Black Dog

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I’d always thought it was funny that I was something that lived in their nightmares, sitting on a dented metal chair, eating fourth-­rate spaghetti off a paper plate while a grandmother with a chain on her cardigan asked me if I’d accepted Jesus. Long before that, my mother sometimes dragged me and my grandmother to the tent revivals that traveled up and down the hollers in Tennessee, men with hard eyes and sweat-­stained white suits shouting into the night that we were all going to Hell.

  I’d thought they were all full of shit when I’d been alive, but I guess that showed what I knew.

  This place was a far cry from either of those. Everything was musty and closed up, and there was a strong rank odor drifting over the whole place, from the kitchen up the stairs into the vestibule and the church itself. Everything was rough and functional, from the boxy pulpit to the log pews that looked like they’d gladly plant a splinter in the ass of anyone foolish enough to sit down. A chalkboard hung to the left of the cross with hymns from two weeks ago written in crooked block letters.

  I eased Leo onto the padded bench behind the pulpit and propped one of those weird little knee pillows behind his head. “Don’t die,” I whispered before I followed Clint.

  “This friend of yours isn’t great at hospitality,” I told him. Clint pushed open the door behind the pulpit, flicking on another bare bulb that hummed and jittered.

  “Father Colin runs this parish on a shoestring. He’s always here, though. Colin!”

  The floor under my boots was covered in a moist carpet, the boards underneath giving softly at each step. Everything was fake wood grain and harsh lighting, an update that had probably seemed like a good idea in 1972, but now just made me feel like I was on the set of a low-­rent snuff movie.

  The rankness tickled my nose with each step, strong now as a trash pile in the dead of summer. At the end of the hall, through a low arch, a metal desk crouched, watched over by a knockoff print of The Last Supper and a ragged cassock hanging from a hook.

  Below the desk, a pair of feet in worn sneakers poked out, tilted sadly to the side like run-­down windup toys.

  “Colin!” Clint shouted, shoving past me and skidding to his knees next to the body. Father Colin was dressed in a gray sweat suit, one hand over his stomach like he’d fallen asleep. His face had a green, greasy cast and his eyes had glossed over with the pale cataracts death imparts. A fly poised on his parted lips, rubbing its legs together before tipping over the priest’s teeth and into his mouth.

  Clint pinched his forehead hard with his thumb and forefinger. “This can’t be happening,” he muttered. He slumped on his knees. “Colin didn’t deserve this,” he said, picking up one of the priest’s hands. The fingers were squishy and bloated. I didn’t make a habit of hanging around decomposing murder victims, but my guess was Colin had been there for at least three days.

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly. Aside from his very dead, indescribably smelly condition, Colin looked like he’d simply lain down. There were no marks on him, nothing disturbed on his desk. A mug reading jesus loves you—­everyone else thinks you’re an asshole sat half full of coffee next to a stack of check stubs and a paper ledger.

  It went flying, along with everything else, when Clint stood up and knocked the desk over with a roar. I got out of the way as he turned on the file cabinet, smashing a Rolodex and knocking a picture of Father Colin standing in front of a small stone church to the ground. Glass tinkled, and he finally stopped, bent over, his shoulders shaking.

  I knew myself well enough to know I wasn’t a comforting presence—­even if I’d run into a lot of grief-­stricken types, I never knew what to say. There was nothing to soften the blow of death, especially when you knew what was waiting on the other side.

  I eased forward and put a hand on Clint’s back, feeling his lungs heave beneath my palm. He shoved me away and I stumbled, tripping over Father Colin’s legs and falling to the ground.

  “You just had to come looking for me, didn’t you?” Clint ground out. “Just had to follow orders, like the pit bull you are. Clamp your jaws around something and hold on until it’s dead.”

  “Pit bulls are loyal,” I said, getting up and brushing black grit from my jeans. “They don’t attack unless they’re provoked. Or unless somebody turns them vicious on purpose.” I glared at him. “If you think I had something to do with this, then you can fuck right off.”

  “Lilith did this,” Clint ground out. “But you’re with her. You’re just waiting for me to let my guard down.”

