Black Dog (12 page)

“Like you were nice to Lolly?” I panted. “I'll pass.”

Billy went down on his hands and knees. His nose looked like something that had gotten run over by a semi on the highway, all blood and mangled flesh. I caught the white gleam of bone through the mess. The sight cheered me up a lot. “You're gonna pay for what you did to Tanya, and my fucking face,” he snarled, his back arching so I could see all the individual knots of his vertebrae.

“That was her name?” I said. “I'd just been calling her Coyote Ugly, up until I snapped her neck.”

Billy let out a roar, his flesh tearing and his muscles forming into the square-­headed mountain lion that had chased me through the ravine. His fingers sprouted claws and his skull compressed and elongated.

I cast for anything to fight him off. If he shifted, I was fucked. I couldn't take him on as a hound—­I'd be half his size. And as a human, I was basically a take-­out gyro. My only hope was that shifting during the day would take enough out of him that I could get a shot in. Shifters weren't tied to moon phases, but the closer it was the easier their shift came, and to do it in broad daylight you had to be really strong or really pissed.

Billy tensed as his golden pelt sprouted from his skin. A shudder rippled through him as he locked eyes with me, lips peeling back from half-­inch teeth. He gathered his legs and sprang, and I braced myself for the rib-­cracking impact.

It didn't come. Billy's leap was arrested at the arc as Leo loomed behind him out of the shadows and jammed a rusty knife between his shoulder blades. Billy screamed as he thrashed in the dirt and snapped at Leo, who jumped out of the way of his jaws.

I grabbed up the knife he'd knocked out of my hand and drove it under Billy's rib cage hard, up and into his heart. He twitched once and died, head lolling in the dirt.

Leo spat blood. “Asshole.” He held out his hand and pulled me to my feet. “You okay?”

I nodded. “Fucker ripped the only pair of jeans I own.”

Leo gave me a smile that displayed his bloody teeth. “You're a lot tougher than you look, even on two legs.”

“You too,” I said, stepping over Billy's body. Inwardly, I was just glad I'd loosened Leo's ropes enough for him to jump in when he did. I might have seemed a lot less tough being ripped to shreds on the barn's dirt floor.

“Not the first crankhead who's tried to torture me,” Leo said. “That guy hit like a drunken prom date.”

Leo was limping as we pushed open the door and picked our way across the junkyard. My stomach knotted when I saw the shifter I'd clocked with the concrete was gone. “Leo . . .” I said, but the rest was drowned out when a shotgun blast ripped across the junkyard, taking out the windshield of a Pontiac over my left shoulder.

I ran, ducking between the rusted-­out cars, Leo close behind me. Another spray of buckshot rattled against metal, and I felt flecks of rust bite into my cheek.

Leo panted a bit, pressing one hand into his ribs over the worst of his bruises. “Good thing he can't aim for shit.” He craned his neck around the trunk of the Ford we were hiding behind. “Think we can make it to the trees before he reloads?”

“We're gonna have to,” I said, standing up and running for it. We hit the tree line as a third shot rolled back from the mountains around us like distant thunder, warning that a storm was coming even though the morning was blindingly bright and clear.

“Please tell me you have a ride out of here,” Leo said. We picked our way through the pines back to the parking lot, me keeping my ears turned toward the clubhouse. Not even a nodding crankhead could sleep through the O.K. Corral back in the junkyard.

I stopped short when I saw Clint's truck was gone. “Son of a . . .” I started, then settled for punching a tree. The bark scraped up my knuckles, but the pain didn't do much except piss me off even more.

Leo groaned. “I was really hoping this wouldn't turn into a nature hike.”

The rattle of a bike engine drifted across the lot, and I watched a ­couple of half-­dressed shifters jump on the starters, the girls gathering at the edge of the porch in a snarling knot. “Yeah, well,” I said, “better to be alive and lost in the woods than back there.”

“Amen to that,” Leo grunted, then stumbled and collapsed against a tree, his face going pale. I started to help him, but he waved me off. “Just give me a second.”

“No, you need a hospital,” I said. I'd seen enough ­people die in the days before X-­rays and modern hospitals to know what the deathly pale and the sudden pain meant. Not to mention if you did manage to get to a hospital, you could die from the ether surgeons used just as easily as from your injuries.

