Must Love Hellhounds

by Harris, Charlaine

  The Order found the Pack’s presence very troubling. The shapeshifters didn’t trust the Order, and rightfully so—the knights viewed each shapeshifter as a monster waiting to happen. So far Kate was the only agent of the Order who had managed to earn their trust, and they preferred to deal exclusively through her. Getting a shapeshifter out of a bind would go a long way toward improving my standing with both organizations. At least on paper.

  I put the parking brake on and walked upwind from the Jeep. Hard to smell anything with the exhaust fumes searing the inside of my nose. Teddy Jo had probably exaggerated the dog’s size—eyewitnesses usually did—but even if it was as large as a “regular-person house,” finding it in the labyrinth of the ravines would prove tricky. The highway didn’t just run straight. It veered and split into smaller roads, half of which led nowhere; the other half ended up rejoining Buzzard.

  I crouched on the edge of the ravine and let the air currents tell me a story. A touch of sickeningly sweet rot of decomposing flesh and the odd, slightly oily stink of vultures eating it. Twin musk of two feral cats enjoying a bit of competitive spraying over each other’s marks. A harsh bitterness of a distant skunk. The scent of burning matches.

  I paused. Sulfur dioxide. Quite a bit of it, too. It was the only scent that didn’t fit the usual odors of animal life. I returned to the Jeep and followed the matches north. There were times when my secret self came in handy.

  The stench of burning sulfur grew stronger. A low growl rolled through the ravine below, dissolving into heavy wet panting, followed by a frustrated layered yelp, as if several dogs had whined in unison.

  I guided the Jeep along the edge of the ravine and peered down. Nothing. No giant dogs, just a shallow twenty-five-foot gap with a bit of scarce shrubs and trash at the bottom. A broken rusted fridge. The remains of a couch. Multicolored dirt-stained rags. A house had apparently thrown up down the slope and now perched in a ruined heap on the edge, where the ravine veered left.

  An excited snarl rumbled through the Scratches, the deep primeval sound of an enormous beast giving chase. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. I stood on the brakes, swiped the Weatherby from the seat, and jumped out, taking position on the edge.

  A shaggy shape exploded from around the bend of the ravine. Saffron-colored with a sprinkling of dark spots on its sloped back, the animal flew over the refuse, the muscles of its powerful forequarters pumping hard. A bouda. Shit.

  The werehyena saw me. A cackle of trilling terrified laughter exploded from its muzzle.

  Please don’t be Raphael. Please don’t be Raphael. Please . . .

  The bouda veered toward me, changing in midleap. Its body snapped, twisting like a broken doll. Bones thrust out of the flesh, muscles sliding up the new powerful limbs, a carved chest, and a humanoid torso. The beast’s jaws exploded, growing disproportionately large, its face flattened into a grotesque semblance of human, its forepaws stretched into hands that could enclose my entire head. A bouda in a warrior form, a monster halfway between hyena and man. For a shapeshifter, to assume this form was a victory, to make it proportional was an achievement, and to speak in one was an art.

  The werehyena’s jaws gaped open, displaying three-inch fangs. A bloodcurdling scream ripped from him. “Drive away, Andrea! Drive!”

  Raphael. Damn it.

  “Don’t panic.” I sighted the bend through the scope. “I have it under control.” A thing that sent a bouda in warrior form running, especially one as crazy and lethal as Raphael, had to be treated with respect. Fortunately, the Weatherby delivered respect in a Magnum cartridge. It would stop a rhino at full gallop. It sure as hell would handle an oversized dog.

  The ground shook as if from blows of a giant hammer. The refuse on the ravine’s floor jumped in place.

  A colossal thing burst from around the bend, nearly level with the ravine’s wall. Blood-red and massive, it slid on the trash and crashed into the curve. The impact shook the slope. The remnants of a house quaked and slid down in a shower of bricks, bouncing from the creature’s three canine heads.

  A twenty-foot-tall three-headed dog. Whoa. This was quite possibly the coolest thing I’d ever seen through the scope of a rifle.