  “I can’t take your soul,” I snapped. “You don’t have one. So I’ve failed Lilith, and I am just as far up shit creek as you. If you’d pull your head out for a hot second you’d realize that.” I spread my hands and saw that my palms were covered in sooty streaks. “I’m sorry about your friend. Are you sure it was Lilith?”

  “You’re wearing the proof,” Clint said sullenly. He reached down and pulled up Father Colin’s sweatshirt. There was a perfect circle burned into his pectoral, roughly the size of a fingertip. “She touched him,” Clint said softly. “Burned the heart right out of him.”

  Suddenly, I would have given anything to scrub my hands until they were raw. “Why would she do this? I mean, I only met her once, but petty revenge murder didn’t seem like her thing.”

  “To punish me,” Clint said. “I avoided her for years by hiding with the shifters, but when I blew into this town in the fifties, Colin was the first human to help me. He was young, just over from Ireland. He joined the seminary after some trouble back there.”

  Clint sat in Colin’s desk chair. The springs creaked under his weight. He looked utterly defeated, much paler than when I’d first seen him. “It was the middle of winter and I was sleeping rough. The cold will get to you, eventually, no matter what you are. Colin let me in to sleep in the vestry, even though the monsignor threw a fit when he found out. He gave me a job as a groundskeeper. We were friends. We talked about everything. When I told him what I was, he put his hand on my arm and said he’d always known, that he would not forsake me, that I was always welcome under his roof.” Clint swallowed. “He saved my life. I stayed on consecrated ground and for a while that was enough. Then Lilith got some thugs from the neighborhood to set the vestry on fire one night. Nobody was hurt, but I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t put innocent ­people in harm’s way. I hadn’t seen him in close to twenty years but I was hoping . . .”

  I stayed quiet. Privately, I thought Father Colin was an idiot for believing that anything in this world could stop a Hellspawn. There was no sign, no church, no faith that could turn them back. They were implacable, unstoppable as a hurricane or an earthquake. All you could do was pray the storm passed you over and survey the damage afterward.

  “I’ll find some plastic to cover him up,” I said finally. Clint didn’t say anything, just sat staring at the far wall.

  I searched the kitchen until I found a tarp amid some rusty paint cans in a supply cupboard. Clint and I rolled Colin into it and I duct-­taped the ends. Another trip found me a handful of air fresheners. Replacing the stench of decay with the stench of Hawaiian Tropical Delight only improved things marginally, but it was a start.

  “I should check on Leo,” I said after we’d covered Colin’s wrapped body with a sheet. Clint rubbed his hands over his face.

  “He kept a first aid kit around here somewhere,” Clint said, rummaging in the file cabinet.

  I accepted the army surplus box and went back to the chapel. Clint needed to be alone and I wasn’t going to help anything by hovering.

  Leo was still on the bench, and my throat got tight until I touched his neck and found his pulse. It was slow but strong, and he muttered when I leaned over him. “This bench is hard as fuck.”

  “I think we’re stuck for the time being,” I said. “Lilith was here.”

  Leo scrubbed a hand over his eyes and sat up, the tic in his jaw
twitching with pain. “What did we do to earn the big bad bitch’s attention?”

  “She killed Clint’s friend,” I said. “The priest here. She was sending a warning.” I fished surgical scissors from the kit and clipped away the remains of Leo’s bloody shirt. His torso was painted with bruises the size of blooming poppies, and his skin was so pallid it almost gleamed in the dim light filtering in through the cardboard-­covered windows in the chapel. I got busy wrapping his ribs, and cleaning off the cuts on his face with peroxide. He inhaled sharply but never flinched or made a sound.

  I didn’t say anything either, just tried to be as gentle as possible.

  Once I’d tossed the bloody gauze, I could see the extent of the swelling across Leo’s jaw. One jagged cut bisected his eyebrow. I remembered the silver rings on Billy’s knuckles and bit my lip in sympathy as I brushed Leo’s hair out of the way so I could close up the gash.

  “I’d do it all over again,” Leo said as I put Steri-­Strips on the cut, trying to be neat so his eyebrow would knit back together.

