Grim Tidings: Hellhound Chronicles

by Caitlin Kittredge

  She turned and started to walk away, but I spoke up. “I’d think after what Gary did to you, you’d want payback as much as we do.”

  “Fucking Gary.” Lilith sucked in air between her teeth. “He’s one soul I’d love to tear to shreds.”

  “Too bad reapers don’t have any,” I said. Lilith brushed a strand of platinum hair away from her eyes, which glowed blue even in the starlight.

  “You got a big set of brass balls, Ava, I’ll give you that much.” She buffed her nails on her black suit jacket. “But what makes you think I’m not just in this to watch the world burn up and you along with it?”

  “Because if every soul that comes to Hell bears Cain’s mark, then you and every other demon are shit out of luck,” I said. “You might hate me, you might visit my dreams and snuff Owen just to torment me for crossing you, but you need the damned or the lights go out in Hell. Whoever set Cain loose this time, they don’t care about you or any other demon. If there’s no world out there, you’ll be in the dark, alone in Hell with the other demons, and the Fallen will have won.”

  I waited as she sized me up, her nostrils flaring. Demons hated the Fallen even more than the angels, if that was possible. Lilith knew what it was to be a Fallen’s slave. She couldn’t be on their side in this.

  “Fine, you make a good point for a glorified purse dog,” she sighed finally. “Step into my office, both of you.” She pointed one perfect pale finger over my shoulder and I blinked when I saw a door in the middle of the barren sand. It was just there, like one of those fake tunnels the Coyote paints for the Road Runner. As much time as I’d spent around demons, I’d never get used to the way they could grab reality by the hair and twist its neck around. It made my stomach roll, like I was at the top of a carnival ride.

  Lilith opened the door and the next thing I knew we were standing in the kind of office you usually only see on TV shows about bratty teenagers in a prep school. Lots of leather furniture, a tray of expensive scotch on a side board, paintings of boats on stormy seas, and a nice big chair for Lilith to sit in, setting one red-soled foot on the desk as she sat and looked up at Leo and me.

  “Demons are so literal,” I murmured. Lilith cocked her head. She favored the business bitch look when she was wearing human skin, and her black pantsuit was so sharp it could have sliced me. Her high-collared shirt showed just a hint of skin and her hair was loose and blown pin-straight.

  “I don’t know the Fallen’s name,” she said. “No one knows the name of every angel expelled from the Kingdom. But I did spend a lot of time serving them drinks and pretending to laugh at their jokes. I could easily find out.”

  “For a price,” I finished. After hearing Gary give the pitch for ninety years, I could recite it in my sleep.

  “Well, of course,” Lilith said. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to ask you for the head of John the Baptist. It’ll be something manageable.”

  I didn’t believe her—because who in their right mind would believe a demon, never mind the evil queen among their ranks of screwing people over? “I’m through owing people,” I said, but Leo stepped up.

  “What do you want?”

  I stared at him, trying to bore into him with my eyes and let him know this was a bad fucking idea. Lilith looked between us, tapping her forefingers together. “Now, this is interesting. The big bad man is willing to deal, and the scrappy sidekick has grown a spine.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said, tugging at Leo’s arm. “Come on. She doesn’t know anything.”

  “Cain is pals with a Fallen named Dantanian,” she said. “Looks blond, corn-fed, pretends to be a cop? We thought she and many others who left Hell were dead until just now, when you two went to Headquarters and started making a ruckus.”

  “So?” I said.

  “So I have that dead list, if you have what I’m after,” Lilith said. “One of those is the Fallen who’s remaking the world in their very own zombie image, and it’s not a long list.”

  “It’s not worth it,” I said as Leo leaned in. “Leo,” I exclaimed in a whisper. “Whatever it is, it’s too much.”

  “It’s not too much,” he said. “The world is ending, Ava. You said it yourself. I need the Scythe. You need me to have it.” He looked back at Lilith. “Besides, without us, there’s no damned souls flowing into this bitch’s coffers. So whatever she wants, it’ll have to leave us in one piece.”

