“Deal with the hounds,” Leo said in my ear. “I’ll handle Gary.”
I glanced back at him, but he seemed serious. Well, it was his funeral. He might not have sold me out, but I still didn’t think he had more than an ice cube’s chance floating in a hot chocolate made in Hell.
Blue leaped at me, shifting on the fly, and the time for thinking deep thoughts was over. I let him barrel by me, stepping aside and swiping his throat with my claws. Blood erupted, coating my palm and arm halfway to the elbow. Blue coughed once and collapsed, twitching. Arterial red turned black, just a slick shiny spot on the asphalt as he died.
Before I could celebrate, Wilson slammed into me from behind. He might not be graceful, but he had almost a hundred pounds on me, and that was enough.
“Always knew you’d turn someday,” he grunted. “You think you’re better than us.”
“Wilson,” I managed, even though he was slamming my head repeatedly into the pavement. “Why are you doing this?”
He stopped, chest heaving, staring at me. The white network of scars across his skull looked like fresh paint in the sunlight. The shifter pack had taken off half his face, and even hellhound healing wasn’t perfect.
“Gary keeps you around as a joke,” I said. In my peripheral vision, Leo accepted a black case from his father, taking out a flat bag full of red—a hospital blood pack. Alexi probably had an entire bank’s worth on ice when Leo had capped him.
“Gary is my master,” Wilson snarled. He shook me a little. It wouldn’t take much more pressure to snap my neck.
“Your master did the same shit to you he just did to me,” I said. “He sent you off to do his bidding and didn’t give a shit when those lycanthropes almost made you hamburger. Why the fuck do you care about him, Wilson? To Gary, you might as well be a used tissue.”
Leo poured the blood across the ground in a line as Gary came at him, and when the reaper hit the line he bounced back. The ozone taste of black magic hit my tongue, and all the small hairs on my neck lifted like lightning had fried the parking lot.
Gary shook off the impact, but I saw a thin line of black trickle from his nose. Hellspawn bleed black, nasty acid crap with fumes that smell like a mass grave. That Leo had made Gary bleed encouraged me a lot.
Wilson bared his teeth at me. “Gary saved me. That’s what you never got. He made me. I owe him my life no matter what.”
There’s no point in arguing with thugs, especially happily brainless ones. I hit Wilson in the throat, the soft spot that makes a crunching sound if you do it right. He fell over, and I wriggled out from under him.
Gary still battered Leo’s blood line, and it finally gave. Leo waited, watching Gary’s Scythe as he advanced.
“Nice work,” Gary said, swiping at his nose. “I’m still going to cut your balls off with this.”
Seeing Leo pinned down and his useless father just standing there, I shifted without thinking about it. It hurt like hell, all my broken bones rearranging themselves into their four-legged configuration, Gary’s cut making me favor my front right leg, but that didn’t matter.
Leo poured out more blood, mumbling with his eyes closed, and red smoke started to rise as the stuff bubbled. Gary choked, his eyes watering, but he still came.
Until I hit him and wrapped my jaws around his throat.
Hellspawn blood tastes like sewage, and it burned, so bad that I almost let go. But I didn’t. I wrestled Gary to the ground and bit down hard, feeling flesh and tendon and windpipe break under my teeth.
I may see in black and white, but my brain is almost sharper when I’m a hound. All that human fear and worry and indecision washes away, and I know exactly what I have to do. I whipped Gary back and forth, breaking his neck and choking off his scream.
Leo kept mumbling, and I could feel whatever he was conjuring with the blood creeping all over my skin. He opened his eyes at last, and I realized that some of Gary’s blood had spattered across his face, fine black droplets like rain on his pale skin.
Before he could move, though, something hit me in the side, a small impact that quickly turned into wretched, burning pain. I went off my feet, and Leo’s father pumped another spray of bullets into me for good measure.
