Must Love Hellhounds

by Harris, Charlaine

  Her gaze skipped from his knees to his ribs to his throat. A single blow would eliminate her height disadvantage.

  But taking him out wasn’t necessary; getting him out was. “Have you trained with guide dogs?”

  His expression tightened, but she couldn’t read anything in his face. “Yes. Uncle Colin sent one with you?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Maggie backed into the hallway and called out, “Sir Pup!”

  The hellhound trotted into view and clambered up the stairs, his tongues lolling from each of his three enormous heads.

  “We need the harness,” Maggie said as he reached the landing. “You’ll escort Mr. Blake downstairs and to our vehicle.”

  Sir Pup brushed past her hip and padded into the bedroom, his black fur gleaming over heavy muscle. His middle head looked Blake up and down. His right examined the room, and with his left, he turned to glance over his shoulder at Maggie.

  She had no doubt that the expression pulling at his lips and exposing razor-edged teeth was a grin.

  Her eyes narrowed. “You won’t take him anywhere but to the vehicle and through the airport,” she ordered. “And you won’t leave him anywhere, either.”

  The hellhound’s grin lengthened. Oh, damn. Most likely, she’d just added another idea to whatever mischief had already been percolating in his heads.

  She returned her gaze to Blake and frowned. His skin had paled to a sickly gray. When he weaved on his feet, she stepped forward and caught his elbow.

  “Mr. Blake?”

  He visibly gathered himself. His chest rose on a long breath before he echoed, “Sir Pup?”

  Maggie began to nod, then realized Blake wouldn’t see it. “Yes.”

  “The hellhound? The one that my uncle watches from time to time?”

  Actually, it was the other way around. Sir Pup was the companion to Ames-Beaumont’s closest friend, and it was true that the vampire sometimes let the hellhound stay in his mansion. But it was the hellhound who watched over Ames-Beaumont; Sir Pup helped Maggie protect the house on those days the vampire succumbed to his sleep.

  Demons were the only real threat to Ames-Beaumont while he slept, and they had nothing to fear from Maggie’s gun—but Sir Pup’s venom could paralyze a demon, and his massive jaws could easily rip one apart.

  Maggie was not willing to reveal the details of Ames-Beaumont’s security, however—even to his nephew. She said only, “Yes.”

  “In his demon form?”

  He wasn’t, thank goodness. But if Blake knew that Sir Pup had a demon form, then it was no wonder he’d been so pale a moment ago. Maggie was used to the three heads, but she didn’t think she’d ever be comfortable with the giant, terrifying hound he could become.

  “No. Right now he looks like a three-headed black Labrador.” A very large black Lab. When Maggie knelt beside the hellhound, her eyes were level with his shoulder. “Once we’re outside, he’ll shape-shift back to one head. Sir Pup, the harness?”

  The guide apparatus appeared in her hand. Sir Pup’s invisible, formless hammerspace allowed him to store almost any object, but even a hellhound couldn’t make a retriever-sized harness fit over a bear-sized torso.

  “And shrink, please,” Maggie said, rolling her eyes. The hellhound was being a pain in the ass by forcing her to ask him to shift into a smaller form.

  Probably, she thought, so that Blake wondered exactly how big the hellhound had been. Though Sir Pup was friendly enough to be considered a bad hellhound by Hell’s standards, he still enjoyed making people uneasy. He just had a better sense of humor than most hellhounds—and was less likely to tear out throats first, and eat the rest later.

  Or so Maggie had heard. She’d never been to Hell, and so she’d never met any other hellhounds. If her luck was good—and if every negative thing she’d done in her life didn’t land her in the Pit as soon as she bit the big one—she never would.

  And if her luck was very good, she’d never run into another demon, either. After discovering that her previous employer was one, she’d had enough of them to last her a lifetime.

  She adjusted the last harness strap and gave Sir Pup a scratch behind the ears of his left head. His dark eyes glowed faintly crimson before rolling back in ecstasy. A freakishly powerful and terrifying hellhound, sure—but pettings and food were two things guaranteed to make him more biddable.

