Black Dog

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I stood up. “You should go,” I said. “I mean it. This is probably the last chance you’ll get.”

  “I don’t need your help,” Lolly grumbled. “My life is fucking fine, okay?”

  I slipped out the door. “Whatever.” I found a narrow hall that lead to an old freight platform at the back of the barn. A battered panel truck on blocks sat to one side, a welter of other stripped hulks spreading out from it into the woods like rusted, oil-­streaked herpes.

  The barn was probably a shearing shed for sheep farmers back when this was still the Wild West. The doors were shut up tight, but one of the shifters from last night stepped out of a smaller door at the side, wandering into the rusted cars and loosening his silver belt buckle.

  I waited until he’d unzipped his fly, then picked up a concrete chunk fallen from the blocks holding up the panel truck and advanced through the weeds and broken glass. He whipped his head around at the last second and I hit him hard with the concrete. He let out a soft sigh and collapsed next to the burned-­out body of a Chevelle, wafting the sour stink of coyote piss in my direction.

  I dropped the block and eased open the side door of the barn, peering into dimness punctuated by sharp bars of light coming through jagged holes in the high ceiling. Something fluttered and squeaked high in the rafters above as I shut the door. “Leo?” I whispered.

  I heard a cough from the shadows beyond the bars of light, and took another step into the dimness. “Leo,” I said again.

  “Ava?” he whispered. I felt something cold and tight uncurl inside my guts and slither back to where it had come from.

  “Yeah,” I said, picking my way around a broken tractor and a pile of dirty mattresses chewed through by rats. The remains of a conveyor belt were piled against one wall, and rusted hooks and saws hung from nails driven into the splintery wood, all that remained of the slaughter operation this had once been. Above me, a metal track creaked in its bolts, chains for hanging up carcasses dangling from rollers like the roots of some rusty tree high above us. The air smelled subterranean too, musty and dank with mold and old blood.

  I let out a small breath when I saw Leo’s face floating in the shadow. His wrists were tied with frayed, splintery rope, the loops caught over a rusty hook at the end of a chain. His shirt was torn open, revealing his tattoos down to his navel, and his head drooped as he tried to look at me.

  “You came to rescue me,” he said thickly. “I’m touched.” His face was swollen on one side, his eye almost shut and crusted with blood. Droplets had dried on the floor around his feet, turning the dusty floor to mud under my boots.

  “Don’t thank me just yet,” I said. I grabbed a rusty knife out of a wooden box of similar blades, things used for skinning and gutting and slicing. I kicked over the box to stand on and started sawing through the rope.

  Leo sucked in a sharp breath, and I felt a rush of air on my face as the door flew open and a body smashed into mine, knocking the knife out of my grip.

  “Hey, puppy dog,” Billy said as he straddled me, grabbing me by the hair and pushing my face into the dirt. “I knew you’d come home when you were hungry.”

  Tears sprouted from my eyes as he yanked on my scalp, grunting. I tried to roll over and free my arm. One good hit to the throat and Billy wouldn’t be so fucking smug. I struggled, my toes digging furrows in the dirt, but he was too heavy and he laid his torso on top of mine, his lips leaving spittle on my ear as he spoke.

  “Keep doing that, puppy, and I just might keep you alive for a few days longer.” He ground his pelvis hard into my ass, slamming me into the dirt again. His heavy pants cast sour breath against my cheek like a blast furnace, and I felt his fingers dig into the flesh of my hips as he yanked at my jeans.

  I let myself go limp for a few seconds, so he’d think he was getting what he wanted. His panting went ragged, his thrusts more insistent, and when he tore the seam of my underwear I snapped my head back and cracked him in the nose. I felt the cartilage give with a pop like stepping on an aluminum can.

  Billy screamed and reared back, clutching his face. “You fucking bitch!” he bellowed. Blood seeped from between his fingers, a lot of it, and I scrambled away from him as he swiped at me with one crimson-­soaked hand.

  “I’m gonna kill you,” he ground out, his voice muffled from his smashed nose. “I was gonna be nice, but now I’m going to skin you inch by inch.”

