Black Dog

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “You want a dance?”

  I shook my head. Getting a whiff of her confirmed what I thought—­she was fucked up on vampire venom. A sucker had fed from her, and recently. That might explain why I saw a faded black eye under her makeup, when I hadn’t seen any on a video taken barely twenty-­four hours ago. Vamp venom helped speed up human’s metabolism and cellular reproduction, which meant you’d be beautiful, skinny, and invincible right up until the venom either popped your heart like a balloon or you lost the dice roll and a carrier vamp fed on you, you got the virus, and turned.

  “What, then?” Her eyes had a hard time focusing, and she’d stopped any pretense of swaying, kneeling before me in torn tights and a purple bra and panties that were too big for her.

  “Where’s the guy who did that to you?” I pointed at her eye. A sucker had slapped her around and fed on her, and a sucker would know where to find Ivanof. Blood dealers were a lot less hassle than finding willing human feeders. Or unwilling. A tiny splinter worked its way into my mind. Feeding on someone who didn’t want it was a violation, the same as any other. I didn’t like throwing down with vampires—­they were smelly and they bit—­but this time I’d be happy to make an exception. With so many ­people out there who’d willingly give their blood to chase the dragon with vamp venom, there was no excuse for taking it by force.

  The blonde pointed to the VIP room. “In there.”

  I turned on my heel and started for the curtains under the pink neon sign.

  “Hey,” the blonde said. “What are you gonna do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t exactly get an employee handbook when I died and signed my afterlife over to a reaper. Sorry.”

  Ivanof had disappeared when the deadheads had appeared. I figured if I found him, he’d tell me what he knew, which would probably include the name of the necromancer responsible.

  I sped up as I passed the door guy in the VIP room, two Indian tourists getting a lap dance, and a waitress loaded down with empties and went straight for the booth on the far wall.

  Suckers aren’t hard to pick out. They stink like old women’s underwear, and unless they’ve got a good hemoglobin-­rich supply, they start looking like beat-­up luggage within a ­couple of weeks.

  I grabbed the vamp by the back of his shirt collar and dragged him from the booth, his drink and his stack of singles flying in opposite directions. He didn’t weigh much—­he’d been around long enough for his internal organs to dry out and the water to leach from his body.

  His skull made a hollow sound against the wall as I lifted him off the ground, his skinny legs dancing. A snakeskin shoe caught me in the shin, but I ignored it. “Where’s Alex Ivanof?”

  The sucker stared at me, his yellowed eyeballs bugging out a little. Vamps don’t need to breathe, but nobody wants to end their night getting their neck wrung by something that can tear into them like kindling.

  “Hey! I’m calling the cops.” The door guy was trying to get involved. Clearly he took his job in a shitty topless bar way too seriously if he thought that was any flavor of a good idea.

  “Stay out of this.” I let him see full fang-­face: red eyes, hound teeth, the whole nightmare. He didn’t even scream, he just ran.

  I didn’t blame him. Hell, I didn’t want to look at me. Not at my real face, anyway.

  I looked back at the sucker still dangling from my hand. “Where’s Ivanof?”

  “I don’t know!” he wheezed. “I’d tell you if I did! Fuck!”

  We were alone in the VIP room when I dropped him. He made a sound like somebody let the air out of a blow-­up doll.

  “He’s been gone for a week,” the vamp said. “Whole town’s dry. I’ve had to go back to scavenging.” He rubbed at his neck. “Believe me, nobody wants to find him more than I do. Hard to make a bitch put out when you’re hungry.”

  “About that,” I said, drew back my boot, and kicked him in the gut. He screamed, and I felt something give. A vamp who can’t digest blood can’t heal. If I was lucky, this asshole would just dry up and blow away.

  I felt good about my night’s work for about two heartbeats, until I realized that I wasn’t any closer to Ivanof, and only had a sniveling vamp to show for my effort. Gary was going to kick my ass.

  The Switchback Lounge had given me all it was going to. There wasn’t anything here except bottom feeders, and one unlucky son of a bitch who’d been easy pickings for a deadhead.

