The Hounds of Devotion

by Eva Chase

  Only slivers of moonlight and my memory of my earlier scouting missions guided our way. I stopped at the sight of a small notch in the bark of a tree. It easily passed for the scrape of some small animal’s claws, but I’d marked it there yesterday with a pocket knife.

  “Start here,” I whispered to Bash, and pointed to the notch. “You’ll find a mark about every ten feet. We want this whole end of the perimeter covered.”

  He nodded, shifting the large knapsack he’d been carrying off his back. It was full of coils of wire, so thin and dark it wouldn’t show up against the night’s thick shadows, twisted and barbed to not just trip but snare anyone who ran into it.

  The cultists would flee when the police arrived. I aimed to be sure they didn’t make their escape successfully.

  I touched Bash’s arm briefly as I moved to leave, and he gave me the small knowing smile I’d only ever seen aimed at me. The smile that said he had no doubt I’d accomplish exactly what I was setting out to do, and he was looking forward to celebrating my victory on the other side.

  He started fixing the end of the wire around the base of the tree trunk. I slunk on, closer to the spot where the commune’s farthest sentries would be lurking. As I went, I slid on the night vision goggles Bash had obtained for me.

  This cult settlement appeared to be a fairly subdued one, no major troubles recently, so they probably wouldn’t have had a substantial guard most of the time. Tonight, though, with one of their own off arranging a criminal deal, I’d expect their security to be doubled.

  I didn’t want the inhabitants getting much in the way of advance warning of the raid. My job was to dispatch the sentries quickly and quietly. As a bonus, I could plant a few clues on their body to help speed justice along once the police found them.

  I set my feet down with care, avoiding twigs and loose rocks, keeping close to the trees. My stark red hair might have drawn attention even in the dim moonlight, but I’d tucked it under the hood of my light jacket. My skin was starting to sweat with the late summer heat, still present in the middle of the night, but I kept all my attention focused on the forest ahead of me.

  There. The goggles picked up the form of a middle-aged man with a holster at his hip as he shifted his weight at the edge of a little clearing up ahead. I paused for a moment, taking in his stance, the position of his gun, and the movement of his attention. Then I slipped closer.

  No one else moved in the woods as I circled around him. I eased across the uneven ground until I was just a short leap away. He raised his gun hand to scratch at his scalp, and I sprang.

  I’d told the trio that I wasn’t going to try to kill all of the cultists, but I hadn’t made any promises about a handful here and there. This guy would only cease to be a threat if I put him totally out of commission.

  As I caught him, I grasped his jaw and the side of his head. Before he could let out more than a grunt of surprise, I wrenched my arms. His neck snapped, and his body slumped. I lowered him to the ground.

  One down, I’d guess at least four more to go.

  I stuffed my bit of “evidence” in his shirt pocket and stalked on. The guards closest to the dirt road that led into the commune were my main concern. I found another posted by a garage building where the road petered out, and dispatched her as swiftly as the first guy.

  I didn’t have much space in me for conscience, given the life I’d led and the things I’d had to do to make sure I stayed alive. The people whose lives I was taking tonight had sacrificed children to monsters and encouraged everyone around them to carve themselves up in worship. Still, a twinge that felt almost like guilt passed through my gut as I came up on the third guard, a young man with fawn-brown hair like Garrett’s.

  What would my trio have thought if they’d witnessed the crimes I was committing tonight? They’d seen the results of my efforts when they’d stormed the commune in Croatia, but only after a shoot-out between the police and the cultists. There wouldn’t have been any telling which bodies were my fault.

  If they’d watched me walk up to this guy, slam my knuckles into the back of his head, and crack his neck as coolly as if he were a chicken for a roast, would they have looked at me with anything other than horror?

  Possibly not. That was why Bash balked at keeping them around, wasn’t it? He trusted them to help but not to understand, and he was right. If they’d been through what I had—if they’d understood how the shrouded folk had taken over these people and how many more lives would be lost if I couldn’t see through my mission—

  It didn’t do me any good thinking about it.

  The thought lingered with me, though—enough that I paused when I spotted the next sentry. This one was a young woman, barely more than a girl really. Only a few years older than I’d been when I’d fled my family’s commune back in Utah. Old enough to have survived past the sacrificial age and to have become fully complicit, of course. Still, something clenched in my chest as I studied her. She rubbed her thin lips, scanning the forest around her with a twitchy gaze.

  It wasn’t as if I enjoyed killing. Take the shrouded folk out of the picture, and I’d have been perfectly happy never harming another human being—other than separating the undeserving from some of their money every now and then as need be—for the rest of eternity.

  I hadn’t spent much time considering what my life might look like after I removed the shrouded folk from this world. It was hard to imagine that time or that I’d make it through the entire mission alive. But survival seemed a little more likely now. I might be able to look forward to much less fraught times in the distant future.

  I shouldn’t have let myself dwell on those ideas. They threw off my concentration. This time, even though the girl was clearly the least experienced of the guards I’d tackled, I held back just a little as I grabbed her from behind. The tiny hesitation left just enough of an opening for her to cry out and jab her elbow into my stomach.