  “Like you were nice to Lolly?” I panted. “I’ll pass.”

  Billy went down on his hands and knees. His nose looked like something that had gotten run over by a semi on the highway, all blood and mangled flesh. I caught the white gleam of bone through the mess. The sight cheered me up a lot. “You’re gonna pay for what you did to Tanya, and my fucking face,” he snarled, his back arching so I could see all the individual knots of his vertebrae.

  “That was her name?” I said. “I’d just been calling her Coyote Ugly, up until I snapped her neck.”

  Billy let out a roar, his flesh tearing and his muscles forming into the square-­headed mountain lion that had chased me through the ravine. His fingers sprouted claws and his skull compressed and elongated.

  I cast for anything to fight him off. If he shifted, I was fucked. I couldn’t take him on as a hound—­I’d be half his size. And as a human, I was basically a take-­out gyro. My only hope was that shifting during the day would take enough out of him that I could get a shot in. Shifters weren’t tied to moon phases, but the closer it was the easier their shift came, and to do it in broad daylight you had to be really strong or really pissed.

  Billy tensed as his golden pelt sprouted from his skin. A shudder rippled through him as he locked eyes with me, lips peeling back from half-­inch teeth. He gathered his legs and sprang, and I braced myself for the rib-­cracking impact.

  It didn’t come. Billy’s leap was arrested at the arc as Leo loomed behind him out of the shadows and jammed a rusty knife between his shoulder blades. Billy screamed as he thrashed in the dirt and snapped at Leo, who jumped out of the way of his jaws.

  I grabbed up the knife he’d knocked out of my hand and drove it under Billy’s rib cage hard, up and into his heart. He twitched once and died, head lolling in the dirt.

  Leo spat blood. “Asshole.” He held out his hand and pulled me to my feet. “You okay?”

  I nodded. “Fucker ripped the only pair of jeans I own.”

  Leo gave me a smile that displayed his bloody teeth. “You’re a lot tougher than you look, even on two legs.”

  “You too,” I said, stepping over Billy’s body. Inwardly, I was just glad I’d loosened Leo’s ropes enough for him to jump in when he did. I might have seemed a lot less tough being ripped to shreds on the barn’s dirt floor.

  “Not the first crankhead who’s tried to torture me,” Leo said. “That guy hit like a drunken prom date.”

  Leo was limping as we pushed open the door and picked our way across the junkyard. My stomach knotted when I saw the shifter I’d clocked with the concrete was gone. “Leo . . .” I said, but the rest was drowned out when a shotgun blast ripped across the junkyard, taking out the windshield of a Pontiac over my left shoulder.

  I ran, ducking between the rusted-­out cars, Leo close behind me. Another spray of buckshot rattled against metal, and I felt flecks of rust bite into my cheek.

  Leo panted a bit, pressing one hand into his ribs over the worst of his bruises. “Good thing he can’t aim for shit.” He craned his neck around the trunk of the Ford we were hiding behind. “Think we can make it to the trees before he reloads?”

  “We’re gonna have to,” I said, standing up and running for it. We hit the tree line as a third shot rolled back from the mountains around us like distant thunder, warning that a storm was coming even though the morning was blindingly bright and clear.

  “Please tell me you have a ride out of here,” Leo said. We picked our wa
y through the pines back to the parking lot, me keeping my ears turned toward the clubhouse. Not even a nodding crankhead could sleep through the O.K. Corral back in the junkyard.

  I stopped short when I saw Clint’s truck was gone. “Son of a . . .” I started, then settled for punching a tree. The bark scraped up my knuckles, but the pain didn’t do much except piss me off even more.

  Leo groaned. “I was really hoping this wouldn’t turn into a nature hike.”

  The rattle of a bike engine drifted across the lot, and I watched a ­couple of half-­dressed shifters jump on the starters, the girls gathering at the edge of the porch in a snarling knot. “Yeah, well,” I said, “better to be alive and lost in the woods than back there.”

  “Amen to that,” Leo grunted, then stumbled and collapsed against a tree, his face going pale. I started to help him, but he waved me off. “Just give me a second.”

