Black Dog

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I expected Leo to roll his eyes or maybe just start laughing, but he’d gone silent. I looked between them. I knew enough to keep quiet and see which way the wind was blowing.

  “Long after I was run out of Dodge, I started hearing rumors about human souls being recalled. Maybe two or three in all my time here. Necromancers who somehow found a way to breach the wall of Tartarus and bring dead ­people back.”

  Leo grunted. “Now I know this is bullshit. We don’t bring souls back. Just bodies. A deadhead with a soul would be . . . well, it would be a real fuckin’ freak, among other things.”

  I flinched. He wasn’t talking about me, but he might as well have been. Aside from the fact that I had a pulse and breathed oxygen, that was me. I was a dead person with a soul hanging on to my body by a few tattered threads, just enough to give me the illusion of humanity until the hound came out.

  I wanted to let it out just then, claw my way across Leo’s lap, and take off across the scraggly forest of cottonwoods and long grasses that backed up to the diner. With the clarity that only the very wrong and the extremely screwed possess, I saw how stupid I’d been to think we had anything. Leaving aside his thing for redheads, I’d let myself think he was on my side, that we’d gotten along as well as the profoundly damaged could ever get along with anyone.

  But fact was, I didn’t like ­people and they didn’t like me. That had worked for me for a hundred years, and just because a guy was tall and tattooed was no reason to chuck it in the trash.

  “I imagine that reaper of Lilith’s was helping her breach Tartarus,” Clint said. “She always had a way of collecting the top shelf in psychopathic toadies around her.” He’d stopped shaking, and his face looked less drawn. “How she’d do it, I don’t know, but she sure seems to think it’s possible.”

  “No wonder she came after me,” I said. Abruptly, Leo jumped up from his seat and ran out of the diner. Clint rubbed the back of his neck.

  “What now?”

  I followed Leo outside, trying to figure that out. He’d yanked my bag out of the cab and dumped the contents on the ground. “You okay?” I said, standing over him.

  Leo held up Gary’s ledger. “If your reaper really was hunting for necromancers who could bring a human soul out of Hell, then don’t you think it’d be in here?”

  “Why give it to me, then?” I said. Leo shrugged.

  “She didn’t think you were smart enough to figure it out. That’s what happens when you start thinking you’re too much of a badass to ever have anyone turn on you.”

  I leaned on the truck next to him. The sun was up and my skin warmed up for the first time in days. “Speaking from experience?”

  “Never mistreat a man who has a reciprocating saw, bleach, and access to a junkyard,” Leo said, flipping through the ledger. “All I’m saying.”

  I looked over at the Lexus. It was dusty, but even with a shattered window, ten times nicer than any car I’d ever owned. Five times nicer than most of the cars I stole. I thought about my Harley, how some crackhead was probably breaking it down for parts as I stood here, and sighed.

  “You could just go, you know,” Leo said. He didn’t look up from the ledger. I shifted my weight so he couldn’t see my face if he did.

  “I get that you don’t want me around, but I’m sticking with Clint. You can go. Take the car. I won’t stop you.”

  Leo shut the book then, folding it into his arms. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Why?” I spat. “I’m just a freak with a soul stuffed inside a dead body. You think I don’t know that?”

  “Oh, Jesus.” Leo sighed and tossed the ledger back on the passenger seat. I looked at the toes of my boots. It was better than looking at Leo. If I actually made eye contact I was pretty sure I’d slap him. Or burst into tears. Neither would do wonders for my image as an inhuman, soulless freak badass.

  Leo’s hands slid over my shoulders, his fingers squeezing gently through my shirt. “Ava,” he said softly. “What happened to you wasn’t your fault. You might not be human anymore, but your soul isn’t tainted like what Clarence was babbling about. You’re still you.”

  He lifted my chin with the tips of his fingers. “You’re strong.”

  I bit out a laugh, but it sounded like a bark. That was fitting. My throat was tight and my skin was hot, from more now than the steadily warming sun. My heart pounded against my ribs, and I felt my pulse race against the spot where Leo touched me. “I am so far from strong, Leo,” I whispered. “You really know nothing about me.”

