Black Dog

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Over the sirens and the yelling, a voice I never thought I’d hear again spoke. “Leave her alone, asshole.”

  Leo reached his hand down and lifted me to my feet. I stared at him. “How are you here?” I whispered.

  Leo smiled at me. “Don’t worry about it, Ava.” The Scythe gleamed in his other hand, and Lucifer frowned.

  “This isn’t possible. Lilith got rid of you. And . . .”

  His lips pulled back from his teeth as he looked at me. “Well. I guess you’re not just another hellhound, are you?”

  I sagged a little. When the ultimate badass of Hell tells you you’re an immortal hellhound, you sort of have to believe it.

  “He doesn’t matter,” Lilith said urgently, plucking at Lucifer’s arm. “He’s just a man.”

  “He’s not,” Lucifer snarled. “You know what he is, and it’s on you that you didn’t hunt him down.”

  “Gary killed every warlock who could possibly be his human host!” Lilith shouted. Her voice sounded like gravel on a chalkboard, and her eyes were so wide I could see white all the way around. In a moment of almost detached amusement, I realized that Lilith was scared shitless. Not of me or Leo, but of what her charming boyfriend was gonna do to her.

  “Clearly that incompetent sack of incubus cum missed one,” Lucifer growled. He shoved Lilith away hard, so she landed on her ass in the dirt, ruining her perfect suit pants. “Get away from me. Centuries I wait and this is the best you can do? I expected better.”

  “Hey.”

  Leo raised the Scythe. “Doesn’t matter who I am. I’m the guy who’s going to put you back where you belong.”

  “How frightening,” Lucifer said. He shimmered, like a zephyr of heat had sprung up from the desert floor, and I choked as his hands went around my throat. He’d appeared behind me, and clamped an arm firmly across my windpipe. I clawed at his arm, digging deep furrows out of his skin with my nails, but he simply grunted in pain. “Stop that,” he said, giving me a shake that made black circles spin in front of my eyes as he compressed my windpipe. “And the both of you—­I defeated the Fallen’s puppets before and I will have no trouble doing so again. As many times as it takes. You can become the Grim Reaper in a dozen bodies and I will always win.”

  “This isn’t a fight,” Leo said, but his voice had lost a lot of its conviction. Lilith watched us from the ground, a smile still playing around her lips.

  “That’s so cute. I send you to Hell and you show up for a reunion with Ava. She was so sad after I dropped you. She cried, like a sad little toddler.”

  “This isn’t a reunion either,” Leo said. “This is an execution.” He still didn’t move, though, and he clearly didn’t know what to do, now that Lucifer had his hands on me.

  “How about this,” Lucifer said. His voice rumbled against my back. We were touching the entire length of my body. “You put down that blade and walk in the opposite direction, and I’ll let you go with all your bits.” He didn’t feel warm—­his skin was the temperature of the air, but his grip was rock solid. I could shift, I reasoned, and that might give me enough time to get away.

  But then he’d hurt Leo. Leo was dead, sure, but there were plenty of things worse than dying once your soul ended up in Hell.

  Leo looked at me, at Lilith, back at me. The Scythe turned in his grip, and he shifted from foot to foot. I knew he wasn’t used to being the vulnerable one, the one not in control, and he didn’t know what to do. I could see the long row of cell blocks inside the gates of Tartarus from where I stood, and as I watched the damned stream out of the gates around us I knew exactly what to do.

  I looked back at Leo. “Just kill him,” I said. “Put the Scythe in him. Right now.”

  Leo blinked at me. “Ava . . .”

  “Are you mad?” Lucifer barked. “You’ll kill her right along with me!”

  “Leo,” I said, never breaking eye contact. “It’s okay. Just like you told me it was okay before, in Kayla’s house.” I’d die, sure. It wouldn’t be the first time, but this time I got to make it count for something. In the end, that was always what I’d come back to when I thought about Caleb and what he’d done. How pointless the whole thing had been, how little I’d made my life mean.

  I was older now. It was different. Even if I spent eternity in Tartarus, at least Lucifer would be right there with me, and Leo and I could be together.