  “Kill Billy?” I said. Leo nodded.

  “Piece of shit.”

  He put his hand over mine, squeezing my fingers together, and I squeezed back. There was nothing keeping me from this now, not Gary and not my need to keep moving, keep drifting west and east and back again. I could let myself be still for five seconds, actually be grateful I had someone to watch my back, even if he was a professional killer and we were holed up in a church that smelled like decomp.

  The bottom of the first aid kit had a Ziploc bag of pharmacy bottles, all in different names. I uncapped the Vicodin and shook out two tablets. I was glad Father Colin wasn’t as squeaky clean as Clint had made him out to be.

  Leo dry-­swallowed the tablets and leaned back, eyes closing again. “I’ve had worse, Ava. You don’t need to worry about me.”

  “I’ve seen worse, but most of those ­people died horribly,” I muttered.

  Leo ticked off his fingers. “I’ve been shot. I was stabbed twice, once by an Aryan in the shower at Riker’s who melted down his comb and made a shiv.”

  “Damn,” I said. “That’s dedication.”

  Leo squirmed. He still didn’t look good, but the pills were doing their work. He’d at least be able to breathe without excruciating pain. “His brother owed money to my father. I cut off his head and hands and left them in the guy’s driveway.” His voice was getting blurry, and I hoped soon he’d be out. Then I’d deal with the body, and Clint. “If you know where to cut, a reciprocating saw gets the job done. Got to do it someplace you can hose the blood off. We used the back of this deli in the neighborhood. Anyway, this guy jumped the, and I quote, ‘murdering kike bastard’ who took out his deadbeat brother. I have a scar on my back the size of the FDR . . . ” He let out a long sigh, muttering something I couldn’t make out.

  I put my hand over his. “Get some sleep, Leo.”

  He grabbed me and I gasped. His grip was still like iron, even looking like he was about a half step from keeling over. “Is Lilith coming to kill us? I left the knife stuck in that asshole in Wyoming. And my cigarettes. I’d hate to get wasted without a smoke.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I think she made her point with the padre. We’re probably safe for a while.”

  Leo didn’t answer, and when I leaned over him his breathing had smoothed out, less ragged and rattling than it had been when we’d run from the shifters. I covered him with a blanket from a shelf of them tucked behind the pulpit, smoothing out the wrinkles so Leo would stay warm, even in the drafty South Dakota wind coming through every crack in the wall. He moaned but didn’t open his eyes.

  Padding back down the dank hall to Colin’s office, I saw Clint bent over the priest’s body. One hand on his forehead, he murmured gently in a whispery, acidic language that I didn’t speak. He started when he saw me and looked around guiltily.

  “I was just offering him last rites. He would have liked that.”

  I shrugged. “Some ­people want to be cremated and shot into orbit.”

  Clint sighed and stood up. “He has a little apartment through there. I don’t know about you, but I need a few hours of sleep.”

  “Leo needs a hospital,” I said. “He’s bleeding internally, and I don’t think he’ll last if I don’t get him help.” I took a breath. “I’m going to stay with him, so we should probably stop here.”

  Clint shook his head, eyes narrowing. “No. You need to stay with me. Lilith . . .”

  “Lilith was going to kill me no matter if I found you or not,” I said. “She’s just trying to clear off Gary’s ledger. I’m not worried about Lilith.” I had the strange thought that if I could just make sure Leo got through this, I didn’t really care what happened to me. I’d been running on borrowed time since Gary kicked off, and deep down I’d known it when I wrapped my jaws around his throat. And that was okay, but I didn’t need to drag anyone else down with me.

  “She is not just tying up a dead reaper’s accounts,” Clint said, his voice so sharp it made my shoulders hunch involuntarily, waiting for a blow to follow the word. “Lilith is not stupid, Ava. She sent you to me knowing I don’t have a soul.”

  “Yeah, and?” I shrugged. “Demons do a lot of unfathomable shit, Clint. Or whatever your name really is. Lilith will either find you or she won’t. I’m going to take Leo to the ER, so I wish you luck on your quest.” I stepped away from him when he reached for me, and I jerked my arm out of his range. “It’s been real. Please don’t be offended when I say I sincerely hope to never see you again.”

