Black Dog (24 page)

I stayed quiet. I was still trying to calm down and I didn't trust myself to say the right thing. Not that I ever really did. I would never fill out a dating profile with ­“People say I'm a great listener.”

“So I feel a lot of empathy with hellhounds,” Clint said. “I know what a torment that is, to have who you really are ripped right out of you by the root.” He laughed once, lowering his head. “Not that I was such a prize, I'm sure. I enforced the laws of the Kingdom. If the ruling council saw a worthy soul to join the ranks, I went and collected it. Whether the person was happy about it or not.”

“If Annabelle is an example of how the Fallen really act, I think I prefer you this way,” I said. Clint rubbed his hands together and then stood up, toes hanging over the edge of the dock like he was about to lift up and float across the water.

“She's not bad. She has compassion for life, at least. In the Kingdom she wasn't a combatant. She was a diplomat, a scholar. That's how she knows so much about Tartarus.”

“She knows a lot about a lot of things,” I said. Clint was too preoccupied to catch the bite in my tone.

“I'm sorry I can't do what she does. Fallen can read minds, they're strong and fast, they can get from place to place using the crossroads. I'm sorry you have to look out for me.” He turned back to me and smiled. Even to my eyes, it looked forced. “But it'll be worth it.”

“When we kill Lilith,” I said. Clint nodded. He was having a hard time sitting still. I bet if he'd had the room, he'd be pacing.

“Then I'll be free,” I said. “We can go our separate ways.”

Clint nodded, his eyes darting back toward Annabelle's house. “Right.”

I stood up, kicking over the cooler. “You are so full of shit.”

Clint blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You knew I was coming for you,” I said. “Back in Wyoming. Annabelle said you knew something.”

Clint held up his hands. “Whoa. Annabelle says a lot of things. What did she tell you?”

“It doesn't even matter,” I said. I turned and stomped back to the car. Clint ran after me, grabbing on to the window frame of my door as I gunned the engine. Leo was already waiting in the backseat, and he touched my shoulder.

“Ava?”

“Don't,” I snarled, so viciously he jerked his hand away and actually pulled in on himself, like I'd scared him. That fit. I was scared as shit myself right now.

“Stop!” Clint shouted, reaching in the window and grabbing the wheel as I started to put the car in gear. I growled, low and hot in my chest.

“Ava!” he said. “Tell me what I'm supposed to know!”

“I told you I knew who I was before I died,” I said. “You acted like that was normal. But it's not, and I know it's not. I'm certainly not special, I'm not the Harry Potter of hellhounds, so what is it? What's wrong with me?”

“Turn off the car and I'll tell you,” Clint said. “I don't want you to go running off on me.”

“Jesus.” I hit the steering wheel, feeling the impact vibrate up my arm. “It's that bad?”

“You were right about Lilith and me.” Clint sighed. “We were close. She was my personal valet. It's an intimate relationship.”

Leo snorted. “You mean she was your personal slave? You created her out of the mud and then made her do your dirty work? No wonder the bitch resents you.”

“Lilith resents existing,” Clint said. “She hid her hate well. The first inkling I had anything was wrong was when she started trying to ferret out how she'd been made.”

“So she could pull the same trick?” I guessed. Clint nodded.

“Demons were the first, but not the only. We realized we needed beings that could easily navigate the crossroads. Just a few, not more than you have fingers on your hand, to keep tabs on the rest of existence. Warn us if the Kingdom was making a move to wipe us out for good. One of them was Raphael's favorite. He began to see things at the crossroads—­lost human souls, lingering on long after death. Raphael took pity on them and ushered them into Hell.”

“How sweet of her,” I said. Clint folded his arms.

“I'm trying to give you the whole picture. Hell wasn't always a terrible place. Dark and harsh, certainly, but also a place of life. All of those who had no place in the Kingdom or on earth could find a refuge.” He looked back toward the house again. “Human souls ruined it. Lilith figured out pretty quickly she could drain them dry and draw the other things, the things that skulked around the crossroads, into Hell to do her bidding. They killed one of our couriers outright, and we gave Raphael's creation protection, since he was out and about the most. His own hound.”

He paused for a moment, and I chewed over what he'd just said. “This ‘courier,' as you so euphemistically call him . . .”

“A reaper,” Clint said. “The first reaper. A Prometheus that Lilith and the other demons would pervert into their own image. She got to him, finally. Spilled his blood and gave rise to that insect race your reaper was a part of.” A smile flickered across his face. “Raphael had the last laugh, though. She gave the reaper and his hound the one thing that Lilith—­and us, for that matter—­could never have. She gave him a human soul.”

