Black Dog

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Up,” I whispered as I struggled in the murky water. “Get your ass up.”

  If I’d had the new Ava in my head, the hound rather than the foolish, arrogant girl who was too stupid and horny, too desperate for power to realize she was going to die, I might have actually survived that night out in the bayou.

  I ran now, hearing Jasper splash through the shallows behind me. A gator hissed and slid off a log to my left, and I stopped in front of an impenetrable tangle of cypress roots and undergrowth.

  “Darling,” Jasper singsonged amid the trees. “Your sacrifice will be remembered. Your blood will propel the rest of us into eternity. Now stop running and face your fate.”

  “You should do what he says, Ava.” Lilith uncoiled from her spot, leaned against a tree trunk, and stepped forward, looking me up and down.

  I backed up against another tree, fingers digging into the bark at the sight of her. She wore black pants and a jacket, a white shirt so bright it hurt my eyes unbuttoned to just above her cleavage, showing a delicate gold chain. Her hair was swept back, one twisting strand framing each side of her face.

  She regarded me with those unblinking shark’s eyes. “Don’t have a heart attack. You’re still useful to me.”

  “I don’t know where Clint Hicks is,” I blurted. That was the technical truth—­I had no idea where Clint Hicks, dumbass warlock that Azrael had murdered—­was at.

  “See, I don’t think that’s entirely accurate,” Lilith said. She examined the nails on her left hand. The manicure was so sharp it looked like it could carve through my flesh and bone, and I felt sweat roll down my thighs and back in the all-­consuming humid­ity of the swamp. “I think he’s so close he’d probably come running if you screamed.”

  “I’m not lying,” I whispered.

  “I know he left Wyoming,” Lilith said evenly. “I paid a visit to that piss-­scented dog park Billy’s shifters laughingly call their territory. And now I find you here, in a place crawling with blood conjuring and demon nets just keeping me from seeing what’s going on through your eyes.”

  I stayed quiet. She wasn’t looking for a response, unless it was peeing myself from sheer terror.

  “When Hellspawn sleep, you can page through their dreams, and if you’re lucky you find an entry about whatever it is you’re looking for,” she said. “You, Ava, are not a very difficult book. More like Dick and Jane than Anna Karenina.”

  Lilith’s lips parted for a moment, and I prayed she wouldn’t actually try to smile. That would easily rank as the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen. “I don’t know where your backbone came from all of a sudden, but I don’t like it. You’re on thin fucking ice and it’s cracking.”

  She didn’t really move. She was just there, in front of me, grabbing me by the neck and pushing down until I felt my voice box creak, a hair away from being crushed. “You lie to me again, Ava, and you’ll see firsthand just how unpleasant existence can be on my shit list. I didn’t give you Gary’s book so you’d turn crusading avenger for every stray soul in the pages.”

  “Then why did you?” I croaked. “I’m not a reaper. I can’t help you.”

  Lilith gave me a little shake. “No, you’re not, but since you ripped his throat out you’re going to have to do. I will get Azrael on the end of my claws and you will help me put him there. One hellhound with delusions of grandeur is not keeping me from the light. Not when I’ve waited for this long. You understand?”

  She let go and I fell on my knees, gasping. I was shaking uncontrollably, and I wanted to rake Lilith across her face, destroy the waxen perfection staring down at me like I was a stubborn stain. I didn’t, of course. I stayed on my knees, watching her pointed shoes turn and walk away.

  “I’ll see you in the daylight soon enough,” she said. “Now wake up. Your dreams are so fucking depressing I don’t know how you can stand it.”

  The swamp was gone, but I continued to shake and cough. A door banged open and hands grabbed me by the shoulders. I snarled, but they didn’t let go. “Ava!” Leo snapped. He pulled me to my feet, and then scooped me up like I didn’t weigh any more than the overstuffed garbage bags in the alley where I’d been standing calf-­deep in snow.