  “I know because I know myself,” he said. “You think I don’t know the signs? I grew up with a father who beat us so badly that one time I lied and told the social worker the hospital called that I got clipped by a cab playing in the street. When I was fourteen I walked in on my uncles cutting up a prostitute who’d OD’ed in their car with meat cleavers. They offered me twenty bucks to mop the blood off the floor of the cooler and I did it. My dad was only around once in a blue moon, and he used our apartment to stash suitcases full of cash in the bedroom closet. We were still constantly having our power cut off. I gave the twenty to my mom so she could buy groceries.” He straightened up, working the kinks out of his spine like he was gearing up for a boxing match.

  “I went back to my uncle’s restaurant the next day, and kept going back. A ­couple years later a Mexican Mafia soldier named Pablo Cruz beat one of our girls when she was out in Bushwick buying coke. Nobody wanted to deal with him, so I loaded up a syringe with my mom’s insulin and followed him onto an F train around rush hour. I even made sure to jab him in one of his tattoos to hide the injection mark.”

  Hearing Leo describe murdering something like he was ordering a pizza didn’t bother me. I was sure Pablo Cruz, whatever his redeeming qualities, had it coming. After my time with Gary, I could say that ­people who ended up in the crosshairs of someone like Leo, or something like me, almost always had it coming.

  Leo spread his hands. “I had a talent for it. I found out I could call conjuring out of blood when I touched a guy my uncles did in with a hammer. Blood everywhere, and the next thing I know half of the restaurant kitchen is on fire. I was seventeen. My father was a lot more interested in me after that, even if I was just one of seven bastards scattered all over the Triboroughs. He taught me how to make deadheads, conjure, set demon nets to keep Hellspawn out. I never wanted to be a warlock. I was happier being a cleaner, driving junkers out to the scrapyards in Jersey, putting the screws on guys when they wouldn’t do what Sergei told them. But if I’d tried to back out, he’d have made sure I ended up in the trunk with those schmucks, so I dove in, and I was good at that too.” He lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly. “Point is, I see the same look in your eyes I know is in mine. You do what you have to do to survive, and that’s all anyone can do.”

  “I don’t want to go,” I lied. “I know Clint needs my help.”

  “Clint needs to grow a spine and stop pouting about some hair-­pulling that went on a thousand years ago,” Leo muttered. “You could get in that car right now and drive out of here. I wish you would. Knowing you made it out would make me happy.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t leave,” I said. That was only half true, I realized as I turned away from the Lexus and back to Clint’s beater truck. But I can’t leave because I don’t want to leave you was a real conversation killer.

  “I wouldn’t know about anyone he deliberately conned into making a deal,” I said, pointing at the ledger. “All we get is a name and a past-­due date.”

  Leo flipped open the ledger to a page he’d dog-­eared. The twisting scrawl of Gary’s handwriting made my head hurt. “This guy might be a candidate,” he said. “Gregor Grayson. Killed twenty-­three women in an abandoned hospital on Long Island and raised them. Deadheads wandering the halls, attacking ­people out on the road . . .”

  “He was mine,” I said. I remem
bered how cold it had been that day, too cold to even snow. Frozen grass crunched under my paws. “He wasn’t afraid of me,” I murmured. “Most of them are.”

  “Or a woman named Henritte LaSalle,” Leo read from another page. “Necromancer who specialized in bringing back dead children for grieving parents . . . or robbing paupers’ graves for corpses when the actual kid was too decomposed. She sounds like a real charmer. Collected June 1953 in—­”

  “Kansas City,” I finished. She’d been a little woman whose neighbors called her Birdie when they gave me directions to her house. She’d filed her teeth and she bit the fuck out of my shoulder when I came for her. I still had a scar there, so faint you could only see it if I spent an hour or two in the sun. The poison in her soul had seeped into my skin, just enough to burn a faint impression that never faded away.

  I cornered her in her spare bedroom, dressed up to look like a nursery. The little girl lying on the canopy bed was very dead, probably a couple of weeks gone, judging by the bloat and the black and green splotches on her skin.