  “Don’t leave him anywhere,” Maggie murmured, “and I’ll see that Ames-Beaumont buys out a butcher shop for you.”

  Apparently satisfied with that bribe, Sir Pup pranced to Blake’s side. Blake curled his fingers around the harness handle.

  “Why would it be a problem if he does lead me out to the middle of nowhere? You’ll be there.”

  Blake had heard her? There was obviously nothing wrong with his ears. “I won’t be,” Maggie said, moving into the hall and gesturing for Sir Pup to follow her down the stairs. “I’m taking you to the airport. He’ll accompany you on the plane.”

  “What plane?”

  Maggie stopped beside the front door and glanced through the window. Her gaze skipped from vehicle to vehicle, from person to person. She didn’t recognize anyone, and no one tripped the instinctual alarm in her gut that, over the years, she’d learned to trust.

  Of course, it had let her down a few times, so she kept her hand on her gun.

  “Sir Pup, you have too many heads,” she reminded the hellhound before answering Blake. “I’ll charter a plane to take you back to San Francisco. Mr. Ames-Beaumont can look after you while I—”

  “Not a chance,” Blake said.

  “—find your sister,” Maggie finished over him.

  “Find her where? Do you have information about where he’s taken her that I don’t?”

  She opened the door. “No.”

  Not yet, anyway.

  Chapter Two

  Once they hit the sidewalk, Geoff got his first look at Maggie Wren in four years. His first look in person, anyway. A little over three months ago, he’d seen her picture in the file his uncle had sent along with the rest of her history. He’d recognized the woman immediately, her pale eyes. They’d been impossible to forget, considering the last time he’d seen them it had been over the barrel of her gun just before she’d squeezed the trigger. She’d been a CIA operative carrying out a mission in Darfur—both of them a long way from home.

  Where her home had been, exactly, he wasn’t sure. Abandoned as a child, she’d been moved around the foster system until she’d found a steady home at the age of twelve. From there, she’d gone into the military and had been recruited early into the CIA. For years, she’d been based in D.C., but had been away on assignments most of the time.

  Her transition back to civilian life hadn’t been smooth. She’d lived in with her last employer, a congressman—and a demon. After she’d learned what the congressman was, she’d left his employ and taken a position with his uncle Colin.

  Geoff hadn’t known her name until his uncle had sent over her file for his records.

  And he didn’t know if she called the house she’d recently bought in San Francisco, not far from his uncle’s mansion, home. And whether buying it was defense against his uncle, or a signal that she was settling in for the ride. After all, she’d taken the job with his uncle, knowing what he was.

  And so Geoff held out hope it wasn’t just another job to her.

  Just going by appearances, the job suited her. Even Bils worth, the majordomo who’d lorded over the family’s British estate since Geoff had been in short pants, couldn’t have faulted the precise roll of pale blond hair at her nape, the starched white shirt, or the black waistcoat and jacket. The knife-edge crease in her black trousers had withstood travel and the New York humidity.

  There was something inhuman about that sort of rigid neatness, but Geoff couldn’t call it demonic.

  Calling her a Valkyrie might have fit, though. She was taller than he’d thought. Between her height and the hair, he understood why her fellow
operatives had nicknamed her Bullet-Eating Brunhilda.

  Rather, he understood the Brunhilda part. He assumed the bullets were another story, buried in a classified file that he hadn’t yet seen.

  A man on the sidewalk glanced at Maggie’s face as he walked past them. Geoff couldn’t read her expression. Not once since they’d come outside had she shown any emotion.

  She had been surprised by his blindness, but by now she’d covered it. He could imagine what she’d been thinking: What the hell was a blind man doing here?

  There were two answers to that. The short explanation went: He wasn’t blind. He just couldn’t see through his own eyes.

  The explanation for that was the long one, about Lucifer and the demons who’d waged a second war upon Heaven, and the man who’d brought an end to the battle by killing a Chaos dragon with his sword. The man had become a Guardian, an angelic protector. There were more Guardians, but it was the sword that had shaped the Ames-Beaumont and Ramsdell—and eventually the Blake—families.