  I was shaking because my fingers and feet had started to turn blue, coughing because it was so cold that breathing felt like taking a bat to the chest. Leo was wearing boots, jeans, and a too-­long, too-­loose flannel shirt, signifying it belonged to Wallace.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” he demanded, carrying me straight past Veronica and a staring gaggle of hookers and up the stairs. “Were you trying to kill yourself?”

  I finally managed to stop coughing. I must have been out there for at least an hour, to be this cold. The sharp needles driving through all my exposed skin told me hypothermia had finished setting in and was unpacking boxes and picking out curtains.

  “It was an accident,” I rasped. My throat was still destroyed from crying. I sounded like the evil old woman in every bad horror movie.

  Leo didn’t seem to care, he just knocked into my room and grabbed the blanket off my bed, wrapping me in it and rubbing my hands aggressively between his own palms. “Everyone on this block heard you screaming. What happened out there?”

  The shaking was just getting worse. I tried to curl in on myself so I didn’t strain my muscles or break a tooth like I had one night in the forties when I’d chased a warlock across a frozen pond in Indiana. The ice held his three-­hundred-­pound ass, then promptly collapsed under my four feet, sending me into the freezing, crushing black below.

  I managed to turn two-­legged and pull myself out, and then I chased that fucker three more miles through the cornfields outside of Terre Haute before I finally put the bite on him.

  I stumbled into a Mennonite ­couple’s farmhouse and almost died, my heart not able to stand the strain of the unbearable cold and the flat-­out sprint through subzero temperatures. The ­couple was nice to me right up until my blackened skin and labored breathing started to clear up, then it went pretty much like it always did when I showed religious folks the hound—­lots of praying, yelling about Satan, and a quick getaway on my part.

  “Ava!” Leo snapped his fingers in front of my face and I realized I’d drifted.

  “I just had a nightmare,” I mumbled. Nothing was working right, but at least the stinging in my frostbitten fingers had stopped hurting.

  Veronica poked her head in. She was wearing sweatpants and a South Dakota State hoodie, looking completely different with clothes and no makeup. “She okay?” she said cautiously. “What did she take?”

  “Run a bath,” Leo said. “Not hot. We need to get her warmed up.”

  “Leo, if she’s going off the rails she cannot be here,” Veronica said. “I feel bad for her and all, but I’ve got my girls to think of.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Veronica. Run the goddamn bathwater and save the speeches for somebody who gives a shit,” Leo snapped.

  He picked me up, still wrapped in the blanket, and carried me into the bathroom. There was barely enough room for one person, never mind three, and Veronica stepped back, watching me from the door. She didn’t look worried or upset, but I knew I’d worn out my welcome with this little near-­death adventure.

  Leo stripped off my T-­shirt and lowered me into the bath. “Sorry,” he said as I screamed at the touch of the water. It felt like I was boiling alive. “Trust me,” he said. “It’ll stop hurting in a minute.”

  The door to Clint’s room banged open and he stared at Leo and me for a split second before he grabbed a towel and shoved Leo out of the way, covering me with sodden, stained terry cloth. “What do you think you’re doing?” he growled at Leo, eyes narrowing.

  “I’m saving her fingers and her feet from dropping off like the top of an ice-­cream cone,” Leo said. “The fuck are you doing? She almost dies and you’re tumbling
off to dreamland fifteen fucking feet away?”

  “Can both of you just shut up?” I whispered. “I feel bad enough.” The screaming had destroyed my voice, but the rest of me no longer felt like I was dying. As the pain ebbed away, Clint stood.

  “I’ll be right outside,” he said, giving Leo a stare that Leo completely ignored, lifting one of my hands and examining the navy blue beds of my nails.

  “You’re doing fine,” he said. “Once you stop looking like a Smurf you can have a real bath.” He levered himself up. “I’ll be back. You all right to stay by yourself?”

  I nodded. Leo stepped out, then something occurred to him and he stepped back in. “Were you trying to kill yourself?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. My life might be a pile of shit, but I’d never considered ending it myself. Mostly because I couldn’t, as far as I knew, actually die from most anything that would off a human.