  Lilith returned his wide fake smile. “More or less, darling, yes.” She picked up a silver letter opener from her desk and pricked her own finger. “Now you.”

  “Hell no,” I said, and Lilith rolled her eyes. “I need to tell you a story and since you’re the last person I want to chat with I’m just going to show you.” She waggled her finger at me. “Come on, Ava. It’s just a little blood. Far from the worst thing you’ve done.”

  I shut my eyes, willing myself not to vomit as she touched her finger to my lips. It wasn’t the power line I was expecting to bite down on, though. It was numb and soft and warm, like I’d downed that handful of Percocets all over again. Things went bright and fuzzy around the edges and when I could see again Lilith was on the ground in front of me. No more thousand-dollar suit, no more flawless manicure. Black crescents rode high under her eyes, pushed down by tears. Someone had given her a fat lip. I guessed it was the guy standing over her, just a shadow and a pair of feet.

  “You want to raise your voice to me again?” he said. His voice was sharp and angry and Lilith’s breath hitched when he spoke. Lilith was afraid of him. I watched, helpless to move or look away.

  “N-no,” Lilith said softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Damn right you are,” the shadow said. “Now get up. Do it again.”

  Lilith put her hand up to touch her bloody lip and he reached down, slapping her hand away. “Are you stupid? Or just defective?” He grabbed Lilith by the arm and yanked her upright. “There are a dozen girls who’d take your place. Do you want to be out there on your knees, scrubbing or sucking? Is that what you’d prefer?”

  “No, please!” Lilith cried out as he shook her. “I’m sorry . . .”

  The angel grabbed her chin and pulled her close, his face coming into the light. He was beautiful, but he was also even more waxen and dead-eyed than Lilith. “I decide when you’re allowed to wipe the blood off your beautiful skin. Only me. I’m your entire world. I won’t be denied. Soon we’ll be out of this Pit and then nobody can deny me. The world will end in ashes, Lilith, and if you’re smart you’ll be standing next to me instead of tasting them in your mouth.” He smiled when he finished speaking. His eyes were blue, almost white, and his eyebrows blended into his pale skin so that he looked like he almost didn’t have hair, just a halo of white. He was so pale I doubted sunlight had ever touched him—unnaturally pale.

  As I stared, and Lilith sobbed quietly, he turned toward me and the smile stretched wider, wide as a snake ready to swallow me.

  I came back to the real world with a crash, and immediately fell over, retching and clawing at my stomach and throat. I felt like fire ants were crawling from my throat to my belly button and biting every inch in between. I tried to talk and only desperate hacking sounds came out.

  Leo swooped in to hold me up and Lilith leaned over her desk to get a better angle. “Oh, Ava, did that poison not agree with you?”

  I was starting to black out, and I tried sticking a finger down my own throat to make myself puke, but my mouth was dry as the ashes I could still smell everywhere.

  “The humans you love so much have that saying,” Lilith said. “About life giving you lemons? Cute, and I can see the humor in it. To go from one of the top men on the totem pole to some . . . some . . . trailer park on the outskirts of the Pit? All because some hellhound got her panties in a twist over a worthless piece-of-trash mob hit man who would have died before forty anyway?” She shook her finger. “No, no, Ava. Not how I roll. That’s another human saying. I like that one better.”

  “If she dies there wo
n’t be a place in Hell you can hide from me,” Leo snarled. He stroked my face and brushed a few beads of sweat off my forehead as my throat closed up. I couldn’t breathe at all now, my chest a furnace, every muscle in my body seizing.

  “What are you going to do about it?” Lilith purred. “You don’t have your Scythe.” She refocused her shark’s eyes on me. “Imagine how happy I was when you showed up. It cost me nothing to show you that face. You will never put a name to it because you are a fool and you always have been.”

  She straightened up, brushing a speck of lint off her pants. “In the few seconds before you die from anaphylaxis, know that you were never anything but a dead girl living on borrowed time, Ava. And know that I was the one who ended your bonus round in the game of life.” She waggled her fingers. “Bye now.”