  “No, you need a hospital,” I said. I’d seen enough ­people die in the days before X-­rays and modern hospitals to know what the deathly pale and the sudden pain meant. Not to mention if you did manage to get to a hospital, you could die from the ether surgeons used just as easily as from your injuries.

  “That’s not happening, so let’s run instead of crying about it,” Leo said between gritted teeth. When I still hesitated, he leaned forward and gave me a push. “Move your ass, Ava. I’ll be behind you as fast as I can.”

  He swayed and I caught him. “We both know that’s a lie,” I said. The shifters circled their bikes, spraying gravel, and aimed them toward the road.

  I should leave Leo. That was the choice to make if I wanted to live past the next ten minutes. Leave him, feel bad later, and let him turn into just another bad memory that intruded when I couldn’t sleep, which was most nights.

  I couldn’t seem to make myself move, though. I didn’t usually have trouble making shitty decisions that would give me nightmares for decades. It was just part of the equally shitty hand I’d been dealt when Gary decided to pick me up off the muddy bayou ground. I couldn’t now make myself let go of Leo. I couldn’t shut off the small part of me that had existed before the hound.

  “Why are you doing this!” Leo growled, trying to get free of me. “Don’t be a fucking idiot.”

  “I guess I like you a little,” I snapped, refusing to let go. We stared at each other, him panting in pain and covered in his own blood, me silenced by my own words, feeling his heartbeat reverberate through my hand.

  It had been so long since I’d been honest with anyone, about anything, that I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Ever since Gary had gone tits-­up things had been leaking out around the edges of my mind—­the nightmares, not leaving Leo, and now this. I hoped it stopped soon, if I lived. It was embarrassing as fuck.

  “That’ll be a real comfort when I’m torn limb from limb,” Leo muttered, almost drowned out by the roar of bike engines.

  As the shifters’ bikes bore down on our hiding spot, Clint’s truck roared up, slamming to a halt a few feet short of the trees. I slung Leo’s arm over my shoulder and dragged him toward the passenger side. He tumbled onto the seat and I lost my balance and fell on top of him. Clint took off before I could even pull the door shut behind me, fishtailing onto the highway.

  I yanked the door shut and propped Leo up. My pulse was pounding, but as I watched the clubhouse and the shifters’ bikes retreat in the rearview mirror my breath finally smoothed out.

  I reached across Leo and hit Clint hard on the shoulder. “Where the fuck were you!”

  “Relax,” he said, checking the rearview mirror. The shifters were still behind us, five or six of them, trailing the rattle-­bang truck like a school of hungry piranhas.

  “I’ll relax when this shithole is five hundred miles behind us,” I said. Leo let out a soft moan, shifting to look at Clint.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “He’s Clint Hicks,” I said, still watching the shifters. They were gaining on us, the truck no match for the powerful Harley engines. “We need to lose them,” I said to Clint.

  “Won’t be easy after you walked in there and humiliated their pack leader,” Clint said.

  “She did a little more than that,” Leo muttered. Clint cut me a black look.

  “Don’t give me that,” I said. “It was him or me.”

  Clint hit the steering wheel. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Before, they would have just ridden us to the edge of their territory and let it go unless you came back. Now they’ll never stop.” He looked at Leo and huffed. “Stupid.”

  “I don’t see you stepping up, handsome,” Leo said. His voice was a rusty creak and each word clearly caused him pain. “Maybe you should shut up and drive the truck. Seems to be what you’re good at.”

  “If we can get to a city we can lose them,” I said. Shifters hated cities. There were too many smells, too many humans and cars and other predators running around. Plus, cities tended to be home to vamp hives, and those were two groups who were definitely front-­runners in the Asshole Olympics. One bite from a carrier vamp and a shifter was in for a slow, painful death that usually ended with your brain leaking out your ears.

  “Easier said than done,” Clint grumbled. Quieter, “I told you to leave him.”

  “You get us out of here or I’m going to call Lilith’s particular brand of bitch down on your ass faster than you can spit out an apology,” I said. “We clear?”