  Light flared all around me, harsh house lights rather than the dim stripper-­friendly glow. I thought the door guy had come back for another round, but then a body slammed into me and carried me into the far wall, where I left an Ava-­shaped dent before I hit the ground.

  The deadhead snarled and dove at me, and I felt like the world’s biggest moron as I rolled out of the way. I’d been so caught up in shit-­kicking a worthless vamp I’d let a zombie turn me into a hood ornament.

  Forget Gary. I was going to kick my own ass.

  The deadhead snapped but got only a mouthful of my jacket. I grabbed my blade out of my boot with my free hand while I flipped us over, getting the deadhead on his stomach and straddling his back, pulling his neck to one side and jamming the blade against his jugular. Deadheads don’t have enough soul energy for the knife’s borrowed power to kick in, but that was fine. I hadn’t met many critters that could stand up to being decapitated.

  It was a solid plan until he threw me off and I lost the blade as he knocked me aside. This time I didn’t bounce back. The wall was cinder block, and I’d cracked at least a ­couple of ribs. The deadhead didn’t show any signs of slowing down—­in fact, white foam flecked his chin as he skittered toward me like a scorpion.

  As he loomed over me, I finally got a look at the bloated face surrounding his wide, blood-­crusted mouth.

  It was then I realized I was fucked, that I wasn’t going to find the necromancer in Vegas, because the necromancer had already found me. The deadheads hadn’t taken Ivanof.

  The deadhead was Ivanof.

  I let my head clunk against the sticky carpet. “Shit.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  Ivanof snarled again. The skin of his gums had receded in death, and his teeth were stained with old blood. He held me on the ground, nostrils flaring and tongue flicking in and out like a snake. I debated whether it would be worse if he bit me or just drooled on me.

  Outside, the music had cut off. That wasn’t good. ­People had realized something was wrong, which meant somebody was calling the cops. I’d been picked up a few times when I hadn’t been a hound long, and was still stupid enough to think I was invincible. Fortunately, those were the days before computers, and if my files still existed anywhere, logic dictated that I’d be pushing ninety.

  Still, I didn’t need my picture and prints in the system. Gary would have a fit, and I’d fucked this assignment up enough as it stood.

  The deadhead who’d been Alex Ivanof still held me down. I’d never tangled with a deadhead juiced by a necromancer, and it was like trying to heave a compact car off your chest. If I was going to even this fight, I’d have to shift, and that wasn’t an option. Once you turn into a giant dog with red eyes and fangs, ­people tend to stop ignoring you.

  I shoved at Ivanof again, only managing to aggravate my ribs. I thought of Wilson, that bum leg, the way he stared at the hellhounds who could still fight like they’d stolen something from him.

  Gary wouldn’t keep me around out of pity. If I let Ivanof tear me up, that was it.

  “Enough.” All at once, Ivanof’s weight lessened, though he still sat atop me panting, no doubt imagining what my liver tasted like.

  A man crouched down in my line of sight. He narrowed dark eyes and didn’t blink. “Here for my soul?” he asked.

  I narrowed my eyes in return. “Are you offering?”

  He smiled. It wasn�
�t a good look on him. He was having fun watching Ivanof smack me around.

  “I’m offering a time-­out,” he said. “I know what you are and what you can do. And you know what Alexi can do. I’d say that shaking hands and walking away is your only option right now.”

  “You really want to piss off a hellhound?” I growled. “Maybe your corpse bride here can take me, but you can’t. You’re human.”

  The necromancer shook his head. He looked more like an undertaker than a warlock, nice-­looking dark suit, pristine white shirt, short dark hair that called back to my heyday as a human, when most guy’s hairstyles could deflect bullets. Humans messing with black magic don’t tend to be very put together, so I looked a little longer than I should, trying to find a flaw, but there was none. “The last thing I want is you against me,” the necromancer said, “but I also can’t have you ratting me out to a reaper. So what are we going to do?”

  “Let me up so I can kick the shit out of you?” I suggested, but at that point I was just talking. Hellhounds are single-­purpose. If I wasn’t on a collection or doing Gary’s heavy work, I wasn’t much use, and this asshole knew it.