I held my breath. I knew what was coming, but somehow I thought if I shut my eyes and didn't watch the freight train barreling forward, it wouldn't flatten me.

“The soul was released, and it was supposed to find a new body, wait for that body to die, and return to us. But Lilith was stronger than I realized and the demons banded together and banished us before it happened. Raphael has been waiting for a very long time to meet her creation again. You remember your life because it's not your first one. You've been waiting to meet your real reaper again.”

“No.” I shook my head, and everything blurred around me. “No, you're wrong.”

“‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death,'” Clint whispered. “‘And Hell followed with him.'”

“Shut up,” I ground out. I knew the Bible. I didn't need Clint using it to prove some bullshit theory.

“‘And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth,'” Clint continued. “‘To kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.'”

“Did you not hear me?” I shouted, hitting the steering wheel. “This isn't true! I have nothing to do with you or any of the Fallen. I've never even been to Hell!”

“Not yet,” Clint said quietly. “I was pretty sure when I saw you that night in the state forest. When I met Leo, I was sure. He lives by the sword. He's a necromancer—­a warlock who destroys life, twists it, and gives it back in death.” Clint leaned forward, and I turned my face away, partly because I was crying and embarrassed and partly because I didn't want to see this new, strange gleam in his eye. It scared me, and I'd had enough of feeling afraid for one lifetime. “He
is
the rider on the pale horse, Ava,” Clint said. “And the beast of the wild? The Hell that follows with him? That's you.”

 

CHAPTER
24

I
grabbed the steering wheel of the Chevelle until it creaked so I wouldn't reach out and hurt Clint. I wanted to lash out at him, break things, spend my rage on fragile, breakable flesh and bone. A week ago, I wouldn't have hesitated to wrap my fingers around his windpipe, pressing my thumb in until it cracked under the pressure.

I didn't do any of that. I just sat there and stared straight ahead at the white, stretched skin of my knuckles.

It was Leo, finally, who leaned forward. He spoke softly into my ear, although I could tell from the whites of his knuckles where he gripped the seat he was as thrown off as I was. “We can just go,” he said. “Fuck this guy. I always said he belonged in a mental ward.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed in, out. I wasn't going to have another panic attack, not because of two Fallen playing a head game. “No,” I said. “Let him talk.”

“Ava,” Clint said. “Please understand, I wasn't manipulating you. I wasn't using you. I just didn't think you were ready.”

I stayed quiet. Breathed. Stared straight ahead. I'd never wanted to hurt anyone as badly as I wanted to hurt him in that moment.

Leo wasn't this thing, this puppet Raphael had drummed up because she was bored. And I wasn't a hound first and human second. Clint was wrong. Or lying. I didn't care.

“Ava,” he said again.

“Get away from me,” I whispered.

“Ava, I'm sorry,” he said. “But sooner or later, Leo is going to die. When he does, his soul will return to Hell and he'll remember his life there. His creation. He'll be defenseless against the demons in the Pit unless he has you.”

“GET AWAY FROM MY CAR, CLINT!” I screamed, loud enough that the windshield rattled. Clint jumped back a full two steps, his eyes going wide as silver dollars.

“I know it wasn't what you wanted to hear,” he babbled. “I know you think you're human and you resent what was done to you, but I'd hoped knowing this was always your fate would be some small comfort . . .”

I put the car in gear and sped toward him, spraying gravel and hitting the brake a few inches from his legs. Clint tumbled back, landing on his ass in the dirt.

“It isn't,” I told him, getting out and stalking back to Annabelle's shitty little swamp house. She was sipping her own glass of tea, watching us all out her front window. She narrowed her eyes when I banged her screen door open.

“Help you, doggie?”

“Give me your Scythe,” I said, pointing at her boot. “Give it to me now or I swear I will use all this almighty reaper power I have to drag you straight back to Hell to be Lilith's punching bag for the next thousand years.”

Annabelle rolled her eyes, then reached down and took out the Scythe, flipping it in her hand and holding it out to me grip first. “Take it. Belongs to my reaper anyway.”

“Leo is
not
yours,” I told her, resisting the urge to jam the black blade right back into her skinny neck.

“Girl, please.” Annabelle flipped a hand. “How you think you two got together in the first place? The reaper knows his hound, and you know him. You couldn't have stayed away if you tried.”

Rather than acknowledge that she was right, that Leo and I meeting and sticking together was improbable at best, I did what I did best, and ran. I shoved the Scythe in my jacket and ran straight back to the car, forcing myself to stop shaking before I jammed it into gear.

“Ava,” Clint shouted as I turned the Chevelle in a large circle and pointed it to the road. “Ava, wait! I'm sorry!”