  Clint’s knuckles went white on the cracked vinyl covering the steering wheel, but finally he ground out an irritated breath. “If we get to 90 we can probably make it to Rapid City. The interstate is usually crawling with troopers.”

  I kept one eye on the shifters behind us. If not all of them knew Billy was dead, we might have a little time. There was undoubtedly somebody back there who was slamming back a celebratory shot, ready to step into Billy’s skeezy leather pants as pack leader. I couldn’t imagine the guy had made a ton of close friends in life.

  Leo groaned, and I took off the overshirt Clint had given me and rolled it up to put under his head. “Try to rest,” I said softly. He tried to smile through his swollen jaw, then grimaced.

  “No argument. See you on the flip side.”

  Clint kicked the truck up to eighty miles an hour as the on-­ramp to the interstate came into view, staring straight ahead at the road. “Going back for him better not screw me, Ava,” he said as the black dots of the shifters appeared in a line across the white shimmer of the interstate. Arrayed like birds of prey, they kept just enough distance that they could close it and overtake us whenever they felt like it.

  “It won’t,” I lied, and didn’t look in the rearview mirror again.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Highways are anonymous. The horizon might rise and fall, the landscape might go from trees to scrub to desert, but the highway is always the same. For a long time, I’d found comfort in that. Rest stop after rest stop, mile marker after mile marker, never changing. Just like me.

  Clint kept the truck fast through Spearfish and Sturgis, and the ink-­blot trickle of towns leading up to Rapid City, barely dots on a map. By the time we started seeing signs for the city limits, though, the needle was on E and the engine began coughing.

  Clint rolled to a stop on a side street lined with dilapidated ranches. “We’re not far,” he said. I got out and helped Leo, scanning the street for the shadow of the shifter pack, but for the moment they were behind us.

  “Where are we going?” I said as Clint strode ahead. He’d zipped his rifle into a padded carrying case, and nobody on the broken-­down block paid any attention.

  “Somewhere safe,” he snapped, and turned away from Leo and me. Leo grimaced.

  The ranches turned to older frame homes, in even worse repair. Rusty bars guarded most of the windows, and half the yards were overgrown, listless, bleached FOR SALE signs
leaning under weeds and drifts of trash. I heard the thump and blast of music from up the block, and a few old women stared at us from their porches as we passed.

  At the end of the block sat a timber-­frame church, twice as large as anything else in the neighborhood. A plywood sign was tacked to the siding. Part of it had broken off, reading SOUP KITC. Judging from the welter of flyers and leaflets on the door and the dusty grime-­streaked windows looking out on a yard made of weeds and litter, the Soup Kitc hadn’t been operating in a few decades.

  A marquee next to the door was mostly covered with graffiti. The plastic letters were faded almost white, but I could just make them out as Clint tried the door.

  AND I SAW AN ANGEL COME DOWN FROM HEAVEN

  HAVING THE KEY TO THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

  AND A GREAT CHAIN IN HIS HAND

  It was no big surprise that Clint’s friend didn’t hold with the warm and fuzzy God. I wasn’t sure that translated into a willingness to hide us from a pack of angry shifters, but who knew?

  Clint cursed when a chain rattled from the other side of the door. “He should be here.”

  “I wouldn’t be if I didn’t have to,” I muttered, but Clint ignored me other than an irritated shake of his head.

  We slipped around the side of the building, through an alley choked with bursting trash bags and up a loading dock. Clint kicked at the rusted padlock on the sliding door, and managed to lift it a few feet.

  “I hate you,” Leo groaned as he crouched and crawled under the door, collapsing on the other side.

  Clint found a light switch, and a swinging bulb lit the small van bay. “This way,” he said. I helped Leo through the door into an industrial kitchen, which smelled like all church kitchens—­bleach, stale coffee, and the faint whiff of rotting trash. During my low periods, church charities were a pretty reliable source of food and a place to sleep where I wouldn’t end up with a hobo crawling into my cot or a bag lady helping herself to my only pair of shoes.