  There were worse deaths.

  Leo hesitated, the Scythe poised, and I leaned forward against Lucifer’s grasp even as he tried to pull me tighter. “Leo, do not let him leave this place,” I said. “You know what you have to do, so do it.”

  “He won’t,” Lucifer said, his lip curling. “He doesn’t have the stones.”

  “You’re not great at reading ­people,” I told Lucifer. “Probably why you spent a thousand years as a demon’s cell block bitch.”

  Lucifer let out an angry snarl, but Leo stepped forward and stuck the Scythe into my gut just under my ribs, angling it up. I felt the red hot blade slice through me, and the thud as it went into Lucifer, deep enough to pierce his heart.

  Leo shut his eyes. “I’m sorry, Ava,” he whispered.

  The pain was indescribable, the worst I’d ever felt. I could feel every cell in my body lighting up as the Scythe took hold of the hound inside of me and ripped it back into Tartarus.

  There was screaming, a lot of screaming, and darkness. Some of it sounded like Lilith, some of it like Leo, most of it from me.

  I was dead, that much I knew, and my soul was burning. Hit something that’s already damned with the Scythe and it goes up like flash paper. I waited for everything to stop, that last period on the page that I’d longed for so many times over the century I’d been a hound.

  Instead, I opened my eyes and saw a sky full of thick gray clouds, lit by the spotlights of Tartarus in a dizzying pattern of roaming circles. A little bit of sooty rain fell, washing the dirt and blood from my skin.

  It wasn’t my blood, I realized, feeling myself over. I had a stab wound in my side that felt like I’d been stuck with a hot poker, but I didn’t have that nauseating pain that comes with a gut wound leaking poison from my intestines into my blood. The blade had gone through the cords of my abdominal muscles and into Lucifer, who lay beside me. A vast pool of red spread around him as he lay facedown in the mud, not moving.

  I got to my knees and forced myself to touch him, rolling him over onto his back. The Scythe had gone up and into his heart, a fatal blow delivered by an expert. Leo had done the good work I would have expected of him.

  Finding out I was still alive was oddly anticlimactic. I’d been prepared to die for so long that actually going through with it, and then finding out I’d avoided the end by a few centimeters of blade, mostly just felt like a letdown.

  But Lucifer was contained, and when I looked up I saw the doors of Tartarus were shut tight. No sign of Lilith. No Leo.

  I wasn’t alone, though, and before I could really freak out about what had happened I realized I had a much bigger problem than a dead Fallen at my feet.

  The damned surrounded me, watching me, none of them ready to get close yet. That would change as soon as they realized Lucifer was dead. I shivered as the rain soaked me. That sidestep from dying might have been shorter and narrower than I thought. These assholes were going to tear me apart.

  “Hey, girlie,” one of the closest said, a barefoot human dressed in ragged gray pants and a shirt, every inch of him smeared with soot. “You don’t look so hot.”

  I cast around. Stay calm, assess your surroundings, find a way out. The things I’d done a million times, only now I was stabbed, trapped in Tartarus, and there was no way out. That was the whole point.

  We were in the main corridor of cell blocks by the gates, and farther in I could see a low spread of buildings, surrounded by barbed wire and topped off with the twin chimneys o
f a crematory that was the source of the oily jet-­black soot that clung to everything and permeated the air with cloying smoke.

  “Hey,” the man said again. “I’m talkin’ to you.” He came close enough to touch and looked down at me, at the gaping knife wound in my side. “Looks like you might need fixing,” he said.

  “Fix-­it!” another of the crowd echoed, and the surrounding damned took up the chant. The man and others reached out and grabbed me. I swatted and clawed at them, trying to fight them off, but there were just too many.

  “Fix-­it, fix-­it,” the crowd chanted, lifting me off the ground and propelling me toward a ramshackle shed leaning at the end of one cell block. A bare bulb dangled inside, and I could see a work bench and a metal table, covered with crusty dried blood.