He picked up Gary’s Scythe and wiped it on the sleeve of his suit. Leo started to say something, but his father said a single word, something that landed on my senses like a hammer blow, and Leo went flying into the hood of his car, smashing it to shit.
I guessed Leo’s plan wasn’t as brilliant as he’d thought.
Leo’s father and his men got back into their cars and drove away, leaving me in a pool of my own blood, surrounded by deadhead parts and bleeding hounds and the reaper I’d just betrayed.
CHAPTER
9
Bullets don’t slow Hellspawn down. If you’re thinking about warding off a hellhound with some silver-tipped hollow points or a spray of buckshot dipped in holy water, kiss your gun hand good-bye now. All bullets do is piss us off. There are metals that can poison a hound, but usually only smart warlocks have weapons that pack the punch.
I was thanking everything I could think of that Leo’s father wasn’t one of those.
The bullets worked their way out of my side after a few minutes, sticky with my blood. I concentrated on breathing until they were all out, and then got myself up and padded over to Leo. I didn’t really want him to see me fuzzy this early in our relationship, but shifting back would have knocked me out, and one of us needed to be conscious.
I nudged Leo with my nose until he muttered and started, coming awake with a groan. “Fuck me,” he said.
I let out a whine to tell him he needed to get up and get moving. Gary wasn’t stirring, but I had no way of telling if he was down for good. Between Leo’s conjure and my mad-dog attack, we’d at least managed to dent him. Maybe later, if I survived, I’d celebrate.
Leo looked at me, eyes narrowing. “Ava?”
I bumped his hand again. Leo passed it hesitantly across my head, ruffling the hair. “Christ, that is freaky,” he said. “You’re a dog but you’ve still got your eyes.”
I herded him toward the door of his car, and he stumbled. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m only human, give me a break.”
He winced every time he breathed, and I felt for him. I whined, scratching at the closed door, but Leo shook his head. “We gotta ditch the car,” he said. “My father knows it.”
I scanned the lot for anything else, since my beautiful bike was probably living in the Vegas impound lot by now, and saw the bulb of an enormous taillight protruding from behind the motel office. I let out a bark, one I hoped wouldn’t make Leo pee himself. He started, but he kept it together.
“Okay,” he said. “Keys?”
“Can’t you jack it?” I said, but it just came out as a long snarl, and Leo recoiled. Shit. I really wished he could speak hellhound.
This was ridiculous. I wasn’t going to get anywhere playing Hellspawn Turner & Hooch with Leo, so I gritted my teeth and shifted.
He caught me when I started to pitch over, even though I landed on his broken ribs. “Fuck,” I said. “We’re quite a pair.”
“I’m sorry,” Leo said. “I had no idea—”
“I completely understand why you want to shank your dad,” I cut him off.
He nodded, still holding on to me. I wasn’t sure if I was propping him up or the other way around. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Leo said. “We need keys for that thing.”
“What kind of gangster can’t wire a car?” I said. Leo’s mouth crimped.
“Look, if you need someone to cook up a deadhead or drop some blood conjuring, I’m happy to help, but I never jacked cars. My skills run more to cleaning and disposal, if you get the drift.”
I got it, and felt a little bit of my own smugness that I could do something a badass
warlock couldn’t, even if it was just petty theft.
The car was a monster, a candy-apple-red Buick Skylark from a time when there was enough metal in the fins alone to build a small aircraft. “I hope you weren’t going for inconspicuous,” I said to Leo, breaking the door lock with a sharp jerk. I slid onto the buttery white leather seat and pulled out the ignition wires.
“Something’s bothering me,” Leo said.
I stripped the ignition and the solenoid wires and started the delicate courtship of tapping them together until the motor coughed, then grumbled, then caught. “Getting blood out of white leather is your area, I’d think,” I said. “But if it’s really getting to you I can try to find a towel to sit on.”
Leo shook his head. “Are you always this calm right after everything goes to shit?”
I wasn’t calm. I was numb. But fuck if I was going to let Leo know that.