  “Okay,” Leo said. “Good to know.”

  His footsteps faded and I sank down in the murky, rust-­colored water. I could see how Leo got to “suicidal” from finding me in the snow. From the outside, I must look pathetic.

  I drained the water and waited for it to run clear and steaming hot before I filled the tub again. Leo came back and stuck a handful of clothes through the door. “Veronica wanted you to have these.”

  “She must really want us gone,” I whispered.

  Leo shrugged. “You can’t blame her. She’s got her own to look after, and Clarence in there does have a bull’s-­eye painted on his perfectly manscaped chest.”

  He left me alone and I stayed in the tub until the water was cool again, and my skin had resumed a color that was close to normal. In the mirror, I looked merely corpselike, rather than like some kind of freakish, frozen zombie.

  Veronica’s sweatpants swam on me, but they were clean. I stepped out to find Leo sitting on the bed, tapping his pack of cigarettes against the bedpost in an arrhythmic clatter.

  “I promise I am not going to hang myself from the closet bar,” I said. “You don’t have to babysit me.”

  Leo stood, perhaps sensing I intended to flop on the bed whether he got out of the way or not. “Not to be nosy, but either you’re a hell of a sleepwalker or something is wrong. You were screaming. Really screaming, like you were in agony.”

  I put an arm over my eyes. Even the dim bare bulb hanging from the ceiling was too much. “I’ve been hunting down rogue souls for a hundred years. I have some crazy nightmares.”

  “I get those too,” Leo said. “I don’t end up almost frozen to death in my underwear.”

  His shadow moved to block the light, and when I looked up he was standing over me with his arms folded. I had the feeling this view was the last thing a fair number of Leo’s enemies saw. “It was Lilith,” he said, with no question at the end.

  “So what if it is?” I said. “You’re not involved in this. You can just go. Or I can. You and Veronica seem to have a pretty good arrangement.”

  “Look, last night was bullshit on my part,” Leo said. He sat down on the end of the bed, his weight making the mattress cave in so I rolled toward him. “Veronica is somebody I’ve known for a long time. I trust her, and yeah, we’re friends. But I was married for most of the time I knew her, so it doesn’t go beyond what you saw. I don’t have feelings for her and she sure as hell doesn’t feel anything for me.”

  “I don’t care.” I sighed. “You and she could elope tomorrow. I just don’t want you to feel like you owe me something.”

  “You saved my life,” Leo said. “So I do, in fact, owe you a little something.”

  I could argue he’d done the same when he kept Gary off me long enough for me to tear his throat out, but I let it pass.

  “It was my fault,” I said. “Lilith got inside my head and she coaxed me outside. She was trying to find out if Clint was with me. She can’t see past Veronica’s demon nets, but if she doesn’t know he’s here she will soon.”

  Leo held up his hand. “Whoa, got inside your head how? Are you broadcasting right now?”

  I shook my head. “Apparently any time I sleep, I’m a walking, talking video camera.” A residual shiver worked its way up and down my spine. I did my best to ignore it. “I thought I was running. In the dream.”

  “Running from what?” Leo clicked his lighter, the gold lid flashing.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “But I think we should probably not be here when I pass out again.”

  “I know a ­couple guys in Denver,” Leo said. “Low level. They mostly run the fights and do some trade with the Asians to bring oxy down from Canada. They aren’t connected enough to rat us out to my father.” He sighed and rubbed his forehead. “I think we’re probably safest with regular ­people for a while.”

  “A human would say that,” Clint said, coming in and sitting on the room’s single chair like he paid rent.

  “The human didn’t ask you,” Leo said. “You’re not handcuffed to me, Clarence. You go right ahead and fly free.”

  I rolled into a sitting position and grabbed up my clothes from the floor. “Enough,” I said. “Leo’s right. You can come with us or not, but I’m not staying here waiting to get picked off by Hell’s very own bitch on wheels.”