  I snarled as the inmates holding me laid me down on the table, a dozen hands holding me in place. Overhead, hooks dripped slow, coagulated blood onto the cement floor. I caught sight of an oil drum out of the corner of my eye overflowing with a rotting sludge of skin and fat that made my eyes water. The whole shed was rampant with flies and the smell of rotting meat.

  “Mr. Fix-­it will make you right as rain, girlie,” the damned who’d spotted me said, then smiled. I decided right then that I did not want to meet Mr. Fix-­it, and I’d risk exposing myself rather than take my chances with this mob.

  I wasn’t even sure I could shift in Tartarus, but when I shut my eyes I felt the familiar exchange between the hound and me, and when I opened them the damned were in a frothing panic. I leaped off the table, hitting the dirt and running for my life. There was a lot of yelling behind me, and the sight of a hellhound agitated all the damned in my path. They converged on me, and soon I realized that I was hemmed in, even my smaller size and a mouth full of wounding teeth not doing a whole fuck-­ton of good against hundreds of damned souls looking to take their fate out of my hide.

  Hands started to grab at me, and I snapped down on a few fingers and palms. The circle was narrowing, though, and it was getting harder and harder to dodge the grasping hands of the damned.

  A rock bounced off my back, then another. Just as I realized I was going to go down under a hail of stones and broken bricks, a blinding blue light washed over the open yard.

  The damned fell back, and I was temporarily blinded by the spot. When the sparklers cleared from my vision, I saw two figures approaching. They were taller than the damned, somehow more solid, and the damned fell back and knotted up far out of range of them.

  I also backed up as they came toward me with no sign of slowing, but one grabbed me by the skin between my shoulder blades and the other thrust a black cotton bag over my head. I was lifted, struggling, and then something struck the back of my skull, turning everything soft and cottony and blank.

  CHAPTER

  27

  Ava,” a voice said, soft and firm. A hand touched my shoulder. “Ava, come back to us.”

  I jolted up, and my head let me know how pissed off it was by sending a wave of nausea through me.

  I was on two legs again, lying on a white leather sofa inside an office done in muted tones of white and gray. The only color in the room came from the tie of the man sitting across from me, behind a white desk carved from a single block of marble.

  “You’re all right,” he said, standing and coming over to me. He wore a black suit and a white shirt that started my head throbbing even harder than it already was, it was so bright.

  I sat up, my boots leaving streaks on the white leather. Inexplicably, I felt terrible about that and tried to wipe them away with my sooty sleeve, which only made things worse.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the man said. “Happens all the time.”

  He was beautiful up close. It was an odd way to think of a man, but I didn’t have a better word for it. His skin was that same golden tan as Clint’s and Annabelle’s, and his hair was lighter, soft brown streaked with a few sun-­kissed strands here and there. His eyes were a bright gemstone green that dazzled in the soft light, and I got a close-­up look as he leaned in and examined my pupils. “You’re fine,” he pronounced. “You feel all right?”

  I touched my side, but beyond the blood crusted on my T-­shirt, my side had already started to knit back together. The incision was red and sore, and if my arm was anything to go on, would be for weeks, but I didn’t even feel all that queasy from the knock on the head. “I think so,” I said, baffled. “Where am I?”

  “Tartarus,” the man said. He went to a window of long white panels and flipped a switch. They rolled back to show a view of the prison, from high up near one of the crematory chimneys. My heart sank.

  “Not to make a bad joke,” I said, “but what fresh Hell am I in now?” The office was basically bare except for the cube-­y white furniture, nothing on the desk or the walls I could use to fight with. Even the floor was polished white cement, a high sheen that the cynical part of my mind figured would be easy to hose off when blood got spilled.

  This guy definitely had the upper hand, so I stayed where I was, trying to stop the waves of dizziness so I could run if I had to.

  “You’re in the administrative building,” the guy said. “Rest assured, none of the damned are allowed here. No Hellspawn at all. You can’t even turn into a hound within these four walls. I have barriers that prevent anything of that nature all around my office.” He turned and gave me a chagrined smile. “When you’re the warden you don’t take a lot of positive meetings.”

  I felt my breath catch. According to Lilith, Tartarus didn’t have a warden. It was just a dumping ground for the damned, the kind of wasteland where things like laws and decency came to die, caught under the wheels of basic survival.

