by Rhys Ford
“Here,” Conri said. He grabbed the knife from Bell and darted forward between the galloping legs to slide the knife in, neat and precise, under the unicorn’s jaw. It stopped the god-awful screech and went limp, bloody tongue hanging out of a slack jaw. Conri twisted the knife in a vicious, just-to-be-sure motion and scrambled back to Bell. Sweat cut through the blood on his face, but his hand was steady as he offered the knife back. Bell didn’t take it. It wasn’t exactly procedure to arm changelings, but if Conri wanted him dead, he could have left him. Conri nodded acknowledgment of the gesture and hung on to the knife. “I’ve done it before. After a while it doesn’t feel quite so much like murdering Tinkerbell.”
It had only been minutes, but Bell felt like he’d been in a fight for an hour. He gingerly got onto his knees—and had to choke back a yelp as one of them protested with the hot, wire-yank pain of a dislocated kneecap—and peered over the unicorn’s broad back. The herd poured through the trees like a grubby tide, and he saw smaller, paler things weave through the heaving bodies on fast, sure feet.
“You’ve read Peter Pan?” Bell asked absently.
“Finn was not always fifteen and too cool to like things,” Conri said. He scrambled over and poked his head up above the unicorn’s flanks to follow the direction of Bell’s stare. “Son of a bitch.”
“Hounds,” Bell said, his suspicion confirmed as the end of the stampede grew closer. The slim dogs—long, bony, and sharp—snapped at the unicorn’s heels and faces to harry them on. Ribs showed under their thin coats, and they had lost some of the dog that the fey liked their beasts to have. Still generally dog-shaped—the intent of a dog—but they stretched too long and they were too smooth. The details were gone. “I guess we’ve found Robin.”
“He’s from Mag Mell. They don’t hunt,” Conri said. “The hounds wouldn’t answer to him. Not this quick.”
“They’re answering to someone,” Bell said. He reached around to draw his other knife and unhooked the sap from his belt. Guns were no good against hounds. Bullets tore through the air where they had been, and it was hard to fire a second time with no face. “And it’s not us.”
He flicked his wrist and extended the sap. The click as it locked into place—half felt, half heard—was familiar, but the weight of it was off. His old sap had been dented from use, scarred and scraped from impact. He’d been used to it.
Time to break this one in.
The last of the unicorns—the old, lame, and young—hammered down onto the road. Splinters chipped up under their hooves as they hit the stone, and Bell caught the sound of the yellow pickup as it growled to life.
Something eerie undercut the sound of diesel combustion—an unnerving rattle. Ned had driven a long way today, and the more mundane an object, the harder the Otherworld ate at it.
A few of the hounds stuck to the chase, but most of them peeled away to surround Bell and Conri. Bloody ears pricked and white, rubbery jowls wrinkled back from sharp, ragged teeth as they growled. Blood streaked their necks and chests as it dribbled from the thin, thorned collars that wrapped around thick, long necks.
Conri put his back to Bell’s and growled at them. It was the surprisingly thin, slightly mad snarl of a herding dog at bay, and it made the hounds shy back, but not for long. A lean bitch, whose collar had hooked into the corner of her mouth to give her a wonky smile, lunged forward to snap at Conri. He kicked her back, but the rest of the pack had already committed.
The last time, Bell had run. More often than the Iron Door Press Office was willing to admit, that was the best option a Walker had. They were usually alone, always out-gunned, and far from home. If they wanted to win, they needed to fight smart, not brave.
Time to see how the hounds fared if he stood his ground.
Bell cracked the sap over narrow skulls and against the joints in long, narrow legs. When the hounds lunged at him, he shoved the sap into their jaws, so their teeth cracked on the iron and silver, while Conri slit throats or slashed at stomachs with the knife.
The thorn collars got in the way. They deflected the knives, so the cuts were shallow instead of deep, and they scratched along muscle instead of opening the jugular. If the hounds got too close, the thorns caught on fabric and skin to foul movement and slow them down.