  The dog shook, flinging rubble from his fur. Thick, deep-chested, built like an Italian mastiff, it gripped the ground with four massive paws and charged after Raphael. Behind it a long whiplike tail lashed, the barb on its end shaped like a snake’s head. The mouths of its three heads hung open, displaying gleaming fangs longer than my forearm. Three forked serpentine tongues hung out as it thundered to us, flinging foam from between the horrid teeth. The drops of drool, each big enough to fill a bucket, ignited in midair.

  It was built too thickly. The bullet might not penetrate.

  However, I didn’t need to kill it. I just had to delay it long enough for the knucklehead to reach me. I sighted the muzzle of the center head. The nose shot would deliver maximum pain.

  “Run, damn you!” Raphael howled, scrambling up the slope toward me.

  “There’s no need to scream.” Excitement buoyed me, the ancient thrill of a hunter sighting his prey. The beast’s dark nose danced in my scope.

  Steady. Aim. Breathe. You have time.

  A triple snarl ripped from three huge maws.

  Gently, slowly, I squeezed the trigger.

  The Weatherby spat thunder. The recoil punched me in the shoulder.

  The dog’s middle head jerked. The Weatherby’s magazine held two rounds and one in the chamber. I sighted and fired again. The middle head drooped. The beast yowled and spun in pain. Perfect. The Weatherby wins again.

  In a desperate leap, Raphael launched himself up the slope toward me. I caught his arm and hauled him up. We dashed to the Jeep. I hopped into the driver’s seat, Raphael landed in the passenger’s, and I floored the gas pedal.

  A howl of pure frustration shook the highway. In the rearview mirror the dog sailed out of the ravine as if it had wings and landed on the road behind us.

  “Faster!” Raphael snarled.

  I drove, squeezing every last drop out of the Jeep’s old engine. We hurtled down the highway at a breakneck speed. The dog gave chase with a triumphant howl that shook the ground beneath the car wheels. It closed the space between us in three great bounds and bent down over the car, its mouths opened wide. The foul, corrosive breath washed over me. Raphael jumped up and snarled back, his hackles up. Burning drool hit the backseat, singeing the upholstery in an acrid stench of melted synthetics.

  I swerved, taking a sudden turn onto a wooden bridge and almost sending the Jeep off the edge into a gap. Monstrous teeth snapped a foot from the backseat.

  The dog snarled. In the rearview mirror I saw its muscles bunch as it gathered itself for a leap. Before me, Buzzard’s Highway ran straight and narrow, ravines on both sides. Nowhere to go. That’s it, we’re done.

  Inside me, an animal raked at my flesh, trying to spill out of my skin. I clenched my teeth and stayed human.

  The dog jumped. Its huge body flew toward us and then jerked back, as if an invisible leash had snapped, reaching its full length. The giant canine fell, its paws waving clumsily in the air. In the rearview mirror I saw it rise. Its bark rang through the Scratches. The dog barked again, whined, and jumped back into the ravine.

  I slowed to a speed that would let me make a turn without sending us to a fiery death in the gap below. “You! Explain!”

  In the seat next to me Raphael shuddered. Fur melted into smooth human skin, stretched taut over a heartbreakingly beautiful body. Coal-black hair spilled from his head to his shoulders. He looked at me with smoldering blue eyes, smiled, and passed out.

  “Raphael?”

  Out cold. With magic down, changing shape took a lot of effort and combined with the strain of that run, Lyc-V, the shapeshifter virus, had shut him down for a rest.

  I growled under my breath. Of course, he could’ve stayed conscious had he not changed into a human. But he knew that if he shifted s
hape, he would pass out on the seat next to me, nude, and I would be forced to stare at him until he slept it off. He had done it on purpose. The werehyena Casanova strikes again. I was getting really tired of his ridiculous pursuit.

  Ten minutes later I pulled into an abandoned Shell station and parked under the concrete roof shielding the pumps.

  I hugged my rifle and listened. No snarls. No growling. We were in the clear.

  My heart hammered. I tasted a bitter patina on my tongue and squeezed my eyes shut. A delayed reaction to stress, nothing more.