“That's not happening, so let's run instead of crying about it,” Leo said between gritted teeth. When I still hesitated, he leaned forward and gave me a push. “Move your ass, Ava. I'll be behind you as fast as I can.”

He swayed and I caught him. “We both know that's a lie,” I said. The shifters circled their bikes, spraying gravel, and aimed them toward the road.

I should leave Leo. That was the choice to make if I wanted to live past the next ten minutes. Leave him, feel bad later, and let him turn into just another bad memory that intruded when I couldn't sleep, which was most nights.

I couldn't seem to make myself move, though. I didn't usually have trouble making shitty decisions that would give me nightmares for decades. It was just part of the equally shitty hand I'd been dealt when Gary decided to pick me up off the muddy bayou ground. I couldn't now make myself let go of Leo. I couldn't shut off the small part of me that had existed before the hound.

“Why are you doing this!” Leo growled, trying to get free of me. “Don't be a fucking idiot.”

“I guess I like you a little,” I snapped, refusing to let go. We stared at each other, him panting in pain and covered in his own blood, me silenced by my own words, feeling his heartbeat reverberate through my hand.

It had been so long since I'd been honest with anyone, about anything, that I couldn't think of anything else to say. Ever since Gary had gone tits-­up things had been leaking out around the edges of my mind—­the nightmares, not leaving Leo, and now this. I hoped it stopped soon, if I lived. It was embarrassing as fuck.

“That'll be a real comfort when I'm torn limb from limb,” Leo muttered, almost drowned out by the roar of bike engines.

As the shifters' bikes bore down on our hiding spot, Clint's truck roared up, slamming to a halt a few feet short of the trees. I slung Leo's arm over my shoulder and dragged him toward the passenger side. He tumbled onto the seat and I lost my balance and fell on top of him. Clint took off before I could even pull the door shut behind me, fishtailing onto the highway.

I yanked the door shut and propped Leo up. My pulse was pounding, but as I watched the clubhouse and the shifters' bikes retreat in the rearview mirror my breath finally smoothed out.

I reached across Leo and hit Clint hard on the shoulder. “Where the fuck were you!”

“Relax,” he said, checking the rearview mirror. The shifters were still behind us, five or six of them, trailing the rattle-­bang truck like a school of hungry piranhas.

“I'll relax when this shithole is five hundred miles behind us,” I said. Leo let out a soft moan, shifting to look at Clint.

“Who the hell are you?”

“He's Clint Hicks,” I said, still watching the shifters. They were gaining on us, the truck no match for the powerful Harley engines. “We need to lose them,” I said to Clint.

“Won't be easy after you walked in there and humiliated their pack leader,” Clint said.

“She did a little more than that,” Leo muttered. Clint cut me a black look.

“Don't give me that,” I said. “It was him or me.”

Clint hit the steering wheel. “Do you have any idea what you've done? Before, they would have just ridden us to the edge of their territory and let it go unless you came back. Now they'll never stop.” He looked at Leo and huffed. “Stupid.”

“I don't see you stepping up, handsome,” Leo said. His voice was a rusty creak and each word clearly caused him pain. “Maybe you should shut up and drive the truck. Seems to be what you're good at.”

“If we can get to a city we can lose them,” I said. Shifters hated cities. There were too many smells, too many humans and cars and other predators running around. Plus, cities tended to be home to vamp hives, and those were two groups who were definitely front-­runners in the Asshole Olympics. One bite from a carrier vamp and a shifter was in for a slow, painful death that usually ended with your brain leaking out your ears.

“Easier said than done,” Clint grumbled. Quieter, “I told you to leave him.”

“You get us out of here or I'm going to call Lilith's particular brand of bitch down on your ass faster than you can spit out an apology,” I said. “We clear?”

Clint's knuckles went white on the cracked vinyl covering the steering wheel, but finally he ground out an irritated breath. “If we get to 90 we can probably make it to Rapid City. The interstate is usually crawling with troopers.”

I kept one eye on the shifters behind us. If not all of them knew Billy was dead, we might have a little time. There was undoubtedly somebody back there who was slamming back a celebratory shot, ready to step into Billy's skeezy leather pants as pack leader. I couldn't imagine the guy had made a ton of close friends in life.

Leo groaned, and I took off the overshirt Clint had given me and rolled it up to put under his head. “Try to rest,” I said softly. He tried to smile through his swollen jaw, then grimaced.