“It’s that call,” he said. “Gary said I called him, but I didn’t. I’d say it was my father, but I think he was surprised as I was. Who’d pretend to be me just to get you iced by a reaper?”
I sat back, looking at the tchotchke dangling from the rearview mirror. A big fuzzy pink M, for Marty.
“You still have that gun?” I said to Leo. He pulled it from his waist and handed it over.
“Full mag, one in the pipe,” he said. I flipped the safety off and stalked back toward the motel office, ignoring the dozen niggling pains that wanted to make me limp.
Marty had come out of hiding and was sweeping up broken glass from his front window, carefully skirting the pieces of deadhead that were scattered around like the world’s most morbid store display.
“Why?” I said. He stopped sweeping and bugged his eyes at me.
“Did you really think Gary was going to pat you on the head and give you a corner office?” I said. “And don’t you think you should have called him as yourself if you wanted to effectively kiss his ass?”
Leo had said Marty didn’t know who he was, but I thought Marty was exactly the kind of prying jerkoff who liked knowing things he shouldn’t. It probably got him good and stiff on nights when the Japanese zombie nurse porn just wasn’t doing it.
“I don’t give a crap about Leo Karpov,” he said. “I just wanted Gary to fuck you up.” He shrugged and went back to sweeping. “I’m a shifter. I hate hellhounds.” Glass he’d collected clattered into his wastebasket. “Here’s a tip: next time, be a little nicer. I respond to girls who have manners.”
I shot him right between the eyes. It might not have been the tooth-and-nail death I wanted to give him, but I was tired. “Thanks for the tip.”
Leo didn’t say anything when I gave him back his gun, and I scooted over to the passenger side of the car. “You drive,” I said. “My arm hurts like a bitch.”
He pulled out of the lot, still silent, and I let the hum of the wheels even out my heartbeat. By the time Vegas had vanished into the shimmering Mojave, I’d managed to convince myself that I might not be fucked. Sure, Leo’s father had the Scythe and we were bolting with a stolen car, no cash and dubious survival skills, but I was alive. I felt the air on my face, the drying blood on my skin, my heartbeat, and my breath more sharply than I had in decades.
Being alive was just going to have to be good enough for now.
CHAPTER
10
Leo drove us as far as Elko, courtesy of a trucker in Henderson who left his wallet on the counter of a gas station.
Marty’s car swilled gas like a wino with a gallon of Thunderbird, but nobody stopped us or even noticed, except a couple of guys who told Leo he had a sweet ride.
I concentrated on not passing out. I wasn’t healing like I should. I didn’t know if it was the cut from the Scythe or just being so beat to shit my body was giving up on me. Leo finally pulled into a motel at least ten times as crappy as the Mushroom Cloud, and turned off the car.
“You need to rest,” he said.
“No,” I said. “We should at least cross the state line.”
“There’s no magical fence keeping my dad out of Idaho,” he said. “And if you crap out, then you’re not going to be very useful when he does catch up to us.”
I flinched. I knew that Leo only went with me because I was good in a fight, extra protection against his father’s gang of deadheads, but being reminded that I was only good for one thing didn’t help me feel any better.
“Come on. At least let me take a look at that arm.” Leo’s voice was a lot softer. I had the thought maybe he’d realized he’d stung me, but that was silly. Guys who didn’t care about hurting your kneecaps sure as hell didn’t care about hurting your feelings.
The thought of a bed was appealing, even a bed in the sort of place where the working girls didn’t bother to pretend they were just taking a trip to the ice machine.
“I’m pretty sure that trucker has canceled his cards by now,” I said. “And he didn’t have a whole lot of cash.”
Leo helped me out of the car and pounded on the nearest door with the butt of his gun. He grabbed the shirtless guy who answered by the neck and tossed him into the parking lot. “Out.”
“Hey!” the guy screamed. He had fewer teeth than he did prison tats, but he looked pretty pissed.