  That sword, changed by the dragon’s blood and imbued with the dragon’s power, had ended up in the home of Geoff’s ancestor. Two hundred years before, Uncle Colin and Geoff’s many-times-over great-grandfather, Anthony Ramsdell, had performed a blood brother ritual with it, and the sword had tainted their blood. Later, Geoff’s many-times-over great-grandmother—Uncle Colin’s sister—had also been cut by the sword. Both his great-grandparents had been slightly altered by the taint in their blood—and so had their children. Now and then, one of his relations was born with a bit of the uncanny in them, possessing empathic abilities, flashes of telepathy, telemetry, or foresight.

  Geoff’s parents had been distant cousins; both could trace their bloodlines back to the many-times-over great-grandparents. So the taint had combined, multiplied, and he and Katherine had ended up the uncanniest of the uncanny.

  Geoff had been born without pupils and with the ability to see through the eyes of anyone near him—but his connection to his sister was stronger. He could link to Katherine’s eyes whenever he wanted, no matter how distant she was.

  But her eyes hadn’t been open since the evening before. That likely meant she wasn’t awake.

  That likely meant she’d been drugged. Whether just to keep her quiet or because her abductor was aware of their connection, Geoff wasn’t certain. But considering that only their parents and Uncle Colin knew about the link between them, Geoff thought it must be to keep her quiet.

  When Katherine woke up, she’d find a way to let him know where she’d been taken. In the meantime, Maggie Wren’s expertise would be useful.

  If she hadn’t been involved in Katherine’s disappearance.

  Since receiving the picture, he had been hoping to see her again, just to see. He’d been fascinated by her. Had barely resisted the impulse to pepper his uncle with questions about her like an infatuated schoolboy.

  Not that it would have surprised anyone if he’d shouted his interest. The men in his family had a history of obsessing over women from afar.

  Geoff was the first who hadn’t even met the woman yet.

  And he hadn’t imagined their meeting would be like this. But it was probably best that he found out now if she’d betray the family.

  He watched her through the hellhound’s eyes before he was forced to move on to someone else’s. Now that Sir Pup only had one head, the sensation wasn’t as bloody room-spinning as when Geoff had first connected with the hellhound’s mind. His vision was so clear and sharp, however, that it made Geoff’s brain ache.

  Then there were Maggie’s eyes.

  Geoff couldn’t keep up with them. He was used to taking in as much detail as he could in a quick glance, but this was beyond his scope. She constantly changed her focus; her gaze was continually moving. Everyone they passed was given a speedy head-to-toe examination, and she used every available reflective surface to keep watch behind them.

  He had her eyes, but without her brain behind it, looking through them was almost as dizzying as seeing through the hellhound’s. And he could usually navigate busy sidewalks and streets by knowing his position relative to the people he looked through, but he couldn’t do that with Maggie. For the first time, he was grateful for the harness and the dog at his side. Uncle Colin had sent Sir Pup to protect him, but Geoff was just glad he wasn’t tripping over curbs trying to follow her.

  He slipped into the eyes of the man walking behind them, instead.

  The bloke was staring at her ass. Jesus, Geoff couldn’t blame the man. From the top of her head to her endless legs, Maggie Wren was worth a second look—then a third and fourth. But still, there were lines. You looked, then looked away. You didn’t stare down even the finest ass like a wolfhound at a dinner table.

  Geoff stopped, turned. The man’s attention lifted to his own forbidding expression. Geoff waited until the pervert zeroed in on his solidly blue eyes before grinning. The pervert’s gaze snapped to the left, and he walked hurriedly on.

  “Is something wrong, Mr. Blake?”

  “No.” He used her eyes again. Her field of vision had narrowed slightly, and was shadowed at the upper edge, as if her brows had lowered.

  She looked at Geoff’s eyes, then his mouth. Then she was away again, taking sharp, quick glances over his shoulder at the people walking behind them, focusing hard on their faces. She went back to him, then made a lingering—for Maggie—perusal of a man passing her.

  The pervert, Geoff realized. She studied the back of the man’s neck, his knee.

