by Levi Black
But Sensei Laura never had a living, cursed sword.
Or magick.
So I push her voice out of my head.
At the sight of the sword the skinhound barks and takes a step back. It’s a strangled sound, asthmatic and wheezing. It surprises me. Weeks of being followed by this damn thing and I’ve never heard him do anything other than growl. Usually he is silent.
“Oh, you don’t like that?” I snarl. “Imagine how much you aren’t going to like it when I cut you in two.”
The skinhound yips and lowers himself on raw haunches.
Then he steps forward again.
The sword sings out, its thirst pulsing down my arm and spilling into my chest. My stomach clenches in response. I pull the sword up by my face in ready position and feel heat radiating off the razor edge of it. I growl back at the skinhound. “One more step.”
He launches himself at me in an oily uncoiling of vivisected muscle.
Ripping the sword around, I swing for his thick neck. As the blade curves through the air at the end of my arm I can already feel it slicing through the muscle, cutting the fiber of it, shearing through the vertebrae hidden inside, and my heart surges in my chest with the thought of one blow one kill.
A split second before the edge of the sword can connect, the skinhound twists in midair.
He rolls around my strike like liquid mercury, his body defying the laws of physics, and his teeth clamp on to my left arm. The coat screams as the long teeth punch through it, but it still hardens around my arm, protecting me. The skinhound’s momentum whips his body through the air, jerking me around and off my feet. I hit the tile hard, landing on my chest and chin, mostly my chin. The jolt cracks my teeth together and sends flashes of bright white crashing against my eyelids. Oathbreaker clatters out of my hand, bouncing away, leaving me unarmed.
I open my eyes, lying on my stomach, and they are full of water, making everything blurry and indistinct. I can make out the shape of the skinhound as he struggles to catch purchase on the hospital tile.
Get up. Get up or get dead! Sensei Laura screams in my head.
Pushing into a roll, I sit up and shake my head, trying to clear it out. The blow to my chin rung my bell and now everything is in sight, but it all has a vibration to it, making it slightly indistinct, as if I am out of sync with the frequency of the world around me. Climbing to my feet, I look for Oathbreaker but don’t see it.
The clickity-clack of nails on tile brings me back to the skinhound.
He’s coming at me, trotting down the hallway, building momentum. I drop down, lowering my stance, getting ready for him. My arm is throbbing from the pressure of the bite and my shoulder has a white-hot needle of pain jabbing into it from being yanked around.
And everything is still fuzzy.
And I don’t care.
The adrenaline sings in my blood, making my body tingle. Magick bubbles in my stomach and spills out of my Mark in crimson gobbets of etheric energy. I feel electrified and in this moment I am alive, nothing more, only alive, and nothing matters but me and my enemy.
In this moment there is no Man in Black, no elder gods with bad intentions, no Daniel being in a coma.
Just war.
The skinhound hits me dead center, weighing more than me and full of power, but I am ready and braced. My fingers dig into the raw meat of him, sinking like it’s gelatin. I twist with my hips and thrust with my legs, taking the skinhound off his feet. The coat whips up around me, slapping into the skinhound and helping me lift as I toss the damned thing up and over my shoulder and away from me.
He crashes into the ceiling with a yelp, knocking white acoustic tiles down in a shower of dust and dirt. He slams into a light fixture and the fluorescent bulbs explode on impact, tinkling down onto the tile in a shower of tiny glass shards. The skinhound lands in it, sliding along his side for a few feet. The broken glass sticks to his body but doesn’t seem to hurt him at all.
He climbs to his feet, but I’m still on mine. I’m sucking wind, but I’m doing it standing up.
Take that, sucker!
My hands ball into fists; my right one, the one with the Mark, feels swollen and heavy and hot. I glance down and it is nearly twice the size it’s supposed to be, the flesh along the back of it tight and veiny and crimson red. Magick leaks out of the sides of it like pus from a suppurated wound.
My red right hand.