“No argument. See you on the flip side.”

Clint kicked the truck up to eighty miles an hour as the on-­ramp to the interstate came into view, staring straight ahead at the road. “Going back for him better not screw me, Ava,” he said as the black dots of the shifters appeared in a line across the white shimmer of the interstate. Arrayed like birds of prey, they kept just enough distance that they could close it and overtake us whenever they felt like it.

“It won't,” I lied, and didn't look in the rearview mirror again.

 

CHAPTER
15

H
ighways are anonymous. The horizon might rise and fall, the landscape might go from trees to scrub to desert, but the highway is always the same. For a long time, I'd found comfort in that. Rest stop after rest stop, mile marker after mile marker, never changing. Just like me.

Clint kept the truck fast through Spearfish and Sturgis, and the ink-­blot trickle of towns leading up to Rapid City, barely dots on a map. By the time we started seeing signs for the city limits, though, the needle was on
E
and the engine began coughing.

Clint rolled to a stop on a side street lined with dilapidated ranches. “We're not far,” he said. I got out and helped Leo, scanning the street for the shadow of the shifter pack, but for the moment they were behind us.

“Where are we going?” I said as Clint strode ahead. He'd zipped his rifle into a padded carrying case, and nobody on the broken-­down block paid any attention.

“Somewhere safe,” he snapped, and turned away from Leo and me. Leo grimaced.

The ranches turned to older frame homes, in even worse repair. Rusty bars guarded most of the windows, and half the yards were overgrown, listless, bleached
FOR SALE
signs leaning under weeds and drifts of trash. I heard the thump and blast of music from up the block, and a few old women stared at us from their porches as we passed.

At the end of the block sat a timber-­frame church, twice as large as anything else in the neighborhood. A plywood sign was tacked to the siding. Part of it had broken off, reading
SOU
P KITC
. Judging from the welter of flyers and leaflets on the door and the dusty grime-­streaked windows looking out on a yard made of weeds and litter, the Soup Kitc hadn't been operating in a few decades.

A marquee next to the door was mostly covered with graffiti. The plastic letters were faded almost white, but I could just make them out as Clint tried the door.

AND I SAW AN
ANGEL COME DOWN FROM
HEAVEN

HAVING THE K
EY TO THE BOTTOMLESS
PIT

AND A GREAT CHAIN IN HIS HAND

It was no big surprise that Clint's friend didn't hold with the warm and fuzzy God. I wasn't sure that translated into a willingness to hide us from a pack of angry shifters, but who knew?

Clint cursed when a chain rattled from the other side of the door. “He should be here.”

“I wouldn't be if I didn't have to,” I muttered, but Clint ignored me other than an irritated shake of his head.

We slipped around the side of the building, through an alley choked with bursting trash bags and up a loading dock. Clint kicked at the rusted padlock on the sliding door, and managed to lift it a few feet.

“I hate you,” Leo groaned as he crouched and crawled under the door, collapsing on the other side.

Clint found a light switch, and a swinging bulb lit the small van bay. “This way,” he said. I helped Leo through the door into an industrial kitchen, which smelled like all church kitchens—­bleach, stale coffee, and the faint whiff of rotting trash. During my low periods, church charities were a pretty reliable source of food and a place to sleep where I wouldn't end up with a hobo crawling into my cot or a bag lady helping herself to my only pair of shoes.

I'd always thought it was funny that I was something that lived in their nightmares, sitting on a dented metal chair, eating fourth-­rate spaghetti off a paper plate while a grandmother with a chain on her cardigan asked me if I'd accepted Jesus. Long before that, my mother sometimes dragged me and my grandmother to the tent revivals that traveled up and down the hollers in Tennessee, men with hard eyes and sweat-­stained white suits shouting into the night that we were all going to Hell.

I'd thought they were all full of shit when I'd been alive, but I guess that showed what I knew.

This place was a far cry from either of those. Everything was musty and closed up, and there was a strong rank odor drifting over the whole place, from the kitchen up the stairs into the vestibule and the church itself. Everything was rough and functional, from the boxy pulpit to the log pews that looked like they'd gladly plant a splinter in the ass of anyone foolish enough to sit down. A chalkboard hung to the left of the cross with hymns from two weeks ago written in crooked block letters.

I eased Leo onto the padded bench behind the pulpit and propped one of those weird little knee pillows behind his head. “Don't die,” I whispered before I followed Clint.