  “How about I buy you coffee?” he said. “And we can talk. Ava. That’s your name, isn’t it?”

  I decided to skip the part about how he knew. Any one of a hundred bottom feeders on Gary’s payroll could have dimed me out. Didn’t mean I wasn’t going to enjoy tearing the throat out of whoever had.

  “Good a name as any.”

  The necromancer pulled me to my feet. “Leonid Karpov,” he said, still gripping my hand. After the deadhead, his strength and warmth were surprising. “Most ­people call me Leo.”

  “I bet that’s not all they call you,” I said. I was used to going in hard and ending things messily, but if this Leonid guy didn’t want to square off, I could play along until I found out where he was keeping the rest of his deadheads. Maybe even why he’d started a dustup on Gary’s turf in the first place. Then I could go back to breaking heads and taking souls—­the comfortable stuff.

  Leo snapped his fingers at Ivanof, who hissed but followed us out a back door hidden behind a cheap curtain and into the alley off Sahara. Once outside, he went running off, that crooked off-­balance run endemic to the dead.

  “You sure he can find his way home?” I said. “I mean, without stopping for a snack?”

  “They feed when I say,” Leo said. “My control over the dead is absolute.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “I might as well pack up and go, then.”

  Leo pointed me ahead of him to a boxy black car in the alley. “I don’t know much of anything about hellhounds, beyond what they can do. I didn’t expect a sense of humor.”

  I stayed put. If he thought I was turning my back on him, Leo was a lot dumber than he looked. He sighed and pulled a key chain out of his pocket. The car started with a hum when he pressed a button. “Ava, if I wanted to hurt you I would have let Alexi finish you off in there.”

  “Nothing personal,” I said. “Sorry if I don’t trust a complete stranger who used a deadhead to get my attention.”

  Leo shoved the key chain into his pocket. “Fine.”

  He moved faster than a man had any right to, the small black box out of his pocket and leveled at me in the space of half a heartbeat.

  The stun gun leads bit into me just below my clavicle, and the electricity knocked me back onto my ass. Hellhound bodies are designed to take a lot of punishment, even as humans, so it didn’t put me out, but it hurt like a drunken bastard on payday.

  Leonid rolled me onto my back and slipped a pair of disposable cuffs onto my wrist, pulling them tight. “I really am sorry,” he said as I retched from the jolt, trying to get myself back under control. Trying to fight. This was all backward. I was faster and tougher than any warlock, juiced on black magic or not. It took a lot more than a stun gun to put me down.

  Cracked ribs, a deadhead beatdown, and then a stun gun seemed to be working, though.

  “Stop it,” Leonid said. He slung me over his shoulder like I was luggage while I kicked and snarled. Everything hurt, but if I could just shift, I could shred this fucker. Forget the deadheads. Forget what Gary had sent me to do. I wanted to rip Leo’s head off, plain and simple.

  Leo popped the trunk and dumped me in. I landed on a blanket that smelled like motor oil and fake pine trees.

  “If you’re thinking about going four-­legged, it’s not an option,” he said. “The trunk is warded against anything that expends magic. That includes you.”

  “I’m going to fucking kill you,” I rasped. My voice sounded like I’d been screaming for hours.

  “Scary,” Leo said without expression, and slammed the trunk lid on me.

  I got the handcuffs off in the first ­couple of minutes—­I was still stronger than any human woman, even beaten to a pulp. Escaping the trunk was a different story. I kicked the lid, I screamed, I jiggled the emergency latch until my fingers were raw, but the trunk lock was strong and the latch was disconnected.

  Panting, I looked up at the rough symbols painted on the trunk lid. Magic sigil bullshit all looks the same to me, unless it’s demon language, but when I tried shifting, it was like I’d jumped into a dry swimming pool.

  Lycanthropes literally change their shape, but with me, it’s something else. I’m always the hound. That black dog is always there, creeping in my shadow. If I was the kind of person who nerded out about physics, like Marty back at the motel, I’d probably guess that I existed in both states, and the power given to me when the reaper took my soul and gave me a hound’s allowed the switch. Call it a pocket dimension, call it a dual state, call it Shirley. I’d heard a lot of crackpot theories during my time as a hound, and that was as good as any.