One of the bigger hounds ignored the knife that slashed its sides and slammed into Conri. It ground its teeth down into his arm, through layers of fat and muscle, as they both fell over backward into the mud. Conri groaned and then choked the noise back as he struggled to keep the hound’s teeth from his throat.
He wouldn’t succeed for long.
Bell swore to himself and left his knife jammed between the ribs of one of the hounds. He spun on the balls of his feet and swung the sap in a short, brittle arc that caught the hound under the front leg. It shrieked in pain around the mouthful of Conri meat, and Conri dug his fingers into the scruff of his neck and tossed it away.
“I think Robin’s better at being fey than you thought,” Bell said. He wiped blood off his hands so his grip wouldn’t slip. “They aren’t going to break.”
“Not for you,” Conri said as he scrambled back to his feet. “They were bred to hunt men. They wouldn’t be much good at it if they feared us. Can you hold them for a minute?
Bell grinned with a flash of bleak amusement. “I thought I already was. You can jump in anytime.”
He got a snort for that, but before he could enjoy the moment, two of the hounds charged in. The sap cracked one over the head hard enough to stagger it, and he kicked sideways to slam the heel of his boot into the side of the other hound’s throat before he could reach Conri. He lost his knife in the meat of a hound’s chest and nearly his Achilles tendon to sharp teeth, but his Iron Door–issued boots were thick enough that the fangs only scraped his skin.
In the middle of all that, he was still—very briefly—tempted to look when he saw Conri’s jeans get tossed aside out of the corner of his eye. When the ragged T-shirt followed them, he did steal a second to glance over his shoulder.
He got a brief eyeful of Conri’s long, lean body, and then it blurred, like a child had scraped their fist over a chalk drawing, and snapped back together into a dog. Bell had seen transformations before, but never such a clean one. It was usually a… wet… process, with the leavings left splattered all over the walls.
This time, one second there was Conri, and the next a dog. So neat that Bell wondered if he’d mis-seen.
Except it was obviously still Conri. The eyes were the same, and the scruffy merle-patterned fur now stretched over a rough-coated collie the size of a Newfoundland. Conri-the-dog shook itself, shed what looked like an entire other dog, and then threw itself forward to slam shoulder-first into a hound.
The long, white almost-dog hit the ground and rolled. When it came back to its feet, it snarled and backed away unhappily. Sharp fangs couldn’t dig in through the dense, wiry coat, the collie was nearly as fast and thick with muscle, and a thick, nail-studded leather collar around its throat tore their mouths to shreds when they tried to take it down.
One snuck around to go for the collie’s flank, but Bell grabbed it by the scruff of the neck. The thorn collar tore his palm open as he dragged it back and put it down with a short, sharp blow from the butt of his sap to the base of the skull. He shot another, the quarters too close for the hounds to twist out of the way, and got his knife back from one dead hound in time to slash it across another’s face.
As the hound staggered backward, one eye and one ear wet with blood as it shook its head, a shrill whistle cut through the trees. The hounds all pricked their ears—the ones that could—and then slowly broke away from the fight to flee into the trees.
The last living hound stood her ground, head dropped and lips curled as she glared at Conri. He shook his head—and maybe his fur wasn’t as thick as all that, because he splattered blood—and waited with his paws braced.
Then she snapped at him, the click of her teeth loud as they hit eac
h other and turned tail to follow the rest.
Conri groaned once she was gone and flopped down to roll on the ground as if the dirt would help his bites. Maybe it would. Bell pressed the ball of the sap against his thigh and retracted it as he stepped forward.
“Conri?” he said as he extended his hand. “You still in there?”
The narrow, pointed head that swung toward him didn’t have enough room for a human brain, but the spark of Conri was still there in the mismatched eyes. He wagged his tail as Bell stroked his soft ears and wondered how insanely inappropriate that was. Then the dog scrambled back to his feet for a quick scratch before he took off at a trot after the hounds.
