Black Dog

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I cried out, and then there was a heavy, jagged clanking from outside and the lid of the cooler popped open, just an inch or two. I shoved it the rest of the way, gasping cool, recycled air flowing from a bare HVAC vent above us.

  We were on the loading dock of the casino, wedged out of sight next to a Dumpster. I helped Leo saw the tape off his hands, and we both climbed out. Leo grabbed my hand. “Come on. We need to get out of here before he realizes we’re gone.”

  “No,” I said, pulling away from his grip and heading back toward the inside door. “I need the Scythe.”

  “Ava, forget it,” Leo hissed. “We need to be out of Reno yesterday.”

  I just kept walking. I remembered what that thing in my dream had said, how I needed to forget about revenge, but revenge was all I could see. I wanted to hurt Sergei, for what he’d done to me and to Leo, for Leo’s whole life, for the misery he wore on his face just under that expressionless mask.

  “Ava,” Leo said quietly. “If we don’t go now, I’m going to die. You might survive, but my father is going to make sure I don’t get another chance to screw him.”

  I stopped, the loading dock spinning again under my feet. He was right. I could get my own back on Sergei or I could go. It wasn’t a hard choice.

  Leo’s shoulders went slack when I turned around, and I could see his relief as we hopped off the dock and jogged down the alley behind the Eldorado. “Wonder if Clarence took flight or if he’s still waiting,” Leo panted. He was pale, and we stopped in the shadows to get our bearings. No one behind us was yelling or shooting, and I figured Sergei must think I was good and dead. I wasn’t keen to disabuse him of that notion. Clint better not have bolted on me.

  The temperature was dropping rapidly in the hours before dawn, and I shivered as we hurried away from the promenade and into the wasteland of twenty-­four-­hour minimarts and faded, scuzzy motels.

  I popped the door on an old Chevelle with dinged paint and Utah plates, and we drove back to Circus Circus. I felt something give a little in my chest when I saw Clint waiting, leaning against the SUV’s bumper and tapping his foot. He glared when he saw us drive up.

  “Grand theft auto is just a fun hobby for you two, isn’t it?”

  “Just get in,” I snapped. Clint got his bag and climbed into the backseat.

  “Mind telling me where we’re going?”

  “I have no fucking idea, beyond ‘away,’ ” I said. Maw-­Maw’s tobacco rasp floated up in my mind again. Lilith has found the crossroads. You need to find her.

  “Even with the Scythe, Lilith is way ahead,” I said. “She knows where the crossroads are to reach Tartarus.”

  Clint gaped at me. All I could see in the rearview mirror was his teeth. “How the hell do you know this?”

  “I just do, okay?” I said. I could tell from his startled glance that Leo was also wondering, but he had the sense to button his lip in front of Clint.

  “How could she have found out?” I asked Clint. “If the Fallen knew the locations, it had to be one of you, right?”

  “None of us would do such a thing,” Clint said, way too fast.

  “Don’t hand us that crap, Clarence.” Leo sighed as I merged onto the interstate. I’d never been so glad to leave a town in my dust. “Everyone has their breaking point, and everyone has their price.”

  “If I did guess,” Clint said, “she would not have betrayed us. She was one of the few Fallen to speak against our treatment of the demons, in point of fact.”

  “Spit it out,” I said as an interchange loomed ahead in the gray, greasy dawn. “North or south?”

  “South,” Clint said after a long moment. I merged over. A trucker laid on his horn and flipped me off. I returned the gesture with my blood-­soaked hand, in no mood.

  “A state and town would also be helpful,” I said. Behind us, over Reno, the same iron-­bellied clouds from Rapid City were gathering. Lilith was here, breathing down my neck. I was running out of highway.

  “Bayou St. Charles,” Clint said. “Louisiana. I’ll know it when we get there.”

  I almost swerved into the oncoming lane. “Is that really the only place we can go?”

  “If you want to speak to a Fallen who knows these things, it is,” Clint said. He examined my face in the oncoming headlights. “Problem?”