Leo pointed the gun at him while he held the door open for me. “Look at it this way—now you don’t have to leave the maid a tip.” He shut the door and put the chain on. The guy pounded for a minute, but he was gone by the time I’d cleaned up the burnt foil and glass straws on the bed and turned on the arthritic bathroom fan to air out the smell of crystal meth and cheap aftershave.
“Home sweet home,” I said, tossing the filthy bedspread on the ground and sitting down.
“Just like my condo on Flamingo,” Leo said. “Except this place has a painting of a sad clown to replace my flat screen.”
He took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves before he grabbed the ice bucket. “Sit tight,” he said. “I’m going to grab some stuff to stitch up your cut.”
“I don’t need . . .” I started, but the door had already slammed.
I looked at the ceiling stains while I waited for Leo, listened to a hooker on the second floor curse out a john in English, Spanish, and what sounded like broken Cantonese—impressive—and tested the TV, which got a fuzzy porn channel and a shopping network selling me cubic zirconium jewelry that even Liberace would have said was a tad flashy.
Leo would learn that he didn’t need to take care of me if he stuck around, but he wasn’t going to. If playing nurse took his mind off things, then I wasn’t going to pee on his parade. I liked him as much as I liked any human, but he’d learn soon enough why even warlocks didn’t become best buddies with Hellspawn.
I pulled my knees up to my chest and listened to the helmet-headed bimbo on TV drone on about the brilliance index. I used to love the television—when they first started showing up everywhere, I always found a way to catch crap like The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Lost in Space, and Twilight Zone. Humans were scared of all the wrong things, I realized when I started watching TV. Nuclear war, Communists, monsters out there in the dark.
The monsters weren’t out there, though. They’d already come inside, infected the world like the zombie virus in Night of the Living Dead. Humans with a little power would always try to peer into the darkness, and things like Gary would always be there waiting, ready to cement Hell’s foothold in their world another inch or two.
Really, I had more in common with them than I’d realized before I’d started watching those shows. We were both small things in a vast forest, and we could only walk so far before something higher up the food chain snatched us in its jaws.
All at once the room was too tight and too hot, feeling exactly like the filthy little box it was. I ran into the bathroom and spun the tap, orange rust water splashing over my shirt. I ripped it off, tossi
ng it in the tub. It stank like stale sweat anyway, and was in even worse shape than me.
I ducked my head down and splashed water on my face until all the blood and salt crust was gone, and my hairline was damp. Black strands stuck to my skin when I came up for air, but I’d staved off the panic attack.
I wasn’t used to being anchorless. I’d seen a thousand motel rooms just like this one, but I’d always been going somewhere on a collection or going back to Gary. Now there was nothing except this.
Vomit took the expressway up my throat and I dove for the toilet, which was a dubious choice at best. The grime-streaked bowl didn’t help, and I retched until my abdomen cramped and my head was pounding.
“Take some deep breaths.”
I shrieked and skidded backward on the slick tile until I hit the tub, where I managed to yank the curtain rod down and start an avalanche of tiny shampoo bottles.
The demon put down the toilet lid and sat, clicking her tongue. “You must be Ava. I’m Lilith. You’re not at all what I expected, based on the things Gary said.”
A weird thing happens when you see a demon in the flesh. They’re like a truck bearing down on you, even if they’re just sitting there. You lose all logic and sense, and your hindbrain jumps in and sets up a litany of ohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuck. Which really is a perfectly normal reaction for a bunny rabbit running smack into a hungry wolf.
I’d managed to go my whole existence as a hound without running into Gary’s boss. Clearly, I’d run through my luck when Leo and I made it out of Vegas, because here she was, tapping one foot on the tile and staring at me like I was supposed to do a trick.
“Sorry to just drop in on you like this,” she said. “But I think you and I have something to discuss.”
I pushed the shower curtain off me and tried to lever myself up, managing to sit on the edge of the tub. My fingers chipped divots out of the cheap fiberglass when I gripped it to hide my shaking.
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