Black Dog

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I didn’t mean to, but I teared up and a long gasp came out of my throat without my bidding. Uriel gave me a sad smile, then handed me a pristine white box of tissues from his desk drawer. “The Fallen lied to you, Ava. They have as much of a stake in opening Tartarus as Lilith did. Actually, they’re worse, because she did it for Lucifer and the Fallen are just waiting to pounce on the damned and use them for their own ends. With that many souls at their disposal they could reenter Hell, and then we’re all bent over a table being fucked.”

  I sniffed. “Are angels supposed to cuss?”

  Uriel chuckled. “I do. But I’m not very polite by angelic standards, or any others.” He leaned across his desk, and I braced myself for what was coming.

  “We knew Lilith was up to something, but she’s slippery, so when Leonid Karpov came to our attention, we . . . arranged protection for the two of you.”

  I pulled in on myself. “What?”

  “Think of what’s happened since you two met,” Uriel said. “Your souls are drawn together, true, but did you ever think it was odd how Lilith could never quite lay hands on you? How Raphael helped you, even though she hates Hellspawn and Fallen and probably adorable fluffy puppies too?”

  Something he’d said clicked together in my exhausted, battered brain and I snapped my gaze up. “You said you’d never met me in person.”

  Uriel grinned. “I prefer talking to you like this, rather than digging around for a trusted memory and showing up in your head as your grandmother.”

  “Oh, fuck . . .” I moaned, burying my head in my hands. Uriel leaned against his desk.

  “Others were skeptical about letting this play out the way it did, but I knew you’d figure out what Lilith was doing and I knew you’d stop her. Now Lucifer is gone, Lilith is outed, and no one in Hell is any wiser that the Kingdom has a presence here.”

  “I could have died,” I snarled at him. “A bunch of times. You should have told me what was happening, that you were . . . I don’t know . . . riding shotgun in my mind this whole time?”

  “Just visiting occasionally,” Uriel said. “Lilith and her reapers have done a good job of killing off either the reaper or their hound before they could find each other. This was the first time in a very long time both of you were born and survived long enough to meet.”

  I shivered uncontrollably, Uriel’s words worse than any truth bomb Lilith could dump on me. He leaned forward and I braced myself for the other shoe to drop and explode my world even more. “I’m going to give you a choice, Ava, because I’m not just in it for myself. There’s no upside to me letting you and Leonid continue to exist. I can blink your souls out of existence and that’ll be that. The thousand-­year cycle will be over. But . . .” He held up a finger. “Hell’s been languishing for a long time without a leader. It’s weak. And the Kingdom doesn’t like weakness. The realms coexist, and if one of them collapses, it’ll be like beads falling off a broken necklace.”

  He stood up again and gestured to me to do the same. I had to crane my neck to meet his eyes.

  “That’s the physics,” Uriel said. “The practical side is that you’re a lot better at killing Fallen and Hellspawn that most of us in the Kingdom. Real-­world experience and all that.” He opened the drawer he’d pointed to and handed me a black accordion folder. “That’s every Fallen that survived the exodus. Leo takes up the mantle of Grim Reaper, you become his hound as you were meant to. The pair of you hunt down and destroy every last one of said Fallen, and you and Leo can go about your business of reaping souls until the heat death of the universe for all I care. You’ll be together, and more important, you’ll have our gratitude.”

  I swallowed. It was going to be harder to keep my cool than it had ever been when my life was actively in danger. Uriel was still smiling, but it wasn’t reaching his eyes anymore. He was waiting for me to say no, and I had no doubt if I did it’d be my blood getting hosed off the floor.

  “Clint—­Azrael—­doesn’t remember anything about his time in Hell,” I said. “I think as far as he’s concerned what he told me was the truth.”

  “I really don’t care about Azrael’s feelings,” Uriel said. “He did terrible things, Ava. He manipulated you and he enabled Lilith to set herself up as the queen bee in Hell, and by extension, he’s responsible for you being a hound this time around. It was her reaper, right?”

  I looked at my feet and nodded. “I’m just not sure how I feel about genocide.”

  “Genocide?” Uriel raised an eyebrow. “Ava, you’re not wiping out something as precious and worthwhile as life. Think of it as correcting nature’s mistake. Angels stay in the Kingdom, the Hellspawn in Hell, humans and the things born from them on Earth. There’s no place in that picture for the Fallen.”

  I met his eyes again. “What happens if I say no?”

  Uriel’s face hardened. “I’m cleaning up Lucifer’s and Azrael’s mistakes one way or the other. Technically, you’re one of them. I’m being generous here, Ava. I suggest you pull your head out of your ass and work for me. You keep breathing, the Fallen are gone, and your buddy Leonid even gets to live on as the head of the reapers.” He gestured at the window. “He’s going to be plenty busy rounding up all the escapees from Tartarus, so it’s probably best to just keep this little side job on the Fallen between us.”

  I folded my arms. “You’re pretty confident I’m going to say yes.”

  Uriel reached out and patted me on the shoulder. “You stick with me, Ava, and you’ll find out I always get what I want.” He went to his office and opened the door. “One way or another.”