  “No,” I said, speeding up as we left the city traffic behind us. “I can’t think of one fucking place I’d rather be heading for than the town where I died.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  The drive to Louisiana was mostly a blur of bad food and knotted-­up muscles from sitting in the Chevelle. The seats managed to simultaneously sag and be entirely full of springs. By the time we stopped for gas in Shreveport, more than thirty hours after leaving Reno, I thought I might have a permanent curve in my spine.

  Bayou St. Charles was a tiny map speck on the Mississippi Delta close enough to the Gulf that you could smell salt and mud when I opened the car door. Most of the houses we passed were on stilts, once we got off the main drag, which consisted of a post office, a diner, a liquor store, and a Piggly Wiggly. In rural Louisiana, you didn’t need much else.

  I didn’t try to find out if the plantation was still there, out in the swamps, far from the clean salty air. I didn’t want to know. I hoped that dump burned to the ground long ago, and the ashes got eaten by the bayou so you’d never even know it existed. I pulled into the gas station and filled up the tank, trying to ignore how familiar all of it felt. Nothing lasted long around here—­everything changed with the seasons, with the creep of the modern world, even here in the back of beyond—­and what progress didn’t wipe out, Katrina had finished off.

  There was nothing left of Jasper and Caleb. Fate willing, even their bones had been ground to dust in the Louisiana mud. There was nothing here to hurt me any longer.

  Leo went to take a leak, but Clint stayed in the car so long I tapped on the window. “You’re gonna get a blood clot you stay in there much longer.”

  He stepped out and looked at the little stilt houses across the highway. Some of the others we’d passed still had signs of FEMA building materials, or were clearly newer construction to replace a home that had been washed away. “Don’t like it here much,” he said.

  I slammed the gas pump back into its cradle, glad to see Leo approaching from the back of the gas station. “You and me both.”

  I drove on, following Clint’s foggy directions, until I thought we’d drive into the delta. Just before the road turned to water, he told me to turn off, and I pulled to a stop in front of another stilt house. This one was so old the corrugated roof was a deep orange rust, and the posts of the wraparound porch were entirely silver, looking no sturdier than toothpicks. I could hear the ocean from the driveway, even if I couldn’t quite see it. The sky was that bleached blue-­white that you only get near the ocean, when the land flattens out to sand and scrub. It was like being under a scrubbed blue bowl, and I worked the knots out of my back, relishing the heat trapped under the bowl’s dome. Back in Nevada, winter had started setting in, but here it felt like the last of the chill from when I’d woken up in the snow worked its way out of my bones.

  Clint climbed out of the car and flinched. “Jesus, it’s humid.”

  “This is nothing,” I said. “Air’s moving. You want humid, try Canal Street in July in the days before central air.”

  The windows of the little house were open, but nothing moved behind the faded cotton curtains. There was no car in the driveway, though I saw a little dock across the way with a small powerboat tied at the end. “I don’t think your friend is home,” I said to Clint.

  He shifted from foot to foot, and I wondered what was making him so nervous. “Not a friend?” I said. “If we’re not welcome here, I wish you’d told me.”

  The first hint I had we weren’t alone, and somebody was in fac
t home, was the sound of a shotgun racking up a few feet behind me. “Not him,” a voice said. “Just you.”

  I turned around very slowly, putting my hands up and splaying my fingers so there would really, truly, be no misunderstanding. I don’t care who or what you are, nobody wants to take a spray from a Winchester Model 12 at close range.

  “I’m sorry,” I said carefully. “Let’s just chalk this up to wrong place, wrong time.”

  The woman holding the shotgun sneered. “Yeah, that’s not happening, baby girl. Turn that happy ass around, tuck your tail, and get the hell off my property.”

  “Raphael,” Clint said. “This isn’t necessary.”

  She swung the shotgun to Clint. “I told you that’s not my name anymore.”

  I looked at Leo. He was watching the whole exchange with mild amusement, hands half-­assedly in the air. I glared at him. He could be taking our imminent shotgunning a little more seriously.

  “I’m sorry. Annabelle,” Clint said. “I wouldn’t have brought Ava here if I didn’t trust her.”