  I’d actually enjoyed collecting on Birdie LaSalle. She’d laughed at me, spat something in French I didn’t quite get, and gurgled as she died, still trying to laugh at me.

  “So we have two who apparently managed to raise an obscene number of deadheads, and it sure does sound like Birdie got the real deal back for those parents,” Leo said. “I mean, if I went in expecting little Timmy and got Dawn of the Dead, I sure as hell would demand a refund.”

  “Okay, but it’s a long way from there to opening the floodgates of Tartarus and releasing Grayson and Henritte and all the millions of other ­people the reapers sent there,” I said. “I mean, Clint lived in the woods for thirty years. It only took Jack Torrance six months to lose his shit, and he had a wife and kid to keep him company.”

  “Lilith sure has a hard-­on for him,” Leo said. “If this is what she’s doing, it makes sense. Off the one person you know who knows your secret.”

  “Also professional advice?” I said. Leo smiled.

  “Someday we should have a few drinks and compare notes. I’ll tell you about the government witness and the Serbian death squad leader. You can tell me how you handled working for Gary all those decades.”

  “Drinking, mostly,” I said. I made a note to avoid telling Leo anything about my time as a hound if I could help it. Depressing the shit out of him wouldn’t do either of us any good.

  Leo paused on a fresh page. “Caleb Whitman,” he said. “In 1922, New Orleans. A necromancer who bargained for the knowledge to contact Baron Samedi, the loa of the Underworld. Some bullshit about the blood moon, unhallowed ground, human sacrifice yada yada . . .”

  He stopped talking, which I assumed was because the blood had drained from my face and I was white as any of the deadheads called by the witches in Gary’s ledger. “Ava, what’s wrong?” he said, frowning at me.

  I felt hands around my neck, or maybe it was just my air choking off, the heavy pressure that builds on your chest as you drown in your own blood. The dull pain you’re glad for because it fades out the sharp, unbearable ache of a six-­inch skinning knife between your third and fourth rib. The blackness came with it, crawling from the edges of my eyes like the world was burning, curling up at the edges and disintegrating into ash.

  Leo gave me a hard shake. “Ava!” he snapped. “Stay with me.”

  I fell to the ground without realizing it. There was a terrible wheezing sound loud in my ears, and something slamming against my ribs from the inside as the weight got heavier and heavier, choking off my air entirely.

  “You’re having a panic attack,” Leo said from down a long, twisting tunnel, his voice echoing tinnily above the blood rushing through my ears. “You need to breathe deep. Listen to my voice and don’t think about anything else. I want you to look at me.”

  I tried, Leo’s face hovering large as the moon in my limited tunnel of sight. His tattoos started to squirm across his skin, the stylized trio of skulls on his neck turning their empty eyes and rictus grins to stare at me.

  I pitched violently away from Leo and threw up, mostly bile and the few sips of the horrible coffee. It burned my throat like I was vomiting bleach, but after a few seconds my heartbeat stopped punching me in the chest and the bands around my lungs let go.

  “You’re okay,” Leo said. His voice was still faint, but no longer so far away I had no hope of reaching it. “You’re okay,” he repeated. He kept saying it like a mantra, lapsing into Russian. “Ya zdes’. Ty v poryadke.”

  I swiped the back of my hand across my face, and Leo ran his palm between my shoulder blades, the kind of slow stroke you used to calm a cat or a small child. “What was that?” he asked softly.

  “Caleb Whitman,” I whispered, suddenly as cold as if I was still out in the snow. I started to shake and couldn’t stop, not even when I curled myself into a tight ball, knees pressing into my ribs so hard I was amazed they didn’t crack. “Caleb Whitman is the man who murdered me.”

  CHAPTER

  19

  Leo stared at me. I sighed, looking down at the page of Gary’s scrawl. “I don’t like saying this, but Clint might be right,” I said.

  “You know something about this Caleb guy?” Leo said.

  I bit my lip, bearing down until I tasted blood. It went against everything I’d taught myself during my time as the hound. Don’t talk, don’t tell secrets. Don’t trust anyone, especially a human. Never, ever let on you remembered your life before.