  I turned to go back to the chapel, but the bulb burned out in the hallway with a pop and a snowfall of pulverized glass. In the dark, Clint’s voice felt like it was against my skin with actual weight, warm and hot as desert wind.

  “You’re right.” He sighed. “My name isn’t Clint Hicks. Or any of the other names I stole.”

  I waited, feeling my heartbeat pick up. I hadn’t given Clint’s species much thought once I’d decided he wasn’t a threat to me. It wasn’t any of my business. There were a lot of strange things creeping through the shadows at the edge of humanity, and I was one of them. Nothing Clint could say would particularly shock me.

  “What is it, then?” I said into the silence.

  Clint’s voice was so soft he sounded like he was miles away. “It’s Azrael.”

  I froze. I hadn’t thought about my grandmother reading the Bible to us in her measured voice for years, if not decades, but that name, I remembered. That name wasn’t from the Bible, but from stories she’d tell me, about things older and darker than the good book, when she’d been drinking her own product and was in a bleak mood. “You expect me to believe you’re a fucking angel?”

  “Fallen angel,” he said. I heard sounds of rummaging, and a weak flashlight beam flicked on, dazzling me. I threw up a hand, and Clint fumbled. “Sorry.”

  “Why should I believe you?” I said, although the denial was more me not wanting to deal with any more weird shit today than actually thinking Clint was lying.

  “You know demons and Hell and reapers are facts, but you stumble on angel?” Clint muttered. “Typical.”

  “First off, your shitty tone isn’t making me any more inclined to listen,” I said, folding my arms. “Second, if you’re more than a scary story in the Bible, then how come I’ve never run into an angel before?”

  “Because we’re not all that fucking common,” Clint said. “The Fallen are dispossessed scavengers, and we survive by staying off everyone’s radar, including Hell’s. I hid from Lilith for centuries by finding warlocks who’d made deals with reapers and taking their place.”

  “You killed them, you mean,” I said. Clint shrugged.

  “Like you’re shedding a tear for some anonymous warlock. No one expected me to be hiding so close to what was hunting me. It worked out. Until Clint Hicks.”


  “Because Clint was Gary’s,” I said. “And Gary was Lilith’s.”

  “She’s evil, Ava,” he said softly. “All of the demons in Hell are inhuman monstrosities, but Lilith craves only the end of everything. She wants to taste the ash of the burning world on her tongue.”

  “Yeah, I got the vibe she was not humanity’s biggest fan,” I said. I turned my back on Clint, trying to weigh what would happen if I believed him for the time being. He wasn’t any more a fan of Lilith than I was, but I’d never run up against the Fallen before, and I didn’t like unknown quantities. I’d kept myself out of the Pit by being solitary and suspicious, not joining up with every loser who crossed my path.

  “The Fallen are mainly a story,” I said finally. “Even among Hellspawn. Just so you know what kind of a limb you’re asking me to climb out on and how pissed I’ll be if this is all a con.”

  “We were the first beings in Hell,” Clint said. “When Lucifer rebelled, the Host sent him to the bottomless pit and every angel since who’s stepped out of line has fallen after him.” He flicked his beam up to illuminate Colin’s cheap plastic cross. “The Host are the Gestapo of the Kingdom. The big swinging dicks. You don’t want to see their bad side.”

  “Too bad you didn’t figure that out before they tossed your ass out like a used diaper,” I said. “And this doesn’t change things. I’m still taking Leo to the hospital. If you won’t let me use your truck, at least show me the phone so I can call a cab.”

  “I told you, Lilith will pulverize you if you leave my side,” Clint snapped. “Don’t you care about what she’ll do to you?”

  “I died a long time ago,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, the last hundred years have been a bonus round.”

  “So you’d die for a human you barely know, a human who would turn on you in a second?”

  I narrowed my eyes at the puffed-­up sanctimony in his tone. “Leo isn’t the head case spouting nonsense about living on Cloud City and being on the run from demons.”