by Andrew Dudek
To The Dogs
by Andrew Dudek
Copyright 2016 Andrew Dudek
Amazon Kindle Edition
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
For Jeff. Thanks, buddy!
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Author's Note
Preview: Sword For Hire
Also by Andrew Dudek
About the Author
Chapter 1
Even without the heat from the fire, it was hot in the graveyard. Well after dark, but the temperature was still near ninety degrees and the air was muggy with the threat of an approaching thunderstorm. There was no one in sight except for the five women of the Sisterhood. Only a few headstones were visible by the flickering orange firelight, but they weighed as heavily on Sage’s mind as the late August humidity.
Sage was sitting cross-legged on the grass beneath a dead oak tree. Like her Sisters, she wore modernized version of antiquated clothing—hers was a corset with nothing underneath, a skirt that didn’t quite make it to her knees, and thigh-high boots, all in black leather. Not exactly the most practical clothing for a late summer in Newark, New Jersey, but looking like a witch was an important part of being a witch. Sage hooked a strand of her midnight-black hair behind an ear and looked across the circle.
A woman in her mid-thirties was seated there, and she smiled at Sage, whose heart fluttered. The Professor’s hair and eyes were dark, but not in the forced way of the rest of the Sisterhood. Even the warm glow of the fire did little to shed light on them. Her shoulders were broad for a woman’s, and she was layered with lithe muscle. The Professor was dressed in a loose-fitting black robe that pooled around her legs. It was made of some kind of silk, the material so thin that Sage could see that the Professor wore nothing underneath.
There was a bright green cooler on the ground near the Professor, the kind that most college kids would have used to carry beer. The Professor had refused to answer any questions about its contents, so Sage had assumed that it was somehow vital to the completion of the joining ritual.
“Sisters,” the Professor said. Her voice was calm, but powerful, and aggressively feminine. The sound made Sage snap to attention and stirred something deep in her abdomen. “Our hour is finally at hand. Tonight, we complete the Ritual of Artemis and each of us will know power beyond previous imaginings.”
When the Professor’s gaze lingered on Sage, the younger woman shivered, despite the heat. “Are you ready?” She was speaking directly to Sage; anyone could see that. Sage opened her mouth to answer—
“I’m ready to get this done and back into the A/C. It’s hot as balls out here.”
Sage glared at the girl who had spoken: Amy—with her bleach-blond pixie-cut, skintight pink tank top, shorts that barely covered her ass, and flip flops—didn’t belong in the Sisterhood. Sage could see that, so why couldn’t the others? As far as Sage was concerned, Amy was a sorority girl who had accidentally wandered into a meeting of a coven. She didn’t take the Art seriously. She didn’t understand the power. It was disgusting.
Ecstasy, then, when she could see the same disdain in the Professor’s eyes. Her voice dropped to a whisper as she stared at the blonde. “Is this ritual a joke to you, Amy?”
Amy swallowed, then shook her head. “No, ma’am. I apologize.”
The Professor smiled, more tolerantly than Sage would have liked, but she had to admit the other girl seemed contrite. Maybe she did have a little bit of sense. If the rumors about Amy were true, she should take it seriously. None of the Sisters knew much about Amy. She was a transfer student, but no one even knew from where she had come. Marigold had heard that Amy had more experience with the Art than any of the Sisters, save the Professor. According to someone she’d met while shopping at the Rabbit’s Hat, Amy was actually sleeping with a vampire. A vampire! It was amazing, and Sage wondered what it would be like to be with something like that. Still, she wished that Amy wouldn’t make jokes during the Professor’s speeches.
“No matter,” the Professor said. “But please don’t do it again. Are we all ready?”
“I’m ready, Professor,” Sage said, a fraction of a second before the rest of the Sisters—Marigold and Chyna, both juniors like Sage—spoke up.
Marigold had violet hair and wore a complicated apparatus of leather and stainless chain-mail. Chyna apparently had some Asian heritage, but Sage had never asked to find out for sure. They called themselves Sisters, Sage didn’t feel especially close to either of them. She hadn't felt close to anyone, really until the Professor.
Sage had grown up in a small town, where being gay wasn’t really an option. As a result she didn’t have many friends back home, and that had followed her east to the small school in Jersey. She’d never gotten over the feeling, so she kept herself respectfully cloistered from the other three Sisters.
Until the Professor. At the end of the spring semester last year, the Professor had swooped into a meeting of the Sisterhood where they had been experimenting with a minor flame spell. All it was really good for was changing the color of the fires on birthday candles, but Sage had been pretty good at it. She’d been proud.
And then the Professor had walked in, older and experienced and fucking gorgeous, and Sage had been smitten. And then the Professor had frozen the flame. Frozen it solid. Literally turned fire into a clump of ice. And she’d been barely trying. The Professor had power on a scale that the Sisterhood of Jackson Perez-Connelly University had never encountered.