  “The other hounds are lucky,” I said. “They don’t remember. That’s the way it should be.”

  I hit my fist against the side of the truck. A few flakes of rust drifted to the ground but otherwise I didn’t make much of a dent. “He’s who I was dreaming about,” I whispered. “Caleb. He’s always what I dream about when I have a nightmare.”

  I paced a few steps away from Leo. It was easier to talk looking out at the broken-­down stretch of road than into his face. “Caleb cut out my heart before the ritual even started. I was the pure soul he offered up. Except I guess I wasn’t the right vintage for Baron Samedi, because the only Hellspawn who showed up was Gary.”

  “That’s a letdown,” Leo said.

  “I always wondered why he picked me,” I murmured. I ran my toe through the dust, drawing a jagged circle. I wished I could just keep walking until the diner was behind me. “I guess he was never there for me in the first place.” Caleb had gone less than five years after I died. It seemed so anticlimactic.

  I faced Leo again. He unlatched the tailgate of the pickup and sat down, gesturing at me. “Come here. You look pale.”

  He was being polite—­I was sure I looked like shit, but my legs were starting to feel kind of watery talking about all of this crap again, so I levered myself onto the tailgate, letting my legs swing.

  “I met him through a boy named Jasper James. They were best friends. Caleb was mixed, but nobody in our circle cared. In New Orleans back then, ­people looked the other way if you could halfway pass. Point is, Caleb’s great-­grandmother, Hepzibah Whitman, was a slave on a sugarcane plantation south of New Orleans. She was a mambo—­a voodoo priestess. She healed ­people, delivered babies. She got them through all of the misery that their lives entailed.”

  I was shivering again, like I always did when I thought about the tale of Hepzibah. Caleb had told it to me at least a dozen times as we lay under the lazy fan bolted to the ceiling of his single room. It always made me feel cold, even when I was alive, and I’d curl closer to him no matter how hot it was outside, even at midnight. I thought he told it in the first place to get me closer. I didn’t realize I was wrong until his blade was already between my ribs, tight and snug as part of my own body.

  I dug my fingers into the tailgate until the beds of my nails turned white. “There was another woman on the plantation, Mama Eugenie. She was big and jolly and kind, but
­people whispered if you crossed her, she’d make you sick, make you hurt. Mama was a bokor, a priestess who works with both hands.”

  “Black voodoo is nasty shit,” Leo said. “I’ve run into a few bokors. Nobody’s idea of a good time.”

  “Animals started disappearing,” I said. I could practically hear the echo of Caleb’s voice. It always got soft at this part, like pressure building in a steam valve. “The master’s prize horse, a stud he brought from Kentucky, disappeared into the swamp. Nobody cared in particular, because, you know, fuck those slave-­owning assholes.”

  “Until it wasn’t just animals disappearing,” Leo said quietly. “It was children.”

  “Mama affected an exchange,” I said. “A pure soul for access to the land the Baron guarded. I don’t know what she was really dealing with—­Hellspawn, probably. But Caleb was convinced he could open a door to the Underworld and all the Hellspawn’s power would be his for the taking if he could just find the spot where Mama worked her voodoo.”

  “Moron,” Leo muttered, lighting another smoke.

  “Hepzibah told her daughter the story,” I said. “The daughter was a freewoman and she wrote it all down. Caleb had the journal, with the words and everything else he needed. All he needed from Gary was the spot. He was never very good at negotiating, but he was real good at stabbing ­people in the back. Just his bad luck Gary collected before Caleb could finish what he was up to.”

  “Ava, in your opinion,” Leo said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke, “do you think Lilith is really capable?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, without even needing to think about it. Gary had almost certainly been helping her, the two of them snickering behind their hands at their plans to start an industrial-­level panic both in Hell and here on Earth.

  I started to tell Leo this, but the whine of engines up the highway drowned me out. I saw three black SUVs turn into the parking lot, tires fishtailing on the gravel and kicking up plumes of dust three times as high as the diner roof.