  Pain burst through my abdomen. My body reacted on pure instinct after that. I slapped my hand over her mouth to prevent any louder shouts for help or of warning and yanked her head to the side so fast my shoulders burned with the effort.

  Her spine snapped. Her body sagged like all the others. I laid her down with a trickle of queasiness both at the task I’d had to carry out and my own momentary faltering.

  What good was it being human, caring about other humans, if that would mean the shrouded folk kept strewing their misery and violence? No, I was exactly the way I needed to be right now, and if my trio ended up having a problem with that, the door was always open for them to leave.

  I turned on my heel, studying the woods around me, my ears perked for any sound—any indication that the girl’s brief cry had drawn attention. Nothing stirred. The next sentry, if there even was another, must have been far enough away. I exhaled in relief and was just moving on in my sweep of the forest when engines rumbled behind me.

  I spun with a lurch of my heart, but my pulse settled in an instant. The flash of headlights carried from the road I’d passed, showing the colors of a line of police cars arriving. The cavalry was here.

  That was my cue to fade away. The local police didn’t know anything about my involvement in this sting operation, and it was better for everyone if we kept it that way.

  I turned to head for the spot where I was supposed to meet Bash at the car, and a whiff of a scent reached my nose that set the hairs on the back of my neck on end. Dry and sour like something dead so long it’d mummified—that was the smell that clung to the shrouded folk. None of those fiends could sense my presence with the gold cuff shielding me, but I could pick up on theirs just fine.

  The odor could have simply lingered from when the folk had moved through and around the commune during the previous day, but I hadn’t noticed it earlier. That suggested this waft was fresh. Despite the lack of sunlight, at least one shrouded one’s attention had been drawn back to our world by the growing commotion descending on their worshippers.

  Wh
at the hell did it mean to do?

  The police cars had parked around the garage. Officers poured out of them and hustled with guns drawn along the narrower footpath that led to the commune. I made out Sherlock’s tall, thin frame and John’s broader form amid the uniforms.

  Another whisper of the shrouded-folk scent drifted past me. I grimaced and treaded carefully after the flood of cops.

  The fiends shouldn’t interfere with this operation. There were too many witnesses; the risk of discovery too high. But they’d been desperate enough in Chile to attack me in front of the crowd that had gathered to watch the eclipse. I wasn’t sure I trusted them to follow their own laws at this point. And if one of them was up to something, none of the officers who were storming the compound had any idea how to deal with them.

  Shouts were ringing out now. A couple of cops led figures in handcuffs back to the cars. The crack of a gunshot split the air, and I restrained a flinch. Oh, yes, the police were convinced this commune was a den of criminals now.

  I stopped several feet back from the sparser patch of forest where the commune had set up their cabins. Flashlights cast their beams all through the area, catching on the walls and the nauseated faces of the cops making gruesome discoveries. As they hustled more people off, one of them emerged from a building and promptly vomited beside the doorway. I was going to guess that was the bloodletting room.

  I edged around the settlement until I spotted my consulting detective and his sidekick again. Sherlock was motioning to something on the ground while a few of the cops looked on, John nodding enthusiastically as if his show of agreement would make whatever the other man was saying easier to swallow. One of the cops knelt down—and a flicker of light that hadn’t come from any flashlight glanced off the leaves over Sherlock’s head.

  A cry of warning caught in my throat. If I rushed in there without any good reason to be in the area, I’d force my two allies to make up a big story about what I was doing at the commune that would complicate everything. I tensed, watching to see if the shrouded one would actually make a move.

  The light wavered and then vanished. I’d just started to relax when Sherlock’s arm twitched. He slapped his forearm as if to catch a mosquito, and I sprang a few steps forward before I realized there was nothing more to the apparent “attack.” If he’d been reacting to the shrouded one, it’d barely touched him.

  I stayed there, braced to leap in if the fiends made another move, as Sherlock returned to his work. He didn’t pay his arm any more mind. But even from where I stood, I could see a purplish mark coming into focus on the skin just below his wrist. My hands clenched at my sides.

  The shrouded one had touched him. What were the fiends playing at now?

  Chapter Six

  Jemma

  Garrett made a disgruntled sound and sprawled deeper into the corner of Sherlock and John’s sofa. “I wish I could have made it up there for the takedown.”

  “No, you don’t,” John said from the other end of the sofa, with an uncharacteristically grim expression. “The things those people do, the evidence we uncovered just in the initial sweep…” His lips twisted at a sickly angle. “And all this time these creatures have been pushing people to savage each other right under our noses.”

  Sherlock had stayed on his feet for this meeting, pacing now with a soft rasp of his shoes over the rug. In the early afternoon light steaming through the living room’s two narrow windows, his light blue eyes glittered even more coolly than usual. “Not any longer. We’re bringing them to justice just as we’ve gone so many other criminals, even if the others were human. It makes no difference.”

  I shifted in the stiffly padded armchair I’d taken—I could tell just from the rigid feel of it that it was probably Sherlock’s usual perch. “That’s not entirely true. Let me see your right arm?”

