Black Dog

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Leo threw down his cigarette and jumped to his feet. “Get inside,” he said, grabbing me by the hand and yanking me along. The first SUV careened to a halt and the passenger door flew open, disgorging a tall man in a tracksuit and wraparound sunglasses. He held a machine gun low at his hip like an outlaw gunfighter.

  Leo cleared the steps of the diner in one leap and bashed open the door with his shoulder. I threw myself after him. Naomi stared at us, frozen with a silver canister of milk shake mix in her hand.

  “Get down!” I screamed as I flattened myself out on the sticky linoleum. Naomi ducked, the milk shake splashing on the floor. Clint dove out of our booth and Leo dropped down next to me. As he landed, the world above my head exploded.

  The grimy row of windows looking out on the parking lot shattered. Glass rained down, stinging my hands and the back of my neck. Bullets passed straight over the counter and thudded into the metal wall in the kitchen, punching neat circles into the greasy refrigerator unit and the pantry shelves loaded with napkins, sacks of pancake mix, and industrial-­size vats of lard.

  Naomi was screaming. I could see her lying behind the cash register, her mouth a round black O of panic, holding her hands over her ears. Tears sent her mascara cutting sharp black rivers down her cheeks.

  The hail of gunfire stopped for a few seconds and I craned my neck around the still-­flapping front door. There were six men standing about ten feet away from the diner. The two I’d smashed up plus their friends. They had given up pretty easily, and clearly felt bad about how the situation had played out.

  The four new guests to the party carried short machine guns, with folding stocks that let them sling easily under their zippered satin jackets. Two of them ejected their banana clips and slammed new ones home. I started to go up, make a run for the kitchen, where we had more cover, but Leo clamped his hand on my arm and shook his head. In another split second, the firing started again.

  The noise wasn’t so much sound anymore as it was a rumble where my body touched the floor. I covered my head and waited, trying to keep my breathing steady. I’d been shot at before, enough times that it didn’t exactly shock me when it happened, but a hunting rifle was a lot different from a Kalashnikov. The good news was that the things carried only thirty rounds, and Sergei Karpov’s attack dogs didn’t act like they’d invested a lot of hours at the range.

  When the bullets finally stopped flowing again, Leo nodded at me and we belly-­crawled through the glass, shattered dishes, and puffs of stuffing from the inside of the booth cushions. Clint joined us behind the counter and I grabbed Naomi by the arm, pulling her along with me to the kitchen.

  “Oh my god,” she whispered, her voice blown out from screaming. “Oh my god, oh my god . . .”

  “Listen,” I said, squeezing her arm hard enough to leave a mark. “Those guys outside aren’t here for you, but they’ll kill everyone in here to avoid witnesses. In thirty seconds they’re going to come in and mop up anyone left alive, so you don’t want to be here, all right?”

  Naomi nodded, trembling. “I’ve got a son,” she choked out. “I just want to see him—­”

  “You have a car?” I said. She shook her head.

  “Marcus has the car.”

  “Who’s Marcus?” I said. She pointed past Leo and Clint to the line cook, lying on his side in a pool of blood. Two giant holes had been punched in his stained apron, spinning him around and knocking him to the ground.

  “Take his keys and go into the walk-­in,” I said. “When we tell you it’s safe, run to the car. After you run, go pick up your son. Get back on the road, drive until you run out of gas, and don’t come back here. You’ll be safe that way.”

  She was already shaking her head, so I gave her arm a yank. “This is the only way you live past the next few minutes, Naomi,” I said. “Go get his keys.”

  The door to the diner banged open, and I heard the tentative crunch of glass under slow, careful footsteps. Naomi scrambled over and yanked a fob from Marcus’s back pocket, scuttling to the walk-­in and slamming the door.

  Clint looked at Leo and me. “What the hell are we supposed to do?” he hissed.

  Leo’s tongue flicked in, out, like he was a serpent scenting the air. I saw the Leo Karpov I’d first met, the one with no expression and no emotion. The guy who’d shoot a banger full of insulin on the F train and mop up blood without letting it worry him any more than a spilled glass of wine.

