Black Dog (15 page)

“Jesus,” Leo muttered. He scrubbed a hand over his eyes. “You aren't freaking out about this. Why?”

“If we stick with him, maybe Lilith will think twice about punishing us for Gary,” I said. “And vis-­à-­vis the angel thing—­why not? I'm a hellhound and you raise monsters from the dead. Why can't Clint have come from the good side of the tracks rather than the shit side?”

“I guess if you're gonna hang with an angel, go big or go home,” Leo said. When I didn't reply he frowned. “When was the last time you perused a Bible?”

“Seventy, eighty years,” I said. By the time I landed in Louisiana I was more interested in a good time than in my eternal soul.

And even if I had believed, it wouldn't have done me a damn bit of good.

“I suffered through an Orthodox ser­vice every Saturday for fourteen years,” Leo said. “They never actually mention him by name, but Azrael is one of the heavies in the Old Testament. There's this book called the Zohar that all the weird old guys at temple loved to talk about, the mystical shit. Azrael is a big deal to them.”

“I'm not exactly a fangirl of religion,” I said. “What's the big deal about him supposedly?”

Leo took the cigarette from my fingers and dragged on it. “He's the angel of death.”

I dropped my chin to my chest, squeezing my eyes shut. A headache clamped down on my skull like a vise. “Of course he is.”

Leo shrugged. “Could all be crap, but if he is who he says he is, he's not fuckin' around.”

“And neither is Lilith,” I said. “So I'd rather keep the Old Testament hit man close than piss him off.”

“I don't know, Ava.” Leo sighed. “The idea of a heavy like that breathing down my neck is killing my buzz with a fucking hammer, I'll tell you that much.”

I spread my hands. “What's to know? He can help us out, so if it takes a few hundred awkward miles crammed into his truck, small price to pay.”

“Or you could just tell Lilith where he is, and let the two of them duke it out,” Leo said. “You're punching way above your weight with this guy, Ava. Sell him out and get Hell's very own bunny-­boiling bitch off your tail, is my advice.”

“And I need your advice, yeah, because I'm so weak and helpless,” I snapped. Usually I was better at reining in my temper, or at least keeping my thoughts to myself. It was easier to avoid getting smacked if you were quiet.

Leo reached for me but I jerked my hand away, scrambling off the bed. The room was way too hot, and the stench of Veronica's perfume suddenly stank like an open sewer full of flowers. “I didn't mean it,” he said quietly. “Calm down.”

“Clint saved your life,” I said. “And you
ruined
mine, so do me a favor: stick your dick back into your BFF Veronica and I'll handle keeping us alive.”

“Your life can't have been that great,” Leo drawled. Only his eyes gave away anything, and they were dark and hard as stone. “You agreed to help me liquidate Gary. I didn't even have to hurt you that much.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “I'm leaving in the morning. Free advice—­quit pretending like you're my friend before I get disappointed enough to stick a blade in some part of you that's important.”

I stormed back to my room, pushing past Veronica in the hall. Her full lips parted as she bumped into the wall, and I held up my hand. “He's all yours. You can pull your fangs back in.”

I slammed the door behind me, threw the bolt, and curled up on the faded bed. It had been years—­decades—­since I'd cried more than a few tears. Pressing the musty feather pillow against my face, I sobbed until I thought my chest would crack open. It wasn't because of Veronica, or Clint, or even because of Lilith. I hadn't realized until this moment that I was alone, and I'd been stupid to ever think anything else.

The moment I'd closed my jaws around Gary's throat, I'd consigned myself to the loneliest existence I could imagine. Even hounds had other hounds, their reaper. There was order and structure, even if the flip side was punishment and a violent, pointless death when your luck finally trickled out the ass-­end of the hourglass.

Now I was nothing. I'd let myself pretend that Leo would stick with me, that his disobeying his father was the same as my killing Gary. I'd let myself drop my guard around literally one human in a hundred years, and I was screwed. Leo wasn't in the same boat. He was safe on shore, watching me drown. He'd deserted me as soon as he'd remembered he belonged among humans. Not that I blamed him. I wouldn't pick me over Veronica.

He was right about Clint too. I should do what Lilith asked and be done with all of this. Get busy with the endless stretch of empty highway that was the rest of my unending life.