  Inside, my secret self danced and screamed in frustration. I chained it. Control. In the end it was all about control. I had learned to impose my will over my body in childhood—it was that or death—and years of mental conditioning in the Order’s Academy had reinforced my hold.

  Breathe. Another breath.

  Calm.

  Gradually the bestial part of me settled down. That’s it. Relax. Good.

  All shapeshifters struggled with their inner beast. Unfortunately, I wasn’t an ordinary shapeshifter. My problems were a lot more complicated. And the presence of Raphael only aggravated them.

  Raphael sprawled next to me, snoring slightly. Until he awoke, speculating on why a giant three-headed dog with burning drool had chased after him would be pointless.

  Look at him. Napping without a care in the world, confident I would be watching him. And I was. I had met handsome men in my life, some born with classically perfect features and the physique of Michelangelo’s David. Raphael was not one of these men, and yet he left them all in the dust.

  He had his good qualities: the bronze skin, the masculine jaw, the wide sensuous mouth. But his face was too narrow. His nose was too long. And yet when he looked at women with those dark blue eyes, they lost all common sense and threw themselves at him. His face was so interesting and so . . . carnal. There was no other word for it. Raphael was all tightly controlled, virile sensuality, heat simmering just beneath the surface of his dusky skin.

  And his body took my breath away. He was built lean, with crisp definition, proportionate and perfect with wide chest, narrow hips, and long limbs. My gaze drifted down to between his legs. And hung like a horse.

  He had been kind to me, more kind than I probably deserved. The first time, when my body betrayed me, he and his mother, Aunt B, saved my life by guiding me back into my shape. The second time, when my back was pierced by silver spikes, he held me and talked me through pushing them out of my body. When I thought back to those moments, I sensed tenderness in him and I wanted very badly to believe it was genuine.

  Unfortunately, he was also a bouda. They had a saying about werehyenas: fourteen to eighty, blind, crippled, crazy. Boudas would screw anything. I had witnessed it firsthand. Monogamy wasn’t in their vocabulary.

  Raphael had seen the true me and he’d never come across anyone similar. To him I was the TWT-IHFB. That Weird Thing I Haven’t Fucked Before.

  The more I thought about it, the madder I got. He could speak in a warrior form just fine. Had he stayed awake, I would’ve gotten the whole explanation from him by now. Not to mention that if something attacked us, I’d be left to defend a limp man who outweighed me by about eighty pounds. What exactly was I supposed to do with him? Did he expect me to sigh heavily while admiring his naked body? Or perhaps I was supposed to take advantage of the situation?

  I reached into the glove compartment and got out a Sharpie. Taking advantage of the situation didn’t sound bad at all.

  An hour later Raphael stretched and opened his eyes. His lips stretched in an easy smile. “Hey. Now that’s a beautiful sight to wake up to.”

  I leveled my SIG-Sauer at him. “Tell me why the nice puppy was chasing you.”

  He wrinkled his nose and touched his mouth. “Is there something on my lips?”

  Yes, there is. “Raphael, concentrate! I know it’s hard for you but do try to stay on target. Explain the dog.”

  He licked his lips and my thoughts went south. Andrea, concentrate! Try to stay on target.

  Raphael remembered to look cool and leaned back, presenting me with the view of a spectacular chest. “It’s complicated.”

  “Try me. First, what are you even doing here? Aren’t you supposed to dragging around giant rocks right now?” About six weeks ago, the lot of us had entered the Midnight Games, an illegal, to-the-death fighting tournament. We did it to prevent a war against the Pack. Both the Order and Curran, the Beast Lord, took a rather dim view of this occurrence. As a result, Kate was on medical leave, and the Beast Lord, who had actually ended up participating in the tournament with us, had sentenced himself and the rest of the involved shapeshifters to several weeks of hard labor building an addition to the Pack’s citadel.

  “Curran released me due to family hardship,” Raphael said.

  Not good. “What happened?”

  “My mother’s mate died.”