Bell wiped his face on his arm—regretted it as it hurt—and supposed that made sense. He didn’t know if they could save the Treaty anymore—the kids had obviously been trapped here for more than a scary few days—but maybe he could still save Nora.
It wouldn’t change anything. He used to think it would, but no matter how many people he did save, it would never make up for the one he hadn’t. Not to him, not to anyone. But it was still worth doing.
Chapter Seven
IT FELT too good to be back on all fours again. Conri could feel the press of the Otherworld’s approval against his bones. This was the shape it thought suited him, the skin he should wear, and the thoughts he should think.
There was no malice to it. It was how the Otherworld worked. In the mortal world, people talked about form over function as though it was a bad thing, but here they were the same. Lovers grew more beautiful, bards could—literally—sing like birds, and Conri got turned into a dog because that was how his life always went.
The Otherworld thought he’d make a good dog… and it had been right. Like it or not, no matter what that Kessel hound dog said, Conri was a good dog. It was a shame he’d always wanted more, or he could have been happy.
The stink of the hounds hung on the air like burnt caramel, so strong he could almost reach out and snap off a thread of it. He could taste their blood in his mouth, thick and slippery and undersalted, and the rose-thorn magic that bound them.
Something else too. He ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth and along his teeth as he tried to identify it. Meat and smoke and the crack-slurp of marrow between their jaws.
Loyalty, he realized. It was the smell of loyalty.
That put his ears back. The hounds weren’t loyal. They were hounds. They were hunger wrapped in mist-skin and given bone teeth because the fey wanted dogs to hunt with. Conri’s old master had bred mortal dogs into the line, but that was because he liked their belling howl, not for any doggy attribute.
He’d had Conri for that.
A quick shake of his head dislodged that thought. Collie or man, Conri had never seen any point in worrying about what couldn’t be fixed.
The hounds had been here a long time, with nothing mortal enough to make killing it worthwhile. Maybe, like the slough itself, they were happy to be back to work.
Cold water splashed Conri’s paws and belly as he landed in a thin, brackish stream. He stopped for a second to stick his muzzle in it and slurp up the water. It let Bell catch up with him.
Bell flopped belly down on the bank of the stream and stuck his head into it. Dark hair floated on the water and bubbles trickled up from his nose. Then they stopped. Conri shoved his nose into Bell’s ear and snorted to make Bell surface, spluttering water and blood.
“I’m not drinking it,” Bell said, after Conri woofed at him. He propped himself up on his elbows and let the water drip off his face. His nose was crooked, his eyebrow split and scabbed, and a dark bruise was rising to the surface along his jawline. The scar the unicorns had given him had already faded to a thin, silver line—actual silver that glittered dully when he turned his head. Conri would have to talk to him about that, when he had words again, anyhow. “I needed to…. How far are they ahead?”
Conri tilted his head to one side and then the other. He was still a person in a dog skin—more or less, less if the Otherworld had its way—but how the hell was he meant to convey distance? Bark once per yard?
“Fair enough,” Bell said. He wiped the water off his face and flicked it away. “Far?”
It was a bit undignified, but Conri shook his head.
“Then we want to see what we’re getting into before we have to deal with it,” Bell said. He pushed himself back and into a sitting position so he could fish the trow ointment out of his belt. “Don’t rush in. Stay back and give me a chance to assess that situation.”
Conri laid his ears back.
“You nearly got shot sticking your nose where it didn’t belong back in the mortal world,” Bell said. He cracked the seal on the ointment with his fingernail. It was potent enough that even the smell of it perked Conri up like a good cup of coffee. “I’m not out of line to think you might not wait for me to catch up.”
Conri scrambled out of the water and shook himself. He paced back and forth, sniffing the air as Bell rubbed the ointment straight onto his skin. Open wounds first—they didn’t heal immediately, but blood dried up—and then a bit for his nose and the knee he’d favored the last half mile.
Once he had the ointment on, Bell took a second to close his eyes. He looked oddly young when he did that, and Conri realized with a start that he actually was. After a while in the Otherworld, you stopped trying to work out ages. Old enough for morality was the only standard he really worried about.