  But Gary didn’t reward theories—­kind of the opposite—­so all I really knew for sure was that it took magic to shift, and it wasn’t there.

  Something I hadn’t felt in a long time crept into me, starting low down in my abdomen and spreading like spiders crawling all over my skin. Leo had actually managed to get the drop on me. I’d always thought I’d go down fighting, finally run up against something bigger and badder than me, but this could be it. One necromancer too smart for his own good, and that would be the period on the sentence Gary had imposed on me.

  Almost a century of bringing trash like Leo to the reaper, and I was going to die in his trunk.

  I let myself have ten seconds of the panic and fear, something I thought I’d almost entirely lost when I became a hound, and then I made myself think as the car rumbled on, picking up speed.

  It didn’t matter what else was going on here—­I could care less what Leo was up to at this point. Back me into a corner and I’ll bite, simple as that.

  Leo was going to wish he’d never had the bright idea to kidnap a hellhound. For about ten seconds, while he watched his own guts spill out before he died.

  I lay still, trying to breathe shallow, until the car finally pulled to a stop. I heard it crunch over gravel and then the absolute silence that told me we were far outside Vegas in the desert.

  Leo’s feet crunched toward the back, and after a moment the trunk latch gave.

  I didn’t even give him a chance to open it. I exploded out of the trunk, ignoring all the parts of me that screamed for mercy, landing on the gravel on all fours.

  The shift came on, but even as my vision started to slide into gray scale I realized there was one problem. Leo wasn’t in front of me.

  I got out one breath before he raised the dart gun and fired until the clip was empty. Five darts, a payload that would drop a three-­hundred-­pound lycanthrope.

  A blue velvet sky full of stars spun across my vision, and then the stars blurred into white lines on the center of an endless highway before everything went black.

  CHAPTER

  6

  I was seven
teen when I left Bear Hollow, Tennessee, for the last time. I had one dress, one pair of shoes, and two dollars that I’d saved working since I was barely fourteen mending and taking in washing with my mother.

  I had never seen electric light or indoor plumbing, but I was no dummy. I worked my way to New Orleans, mending clothes for rich women and cleaning houses when I had to, watching children, anything that paid the bills and didn’t involve putting my legs in the air for strange men. Prohibition was going strong, and my grandmother had made the best moonshine in Bear Hollow, so it wasn’t hard to set up a little shack in the bayous of St. Bernard Parish and watch the money roll in.

  She was the one who told me about haints, about the black dogs that prowled the swamps where she grew up, deep in Cajun country. About the rougarou, the beast with red eyes who’d consume you, body and soul.

  I guessed it was only fitting I’d ended up back there. And I made a good life for myself until I died.

  After I became a hound, I’d catch glimpses sometimes of that mirror-­still bayou water, silvered by the moon. Of the things moving in the cypress swamps, ruffling the hanging moss with their passage. No matter where I went, from Anchorage to Juarez and most every back road in between, part of me was always back in that bayou. It wasn’t strange to me. After all, it was where I’d left my soul.

  Cold water smacked me in the face, and I choked, sucking in sour-­tasting fabric.

  Leo yanked a black cloth sack off my head. I hissed as harsh light abused my dark-­adapted eyes, and bared my teeth at him.

  “Calm down,” he said. “You’ve been napping for a while, and I need to talk to you.”

  My head was still muzzy from the tranquilizers, but everything snapped into focus pretty quickly. I was in a chair, two-­legged again, chained down hand and foot. Smells of oil and hot metal and the lack of any furniture besides my chair and a rusty metal table told me I was probably in one of the hundreds of abandoned gas stations that littered the Mojave.

  “You keep saying that, and then you keep knocking me out,” I told Leo. He disappeared from the pool of light and wheeled a ratty old rolling chair to face me. He sat, taking a flat silver flask from his pocket and sipping before tucking it away.