  “And the necrophile?” she snapped, moving the shotgun barrel to Leo.

  “More or less.” Clint shrugged. “For a human he’s not that bad.”

  “Thanks, man,” Leo muttered. “You’re a true friend.”

  “You trust everyone,” Raphael—­or possibly Annabelle—­snapped. “That was always your whole damn problem, Azrael.”

  Clint spread his hands. “That name doesn’t bother me. I accept what I am.”

  “And that includes running with hounds?” Annabelle shook her head. The swath of braids at her neck swished. “Uh-­uh. You can get the hell out of here, all three of you.”

  “Lilith is planning to open Tartarus,” I said. She swung the gun back to me and I tried not to flinch. “Clint said you’d know which crossroads she was planning to use. Tell us and we’ll be on our way. Or just shoot me. Either way, my arms are getting tired, so decide fast.”

  We stared at each other, a long, unpleasant stare that held for an equally long moment. Like Clint, Annabelle had black hair and black eyes. Hers were tapered, like a cat’s, and her skin was deeper and more tanned than Clint’s. They had the same long limbs and sharp features, the same liquid way of moving. Definitely members of the same species.

  Annabelle put the shotgun up, propping it on her shoulder. “Tartarus?” she said to me. I nodded.

  “She’s pretty serious.”

  “ ’Course she’s serious,” Annabelle snorted. “The bitch is crazy.” She looked at Clint. “I told you to put her in that Pit with the others when you had the chance, but somebody thought that she could change, that she could be taught.”

  She climbed the steps to the porch and opened the door. “Well, come on,” she called to us. “Y’all look rode hard and put up wet. Get in here and cool off.”

  Stepping into Raphael’s house was like stepping into the home of every kindly southern grandmother I’d ever known—­excepting my own, of course—­if the grandmother was also really into skulls, heavy metal, and the Second Amendment. A plaid living room set crowded around a rabbit-­ear television in one half of the front room. The other half was a kitchen with matching avocado appliances and a copper-­veined Formica counter that sparkled under the imitation Tiffany lamp. Braided rugs covered the floor two or three thick, muffling our footsteps. Then you looked at the walls, saw the playbills from everything from Lilith Fair to Metallica, the collection of skulls and saints’ candles crowded on a low bookcase under the window, and the rack in the kitchen that was filled not with granny-­appropriate preserves but cloudy jars and burlap sacks full of all the trappings of a well-­versed root healer.

  A rack of guns hung above the TV, and Annabelle hung the Model 12 in the top slot. The gun was old, the walnut stock polished to a high sheen, and above it was an even older Spencer repeating rifle. The guns were roughly chronological, ending with a brand-­new matte black Bushmaster in the bottom slot. Leo eyed them, but thankfully kept his hands to himself.

  “She loves guns even more than you,” I muttered to Clint. He glowered.

  “I hate guns. They’re a necessary evil.”

  Annabelle brought us glasses of sweet tea, and I glanced at Clint before I raised the glass to my lips. I wasn’t in a real big hurry to repeat my experience with Sergei.

  “It’s not poisoned,” she said. “Trust me, honey, if I wanted you dead I wouldn’t be all passive-­aggressive about it.”

  Clint leaned toward her. “You know I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t a grave situation.”

  Annabelle rubbed the back of her neck. “What makes you think I know where Crazy Eyes is goin’? You suggesting I sold you out?”

  “Of course not!” Clint said. “Even your best guess. This cannot be allowed to happen.”

  “Shit, Azrael, I know that better than you do.” Raphael sighed. “I was there, you know. I saw every last nasty bit of it.”

  “Nobody’s accusing you of anything,” I said. “But Lilith is gonna do this, and she’s gonna kill Clint as soon as she gets her hands on him.”

  “Oh, I doubt she’s gonna kill him right off the bat, even if she might want to,” Annabelle said with a thin smile. She got up and went to a bookshelf that was nailed together out of driftwood and scrap, pulling down a clothbound book. “You ever read the Gnostic Gospels, honey? Can you read?”

  “I still have a human brain,” I snapped. “I’m not just walking on my hind legs.”