  CHAPTER

  17

  A person can survive an average of three or four minutes without oxygen before brain death starts to set in. If you drown in cold water or stop breathing from a nasty shock, maybe a little longer. There are cases where people spring back to life after fifteen or twenty minutes, with nothing beyond a little memory loss.

  I tried to keep that in mind as I thrashed on the freezing concrete, but it was hard to keep much in mind beyond the indescribable pain.

  If I’d been turned into a hellhound by anyone except Gary, I’d probably know demon blood was poisonous. I wouldn’t be on a basement floor suffocating. I wouldn’t be a lot of things.

  But I wasn’t dying. I’d gotten the suicidal impulse out of my system the first time I’d gone to Tartarus. I’d wanted to die for a long time and actually living for something was terrifying.

  Especially since I was coming close to being dead again.

  I flopped on my stomach. I couldn’t see much, blackness pervading my vision, but I didn’t need to see for this. I used the last tiny gasp of energy I had to let go of the hound’s leash, let it roar out of my throat, and let fresh cold air in as I howled into the blackness.

  I still didn’t make it far on four legs, but at least whatever was in my system was a little more compatible with the hound than my human body. I felt drunk and wobbly but at least I could breathe. Things were still pretty blurry and I sank down on the basement floor, exhausted. I wanted more than anything to just shut my eyes and sleep, but I sat and panted and tried to fight off the poison. Bile roiled around in my stomach and I finally did vomit. After that, I just couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore.

  When I woke up, Leo was leaning over me, stroking my hair. His face went slack with relief when he saw my eyes were open. “I told you not to trust that bitch,” I whispered. My throat was burning from vomiting but I felt better than I had any right to.

  Leo handed me a bottle of water and I chugged it while he passed a hand through his hair. “That isn’t what we need. We’re in this together, remember?”

  I pressed my hands over my eyes, wishing the buzzing from the basement lights would just stop. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Can we please just go somewhere aboveground?”

  Standing, my knees started to give out and he held me up. “You sure you’re okay? You did just take a hit of demon blood.”

  “I’m fine,” I muttered as we headed for the door. “If I let Lilith take me down I’d die of embarrassment.”

  “I mostly can’t believe we went through that and she didn’t even give us a name,” Leo grumbled. “All that just to fuck around with us.”

  “Lilith would level a small city for the sake of petty revenge,” I said. “She’s relentless that way.” I leaned against the wall once we were out of that room, away from the conduit, when the pressure on my skull had eased a little. “And besides, she didn’t give me nothing.” I cracked a tiny smile. “I saw what he looks like. The Fallen.”

  “So, what are we gonna do with that?” Leo said. “Pass out sketches to all the Hellspawn we come across?”

  “No,” I said. “But I bet if I described him to Uriel we’d get a name.”

  I thought Leo might actually be happy that I’d figured out how to find the asshole who’d taken his Scythe, but he started shaking his head instantly, pacing away from me down the hall.

  “You’re done,” he said. “You’re not the Kingdom’s unpaid hitter. Uriel and you are done being besties.”

  “I think that’s up to me,” I said. Leo punched the metal door, the echo reverberating down through my feet. I flinched away from him, bracing for a blow and then hating myself because I knew it wouldn’t come from Leo. Gary really had fucked me up.

  “Dammit, Ava,” Leo snapped. “I know how these guys work. I was one of those guys. When you got somebody who’s good at what they do but doesn’t know they can stiffen up their spine and tell you to go to hell, you squeeze ’em until there’s nothing left. Then you put a bullet in the back of their head and find a nice quiet landfill in Jersey to leave ’em.”

  “And I was someone who hunted down the dregs of humanity for a demon,” I said. “I tracked people down relentlessly and I killed them. I’m no stranger to doing the unpleasant thing, the thing that’s necessary to survive whether it’s ripping out a warlock’s throat or taking twenty bucks from some john so I’d have food for another week.” I folded myself in, digging my fingers into my own rib cage as I hugged myself. “I know that Uriel’s using me, but hunting down the Fallen is a necessary thing. Look what they’ve done here, with one angry monster who’s willing to be manipulated.”