“This friend of yours isn't great at hospitality,” I told him. Clint pushed open the door behind the pulpit, flicking on another bare bulb that hummed and jittered.

“Father Colin runs this parish on a shoestring. He's always here, though. Colin!”

The floor under my boots was covered in a moist carpet, the boards underneath giving softly at each step. Everything was fake wood grain and harsh lighting, an update that had probably seemed like a good idea in 1972, but now just made me feel like I was on the set of a low-­rent snuff movie.

The rankness tickled my nose with each step, strong now as a trash pile in the dead of summer. At the end of the hall, through a low arch, a metal desk crouched, watched over by a knockoff print of
The
Last Supper
and a ragged cassock hanging from a hook.

Below the desk, a pair of feet in worn sneakers poked out, tilted sadly to the side like run-­down windup toys.

“Colin!” Clint shouted, shoving past me and skidding to his knees next to the body. Father Colin was dressed in a gray sweat suit, one hand over his stomach like he'd fallen asleep. His face had a green, greasy cast and his eyes had glossed over with the pale cataracts death imparts. A fly poised on his parted lips, rubbing its legs together before tipping over the priest's teeth and into his mouth.

Clint pinched his forehead hard with his thumb and forefinger. “This can't be happening,” he muttered. He slumped on his knees. “Colin didn't deserve this,” he said, picking up one of the priest's hands. The fingers were squishy and bloated. I didn't make a habit of hanging around decomposing murder victims, but my guess was Colin had been there for at least three days.

“I'm sorry,” I said quietly. Aside from his very dead, indescribably smelly condition, Colin looked like he'd simply lain down. There were no marks on him, nothing disturbed on his desk. A mug reading
jesus loves you—­everyone else thinks you're an asshole
sat half full of coffee next to a stack of check stubs and a paper ledger.

It went flying, along with everything else, when Clint stood up and knocked the desk over with a roar. I got out of the way as he turned on the file cabinet, smashing a Rolodex and knocking a picture of Father Colin standing in front of a small stone church to the ground. Glass tinkled, and he finally stopped, bent over, his shoulders shaking.

I knew myself well enough to know I wasn't a comforting presence—­even if I'd run into a lot of grief-­stricken types, I never knew what to say. There was nothing to soften the blow of death, especially when you knew what was waiting on the other side.

I eased forward and put a hand on Clint's back, feeling his lungs heave beneath my palm. He shoved me away and I stumbled, tripping over Father Colin's legs and falling to the ground.

“You just had to come looking for me, didn't you?” Clint ground out. “Just had to follow orders, like the pit bull you are. Clamp your jaws around something and hold on until it's dead.”

“Pit bulls are loyal,” I said, getting up and brushing black grit from my jeans. “They don't attack unless they're provoked. Or unless somebody turns them vicious on purpose.” I glared at him. “If you think I had something to do with this, then you can fuck right off.”

“
Lilith
did this,” Clint ground out. “But you're with her. You're just waiting for me to let my guard down.”

“I can't take your soul,” I snapped. “You don't have one. So I've failed Lilith, and I am just as far up shit creek as you. If you'd pull your head out for a hot second you'd realize that.” I spread my hands and saw that my palms were covered in sooty streaks. “I'm sorry about your friend. Are you sure it was Lilith?”

“You're wearing the proof,” Clint said sullenly. He reached down and pulled up Father Colin's sweatshirt. There was a perfect circle burned into his pectoral, roughly the size of a fingertip. “She touched him,” Clint said softly. “Burned the heart right out of him.”

Suddenly, I would have given anything to scrub my hands until they were raw. “Why would she do this? I mean, I only met her once, but petty revenge murder didn't seem like her thing.”

“To punish me,” Clint said. “I avoided her for years by hiding with the shifters, but when I blew into this town in the fifties, Colin was the first human to help me. He was young, just over from Ireland. He joined the seminary after some trouble back there.”

Clint sat in Colin's desk chair. The springs creaked under his weight. He looked utterly defeated, much paler than when I'd first seen him. “It was the middle of winter and I was sleeping rough. The cold will get to you, eventually, no matter what you are. Colin let me in to sleep in the vestry, even though the monsignor threw a fit when he found out. He gave me a job as a groundskeeper. We were friends. We talked about everything. When I told him what I was, he put his hand on my arm and said he'd always known, that he would not forsake me, that I was always welcome under his roof.” Clint swallowed. “He saved my life. I stayed on consecrated ground and for a while that was enough. Then Lilith got some thugs from the neighborhood to set the vestry on fire one night. Nobody was hurt, but I couldn't stay. I couldn't put innocent ­people in harm's way. I hadn't seen him in close to twenty years but I was hoping . . .”