And then the Professor was gone, with promises to get in touch when they came back to school in August. And, sure enough, she had. She was waiting when the Sisterhood arrived on campus just the week before.
“Yeah, I’m ready, too,” Amy said, with slight hesitation.
The Professor smiled and the butterflies in Sage’s stomach flapped harder.
“Excellent.”
She opened the cooler and pulled out an object. It was red and wet, a little smaller than a softball. The mass of the thing looked soft in the Professor’s fist, like a piece of uncooked meat. Sage could see veins.
“What is that?” Chyna asked. She sounded as nauseated as Sage felt.
“The heart of a German shepherd,” the Professor said. “The heart of a guard dog.”
Sage swallowed hard. Her stomach churned. Marigold and Chyna covered their mouths with their hands. Only Amy seemed to not be disgusted, and her eyes narrowed with suspic
ion. “Did you kill that dog?” Her voice was flat but somehow accusatory.
“There can be no power without sacrifice, Amy,” the Professor said. “I thought you understood this.”
“I was under the impression that the sacrifice of domestic animals was black magic.”
The Professor laughed and waved a dismissive hand. “There’s no such thing as black or white magic, Amy. All power is equal. The only thing dark or light are the intentions with which it is used.”
Sage found herself nodding. She wasn’t thrilled by the sight of the dog’s heart in the Professor’s hand—it reminded her of her dog, Peaches, who was probably asleep on the back porch of her father’s farmhouse—but she had to admit that the Professor made a lot of sense. Amy frowned, though, and leaned away from the fire, folding her arms across her chest.
Satisfied that she’d get no further arguments, the Professor muttered something in a language that Sage didn’t know and tossed the heart into the fire. Then she took out another one.
“Is that…” Marigold this time.
“A boxer—the dog, not the athlete.” The Professor smiled a little at her own joke, then she tossed the heart into the fire. “This one’s a pit bull.” She took one more heart from the cooler and added it to the others.
Next she pulled a silver chain from the bottom of the cooler and wrapped it around her forearm. The chain was long and ended in three huge loops that could have been shackles for a bodybuilder. The loops scraped the ground as the Professor used her free hand to reach inside her robe—Sage’s heart leaped at the sight, forgetting all about the burning organs.
The Professor took out a short knife. She closed her eyes, rolled her head back so the cordlike muscles in her neck stretched and popped, and began to chant. Quietly at first, but getting steadily louder, the Professor spoke what Sage took to be an ancient prayer. She didn’t know the language, but she’d heard the Professor refer to it as the tongue of the goddesses. Sage shivered at the thought of what the Professor could do with her goddess's tongue.
Miles overhead, the thunderheads rolled in, far faster than the still night winds should have allowed. Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed. The clouds concentrated into a whirling mass overhead. They reminded Sage of the sky right before a tornado back home.
Slowly, the Professor raised her hands until she was posed like a statue of Jesus. Then, with one last word, she slammed her palms against her hips, and the fire roared, leaping to double its previous height.
Sage rocked back, sucking a breath through her teeth. Her mouth fell open as she stared at the Professor, at the way the fire lit up her features, lovely and harsh. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw the Professor let out a breath, a sigh of relief that the spell had worked. Sage, on the other hand, wanted to jump up and down, clapping her hands like a child—the Professor had made the flames more powerful! How cool was that?—but she held it together. She wasn’t an excitable child, she was a young witch, and she had to act like it.
The Professor lifted her knife high above her head. Sage panted, more excited than she’d been with either of the guys she’d been with before she came out to herself, or any of the four girls she’d been with since. What was sex, after all, compared to the pure power that was obvious in the hands of the Professor. Then, in one sudden motion that actually made Sage let out a little gasp of surprise, the Professor slashed steel across her palm. Pulling the blade away, she flicked her hand at the fire, sending blood cascading into the fire.
There was a roar like something inside the fire was trying to escape, a rush of air, then the fire changed color, turning a deep bloody red.
Wordlessly, the Professor turned the knife and offered the handle to Marigold. The violet-haired woman took the blade. At the Professor’s encouraging nod, she also cut her palm. Unlike the Professor, who had taken the pain without blinking, Marigold winced as steel cut skin. She took a hesitant step towards the fire, held her hand over the flame, and opened her fist.
More blood fell into the fire. It let out a beastly scream (was it Sage’s imagination, or did it sound like…barking?) and the fire brightened. Marigold smiled and handed the knife to Chyna, who repeated the process. And then it was Sage’s turn.