  I was glad. I needed that Leo right now. Clint’s pupils were huge, and I could see his pulse throbbing in his neck. Fallen weren’t bulletproof any more than I was, and for all I knew he didn’t even heal quicker than the average human.

  “Leonid, stand up and we don’t gotta hurt anyone else,” a voice called from over the counter. From the congested, nasally overtone I was guessing it was the guy I’d bounced off his steering wheel. “Your father just wants to talk with you. It was your decision to involve the monster.”

  “Is that you, Illya?” Leo called. A moment of silence and he shot me a look, gathering his legs under him. I cast around, looking for anything that I could use against a pissed-­off thug with a machine gun.

  “For some reason, Illya, I don’t believe you,” Leo called. “Probably because you still owe me fifty bucks from that Jets game.” He climbed to his feet in one graceful motion, hands up. “That was three years ago, Illya. You should pay your debts.”

  Illya raised the machine gun. “Only reason you’re alive is because you’re the old man’s son. Now you’ve pissed him off and that doesn’t matter anymore. About fucking time, if you ask me.”

  Leo’s mouth slid up on the left side into a bitter smile. “Nobody asked you.”

  I grabbed the pot out of the coffee machine and swung it as I stood up, smashing it into the side of Illya’s head while he stared at Leo. The carafe didn’t break, but scalding coffee went all over Illya’s face and neck, turning his shirt brown like he was covered in old blood. Illya screamed and swiped at his face as blisters broke out, and Leo lunged for his machine gun, using the strap to yank Illya in and slam his face once, twice, three times into the counter. Illya collapsed, and Leo pulled him over the counter, taking his pistol from his waistband and tossing the machine gun aside.

  “It’ll be all five now,” he said. He checked the pistol’s clip. “Four bullets. Illya is such a fucking sack.”

  “We’re rats in a trap,” Clint said. “This is a firing corridor, and we have no way out.”

  “Chill out,” Leo snapped. “I’m sorry if this reminds you of your time on the beaches of Normandy or whatever, but we’re going to be fine.”

  I heard the door swing open again and looked over my head. The windows were completely punched out from the bullets. The frames were mouths of jagged glass shards, but I could make it. Adrenaline made everything slow and almost methodical. Against things like Lilith I was an ant, sure. Against a group of guys with guns and bad haircuts was another story.

  “How many can you get?” I whispered to Leo. He thought for a second and then yanked a propane tank attached to the cook top away from its mount. I heard the gentle hiss of gas as he spun the valve open.

  “Duck,” I said to Clint, and stood up.

  Leo rolled the tank out from behind the counter as I ran for the broken window. A bullet passed so close I felt it tear a furrow out of my jacket, cool air kissing the back of my neck and ruffling my hair.

  I gathered my legs and leaped, letting go of my hold on the hound. I’d been crawling out of my skin ever since the shooting started, desperate to be in the form where I knew I was strongest and most vicious.

  Glass slashed my palm, but by the time I landed on the gravel it was nothing, just a cut between my front toes that stung but didn’t stop me.

  Leo fired into the propane tank, which exploded and flung two of the thugs backward into the wall of the diner. The three who’d be
en outside the door still fell backward. One lost his grip on his gun, so I lunged for the one who was still armed, clamping my teeth around his wrist and bit down until I felt bone crack.

  Screaming, he swatted at me with his free hand, but I didn’t let go, shaking his arm back and forth until the joint moved freely, broken and useless.

  The other guy scrabbled in the dirt for his pistol, but I planted my front paw on it, bared my teeth, and growled, “I don’t fucking think so.”

  He backed up, hightailed it to one of the SUVs, and sped out of the lot, swerving over the center line of the highway. In ten seconds, the SUV was a black dot in the distance.

  I padded over to the other two thugs and nudged them with my nose. One was alive—­he smelled like sweat and I tasted the sour penny tang of blood when I inhaled. There was a deep gash in his neck from the exploding propane tank and he gurgled when he breathed. I stepped over him. There wasn’t anything I could do. The other was dead already, cold and still, cloudy eyes staring back into the diner, where Leo tossed Illya’s gun aside and Clint cautiously stood up from behind the counter. He stared at me, not blinking. I wanted to ask him what he was looking at—­it wasn’t like he’d never seen a hellhound before, surely.