I peeled out, spraying him with flecks of gravel as I went. In the rearview, I saw the door of the house open and Annabelle come running. She also started screaming at me, but I turned back to the road just in time to see a shape loom in front of me. I only caught that it was big and black and smack over the center line before I jerked the wheel. The Chevelle shuddered and the front wheels jumped onto the shoulder, the soft sand sending me skidding out of control. A thick, twisted pine tree loomed up in the side window and the impact snapped me sideways, my skull cracking the driver's side window in a halo shape. Leo slammed first into one side of the backseat, then the other, his body going limp. A perfect circle of red blood glistened at the center of the driver's window where my skull had hit, the last thing I saw before my senses were taken over by the sound of screaming cylinders and shattering glass. The car shuddered to a stop after the impact, and I was whipped the other way, and then even the chaos of the crash faded to black.

I woke up
staring at a rabbit. It was dead and stuffed and had a pair of small plastic antlers tied to its head. “What the fuck?” I said. The rabbit didn't have any answers.

I tried to sit up and found my head swimming, and one of my arms tied. After a few seconds of frantic reactive thrashing, I realized the tie was just a cheap nylon sling, and the feeling of being wrapped in cotton wool soaked in high-­grade painkillers was because I was, in fact, pumped full of high-­grade painkillers.

A small orange bottle on the nightstand, guarded by the jackalope, announced that somebody named Norma Ethridge had been prescribed thirty Percocet by a doctor in Henderson, Nevada.

That cleared a few of the cobwebs from my head, and I sat up again, fighting against a pile of faded sheets and comforters to get my feet on the floor.

“Whoa whoa whoa!” A figure rushed in and gently held me still. “Don't try to get up just yet. Your head was pretty bashed up when you got here.”

I hit the figure in the throat with my good hand. He stumbled back, choking, tripped over a stack of nudie mags, and fell on the ground. I stood up, swaying from the pills as I yanked off the sling. “What are you doing here, Marty?”

Marty scrambled to his feet, pressing himself against the wall. “You crazy bitch!” he rasped. “This is my house, is what I'm doing. I took your sorry ass in.”

There was a small window over Marty's shoulder, clothed by some drab, sun-­faded curtains. Through the gap I could see a familiar low, slouched building and cheap plywood sign. I blinked for a long moment. My eyes felt like somebody had taken sandpaper to them. “Marty,” I said, “where am I?”

“Las Vegas,” Marty grumbled, bending to restack his magazines. “Where do you think?”

I sat back on the bed. My arm was stiff from being immobilized. In point, my whole body was stiff, my muscles hung over from the impact of running the Chevelle into a tree.

Swerving to miss someone and smashing into a tree. . .

“How did I get here?” I said abruptly. Marty glared at me, holding the Christmas issue of
Naughty Neighborhood Nymphos
protectively against his chest.

“You sure ask a lot of questions for some bitch who put a cap in me.”

“It's a fair question, Marty.” I sighed. The left side of my skull was throbbing, and when I touched it, the tips of my fingers found a patch of sticky, blood-­encrusted hair.

“I got no fuckin' idea,” he said. “I came to open up the office this morning and you were passed out on my welcome mat, beat to shit and muttering about black dogs.”

Leo. Leo slamming hard into the Chevelle's door, body a tangled mass of limbs as we swerved up the sand dune and met the scrubby pine tree headfirst . . .

“Where's Leo?” I demanded.

“Leo Karpov? Don't know and don't care. Aren't you even a little curious about how I survived your crazy ass?” Marty said. I looked back at the jackalope, wondering if it would be an effective weapon to beat him to death with.

“No,” I said. “I literally cannot think of anything I care less about at this moment in time.”

“I can move my brain stem to any part of my body,” Marty said triumphantly. “I shifted the important parts out of the path of that totally uncalled-­for bullet you put in my brain.”

“You sure about that?” I muttered as I let my eyes roam and saw more porn, more sad faded furniture, and more weird taxidermy, including an armadillo smoking a cigar. It glared at me from the top of Marty's TV set.

“Whoever dumped you left you flying solo,” Marty said. “And a bloody mess.”

“And yet you fixed my arm and put me to bed,” I said. “Is this going to be one of those things where you try to chain me up and make me your wife? Because I can spoil it and say it will not end well for you.”

Marty snorted. “Are you kidding? I hate you. I hate Hellspawn. I'm just waiting to see who'll pay me the most cold hard cash to torture you to death.” He flipped open a laptop that, judging by its relative cleanliness and heavy load of boy band stickers, was stolen, and scrolled through a series of messages. “Soon,” he said. “I figure after what you put me through, it's karma.”