  Geoff jumped into another person, then another, until he found someone looking at her face. He saw her eyes, the gray cold and dangerous, before she slipped a pair of rimless dark glasses from her inside pocket. A hard smile touched her lips as the pervert looked back at her, met her eyes, and hastily glanced away.

  And there she was. Geoff recognized that expression. There was the woman who could slip a knife into a man or put a bullet in his head. The woman Geoff had watched do both.

  He pushed into her mind again as they resumed walking. Her shielded gaze ran over everyone she saw—and hesitated very briefly on their knees, their hands, their stomachs, and their necks.

  Not just looking for threats, he realized. She was searching for their vulnerable points. Every person they passed, she lined up as a target.

  But she’d been out of the CIA for three years now. Not enough time to unlearn what a lifetime had taught her?

  Maybe it could never go.

  The SUV she’d rented was black and boxy, and the back-seats had been removed. The harness disappeared from under Geoff’s hand when Maggie opened the rear door. Sir Pup hopped in, lay down, and then grew to the same size he’d been when Geoff had first seen him—through Maggie’s eyes—on the stairs. When the hellhound stretched out, his body took up most of the cargo area.

  Maggie swung open the passenger door and took Geoff’s arm. He let her help him in. She was smart, she was observant, and she knew there were more things in heaven and earth than fit in the average human’s philosophy. If Geoff proved too capable, she might suspect that he wasn’t as blind as he appeared.

  He waited until she’d climbed into her seat. “We need to return to my hotel—”

  “It was on our route from the airport, so we’ve already stopped. Sir Pup has your things in his hammerspace.” Through her eyes, he saw his own puzzled expression. She continued, “It’s like a psychic storage space.”

  Geoff nodded. He’d heard demons and Guardians had something similar. “Is my computer in there?”

  He immediately felt a familiar weight on his lap. Geoff searched for his headset, his fingers moving along the edge of the laptop. “There was a microphone and—Ah, thank you,” he finished when the headset landed in his palm. A convenient thing, that hammerspace.

  Maggie’s gaze left him as she pulled onto the street, but he didn’t need her eyes for this. With a combination of touch and voice commands, he searched the computer for the files he wanted . . . and was
mildly surprised when he found them.

  “Did they toss my hotel room, take anything?”

  “If they did, they weren’t messy about it.” The car slowed. A look through her eyes showed a yellow traffic light before her gaze moved to his profile. “Did the one who drugged you say anything about Miss Blake? Anything about why he’d taken her, or who he was?”

  “No. But a few hours before he grabbed me, hotel security e-mailed this to me. It was from the day that Katherine disappeared from her room.” He angled his laptop, showed her the photo he’d pulled up.

  Maggie briefly glanced at the screen. Then she looked at the picture again and didn’t take her eyes away.

  Through them, Geoff saw the same face a taxi driver had seen just before Geoff had blacked out. The same face someone outside the brownstone had seen, only moments after he’d taken Geoff’s blood and left him handcuffed to a radiator.

  He saw the face Maggie did, but he had no idea what she saw when she looked at the picture. A friend, a former lover—an enemy? Or just a man she happened to have worked with in the past?

  “This is the hotel elevator. He got off on Katherine’s floor,” Geoff said.

  Maggie blinked once, slowly. Her voice was flat. “That’s a good lead. I’ll follow up on it.”

  “While I’m flying out of here to safety? You might want to reconsider. When I didn’t check in last night, what do you suppose was the first thing Uncle Colin asked his fiancée to do?” When Maggie didn’t answer, he continued, “I’d bet he asked Savi to pull my phone records, then hack my e-mail accounts. She’d find out what I’d received in the past couple of hours, who contacted me, where I might have gone. And she would have found this picture.”

  Maggie’s eyes closed, then opened. She stared ahead at a green light.

  “And with Savi’s photographic memory, it wouldn’t take much for her to connect that face with the one in this picture.”

  The second photograph was from a political rally in Washington, D.C., only a few months before Maggie had resigned from the CIA. The original photo had been enlarged to show Maggie—slightly blurry but recognizable—standing in the far background, wearing a dark suit and a military-straight bearing. Beside her was the same man from the first photo.