  “Can you change back?” he said. “I don’t think Naomi needs to see this.”

  I felt stupid letting the thrill of attacking the three men subsume the human side of me, and I inhaled and opened my eyes to color and an eye line that roughly matched up with the bullet holes in the kitchen walls.

  Clint knocked on the walk-­in and got Naomi out the back door. “Don’t look behind you,” he said in a soothing tone. “That wouldn’t be good news for anyone.”

  “Look who’s the white knight all of a sudden,” Leo muttered to me. Clint turned back to us.

  “Just because I abhor violence doesn’t mean I’m some kind of inferior species,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot more of it than you have, and after a while you lose your taste for it.” He reached down and gently rolled Marcus onto his back, closing his eyes. “Unless you’re a psychopath, of course.”

  Leo, conversely, patted down Illya for his car keys and twirled them around his finger. “We need to go. Even in Bumfuck, Nowhere, the cops will eventually show up for a shootout, explosion, and animal attack.”

  Clint hesitated, and Leo snapped his fingers. “Hey. Unless you want to explain all of this from a jail cell, alone, and then sit back and wait for Lilith, get moving, Clarence.”

  Clint did as he was told, and Leo followed him, but stopped by the guy with the broken arm. He looked at me and tilted his head. “Give me a hand?”

  I grabbed the guy by his good arm and helped Leo haul him to his feet. Clint watched us like he thought we might just dump the Russian headfirst into the fryolator, but Leo popped the trunk and dumped him in. The guy landed on his broken arm and let out a hoarse scream.

  He’d landed next to a black canvas bag and Leo rooted around in it, pulling out a roll of duct tape and a handful of zip ties. “What’s your name?” he asked the guy.

  Tears squeezed from the Russian’s eyes, and his chest rose and fell rapidly. His eyes were glassy and unfocused. I sighed and took the tape and the ties out of Leo’s hands.

  “Hey,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention but this is kind of my wheelhouse.”

  “He’s in shock,” I said. I snapped my fingers in the thug’s face and he flinched. “I’m going to tie you up and tape your mouth. If you behave I’ll be a good Girl Scout and make sure you live long enough to get that arm reset. It’ll probably always hurt when it’s cold and the steel pins will set off metal detectors, but you won’t bleed out in the back of a car or go septic on your way to the ER. Sound good?”

  He blinked once. His breathing was shallow, but his arm wasn’t bleeding too badly. Deep punctures hurt like a bitch, but unless I’d hit a major vein he’d live. I tied his hand in front to take pressure off his arm, doubled up the ties on his feet, and pressed tape over his mouth. I turned to Leo. “See if you can find a blanket.”

  He came back with a rough furniture blanket from the other SUV, and I wrapped the Russian in it. “Let’s go,” Leo said. “I could do without getting arrested in the beautiful heartland of our great country.”

  I let Leo drive without any arguments. My palm had a long gash in it, and thin rivulets of blood ran down my wrist and soaked the cuff of my shirt. I found some napkins in the glove compartment and pressed them into the cut. I ran my tongue over the inside of my teeth. The taste of blood starts off as metallic, almost sickeningly so, like chewing on a handful of dirty pennies, but then it starts to taste stale and a little rotten, like a bad cut of meat. I rooted in the glove box more, hoping the previous owners had stashed some mints or even a flask, but there was nothing.

  “Do we need to be worried about your father?” Clint asked from the backseat. “I mean, that was not a proportionate response to us figuring out we had a tail.”

  “That was just Illya being a shit stain,” Leo said. “He got pissed Ava humiliated him and he came back swinging. It won’t happen again.”

  We drove for another twenty miles or so in silence. Normally I was good with silence. I’d gotten used to it over the years. Silence meant nobody was paying attention to me, trying to pry into my business or my secrets.

  Now, though, my hand wouldn’t stop bleeding and I could feel Clint’s eyes on the back of my neck. A rest stop sign flashed on the left and I tapped Leo on the arm. “Pull over.”