  Then again, what did Lilith know?

  The guy came around the desk and stuck out his hand. “Sorry, I’m being rude. I’m Uriel. It’s good to finally meet you in person.”

  I didn’t take his hand, instead staring up at his square-­jawed, perfectly tanned face. “I thought the only Fallen in here was Lucifer.”

  “Lucifer is the only Fallen,” Uriel said, withdrawing his hand. He went to a small indent in the wall and revealed a bar behind a sliding panel. He poured me a glass of water out of a decanter shaped like a teardrop and brought it back. “Here. I know how parched you get down in the yards.”

  I took the glass cautiously. My throat was dry and felt like I’d chewed on sand, and I figured he wouldn’t try to poison me, since he could have killed me when I was passed out.

  “I’m an angel,” Uriel said. “Not a Fallen. I came from the Kingdom to administer things here, but I am not like those animals you met. Especially not Lucifer.”

  I choked on my water, sending a flood down the front of my shirt. Uriel got a bar towel and handed it to me, frowning as I dabbed at my filthy shirt. “Sorry to be so blunt, but we need to talk honestly, and I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Angels only live in the Kingdom,” I said dumbly, like I was five years old and telling somebody what sound the cow made.

  “Some do,” Uriel said. “Some live on Earth. We just know how to actually live, not run around fucking everything up and making a spectacle of ourselves like the Fallen and the Hellspawn.” He accepted the towel back and put it down a laundry chute behind another soundless wall panel.

  “Clint said . . .” I started, then stopped. Uriel cocked his head. He was tall, probably at least six and a half feet, but he carried himself well, his tailored suit fitting his lanky limbs like a carapace.

  “Clint? Oh, right. That’s what Azrael is calling himself these days.” He tapped a drawer in his desk. “I’ve got a file on all of them. All of the Fallen who survived the exodus to Earth. All of the demons out there in Hell too.”

  “I’m really confused,” I blurted, and Uriel laughed. When he laughed his entire face lit up, and if I’d met him anywhere else—­if I was anyone else—­I’d ha
ve a hard time speaking and not just staring.

  “You’re unique, Ava. I assume Azrael told you something to wet your whistle—­mind if I ask how much?”

  I nodded, seizing on the fact that he seemed pleasant and reasonable on the surface. I was pretty sure it was an act, but maybe I could get something. “If I can ask you something too.”

  “Anything.” Uriel spread his hands. “Shoot.”

  “How are you here?” I said. “I mean, I don’t know much, but I understand how the crossroads work.”

  “The Kingdom commands a lot of power, more than anything Hell has to offer,” Uriel said. “When the Fallen built this place it didn’t go unnoticed. We reacted late, but we did what we could.” He sat down in his desk chair, leaning back and crossing one shiny black shoe across the knee of his suit. “Azrael tell you the demons sealed him out of Tartarus?”

  I nodded. Uriel grinned wider. “They had a little help. All we could do was close it up and make sure only the damned and the condemned came in and nothing ever, ever came out. The demons use the damned, and as long as they have souls on tap they don’t ask many questions.”

  “Until Lilith,” I said. Uriel sighed.

  “That nutcase has caused me more problems than any other Hellspawn combined. Her and Lucifer’s little homicidal love story is a pain right in my ass.”

  “He’s dead,” I said quietly. “Leo killed him.”

  Uriel didn’t ask how or who Leo was, so I figured he must be poking around inside my skull like Lilith had. “Ava,” he said aloud. “What did Azrael say?”

  I knew what he was asking about, so I took a deep breath and let it out. “He said I’m not human, that I have the soul of a hound only. That he and the other Fallen created four couriers to travel the crossroads and that one of them started bringing lost souls to Hell. Me and Leo are those souls, dying over and over because there’s no Fallen in Hell anymore to use us.”

  “Use is an accurate description,” Uriel said. “Ava, you were human once. Azrael stole two human souls himself and twisted them, destroyed them to create the reapers and the hellhounds. He’s a bastard of the highest order and always was.”