Bell, with the set of his jaw softened and the hard impatience he approached everything with faded, was only in his twenties. Mid to late, but still. He was probably younger than Conri had been when he was brought to the Otherworld, before he’d been a Walker.
“Let’s go see who we’re trying to save,” Bell said after a single deep breath that he slowly exhaled. He was still injured, but the ointment dulled the pain enough that Bell was able to scramble easily to his feet. “Then see what the unicorns left of Ned.”
Conri bounced on his paws in agreement and took off again. He followed the track of the hounds through the trees, over and under the twisted thorn runners decorated with brown-edged white blooms the size of his head. Up close they looked less like roses and smelled like nothing at all. Spots of blood stained them, bright and indelible.
Cheater’s Rose, his old master had called them with disdain. Fey grew them in hunting preserves to make the chase easier. Blood stained them forever, or at least until a frost dropped the petals.
Only mortal blood, though. Even a changeling who’d been in the Otherworld any length of time wouldn’t leave much of a mark. So however long had passed for the mortal teenagers, it hadn’t been too long.
The brittle blood-toffee scent of the hounds thickened, pliable and fresh in the air, and Conri slowed down. He stopped behind a thicket of Cheater’s Rose and brambles when he heard the harsh clash of voices. After a minute Bell caught up and crouched down next to him, one arm slung over his shoulder.
“Good… work,” he murmured as he listened to the voices bicker, the “boy” caught behind his teeth. Conri huffed down his nose in amusement and wagged his tail, ’cause… well… fuck it. It did feel good. He’d enjoyed praise before he was a changeling. “Let’s see what’s going on and with whom.”
He pulled on a pair of gloves and scrambled up the thorny twist of the rose briars, the hooked thorns not sharp enough to pierce through the fabric. Conri paced at the bottom for a second, the dog anxiety in the back of his head like pressure, and then forced himself to leave Bell to it as he slunk under the underbrush until he could see into the clearing.
The hounds sprawled around the clearing in awkward, angular piles of bone and hair. Like greyhounds at rest, they looked like puppets with the strings snapped. In the middle of them, a skinny, darkly tanned youth with bleached white hair crouched next to the big female that led the pack and fussed over her like a pup. Thin, gloved fingers, with “nails” that were thorns broken off the roses and sewn onto the fingers scratched behi
nd her ears and under the crease of her long thin jaw.
Good? Yes. Good me. The hound huffed to herself in satisfaction. Her bony whip of a tail slapped the ground twice and then spasmed weirdly as dog instincts tried to kick in and got lost halfway through. Kill more. Kiss pet. Pet kiss. Good me kill. Food?
The other hounds lifted their heads at the mention of the food and moaned a weird, wavering noise.
Kill? Food? Food Kill. Yesssss. Good? Me good. You? Good!
A few of them, caught up in the question of who was good, snapped and snarled at one another. The skinny youth jumped in and pulled them apart, backed up by the big female who asserted she was the good until the others slunk away from her.
Conri glanced past the hounds and their keeper to….
It had been the Hunting Lodge at one time, but the slough had picked the brick and timber down to a shell of a landmark. In its place was a shabby trailer, the painted sides blistered and warped from time. Prisoners sat hunched around it, filthy sacks of sticks and bones with thorn collars around their throats to chain them to the ground.
Conri had to squint to get his brain to cooperate with numbers. Dogs definitely couldn’t count in the Otherworld’s view of things. He overrode that.
Four prisoners.
Not enough for all the kids who’d been taken, but graves were easy to miss out here. He glanced up into the tree to judge Bell’s next move as Bell apparently forgot everything he said and dropped out of his perch. He landed easily, knees flexed to absorb the impact, and snapped the gun up to point at the hound’s master.
“Call them off,” he snapped the command in a cold voice. His finger tightened slightly on the trigger. “Now. Or I kill you and see if they have the heart for a fight then.”