  He hesitated for a second before moving toward me when I beckoned him over. That was enough to tell me that he already knew what I was after. Even though it was another warm summer day and only a whirring fan added any relief to the heat in the apartment, he’d chosen a long-sleeved button-up to wear today. With a pointed look, I motioned for him to roll up the sleeve.

  “I bumped my arm against something while we were searching the commune,” he said briskly. “I suppose you saw that from the outskirts before you left.”

  “You didn’t bump it against something,” I informed him. “Something bumped against you. More specifically, a shrouded one.”

  I took his wrist gingerly, studying the mark that had formed like a bruise on his forearm. If I hadn’t seen it happen, I might have taken it for an actual bruise. Because I knew to look for the signs, I noticed the faint, erratic dappling along the edges.

  And when I breathed in, the dry rotten scent I’d first picked up in the forest still tainted the air.

  “One of them marked you,” I said. “I don’t know why, but it’ll have left a little of its energy in you so it can track you down again.”

  Bash leaned farther over the back of my chair, where he’d propped his sculpted arms. “Why would they want to do that? Why him?”

  “Maybe word has spread enough that it recognized you had something to do with the incident in Chile,” I said to Sherlock. “Or in Croatia, for that matter. They’d have wanted an easy way to trace you back to me, or at least to keep an eye on you even if you didn’t. Hold on.”

  I got up and moved to the dining table. One of the napkins from our takeout lunch would do. I ripped it into even pieces and started spreading them across the wooden surface of the sideboard in a Fibonacci pattern.

  John got up from the sofa to watch my progress. “You did that in my hotel room during the conference.”

  I nodded. “The shrouded folk thrive on pain and unpredictability. The certainty of mathematical patterns throws them off. This won’t stop one that’s particularly determined, but it’ll act as a general deterrent—and it may even interfere somewhat with their ability to tune into the energy in that mark. Leave this here.”

  “I suppose it makes for an interesting decoration,” Sherlock said with a lift of his eyebrows.

  He wasn’t taking this problem seriously enough. I went back to the chair and grabbed my purse. “I also think that for the time being, you should wear this. You should be fine for a week or two without any ill effects, and maybe that’ll be long enough for them to give up on you.”

  I offered him the pieces of the gold cuff. Sherlock blinked at them and raised his gaze to my face.

  “You need these,” he said. “You’re their primary target.”

  “Yeah,” Garrett said. “We already know they’ll try to hurt you, even with the contract broken.”

  “They came after all of you when you were getting me out of the way after the ritual, didn’t they?” I shook the pieces at Sherlock. “You’re the one they’re the most interested in right now. If they follow you to me, then I’m screwed anyway.”

  The detective’s lips pursed, but he accepted the cuff. After examining the pieces, he rolled up his pantleg and fiddled with them until he’d secured them around his lower thigh. Then he raised his eyebrows at me. “Satisfied?”

  “Reasonably. Make sure it stays there.”

  Garret shot Sherlock a quick glower as if he blamed the other man for giving in to my demand. “What are the next steps, then?” he asked me.

  “Last night’s raid will have stirred things up all through the cult, especially any other local sects,” I said. “For a few days, we can monitor the various types of activity around the other locations you thought looked like possibilities. I suspect we’ll see some indications confirming one or more of those, and then we can move ahead from there.”

  We discussed who would collect which data for several more minutes. By the time I got up to leave, the rancid scent had faded from the air. The cuff and my sequence must have been enough to put off any shrouded folk hanging around here, if one had stuck around after following Sherlock to the apartment at all.
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br />   Garrett looked as though he intended to stick around, but he caught my arm before I headed out after Bash. His dark brown eyes searched mine. “Are you sure you have enough protections, firecracker? If I can get you anything…”

  I didn’t know if there was anything a police officer had access to that would fend off the shrouded folk, and from his pained expression he didn’t either. But the offer and the affectionately admiring nickname softened the tension inside me anyway.

  “I’ve been keeping myself safe for ten years,” I reminded him. “I’ve got all the methods down pat. But thank you.”

  I tugged him a little closer to kiss him as consolation for my refusal. Garrett stiffened for a second, most likely in awareness of his friends still in the room, but it wasn’t as if my widespread affections were any secret among this bunch.

  He’d been the first of the trio I’d drawn in, the first who’d really cared about me, and as silly as the consideration sometimes seemed, part of me was determined never to make him feel he came in second place.

  He relaxed into the kiss, touching the side of my face as he kissed me back hard. The heat of his mouth sang through me. It was an awful shame I had illicit activities to plan right now that my police officer wouldn’t want to be privy to.

  “To be continued,” I told him in a teasing voice as I drew back, and headed out with a smile on my lips.

  Bash had waited for me in the hall outside. “Where are you off to now, Majesty?” he asked in a dry tone as we headed for the stairs, but his eyes studied me with concern. Apparently all my men were in protective mode at the moment.

  “Back to my place and the computer for at least the next little bit,” I said. “I’ll let you know if I think we need to take another field trip.”

  A hint of acrid rot touched my nose, and I tried not to let him see me tense. Oh, one of the fiends had stuck around, clearly. And now it was following me.

  “Why don’t I join you?” Bash tipped his head toward the street. “Two minds accomplish more than one?”