Finally, my throat was ragged and my eyes too swollen to cry anymore. I watched the snow and the streetlight blur as I drifted finally into the sort of sleep that only comes to the profoundly exhausted. The full weight of what I'd done was slowly crushing me, but that didn't mean I'd feed Clint to Lilith just to prolong my existence. My existence wasn't worth it. I might be a traitor, but I wasn't a coward. Lilith couldn't do anything to me that would be half as painful as the simple fact I was still alive.

 

CHAPTER
17

Louisiana, 1919

T
here was no real land in the heart of the swamp, and no real water. We'd pushed the flat-­bottomed boats until we found the slight rise of solid ground that Jasper told me was where the priestess and her acolytes had congregated in the slave days, when the plantation was full of ­people and surrounded by flat fields instead of the tangle of the bayou.

Caleb was the first one out of the boat, standing on the apex of the hillock with his hands on his hips. He nodded at the cypress roots and the ragged Spanish moss as if he'd personally constructed the swamp—­stink, gators, and all.

Once this small dry place amid the mud had been secret, a respite from the big white house, its porches and peaked roof crouching over the sugarcane fields like a gigantic mausoleum, the upstairs porch just high enough to catch a glimpse of the Mississippi.

Now the big house was rotting and full of possums and bats under the eaves. The ornate railings of those porches were pitted with rust, one felled altogether by a Union gunboat during the war. The bayou had crept in on the heels of the last owner, who took sick with TB and moved to Arizona in 1901. Native plants surged to orgiastic in the damp heat, choking out the carefully planted roses and magnolia trees. Kudzu vines strangled the live oaks into pale skeletons that lined the overgrown drive.

Jasper and the others had to hack a path up to the plantation house, and then tear boards off the fallen pile that was the slave quarters to cover the shattered windows and a gaping hole in the floor just inside the front door. The inside not only looked like a tomb, it smelled like one—­rotting plaster lying in piles all over the floor, wallpaper drooping like peeling skin, gaping holes where anything of value—­lights, doors, even mantels—­had been stripped by thieves.

Now when you looked over the cane fields, a mass of green breathed back at you. The swamp healed its scars faster than any human body. The river was swollen and surged so close to the house I could watch herons picking their delicate way through the shallows that had once been the lawn. I slept on the porch to avoid the heat and the fingers of mold and mildew crawling unchecked across every surface inside. Not to mention the roaches and the rats. I got enough of those back in New Orleans.

Jasper came in the first night, cheeks flushed red in the lamplight. He was from Chicago, thick-­blooded and not used to the constant, unrelenting humidity of the swamp. I had a hard time coming from the Tennessee mountains, so I imagined he must feel like he was roasting alive.

I lay on a mattress we'd pulled out onto the balcony, fanning myself and trying unsuccessfully to keep my white nightgown from sticking to my body.

“We found the well house,” he said. “There are markings on the stones . . .” He pulled a damp notebook from his pocket and sketched with a pencil. Jasper was an artist. He'd come to New Orleans to draw the Mississippi, the cake slice houses, each layer a different color, the explosions of flowers in the Garden District.

I met him on one of my long walks at night, when it was finally cool enough to move. He stumbled out of a bar on Canal Street and knocked into me, sending us both flying. Later, when he grabbed my hips so hard he left bruises when I moved on top of him, I let him stay until morning, our bodies close but not touching, gleaming and breathless in the gray quiet of first light.

“She was real,” he said. “She was here. Ava, this is really going to happen.”

I pulled him down to me, kissed him. He tasted like bitter wormwood and licorice. “I told you to stop drinking so much of that with Caleb,” I whispered. “It makes you talk too much.”

He pushed me down on the mattress, kneeling above me and undoing his belt. I pulled my nightgown over my head, tossing it over the railing. It drifted out of sight like a dove shot on the wing, falling fast out of sight. “I don't need to talk anymore,” he mumbled against my ear, nudging my knees apart. He pushed into me hard enough to make me gasp and sink my nails into his shoulder. Talking with Caleb always made him rough and quick and aggressive. It was one of the few things that made hanging around Caleb tolerable.