I’m still staring at it when the skinhound sinks his teeth on my leg and drags me to the floor.
28
I’M BEING SHAKEN, slid across the tiles like a toy. My head bangs against the door to Daniel’s room and I get my arms up to protect it. I want to throw my hands out, to stop my movement, but I keep the right one clenched tight and the left stays by my face.
The coat is rolled up under me and I feel it struggling to get out so it can help.
I kick out and my foot hits something solid, but I don’t know if it’s the wall or the skinhound’s shoulder. My other leg screams in pain as the skinhound keeps it in his jaws and lifts his head. I kick again and feel it in my other leg, so I know I hit the skinhound.
The pressure on my leg lets go suddenly and I flop over onto my back. Before I can push and get to my feet the skinhound is up by my chest, jaws snapping. I feel a string of ichor land on my cheek and it stings like chemicals. He tenses above me and I know with all certainty he is about to lunge and tear my throat out.
Come on.
Come on!
He lunges and I swing with all my might, driving my magick-laden fist into the side of his raw skull, just behind his bulging jaw and clacking, threshing teeth.
It’s like I hit him with a sledgehammer and the strength of ten mighty men.
The skinhound yelps and flips backward, blasted away from me by the magick I unleash. As he falls, a ribbon of etheric energy stretches from my hand to him and I tap my ability, calling on my Mark, and I sink the hook deep.
My magick connects with the skinhound and my head rushes with the weird alien landscape that is an otherworldly creature’s mind. Nothing makes sense; everything is in fluid feelings and pictures and … scents? Yes, even without a nose, skinhounds work off of smell. There’s a picture of me wrapped in the scent of uncooked steak and dry grass.
It takes me a second to get my mind clear. To fight back to human.
The skinhound doesn’t attack; he sits on the tile, looking up at me with his one baleful eye and waiting for my command.
The magick stretches between us, sticky like taffy and just as messy, but the connection on each end is solid. It’s not a sensation but a concept, like when you drive a car and you know without looking how much space that vehicle occupies around you so that you can move in traffic without causing a crash. You don’t feel the car outside of the seat, the wheel, and the pedals, but you know it like you know the end of your own arm. This is like that. The skinhound isn’t me but an extension of me and my will, bonded though the magick strung betwixt and between us.
The world narrows, the empty hospital falling away, everything tightening down to just me and this thing that has tracked me, has hounded me, since the Man in Black swept through my door and dragged me into a world of elder godly shit.
Holding the connection, I take a step toward the skinhound. My foot hits something that clatters and chimes, muffled under the hem of the coat. I glance down to find Oathbreaker lying naked and raw at my feet.
For a moment I hesitate, afraid to pick it up, afraid that doing so will break the connection between me and the skinhound. I let my mind slide down the ribbon of etheric energy and test it, tugging on the barb of the spell I’ve cast. It’s deep, sunk into the meat of the creature. He won’t be removing it without chewing part of himself off. As I pull to test it the prongs of my magick sink deeper, setting in place. The skinhound whimpers and drops flat, lying in a puddle of his own wet.
I reach down to pick up Oathbreaker and notice that my hand is back to normal. I guess expelling that magi
ck fixed it. It still tingles and aches in the joints, but it looks normal.
Except for the crimson glow of magick.
Oathbreaker feels like it leaps to my fingers when I touch it.They are glad to be back in my hand.
I move to the skinhound, the cursed blade naked in my hand, not gleaming at all in the flickering half-light of the hallway. He looks up at me, lifting his skinless face just enough to roll his one egg yolk eye to look at me.
Oathbreaker pushes against my Mark, urging me to swing it, to cleave this demon dog in two and end his blasphemous existence.
My left ear, the ruined one, the one that’s nothing but a gnarl of scar tissue and shredded cartilage, throbs as if a cold breeze just blew across it. This skinhound did that to me.