  “My apologies,” Annabelle said, flipping through the book at light speed. “Lots of hounds, they were raised up so long ago ­people didn’t learn to read and write real regular like they do now. Run across a ­couple who couldn’t tell you the specials at Bojangles’, never mind read a book.”

  I stayed quiet. My grandmother taught me to read with her Bible, picking chapters largely at random and letting me stumble through them until I got it. I didn’t want Annabelle knowing I remembered my old life. I didn’t trust her, the way her eyes kept darting to Clint, me, and Leo, to the door, to her gun rack. She’d gotten within a few feet of me and I hadn’t even smelled her, never mind sensed her coming. Until I knew how she did that, she didn’t get to know my life story.

  “The book of Enoch makes mention of Tartarus,” she said. “Gets a little bit right here and there too—­a prison to hold the worst Hell has to offer. Then you got the myths, say Tartarus was a place where they chained up one of the Titans when the gods of Olympus turned on him. But what Tartarus really does is act as the prison within a prison. Hell is minimum security and Tartarus is a supermax. Ever since the Hellspawn figured out they could juice human souls long after death, it’s been stuffed to the gills with the damned, fast as the reapers can send ’em south.”

  “She knows all this,” Clint interrupted. “I know this too. Come on, Annabelle—­stop jerking us around.”

  Annabelle rolled her eyes at me. “Men are always so impatient to get to the main event. Foreplay has its place, honey,” she said to Clint. “I’m telling you this so you realize Lilith can’t just snap her fingers and open the prison gates. It’s like cracking open Alcatraz—­you gotta get your boat and your crew and your equipment. It’s a process.”

  I nodded. “I just want to know where she’s most likely to be. I plan to kill her.”

  Annabelle sat back, and I thought for a second I’d offended her, but then she started to laugh, a deep belly sound that shook her impressive cleavage under her tank top. “I changed my mind, dog. I like you all right,” she said. She leaned forward and took her own glass of iced tea. “Only three angels know what closed Tartarus. Those three were all murdered by Hellspawn before we hauled ass outta Hell, so this is secondhand information. I making myself clear?”

  Clint and I both nodded, and Annabelle set her glass down with a thud. “Right then. Lilith needs the three things that sealed the Pit to unseal it. Tha
t’s blood, just like everything to do with black magic and Hellspawn fuckery.” She shot Leo a look, and he raised his glass of sweet tea. Annabelle snorted. “Specifically she’ll need the blood of three creatures—­the Fallen, the innocent, and the damned.”

  Annabelle leveled her finger at Clint. “That’d be why girlfriend has the hots for you.”

  I looked at Clint, who drew back into the orange-­green plaid of the sofa cushions. “Why me?”

  “Why not you?” Annabelle scoffed. “Ain’t like you’ve exactly done a lot to keep the Hellspawn from chewing you a new asshole.”

  “You know why I don’t like to fight them face-­to-­face,” Clint growled. “So I’m the Fallen. So what? Lilith still needs two more.”

  “She’s got the power of Hell behind her, Azrael,” Annabelle said. “How long do you really think it’ll be until she finds what she’s looking for?”

  “What do you mean by an innocent?” I interrupted. How innocent could most ­people be in this day and age? Unless we were talking about a virginal nun in one of those countries where they didn’t routinely have Wi-Fi or electricity, the chances seemed pretty slim.

  “Someone without blackness on their soul,” Annabelle said, as if I were a particularly dumb toy poodle. “Somebody who’s actually done some good. Probably lives in a nice little house and does things like take in the neighbor’s mail when they go out of town.” She stood up and put the book back on the shelf. “Probably had a stint or two in the nuthouse too. Be somebody sensitive, but too much of a beautiful little average human to think the voices they’re hearin’ aren’t some chemicals going screwy in their brain. If you told ’em they had magical powers they’d laugh at you.”

  “And the damned?” I said. Annabelle gave me a sad smile.

  “Rest assured Lilith’s already got her hands on that unfortunate soul, sweetheart, plucked straight from the reaper’s grasp. There’s nothing you can do except try to beat her to the other two.”