  My heart jumped. Aunt B was . . . she was kind. She saved my life once and she kept my secret to herself. I owed her everything. And even if I hadn’t, I felt nothing but respect for her. Among boudas, as in nature among hyenas, the females ruled. They were more aggressive, more cruel, and more alpha. Aunt B was all that, but she was also fair and smart and she didn’t tolerate any nonsense. When you’re the alpha of a bouda clan, you have a lot of nonsense thrown at you.

  Had I grown up under Aunt B instead of the bitches who ruled my childhood, perhaps I wouldn’t be so messed up.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you,” Raphael said and looked away.

  “How is she holding up?”

  “Not that well. He was a very nice man. I liked him.”

  “What happened?”

  “Heart attack. It was quick.”

  Shapeshifters almost never died of heart complications. “He was a human?”

  Raphael nodded. “They’ve been together for almost ten years. She met him shortly after my father died. The service was set for Friday. Someone stole his body from the funeral home.” A low growl laced his words. “My mother didn’t get to say good-bye. She didn’t get to bury him.”

  Oh God. I gritted my teeth. “Who took the body?”

  Raphael’s face turned grim. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”

  “I want in on it. I owe your mother.” Aunt B had a right to bury her mate. Or bury the thing that took her mate’s body. Either way worked for me.

  He grimaced. “Did you smell matches?”

  I nodded. “It’s the dog.”

  “Yeah. I picked up this scent at the funeral home and trailed it here. There was something else under it, but the dog stink is so damn acrid, it drowns everything else.” Raphael gave me a hard look.

  I motioned with my fingers. “Give.”

  “I thought I smelled a vampire.”

  A giant three-headed dog was bad news. A vampire was much, much worse. The Immortuus pathogen, the bacterial disease responsible for vampirism, killed its victim. Vampires had no ego, no self-awareness, no ability to reason. They had the mental capacity of a cockroach. Ruled by insatiable bloodlust, they killed anything that bled. If left to their own devices, they’d wipe out life on Earth and then cannibalize themselves. But their empty minds made a perfect vehicle for the will of a navigator, a necromancer, who piloted a vampire like a marionette, seeing through its eyes and hearing through its ears. Necromancers came in several varieties, the most adept of which were called Masters of the Dead. A vampire piloted by a Master of the Dead could destroy a platoon of trained military personnel in seconds.

  And 99 percent of the Masters of the Dead were members of the People. The People were bad, bad news. Set up as a corporation, they were organized, wealthy, and expert in all things necromantic. And very powerful.

  “Do you think the People stole the body?”

  “I don’t know.” Raphael shrugged. “I thought I’d throw it out there, before you jump in with both feet.”

  “I don’t care. Do you c
are?”

  “Fuck no.” Raphael’s eyes glinted, making him look a bit deranged.

  “Then we’re in agreement.”

  We nodded to each other.

  “So you tracked the sulfur scent here, then what?” I asked.

  “I ran into Fido. He chased me into a crevice. I sat there for about an hour or so, and then he wandered off and I ran the other way. Apparently, he didn’t wander off far enough. What kind of creature is Fido, incidentally?”

  “I have no idea.”

  All of my training had been in contemporary applications of magic. I could recite the vampiric biocycle off the top of my head, I could diagnose loupism in early stages, I could correctly identify the type of pyromagic used from burn pattern, but give me an odd creature and I drew a complete blank.

  “Who would know?” Raphael asked.

  We looked at each other and said in unison, “Kate.”

  Kate had a mind like a steel trap, and she pulled absurdly obscure mythological trivia out of her hair. If she didn’t know something, she would know who would.

  I pulled a cell phone out of the glove compartment. There was only one functioning cellular network. It belonged to the military and as a knight of the Order and an officer of peace, I had access.

  I stared at the phone.

  “Forgot the number?” Raphael asked.

  “No. Thinking how to phrase this. If I say the wrong thing, she’ll be dashing down to the ley line in minutes.” Kate had never met a person she didn’t want to protect, preferably by hacking at the hostile parties with her sword. But Kate was also human and needed the rest.