  “It’s the way he used you!” Leo shouted. “It’s that he took something that wasn’t his and put his fingerprints all over it.”

  I slammed my foot into the floor. “Stop it.”

  “No! You need to get it through your head that Uriel isn’t any different than Gary or any of those johns, because until you do you’re just setting yourself up to be used over and over until you finally get killed!” Leo’s face was red and a vein in his neck pulsed.

  I didn’t have anything else to say, so I turned my back on him and broke into a run. Leo yelled, his voice distorted by the low ceiling, “Ava! Ava, get back here!”

  “Fuck you!” I screamed, turning on him. I wanted to be feral for once. I wanted to be the one out of control, the one people were afraid to get close to. “I’m not yours, Leo! That was the fucking point! I killed Gary and I ruined everything but I am not. YOURS.”

  I flapped my arms helplessly. “And really? If I have to explain that to you now, I don’t think we ever worked.”

  “You’re right,” Leo said without hesitation, and reached out to stop me. “Look, I am an asshole. I died an unreconstructed douchebag. I just . . . the thought of some other guy hurting you just because he can . . . I swore I’d stop that from happening if I could. I didn’t mean I own you. Nobody owns you. If you want to walk away right now I won’t stop you.” He let go of me and backed off. “I’m sorry.”

  I stared him down for a long time, until my heart had stopped pounding. “You’re lucky I don’t feel like fighting with anyone else today.”

  “I feel lucky,” Leo said quietly. He looked almost scared, which I’d never seen before. “I really am—”

  “I don’t want you to apologize,” I said. “I want you to help me stop this. Not your opinion, not your proclamation, your help.” I looked at him. “If we’re as equal as you say, we can stop this.”

  He relaxed, looking more like the cocky bastard I knew, and I relaxed a little too. I didn’t like it when people like him acted vulnerable. It made me think we might all be screwed. “I hate to break it to you, Ava,” he said, “but I don’t think you’re equipped to take out one of the Fallen. I don’t know that I am either, not without any actual backup from my so-called colleagues.”

  I thought about Cain’s face when he’d talked about how we were all just going to stay in the silo and wait out the eradication of humanity. He hadn’t looked angry. He’d looked happy.

  “I think we can get the Fallen to come to us,” I said. “If you can calm down and play nice with Uriel. If
we can figure out who he is.”

  “Fine,” Leo grumbled. “Then what?”

  “Then we take away his toy,” I said. Leo raised an eyebrow.

  “Kill the Walking Man?”

  I nodded. “For a start.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  Leo was skeptical of my plan. Skeptical wasn’t even the right word—he complained all the way back to Kansas. I would have been more annoyed but it was actually kind of nice—just the two of us in the car, like it had been before we’d gotten to Minneapolis and stepped on the hornet’s nest.

  “So you want to go back to the bunker where the crazy undead serial killer held you prisoner and bust him up?” Leo said. “I get this right?”

  “That’s the short version,” I said. The roadblocks were much farther out now, and the real army was here, with convoys on the highway and Black Hawks overhead. I could see the chaos seeping out in the pinched face of the woman who handed me a cup of crappy to-go coffee at the truck stop and the thump of the rotors overhead, the random checkpoints set up by local police.

  Leo burned a fake ID getting us within the quarantine zone and back to the hospital where Hank was recovering. I made him wait outside when I went in—I didn’t want Hank to flip his wig when he met the Grim Reaper up close and personal.

  “Ava,” he said, smiling at me. He looked stronger, but he was still pale and full of tubes.

  “I need to ask you something,” I said. “It’s a lot, and I understand if you can’t do it.” I looked at the steady blip of his monitors. “There’s a chance you’ll die.”

  “Is there a chance you’ll die as well?” Hank said. I nodded. He sat up in bed, his face crinkling with pain.

  “Then say it.”

  “Your grandfather did something to the Walking Man the first time we ran into him,” I said. “He actually managed to slow him down. Do you know how to do that?”