“We're not men anymore, darling,” he said a few minutes later, when our breathing was ragged and his cock twitched insistently, making me squirm and wish he'd just shut up and fuck me like Caleb did.

I wasn't proud of what Caleb and I were doing to Jasper, but his moods and his drinking and the days upon days where he wouldn't sleep or come out of the rattrap attic he called a studio ground me down. I was all right with being alone—­growing up on the mountain had taught me the value of silence, of being peaceful with just your own company—­but being ignored wasn't the same. It made me feel slight and worthless next to Jasper's books and paintings, made an ugly voice whisper I was just a stupid hillbilly he was wasting time with until he went back to where he came from.

Then there were the nights when he did come over, and he'd already gotten so angry at everything else in the world that he hit me until I backed into the corner of my sitting room and sobbed, tears washing the blood off my face and down into my collar. The next morning, when he washed the pink stains out of my favorite dress and brought me a cold bottle of beer from the corner store to hold against my swollen face, I always told him I understood.

And then I went to Caleb's apartment on Frenchmen Street and fucked him silently until I was so tired I couldn't move. He'd sit up, light a cigarette, and tell me to go home. I liked the pain when I struggled to pull on my stockings and underwear. I liked the sting where my thighs touched when I limped to the streetcar. I liked that Jasper had no idea, because Caleb's bruises were hidden by the ones he'd already inflicted.

“We're not men,” Jasper whispered again. “When this is over, we'll be gods.”

He slammed into me, hip bones jarring my thighs, and I finally came, letting myself yell. We were the only ones awake, and the hum of insects and night critters in the swamp didn't care if I joined in. Jasper moaned and came as well, rolling off me and panting on the mattress. “I can't wait,” he whispered. “I am so done with this paltry existence.”

“You have no idea how much I want this,” I whispered. I'd finally be free to tell Jasper the truth. He couldn't hurt me once we'd found the ground where the
bokor
woman had spilled blood almost sixty years ago, once we'd taken it into ourselves.

It wasn't until the next day, climbing out of the boat, feeling mud squish in my shoes, stepping onto the tiny island and almost reaching the summit of that high place in the swamp, that I realized Caleb was staring at me, not the surroundings. That I was alone, Jasper and the others standing behind me. Around me.

As they grabbed me, tearing my dress and stockings, one of my shoes flying off, and carried me to the flat stone in the center of the clearing I screamed, ten times louder than I had in the night.

Nobody who might have helped me heard my screams. Nothing in the swamp cared if I joined in.

I jerked awake, head thick as if I'd polished off the rest of Leo's cheap vodka. I dreamed about Jasper periodically, of the time before we'd gone south from New Orleans looking for the plantation where the blood of innocent ­people soaked the earth. I dreamed about the after far less frequently. Usually it was that night, on the porch, nothing but my own sweat on my skin. Thinking that just maybe, things would be all right.

The memories of when Jasper would beat me out of sheer rage at being a colossal failure of a human being were much sharper, but I tried not to think about him any more than once every twenty years. The prick didn't deserve even that much, and I didn't expect the dream to show up tonight of all nights. I had so many other nightmares competing for space I was usually safe from that particular unfortunate life choice.

So I really didn't expect him to still be standing in the corner of the sad little room in Rapid City, three thousand miles from the sweltering bayou where I'd last seen his face. He stood in the corner by the dresser, his face stark white in the streetlight. Snow covered the lower half of the window, turning my room pale as moonlight. I'd slept for a long time—­it was full night, the blizzard turning the world into the inside of a snow globe.

“Holy shit,” I whispered, rocketing upright on the mattress. I had no weapon, nothing to defend myself with. I jumped out of bed, feet barely touching the boards before I ran. When it came to fight or flight, there was no shame in choosing flight.

“Come back, darling,” Jasper called, his voice somehow echoing through the entire house. “You and I never did say a proper good-­bye.”

I skidded down the steps, catching my foot on a loose board and sprawling on the floor at the bottom. Except it wasn't floor, it was sucking mud, and the walls were trees, and Spanish moss floated down from the ceiling to brush my face.

“Up,” I whispered as I struggled in the murky water. “Get your ass up.”

If I'd had the new Ava in my head, the hound rather than the foolish, arrogant girl who was too stupid and horny, too desperate for power to realize she was going to die, I might have actually survived that night out in the bayou.