I roll my fingers on Oathbreaker’s handle and they pulse in response, eager to be put to their bloody-handed purpose. I lift them over my head, ready to apply them to the task of destroying this thing at my feet.
The skinhound drops his head with a whimper and a squelch.
Then he rolls over and gives me his belly.
Like a real dog.
Like my real dog.
My head fills with the memory of Winston, the great shaggy giant of a golden retriever I grew up with. He was huge my whole life, bigger than me by at least fifty pounds, making the earth shake as he would bound joyfully up to me and then drop and roll to his back, legs akimbo in the air, belly exposed for rubbing, like a giant fool. He did this every time he would see me whether it had been five minutes or five days. After the thing happened, after I had come home from the hospital, he had sensed I was hurt and when he dropped and rolled it was slowly, gently, so he wouldn’t hurt me more or spook me, but still showing me he loved me. He moved into my bedroom after that, sleeping beside me each night, lying along my legs with his great big back on days I was just too damned depressed to crawl out from under the covers. Reassuring, protecting, comforting.
Cancer took him in our sleep when I was eighteen.
Even the day before he passed, when he was too tired from the tumors filling his lungs to bound or run, he still would roll, slowly pushing through the discomfort, for just one second of my hand rubbing his belly.
My eyes feel wet.
Dammit.
Shoving Oathbreaker into the coat, I drop to my knees beside the skinhound. He twists, bending sideways, still on his back but now able to look at me with his awful cardinal eye. He’s grotesque, all exposed muscle and traceries of veins stitched together with gristle and cartilage. The muscles of his stomach are thin and stretched and, this close, I can see the fiber of them through a mostly translucent membrane that glistens wetly. I reach out slowly, waiting for him to lunge and snap his jaws shut on my throat.
His whipcord tail of vertebrae and gristle thumps against the floor.
Just like Winston used to wag his tail when I would bend to give him the belly rub.
My fingers stroke the membrane and it’s slick under them and firm, neither warm nor cold. At my touch the tail goes wild, beating the tile like a drum. The skinhound cracks his jaws. His blister-pink tongue lolls out onto the floor and he begins panting.
Just like Winston.
I kneel in a supernaturally empty hospital hallway, stroking the belly of a dissected hellhound, as big, hot tears stream down my face and magick leaks out into a pool around us.
29
THE SPELL AROUND me crackles. Whatever magick isolated us in the hallway, apart from all the life and activity that has to be inside this hospital, falls in a stinging winter rain of broken spellcraft, like tiny shards of cold spearing into me all around.
Until it begins to come apart I didn’t feel it at all.
And I didn’t put it there.
Maybe the skinhound?
How powerful is this thing?
Sound returns to me slowly, pushing through the crumbling magick. First the low and unobtrusive Muzak of the hospital, some loungified version of a mid-nineties pop hit, starts like a wind-up phonograph, dragging in the beginning and ramping to full speed over the course of many seconds. As it locks into place I can feel the presence of people. They press against me like the living things they are. People in rooms breathing and talking and eating and living even with whatever illness brought them here. People walking and working, attending patients.
The spell begins to slip faster, fleeing away with each second.
We aren’t going to be alone much longer.
I push myself up, the coat moving out from under my feet. That’s reassuring. If the coat hadn’t been alive it would have tripped me.
“C’mon, boy.” I keep my voice quick and low. The skinhound rolls to his feet in an explosion of movement that is violent and graceful at the same time. He moves right to my side, head even with my hip, and follows me back to Daniel’s room.
The envelope of sound around me presses closer. If anyone comes out of any room and sees the skinhound there’s no telling what chaos will erupt.
My hand hits the door and it flies open.
Javier jerks short, his chest against my palm and his face twisted with surprise. Before he can say anything I push him back into the room and step in. The skinhound slips by me like a shadow.
I shut the door as Javier exclaims, “Madre Dios!”
I turn into the room and he’s moved to the corner, hands out and a look of fear on his face. Ashtoreth stands beside Daniel’s bed, arms crossed and one eyebrow ticked up in amusement.