  “I don’t think . . .” Clint started, and I growled at him.

  “I said pull over.”

  Leo parked under a tree at the rest stop and I got out, pacing away from them to a picnic table set down a slope by a small stream almost choked off with weeds. The leaves were starting to turn, giving the barest hint of the frozen tundra that this place would be in a few months. I tossed the wad of bloody napkins into a trash can and put my elbows on my knees. It always took me a few hours to come back to myself after the hound. Last time I’d been so beat up and exhausted I’d just passed out while Leo drove us through Nevada, but I didn’t have that luxury now.

  Clint sat down next to me and looked at my hand, hissing between his teeth. “That needs to be stitched.”

  “I’ll be fine in an hour or so,” I said. “Hell builds us tough.”

  Clint looked down at the river. “Sorry I can’t just heal you. Laying on of hands was never my thing.”

  “It’s not really anyone’s thing,” I said. “Collected more than a few faith healers for Gary.”

  “I used to do something like what you did,” Clint murmured. “I’d track down the wicked and return them to the Kingdom.”

  “So you were an angelic assassin,” I said. “Having your mojo gone must be a serious case of blue balls.”

  Clint coughed, and I hoped he’d just go away, contemplate the beauty of a blade of grass or whatever it was ex-­angels did with their free time.

  “It was hard to accept, yes,” he said. “I’ll never age or change, but that doesn’t do much good against bullets. I can’t snatch them out of the air or stop time. I can’t even heal myself.”

  “How’d you do it?” I said. “When everything imploded and your life became a steaming pile of shit? How’d you pick up and go on?”

  “I joined what I thought were worthy causes but in retrospect were just a series of pointless, bloody wars,” he said. “Then I picked out a new hiding place every twenty years or so. At first there were a lot of Hellspawn after me and the others. They wanted to do to us what we tried to do to them. Lilith is just the most tenacious.”

  Leo came striding from the car, looking pissed. If I were him I’d want to be moving too, but this was it. I’d come as far as I knew how to go. Nobody was going to give me an order, send me off to my next job. I could choose any road I wanted for the first time in a
century and I was so overwhelmed all I could do was sit on a splintery picnic table carved with teenage ­couples’ initials and no less than six crude interpretations of somebody’s penis. If there was a level ten stories below ground from pathetic, I was probably there.

  “We should keep driving,” he said. “If we’re moving it’ll at least be harder for my father to figure out where we’re going.”

  “Nowhere,” Clint said. “We can keep trying to run from your father—­who, I’d point out, is a powerful and well-­connected head of a major crime outfit—­but that doesn’t change the fact that Lilith is probably pointing her broomstick at me this very second.”

  Leo’s jaw ticked. “Fine. Sit here and wait to die if you want. I’m going.”

  “Those are the choices, yes,” Clint muttered.

  I stood up, walking toward the river. Up close, it was filthy, full of rusty beer cans and tattered plastic bags, the detritus of ­people who had come and then moved on in a handful of minutes. I’d have sat here on my Harley and not given the river or any of this a second thought. Just a pause, a small pinprick in the map between one collection and the next. Gary always in my ear, telling me where to go and who to kill.

  Leo and Clint were still bickering. I could tell from their body language, torsos bending toward each other, Leo’s arms tight while Clint was gesturing at himself, at me. I turned and walked back up the hill to them.

  “Listen, you do what you like,” Leo was saying. “Stay here, set up a tent, run for your life, whatever. But I’m moving on. It’s the only option.”

  “It’s not,” I said. My palm, covered in dried blood, itched, but the bleeding had stopped. Soon the skin would knit and it would be like it had never happened. A few days ago, I would have been happy to forget. I liked that things blurred together like ink from a cheap pen. It made it easier to forget what I’d have to do again, and again, and again, every time Gary or someone like him snapped their fingers.

  “Fine,” Clint said. “We’re all ears.”

  I curled my fingers over my palm, hiding the blood and the healing gash. “There’s something we can do besides lie down and die here, or run from Sergei’s boys and die later.”