  I hurried to the threshold, looking out into nothing but blank white hall. “I haven’t said yes.”

  Uriel pointed to the pair of doors at the end of the hall. “You don’t have to say it. Just don’t try and cross me.”

  I thought about it. Not for very long. It wasn’t a hard choice, even if it was a shitty one. I wasn’t going to toe up against an angel for some principled stand. “How do I get out of this place?” I demanded. “I can’t use the crossroads.”

  “You can,” Uriel said. “You don’t give yourself enough credit, Ava. You’re capable of things you can’t even imagine yet.” He smiled and patted me on my sore arm. The ache and the throbbing in my shoulder vanished, and I felt warm and relaxed, as if I’d just spent an hour in the sun. Fucking angels. Always with the Dr. Feelgood routine.

  “Take the elevator all the way to the top,” Uriel said. “It will deposit you where you’re supposed to go.”

  “And Leo?” I persisted. Uriel pointed at the elevator.

  “He’s already free.”

  I went to the door and pressed the black button set into the featureless wall. I didn’t think the Fallen deserved to be wiped out wholesale, but I also didn’t think somebody who lied to me and told me I was always going to be a slave deserved my undying loyalty, either. Who was responsible for what happened to me in Bayou St. Charles a century ago, and the time before that, and the time before that, even if he didn’t remember.

  If getting out alive took agreeing to be Uriel’s personal Fallen hit squad, then I’d do it. I’d do anything to survive. That wasn’t the hound. That was me. The person I’d been all those millennia ago when Azrael had snatched me up and twisted me into the hound of Hell.

  “Ava,” Uriel called as the elevator doors rolled back. I turned. Shadowed as he was by the light of his office, he looked downright spooky, like a bird of prey watching me from a high wire.

  “Yeah?” I whispered.

  “If you try and fuck me over, there won’t be a place in Hell or on Earth you can hide from me,” Uriel said cheerfully. “I’ll find you and I’ll make you suffer.”

  The doors rolled shut before I could respond and I jabbed the top button, collapsing against the wall with my heart pounding. In the last twelve hours I’d been kidnapped by Lilith, traveled to Hell
for the first time, almost been stranded in the Hellspawn equivalent of a supermax, and met an angel who would probably peel my skin like a grape if I crossed him.

  And I was going to have to. Because scary as Uriel was, I was through being somebody’s bitch. Nobody got to tell me to kill on command, ever again.

  The doors rolled back and the lights flickered as I stepped out, and I winced as bright desert sun hit my eyes. I was standing on the side of the highway, the brown and red rolling hills of the Mojave spread out as far as the eye could see. The tall chain fences of the Nevada Proving Ground stood far away down a hill, but I was free of Tartarus. The crossroads had brought me back.

  The air was hot and dusty and full of diesel fumes from the trucks rumbling in the distance as they headed down the mountain grade toward Vegas, and it had never smelled better.

  I lifted my face and felt the hot sun.

  I was alive. I’d never let myself think of it like that, not since that night so many years ago. It might not be the way I’d wanted it, but I was alive and that was beautiful and I kind of wanted to scream.

  I opened my eyes when a car rumbled to a stop on the shoulder of the highway. It was low and black, classic muscle that grumbled like it was alive, white exhaust snorting from the tailpipe. The headlights were crimson, and as the window lowered I leaned down to tell the driver I didn’t need a ride. I gasped instead.

  “Hey,” Leo said. “You look a little lost.”

  I yanked open the door and dove across the seat, wrapping my arms around him and squeezing. Leo grunted but put his arm around me in return. “If somebody had told me being dead would be this sweet I wouldn’t have tried so hard to stay alive.”

  I sat back, looking at him. “Leo, you know—­”

  “I know,” he cut me off.

  “And Lucifer and Lilith . . .”

  “Lilith went through the gate right along with you and her boyfriend and she didn’t come back out,” Leo said coldly. “I made sure of it.” He reached over and opened the glove box. The interior of the car was as black as the outside, the glove box lined with satin. A small leather-­bound black notebook sat inside. I picked it up and paged through it. The pages were blank, but as I looked, a name floated into view on the first page, followed by another, and another, so many that they crowded together in dizzying, indecipherable text.

  “As far as anyone on this earth might care,” Leo said, putting the car in gear but not releasing the brake, “I died back there in Oklahoma. Now it’s just you and me.”

  “And a whole bunch of reapers with no leader who probably want your balls on a nice silver tray for sending Lilith to Tartarus,” I said.

  Leo looked at me. “Hey, if you don’t want this, you can walk away.”

  I should have told him. Right there in the car, I should have told him the truth about Uriel and what I’d agreed to do. I should have told him everything.

  But I didn’t. I was alive. I had time, time to figure out what I was going to do about Uriel’s ultimatum and about Clint’s death sentence and about what Leo and I were supposed to do with this new ledger, weighted with the names of all those who had escaped from Tartarus.

  Not to mention I had Leo. I’d never met anyone like him, and I didn’t talk because I wanted to stay there, right there in the car with him, for as long as was humanly possible. I’d felt invisible until I met him, because he was who I was meant to stand beside, our souls irretrievably linked by Azrael.