“You just keep making friends, don’t you, Charlie?”
“Apparently I’m charming.”
She licks her lips. “You do have your charms, even hidden under that coat of yours.”
The innuendo stops me cold. “Why’d you go there?”
She shrugs. “The door was open. I simply walked through.”
“Don’t hit on me.”
“I didn’t hit you.”
“Goddammit, Ashtoreth.”
“Which one?” She actually has the nerve to smile.
The skinhound sits beside my leg.
My hand falls automatically to his head, stroking the crease behind the nubs of cartilage that once were ears.
I push out of my mind how easy it has been to accept the weird shit I keep getting thrown.
The only way out is through.
Javier drops his hands and steps out of the corner. “I thought the coyote was bad?”
I look at him. “Things change at a moment’s notice in this game, Javi. You gotta keep up and be ready for anything.”
“Can you trust it?”
“She can trust it,” Ashtoreth says. “That is a creature without artifice.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
She gives me a look; is it … wistful? Best word I can find for it. “When you have no lips, you’re always smiling.”
Javier looks from her to me. “Did you understand that?”
“No,” I say, “but I don’t have time for the enigmatic bullshit of gods, even ones who are my friends. We need to find a way to track the Man in Black.”
Ashtoreth comes around the bed. “Isn’t that what this is?”
“What what is?”
She drops to her knees in front of the skinhound. She falls with no reservation, hitting so hard I hear the thunk of bone on tile. Her hands move up to the skinhound’s face and I pull mine back. She begins stroking the bunched groups of muscle at the back of his bone-cracking jaws.
“This magnificent creature is your tie to the Lord of Nightmares.”
“Who?” Javier asks.
“Nyarlathotep,” Ashtoreth says.
“Who is who again?”
“The Man in Black, Javi. Please keep up.”
“Too many chorra names for one person,” he mutters, his accent riding heavy on chorra.
My brain stumbles over her words as things fall into place. This skinhound attacked me right before the Man in Black appeared for the first time. Him saving me was the reason I felt pushed into goin
g with him in the first place. Anytime I had doubts, shortly thereafter this skinhound would appear and I would keep on helping the Man in Black.
I was set up.
Motherfucking, conniving, bastard chaos gods.
One more thing I owe you for.
30
THE SKINHOUND IS curled up on the pull-out chair beside Daniel’s bed. I think the skinhound’s sleeping, but it’s hard to tell when he doesn’t have eyelids to close. His breathing is even and steady and matches the rhythm of the machine attached to Daniel.
It’s just me and the skinhound and Daniel in the room.
Javier and Ashtoreth are wandering around outside. He promised to keep her out of trouble.
I hope it will work.
Daniel lies on the bed, not moving other than the mechanical rise and fall of his chest in time with the machine. I watch his eyelids, looking for some movement to indicate that he’s dreaming, but they are perfectly smooth. The thin skin shines in the low fluorescent light, as if it has a light coating of oil on it.
His face is perfect, dark hair fallen back off it so I can study it. He’s not model pretty, not even catalog pretty, but he’s got strong features that are easy to follow with your eyes. Nothing to snag your vision, no sharp edges or pointy bits. Nice cheekbones and chin, eyes that aren’t too far apart or too small, and if by some miracle he were to snap out of this coma you would see that they are deep emerald and luminescent with the joy of life.
I look to his mouth and I remember our first kiss. My first kiss.
I feel the memory on my own lips.
And even as I smile I hate the Man in Black just a little bit more.
Soon and very soon, you black-hearted bastard. I’m coming now and this time I will end you.
Two knocks and the door to the room opens.
The skinhound is off the chair and between me and the man in nurses’ scrubs who just entered as if by magick. His hackles bunch around the column of his neck and they vibrate as a growl rolls out of his vivisected chest.
The man freezes so sharply his skid-free shoes still squeak on the tile, eyes so wide that even from here I can see white completely around his irises.