I stayed quiet. Privately, I thought Father Colin was an idiot for believing that anything in this world could stop a Hellspawn. There was no sign, no church, no faith that could turn them back. They were implacable, unstoppable as a hurricane or an earthquake. All you could do was pray the storm passed you over and survey the damage afterward.

“I'll find some plastic to cover him up,” I said finally. Clint didn't say anything, just sat staring at the far wall.

I searched the kitchen until I found a tarp amid some rusty paint cans in a supply cupboard. Clint and I rolled Colin into it and I duct-­taped the ends. Another trip found me a handful of air fresheners. Replacing the stench of decay with the stench of Hawaiian Tropical Delight only improved things marginally, but it was a start.

“I should check on Leo,” I said after we'd covered Colin's wrapped body with a sheet. Clint rubbed his hands over his face.

“He kept a first aid kit around here somewhere,” Clint said, rummaging in the file cabinet.

I accepted the army surplus box and went back to the chapel. Clint needed to be alone and I wasn't going to help anything by hovering.

Leo was still on the bench, and my throat got tight until I touched his neck and found his pulse. It was slow but strong, and he muttered when I leaned over him. “This bench is hard as fuck.”

“I think we're stuck for the time being,” I said. “Lilith was here.”

Leo scrubbed a hand over his eyes and sat up, the tic in his jaw twitching with pain. “What did we do to earn the big bad bitch's attention?”

“She killed Clint's friend,” I said. “The priest here. She was sending a warning.” I fished surgical scissors from the kit and clipped away the remains of Leo's bloody shirt. His torso was painted with bruises the size of blooming poppies, and his skin was so pallid it almost gleamed in the dim light filtering in through the cardboard-­covered windows in the chapel. I got busy wrapping his ribs, and cleaning off the cuts on his face with peroxide. He inhaled sharply but never flinched or made a sound.

I didn't say anything either, just tried to be as gentle as possible.

Once I'd tossed the bloody gauze, I could see the extent of the swelling across Leo's jaw. One jagged cut bisected his eyebrow. I remembered the silver rings on Billy's knuckles and bit my lip in sympathy as I brushed Leo's hair out of the way so I could close up the gash.

“I'd do it all over again,” Leo said as I put Steri-­Strips on the cut, trying to be neat so his eyebrow would knit back together.

“Kill Billy?” I said. Leo nodded.

“Piece of shit.”

He put his hand over mine, squeezing my fingers together, and I squeezed back. There was nothing keeping me from this now, not Gary and not my need to keep moving, keep drifting west and east and back again. I could let myself be still for five seconds, actually be grateful I had someone to watch my back, even if he was a professional killer and we were holed up in a church that smelled like decomp.

The bottom of the first aid kit had a Ziploc bag of pharmacy bottles, all in different names. I uncapped the Vicodin and shook out two tablets. I was glad Father Colin wasn't as squeaky clean as Clint had made him out to be.

Leo dry-­swallowed the tablets and leaned back, eyes closing again. “I've had worse, Ava. You don't need to worry about me.”

“I've seen worse, but most of those ­people died horribly,” I muttered.

Leo ticked off his fingers. “I've been shot. I was stabbed twice, once by an Aryan in the shower at Riker's who melted down his comb and made a shiv.”

“Damn,” I said. “That's dedication.”

Leo squirmed. He still didn't look good, but the pills were doing their work. He'd at least be able to breathe without excruciating pain. “His brother owed money to my father. I cut off his head and hands and left them in the guy's driveway.” His voice was getting blurry, and I hoped soon he'd be out. Then I'd deal with the body, and Clint. “If you know where to cut, a reciprocating saw gets the job done. Got to do it someplace you can hose the blood off. We used the back of this deli in the neighborhood. Anyway, this guy jumped the, and I quote, ‘murdering kike bastard' who took out his deadbeat brother. I have a scar on my back the size of the FDR . . . ” He let out a long sigh, muttering something I couldn't make out.