I ran now, hearing Jasper splash through the shallows behind me. A gator hissed and slid off a log to my left, and I stopped in front of an impenetrable tangle of cypress roots and undergrowth.

“Darling,” Jasper singsonged amid the trees. “Your sacrifice will be remembered. Your blood will propel the rest of us into eternity. Now stop running and face your fate.”

“You should do what he says, Ava.” Lilith uncoiled from her spot, leaned against a tree trunk, and stepped forward, looking me up and down.

I backed up against another tree, fingers digging into the bark at the sight of her. She wore black pants and a jacket, a white shirt so bright it hurt my eyes unbuttoned to just above her cleavage, showing a delicate gold chain. Her hair was swept back, one twisting strand framing each side of her face.

She regarded me with those unblinking shark's eyes. “Don't have a heart attack. You're still useful to me.”

“I don't know where Clint Hicks is,” I blurted. That was the technical truth—­I had no idea where Clint Hicks, dumbass warlock that Azrael had murdered—­was at.

“See, I don't think that's entirely accurate,” Lilith said. She examined the nails on her left hand. The manicure was so sharp it looked like it could carve through my flesh and bone, and I felt sweat roll down my thighs and back in the all-­consuming humid­ity of the swamp. “I think he's so close he'd probably come running if you screamed.”

“I'm not lying,” I whispered.

“I know he left Wyoming,” Lilith said evenly. “I paid a visit to that piss-­scented dog park Billy's shifters laughingly call their territory. And now I find you here, in a place crawling with blood conjuring and demon nets
just
keeping me from seeing what's going on through your eyes.”

I stayed quiet. She wasn't looking for a response, unless it was peeing myself from sheer terror.

“When Hellspawn sleep, you can page through their dreams, and if you're lucky you find an entry about whatever it is you're looking for,” she said. “You, Ava, are not a very difficult book. More like Dick and Jane than
Anna Karenina
.”

Lilith's lips parted for a moment, and I prayed she wouldn't actually try to smile. That would easily rank as the most horrifying thing I'd ever seen. “I don't know where your backbone came from all of a sudden, but I don't like it. You're on thin fucking ice and it's cracking.”

She didn't really move. She was just
there,
in front of me, grabbing me by the neck and pushing down until I felt my voice box creak, a hair away from being crushed. “You lie to me again, Ava, and you'll see firsthand just how unpleasant existence can be on my shit list. I didn't give you Gary's book so you'd turn crusading avenger for every stray soul in the pages.”

“Then why did you?” I croaked. “I'm not a reaper. I can't help you.”

Lilith gave me a little shake. “No, you're not, but since you ripped his throat out you're going to have to do. I
will
get Azrael on the end of my claws and you
will
help me put him there. One hellhound with delusions of grandeur is not keeping me from the light. Not when I've waited for this long. You understand?”

She let go and I fell on my knees, gasping. I was shaking uncontrollably, and I wanted to rake Lilith across her face, destroy the waxen perfection staring down at me like I was a stubborn stain. I didn't, of course. I stayed on my knees, watching her pointed shoes turn and walk away.

“I'll see you in the daylight soon enough,” she said. “Now wake up. Your dreams are so fucking depressing I don't know how you can stand it.”

The swamp was gone, but I continued to shake and cough. A door banged open and hands grabbed me by the shoulders. I snarled, but they didn't let go. “Ava!” Leo snapped. He pulled me to my feet, and then scooped me up like I didn't weigh any more than the overstuffed garbage bags in the alley where I'd been standing calf-­deep in snow.

I was shaking because my fingers and feet had started to turn blue, coughing because it was so cold that breathing felt like taking a bat to the chest. Leo was wearing boots, jeans, and a too-­long, too-­loose flannel shirt, signifying it belonged to Wallace.

“What the hell were you thinking?” he demanded, carrying me straight past Veronica and a staring gaggle of hookers and up the stairs. “Were you
trying
to kill yourself?”

I finally managed to stop coughing. I must have been out there for at least an hour, to be this cold. The sharp needles driving through all my exposed skin told me hypothermia had finished setting in and was unpacking boxes and picking out curtains.