real water. We’d pushed the flat-­bottomed boats until we found the slight rise of solid ground that Jasper told me was where the priestess and her acolytes had congregated in the slave days, when the plantation was full of ­people and surrounded by flat fields instead of the tangle of the bayou.

  Caleb was the first one out of the boat, standing on the apex of the hillock with his hands on his hips. He nodded at the cypress roots and the ragged Spanish moss as if he’d personally constructed the swamp—­stink, gators, and all.

  Once this small dry place amid the mud had been secret, a respite from the big white house, its porches and peaked roof crouching over the sugarcane fields like a gigantic mausoleum, the upstairs porch just high enough to catch a glimpse of the Mississippi.

  Now the big house was rotting and full of possums and bats under the eaves. The ornate railings of those porches were pitted with rust, one felled altogether by a Union gunboat during the war. The bayou had crept in on the heels of the last owner, who took sick with TB and moved to Arizona in 1901. Native plants surged to orgiastic in the damp heat, choking out the carefully planted roses and magnolia trees. Kudzu vines strangled the live oaks into pale skeletons that lined the overgrown drive.

  Jasper and the others had to hack a path up to the plantation house, and then tear boards off the fallen pile that was the slave quarters to cover the shattered windows and a gaping hole in the floor just inside the front door. The inside not only looked like a tomb, it smelled like one—­rotting plaster lying in piles all over the floor, wallpaper drooping like peeling skin, gaping holes where anything of value—­lights, doors, even mantels—­had been stripped by thieves.

  Now when you looked over the cane fields, a mass of green breathed back at you. The swamp healed its scars faster than any human body. The river was swollen and surged so close to the house I could watch herons picking their delicate way through the shallows that had once been the lawn. I slept on the porch to avoid the heat and the fingers of mold and mildew crawling unchecked across every surface inside. Not to mention the roaches and the rats. I got enough of those back in New Orleans.

  Jasper came in the first night, cheeks flushed red in the lamplight. He was from Chicago, thick-­blooded and not used to the constant, unrelenting humidity of the swamp. I had a hard time coming from the Tennessee mountains, so I imagined he must feel like he was roasting alive.

  I lay on a mattress we’d pulled out onto the balcony, fanning myself and trying unsuccessfully to keep my white nightgown from sticking to my body.

  “We found the well house,” he said. “There are markings on the stones . . .” He pulled a damp notebook from his pocket and sketched with a pencil. Jasper was an artist. He’d come to New Orleans to draw the Mississippi, the cake slice houses, each layer a different color, the explosions of flowers in the Garden District.

  I met him on one of my long walks at night, when it was finally cool enough to move. He stumbled out of a bar on Canal Street and knocked into me, sending us both flying. Later, when he grabbed my hips so hard he left bruises when I moved on top of him, I let him stay until morning, our bodies close but not touching, gleaming and breathless in the gray quiet of first light.

  “She was real,” he said. “She was here. Ava, this is really going to happen.”

  I pulled him down to me, kissed him. He tasted like bitter wormwood and licorice. “I told you to stop drinking so much of that with Caleb,” I whispered. “It makes you talk too much.”

  He pushed me down on the mattress, kneeling above me and undoing his belt. I pulled my nightgown over my head, tossing it over the railing. It drifted out of sight like a dove shot on the wing, falling fast out of sight. “I don’t need to talk anymore,” he mumbled against my ear, nudging my knees apart. He pushed into me hard enough to make me gasp and sink my nails into his shoulder. Talking with Caleb always made him rough and quick and aggressive. It was one of the few things that made hanging around Caleb tolerable.

  “We’re not men anymore, darling,” he said a few minutes later, when our breathing was ragged and his cock twitched insistently, making me squirm and wish he’d just shut up and fuck me like Caleb did.

  I wasn’t proud of what Caleb and I were doing to Jasper, but his moods and his drinking and the days upon days where he wouldn’t sleep or come out of the rattrap attic he called a studio ground me down. I was all right with being alone—­growing up on the mountain had taught me the value of silence, of being peaceful with just your own company—­but being ignored wasn’t the same. It made me feel slight and worthless next to Jasper’s books and paintings, made an ugly voice whisper I was just a stupid hillbilly he was wasting time with until he went back to where he came from.

  Then there were the nights when he did come over, and he’d already gotten so angry at everything else in the world that he hit me until I backed into the corner of my sitting room and sobbed, tears washing the blood off my face and down into my collar. The next morning, when he washed the pink stains out of my favorite dress and brought me a cold bottle of beer from the corner store to hold against my swollen face, I always told him I understood.

  And then I went to Caleb’s apartment on Frenchmen Street and fucked him silently until I was so tired I couldn’t move. He’d sit up, light a cigarette, and tell me to go home. I liked the pain when I struggled to pull on my stockings and underwear. I liked the sting where my thighs touched when I limped to the streetcar. I liked that Jasper had no idea, because Caleb’s bruises were hidden by the ones he’d already inflicted.

  “We’re not men,” Jasper whispered again. “When this is over, we’ll be gods.”

  He slammed into me, hip bones jarring my thighs, and I finally came, letting myself yell. We were the only ones awake, and the hum of insects and night critters in the swamp didn’t care if I joined in. Jasper moaned and came as well, rolling off me and panting on the mattress. “I can’t wait,” he whispered. “I am so done with this paltry existence.”

  “You have no idea how much I want this,” I whispered. I’d finally be free to tell Jasper the truth. He couldn’t hurt me once we’d found the ground where the bokor woman had spilled blood almost sixty years ago, once we’d taken it into ourselves.

  It wasn’t until the next day, climbing out of the boat, feeling mud squish in my shoes, stepping onto the tiny island and almost reaching the summit of that high place in the swamp, that I realized Caleb was staring at me, not the surroundings. That I was alone, Jasper and the others standing behind me. Around me.


  As they grabbed me, tearing my dress and stockings, one of my shoes flying off, and carried me to the flat stone in the center of the clearing I screamed, ten times louder than I had in the night.

  Nobody who might have helped me heard my screams. Nothing in the swamp cared if I joined in.

  I jerked awake, head thick as if I’d polished off the rest of Leo’s cheap vodka. I dreamed about Jasper periodically, of the time before we’d gone south from New Orleans looking for the plantation where the blood of innocent ­people soaked the earth. I dreamed about the after far less frequently. Usually it was that night, on the porch, nothing but my own sweat on my skin. Thinking that just maybe, things would be all right.

  The memories of when Jasper would beat me out of sheer rage at being a colossal failure of a human being were much sharper, but I tried not to think about him any more than once every twenty years. The prick didn’t deserve even that much, and I didn’t expect the dream to show up tonight of all nights. I had so many other nightmares competing for space I was usually safe from that particular unfortunate life choice.

  So I really didn’t expect him to still be standing in the corner of the sad little room in Rapid City, three thousand miles from the sweltering bayou where I’d last seen his face. He stood in the corner by the dresser, his face stark white in the streetlight. Snow covered the lower half of the window, turning my room pale as moonlight. I’d slept for a long time—­it was full night, the blizzard turning the world into the inside of a snow globe.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered, rocketing upright on the mattress. I had no weapon, nothing to defend myself with. I jumped out of bed, feet barely touching the boards before I ran. When it came to fight or flight, there was no shame in choosing flight.

  “Come back, darling,” Jasper called, his voice somehow echoing through the entire house. “You and I never did say a proper good-­bye.”

  I skidded down the steps, catching my foot on a loose board and sprawling on the floor at the bottom. Except it wasn’t floor, it was sucking mud, and the walls were trees, and Spanish moss floated down from the ceiling to brush my face.