He rolled a tattered chair over to the laptop and wagged a finger at me. “Don't get any bright ideas, either. I'm hard to kill, and you have enough drugs in you to knock down a horse.”

I watched him hammer away at the keyboard, humming and smiling. “I don't suppose you'd be interested in doing something for me instead.”

Marty sucked on his small, nicotine-­stained teeth as he considered. “You got money?”

“Think of it as a public ser­vice,” I said. Marty shook his head.

“Sorry, kid. It's ass, cash, or grass in this establishment. Besides, I don't generally do the bidding of some reaper's purse dog.”

I sighed, testing out my bad arm. My rotator cuff was definitely torn and I was sore, but nothing felt broken. “You're not very bright,” I told Marty.

He smirked at me. “Is that so? In what way?”

“Because when you have a dangerous dog in your house,” I said, standing up and grabbing him by the front of his shirt with my good arm, “you chain that fucking mutt up before it bites you.”

Marty yelped as I tossed him face-­first onto the bed and got on top of him, pressing my knee into the small of his back and the Scythe into the nape of his neck. Whoever had brought me back to Nevada hadn't taken it. Either they'd been even dumber than Marty or they weren't working for Lilith. I could spend all the time I wanted pondering that mystery once I'd found Leo.

“You feel that?” I growled. Marty mumbled something into the comforter and I pushed the very tip of the Scythe into his neck. “Yes or no, Marty.”

“Yes,” he gasped. “Jesus, I can't breathe.”

“This is a reaper's blade,” I said. Marty wriggled in a panic, and I flicked him on the ear with my free hand. “This will slice your spinal cord like twine, and nothing you shapeshift into is gonna be a cure for that. So do you want to help me, or do you want to be an asshole?”

Marty mumbled something, and I grabbed a shock of his ginger hair, lifting his head an inch so he could talk. “Help,” Marty gurgled. “I'll help.”

I let him go, hopping off his chunky torso and trying not to let the floor roll under me as I did. “What do you know,” I said, keeping the Scythe in view as he struggled off the mattress. “You were right. You are smart after all.”

Marty gaped at me, twin spots of color flaming in his cheeks. “Look, just go,” he said. “I don't want any part of whatever it is you're into.”

“I need you to find Leo, and someone else for me too,” I said. “You may be a sleazy little weasel, but you're good with that hacker crap, so get to it.”

Marty swallowed hard. “Okay. I need to go over to the motel where all the servers are . . .”

I pointed at the door. “Get moving.” I followed Marty across a sad expanse of gravel and through the back door of the Mushroom Cloud's office. The mess from the fight had been cleaned up, but there were big bleach spots in his carpet from my blood, and I saw some crime scene tape flapping sadly from the porch posts at the front of the motel.

“I love what you've done with the place,” I told Marty. He pulled up his chair to his computer rig and glared at me.

“I'm gonna need something specific for a search. Computers aren't magic, you know. It's not like in the movies.”

“Leo first,” I said. “Last I remember we were in a car accident in southern Louisiana.”

Marty typed, and before I could blink, the police report from Terrabone Parish was on the screen. “Says the car was empty when the cops got there,” Marty said. He clacked some more. “There's a John Doe in the Las Vegas hospital that matches your asshole boyfriend's description. I figured whoever dumped you here might've ditched him too.”

I looked at the clock on Marty's computer. Only about twelve hours had passed since the accident. I'd crossed thousands of miles in what sounded like minutes.

Any other day, I'd be freaked out and looking over my shoulder, but now I just shoved it into the back of my mind with all the other problematic crap I tried to ignore on a daily basis.

“Lilith is looking for a human,” I said. “One called ‘the innocent' in this ritual she wants to do. I'm guessing he or she is somewhere between Wyoming and northern Louisiana.”

“Oh, that's helpful,” Marty snorted. “I'll just Google it for you.”

I whapped him on the back of the head. “I can still stab you. You haven't been very useful just yet.”

Marty waved me off like I was an annoying fly and started typing. “Lilith got me collectin' names of ­people who brushed up against demons and reapers but didn't deal. Crazy types mostly, little bit of psychic blood or a dash of the old warlock DNA, generations back. She said it was to keep them from being used against her.”

“You hate Hellspawn so much that you troll the entire Web keeping a database of pathetic souls who have run-­ins with demons?” I said, cocking one eyebrow. Marty glared at me.

“Hey, just because your boss is a cunt doesn't mean you don't do what she says if you like your job. And your arms. And being alive.” He looked up at me, his homemade database scrolling past. There were thousands of names, from the time widespread records started being kept.