Her heart pounded in her chest. This was it. Her moment. She shot a look at the Professor. The older woman smiled, her mouth smoldering embers, a look that promised…something deeper than the relationship between a student and her teacher. Sage nodded importantly, swallowed a mouthful of bile, and slashed her palm. The pain was so intense: icy-cold and red-hot at once. It sent sensation all the way up her arm. Most amazing was the way she could feel her Sisters’ blood on the blade. Marigold and Chyna, somehow she could pick out each of their presences on the knife. But she felt the Professor most of all. Warmer and more powerful than the others, it filled her with strength. Sage examined the knife. It was fascinating, wasn’t it? That was her blood, mixed with the rest. She couldn’t pick out her own, even if she’d wanted to. Finally she flipped her blood into the fire.
This reaction was the strongest yet. The fire roared into the air, scorching branches of the dead tree. Suddenly Sage realized that someone might see the fire in the cemetery and come to investigate. Better hurry and finish the ritual. She handed the knife to Amy.
In one fluid motion, the blond girl took the knife, slashed her palm, and flicked the blood into the fire. Sage nodded, impressed. Amy had apparently done this sort of thing before.
Sage’s hometown had the best fireworks show in Oklahoma every July 4th. For hours every year, the entire night sky would be lit with brilliant lights and loud booms. The fire that rose into the air made that show look like a few kids with sparklers. There was a roar unlike anything Sage had ever heard, and the fire leaped clean out of the pit. It rose high into the air, incinerating a chunk of the tree and sucking all of the moisture from the air. Sage looked at the Professor, terrified, but the older woman wouldn’t make eye contact. All Sage could see was the reflection of the fire, filling the Professor’s dark eyes.
For nearly a minute, Sage wondered if the fire would ever die down. It didn't seem like it. But then it shrunk back to its original size and kept going, shrinking till there was nothing but embers.
And then it appeared. Sage couldn’t explain it, but one minute there was nothing, and the next…there was it.
Sage’s father had once insisted on taking her hunting. They’d seen, from a distance, a grizzly bear. It had been the largest thing she’d ever seen: five hundred pounds of slow, lumbering power.
This thing was bigger.
I stood on four legs, each as thick as a small tree trunk. Four paws, each with four dull claws scratched at the soot. Its body was shaped like a barrel on its side and it ended in a long tail. Midnight black fur covered the entire body, thick and shaggy like a bear’s.
But what really drew attention were the heads.
There were three of them. Growing out of three necks, each head was huge with a long snout. Each snout contained a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth and a lolling tongue. Red-hot eyes burned in each canine face.
The three heads moved independently, each looking at a different sister.
“By the Art,” Marigold whispered. “What is it? Did we summon it?”
The Professor laughed, and there was nothing like humor in that harsh sound. “Please. You wouldn’t have the skill to call forth such a magnificent animal. I summoned it.”
At that, the enormous three-headed dog whirled to face the Professor, all three heads lowered, showing all three sets of teeth. The Professor smiled and lifted the chain that was still wrapped around her arm.
“Do you see this, dog?” she said. “It took me a long time to find it. It means you belong to me.”
One of the heads barked, a sound less like Peaches and more like the threat of a monster.
The Professor laughed again. “But I am not without mercy. You are my pet, but I do need your help. In exchange, you’re going to fea
st. These four are the appetizers.”
What? Sage’s head spun. Before she had time to work out what the Professor meant, the monster pounced. Its front paws landed on Marigold’s chest and she fell to the ground, screaming. One mouth grabbed her by the top of the head, another around her ankles. The two heads pulled apart from each other until…
Marigold was ripped apart.
The contents of Sage’s stomach forced themselves violently free and she vomited.
Chyna was running. The dog bounded after her, barking gleefully. The night shook with the sounds. With one massive bite, it cut Chyna in half. She fell to the ground in two separate pieces, ropy tendrils of intestines dragging in the dirt.
Amy stood her ground as the monstrous dog advanced on her. She raised her hand, fingers spread wide in a stop gesture. To Sage’s surprise the dog came to a stop a few yards away from the blonde. It snarled and snapped at empty air, but it didn’t get any closer. Amy’s blue eyes, full of tears, landed on Sage.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. Then, in a flash of pink light, she vanished.
“That one is stronger than I expected,” the Professor said. “We’ll have to deal with her. Finish this one first.” She pointed at Sage, still laying in a puddle of her own puke.
“Why are you doing this?” Sage sobbed as the dog approached.
“Power, child.” There was something almost like sympathy in the Professor’s eyes and Sage thought for a moment she might call off the dog. “It’s always about power.”
All three heads converged on Sage, severing muscle, crackling bones, and puncturing organs. She was still alive when the dog began to eat her. She screamed as she died, the pain was so horrible.
But at least it didn’t last long.
Chapter 2
The wizard told me what to do:
“Shove it out your ass, Carver.”
Steve Dallas glared at me from behind the thick lenses of his glasses. His unshaven jaw was thrust out in annoyance with me and my belligerence.
“Come on, Dallas,” I said. “I just want to know that it’s safe and that nobody can use it to kickstart their own personal apocalypse.”