  Azrael was probably going to be sorry he’d ever brought us to Hell in the first place.

  “I’m ready,” I told Leo. “Where are we going?”

  He accelerated onto the highway, heading east. “Got an address in that book for a place called Head Office. It’s in Minneapolis. Figured that’s as good a place to start as any.”

  I was quiet for a moment, and he looked at me as the road unfurled outside. “Ava?”

  “What are we going to do?” I said quietly. “If it’s the same as before, and we just keep running into problems like Lilith? Nothing ever ends well for me, Leo. Ever.”

  Leo shrugged. “Then we do what we were made for. We send the problem back to Hell, and we keep on going. It’s not like either of us was ever going to have a happy ending, Ava. But we’re together, and as far as I’m concerned that’s not all bad.”

  “For me either,” I said. Leo smiled and opened up the car’s throttle. “Hey,” I said, looking through the glove compartment and finding nothing but gum and an antique highway map. “Where’s the Scythe?”

  Leo gestured around himself. “You’re sitting in it.”

  I felt my eyebrow go up. “I guess when you’re created by the Fallen you get the VIP reaper treatment.”

  Leo pulled the familiar black pouch out of his jacket and handed it to me. “Doesn’t have much juice anymore. I think icing Lucifer took the sting out of it. It’s yours to do what you want with it.”

  I took the Scythe and turned it over in my hands. I shivered a little as I remembered the pain when Leo had stabbed me. When Annabelle had used a Scythe on me and when Gary had used his the time before that.

  I rolled down the window and chucked the Scythe out as we went around a curve. It flashed once in the sun and disappeared into a ravine. “Minneapolis, huh?” I said. “I hate the cold.”

  “Doesn’t bother me,” Leo said. “I’m built for it. I’m Russian. Was,” he corrected himself. “I’m gonna have a hard time getting used to that.”

  “It gets easier,” I said. Leo reached over and patted my leg.

  “I’m glad I have you to show me the ropes.”

  “I’m glad we made it long enough for me to show you,” I said, and really meant it. Leo went quiet after that, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind what was waiting for us in Minneapolis, that our time could be cut short if one Hellspawn took it into his head he didn’t like the changeover. I didn’t even mind that Uriel was expecting me to become his executioner or that I still didn’t really know anything about Hell and its obviously FUBAR politics beyond the tiny slice I’d been shown by Lilith.

  Those were problems for tomorrow. Right now, today, I was alive, and I could sit here forever with Leo, driving into the rising sun and watching the road slip away, mile after mile, under my wheels.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Caitlin Kittredge has written fifteen novels for adults and teens, including the award-­winning Iron Codex trilogy. She also writes the horror comic Coffin Hill for DC/Vertigo. Caitlin lives in Massachusetts with several spoiled cats and a vast collection of geeky ephemera. When she’s not working she enjoys fixing up her 1881 Victorian house and reading extremely nerdy nonfiction books about serial killers, the cold war, fringe science, and anything else that strikes her fancy.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at HC.com.

  Advance Praise for Black Dog

  “As dark as hell, Black Dog is one wild ride, and I loved every delicious, twisted moment. Caitlin Kittredge is an author at the top of her game. Urban fantasy doesn’t get more kick-ass than this.”

  —Adam Christopher, author of Empire State

  “Caitlin Kittredge’s Black Dog reads like The Sopranos with all the forces of Heaven and Hell at stake. A riveting, fun, and dangerous ride with angels, demons, necromancers, and a badass heroine to root for!”

  —Melissa de la Cruz, New York Times bestselling author of Blue Bloods and Witches of East End

  “Some books steal your heart, but Black Dog will steal your soul. Caitlin Kittredge has given the urban fantasy genre a kick in the face—she gives the genre tropes a much-needed upgrade and slathers the whole thing in a heaping helping of horror, humor, and hard-hitting prose. I want more and I want it yesterday.”

  —Chuck Wendig, author of Blackbirds

  “Mwahahaha . . . That was wicked! Couldn’t put it down. Black Dog is off the chain and Ki
ttredge is in top form in this dark, twisty trip down a gritty road to Hell.”

  —Kat Richardson, bestselling author of Greywalker

  “Caitlin Kittredge at her ferocious best. Black Dog sinks its teeth and claws into you and doesn’t let go. And you won’t want it to.”

  —Richard Kadrey, New York Times bestselling author of the Sandman Slim series

  Also by Caitlin Kittredge

  Black London Series

  Street Magic

  Demon Bound

  Bone Gods

  Soul Trade

  Devil’s Business

  Dark Days

  Iron Codex Trilogy (for young adults)

  The Iron Thorn

  The Nightmare Garden

  The Mirrored Shard

  CREDITS

  Cover design by Adam Johnson

  Cover photographs: woman © by Oshchepkov Konstantin/Shutterstock Images; dog © by Volodymyr Burdiak/Shutterstock Images

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  BLACK DOG. Copyright © 2014 by Caitlin Kittredge. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.Harper­Collins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please e-­mail the Special Markets Department at SPsales@harpercollins.com.