  I started shoving my things into a plaid suitcase I’d found in the closet. There was a drawer full of cheap bulk-­rate toiletries in the bathroom and I swiped a handful of those too. At least I was once again the proud owner of a toothbrush.

  Once we’d helped Clint push his truck out of the snowdrift kicked up by the plows and were grumbling down the road again, I turned around and rubbed the frost off the back window. I watched silently until the lights of Rapid City disappeared into the dim gray dawn, and only then did I feel safe.

  CHAPTER

  18

  Clint drove south, the snow fading away to the black and tan landscape of the Badlands. There was nobody else on the roads except for a few truckers blowing past us at eighty miles an hour.

  The sun was all the way up, glinting softly off the tops of the Rockies, when Leo sat up. “Pull over at the next exit, Clarence. I need to piss.”

  “I thought you were all hot to get to Denver,” Clint said.

  “That’s how it is?” Leo muttered, reaching for his fly. “Okay. You want your floor mats smelling like the bathrooms at Yankee Stadium, fine by me.”

  “Jesus, pull over!” I shouted. I jumped out of the cab when Clint rolled to a stop by a roadside diner. My legs were cramped, and I was going to choke at least one of them if I had to be in the truck for another second.

  “Hey,” Clint said, catching up with me. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “I swear to everything in the Pit,” I said. “If I have to be a spectator at one more event in the Dick-­Measuring Olympics, I’m going to wring both your necks.”

  “I’m sorry,” Clint said. “All right? I don’t want to fight either of you. We have problems other than a warlock with a tiny bladder.”

  I folded my arms. I felt like somebody had hit me with a car, backed up, run over me three or four times, and then clog-­danced on my head for good measure. My head was fuzzy, my reflexes were dull, and I didn’t think I could handle another visit from Lilith’s brute squad just yet.

  Clint moved his chin in the direction of a black Lexus that pulled up and parked at the low, red-­roofed motel across the street. “That car’s been with us since Rapid City.”

  “And you didn’t say something?” I hissed. Clint spread his hands.

  “What would you have done, exactly? Gotten out and chased it while barking?”

  “Fuck you, Clarence,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “Why didn’t Lilith kill you?” Clint asked me. “You disobeyed her, since I’m still breathing. All she had to do was leave you outside a little longer to freeze. But she didn’t.”

 
; I kept my arms folded to avoid making a fist. Punching a Fallen angel in the neck wasn’t a mistake I was going to add to my exhaustive list of poor life choices. “I don’t know,” I said. “If you’re dancing around something, Clint, quit with the jazz hands and just say it.”

  “If you’re still here, you’re still useful to her,” Clint said, stepping forward so his body blocked the view of our conversation from the occupants of the Lexus. “In what way?”

  “Because she thinks I’ll fuck up and lead her to you,” I said quietly. “And because she has a hate-­on for you the likes of which I’ve never seen in a century of working for a man who held grudges as his profession.”

  “That doesn’t explain why we’re being followed,” Clint snapped.

  I turned away from him and strode across the dusty parking lot toward the car. “I’ll find out.”

  The motel was a little mom-­and-­pop operation, flowers in front of every room, wagon wheels lining the brick sidewalk, little gnome statues peering at you around the spokes.

  I picked up the nearest one as I passed and kept walking toward the Lexus. Through the tinted windows, I saw the shadow of a driver scrambling to put the car in gear, but I got there first, hefted the gnome, and smashed it hat-­first through the glass.

  “Morning.” I lowered my face to see two tattooed, pissed-­off heavies with the same taste in suits as Leo staring furiously back at me. “Mind telling me why you’re following us?”

  The driver yanked a gun from the shoulder holster inside his jacket. I grabbed the barrel as it swung at me and yanked with all my strength. The driver’s body jerked forward, his nose smashing against the steering wheel. He slumped, and I pulled the pistol from his limp fingers, glaring at the passenger. “Let’s try this again,” I said, aiming at him over the groaning driver.

  “This doesn’t concern you, lady,” the passenger snapped. “Just back off if you know what’s good for you and let us take Karpov in.”