Clint stood as well, brushing his hands down his pants. “It’s decided. I’ll offer myself to Lilith and draw her out.”
Annabelle and I both started talking at once, and I jumped to my feet. “Bullshit it’s decided,” I said. “That’s a horrible idea.”
“Not to mention dumber than me going outside and digging a basement for this place,” Annabelle grumbled. “Seriously, Clint, you never did have more than two brain cells to rub together.”
“We have no way of finding this so-called innocent before Lilith does,” Clint snapped. “I’m the only factor we can control, so let me do it.”
Annabelle put her hands on her hips. Her cheeks had darkened with anger and her lips pressed together in a thin line. She looked like she was about to haul off and smack Clint, and I took a step back to give her room. If I was being honest, I was kind of hoping she would hit him. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t wanted to do since practically the second I met him.
“You know she’s only picking on you because of your condition, Azrael,” she said.
Clint glared at her. “I don’t want to discuss it. I’m doing it, so, Ava, you better be there when she swoops in on her broomstick.”
“You expect this little doggie to go against Lilith all by herself?” Annabelle said. “You’re even dumber than you look, boy.”
“She hasn’t managed to kill me yet,” I grumbled. Annabelle raised one thin black eyebrow at me.
“Then she hasn’t been tryin’ to kill you, baby doll, because if there’s one thing Lilith excels at, it’s homicidal intent.”
“There needs to be a way to get to her without using Clint as bait,” I said. “I won’t let him take that chance.”
Annabelle collected our glasses and went to the sink, slamming a basin around while she ran soapy water. “You should listen to her, Azrael,” she called to Clint. “She makes a lot more sense than you do most days.”
I went to stand beside her at the sink and picked up a blue-and-pink-flowered dish towel, drying the glasses as they came my way. “Anything else useful you can tell me about Tartarus?” I said quietly.
“Yeah. It’s a nasty place and you should do everything in your power to stop Lilith from unleashing it on the poor unsuspecting people of this world,” Annabelle said flatly. “I wish you hadn’t mixed up in this, doggie. You’re tangling with the demonic equivalent of Charles Manson.”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time somebody really wanted me dead.”
“You can gossip about me all you want,” Clint said loudly. “I’m still going to go to Lilith.”
“We haven’t even started talkin’ about you,” Annabelle said, drying her hands on another dish towel, this one yellow and printed with huge palm fronds. “But now that you mention it, Lilith picking on a defective Fallen angel doesn’t seem very sporting, does it?”
Clint hit his fist into the side of the bookcase. “I am not defective. Just because I don’t show off . . .”
“Azrael, you spend days with this girl, let her think you’re some bad man Fallen, and you wonder why I’m picking on you?” Annabelle turned to me. “He’s broken, hurt at the crossroads when we fled from Hell, and now he can’t get it up. Angelically speaking.”
“Shut up,” Clint warned.
“See, most of us kept at least a few of our talents from the Kingdom,” Annabelle told me. “Me, I’m fast. Really fast. I can get you anywhere you want to go. Then there’s the healing, the basic offensive conjuring, the affinity for weapons, and the fact that the Kingdom makes you really, really efficient at killing and maiming.”
“I’m not gonna tell you again!” Clint shouted. Annabelle ignored him, and I was just trying to keep up with her.
“Unless, of course, you almost don’t make it through the crossroads and fall out with all your talents stripped away, just a guy who doesn’t age very fast and knows a few parlor tricks. I imagine you’d be mortified, right, honey? You’d go hide among humans, then when you find out you’re still a good killer, if not a tough one, you get a shame hangover and go hide in the forest for fifty goddamned years.” She turned those coal eyes back to Clint. “Use whatever trailer-park wild bunch you can get your hands on as a human shield, play up the peace-loving, ray-of-light angel angle, stick your head in the sand, and wait for someone to fuck you in the ass. How’m I doing so far?” She was smirking right up until Clint grabbed the Winchester from the gun rack and squeezed the trigger.
Plaster and wood splinters rained down around Annabelle and me as the blast echoed through the little cabin. My ears rang like somebody had tapped a hammer against my head. Leo covered his head with his hands against the shrapnel and shouted. “Fuck is your problem, asshole!”
Clint pointed the barrel of the shotgun at the ground. “I said shut up,” he repeated quietly.
Annabelle stormed over and yanked the gun out of his hands. “We all had problems, Clint. Some of us flat-out didn’t make it. Remember Barnabas? Camael? They’re dead now, thanks to the crossroads. So the least you can do is stop moping around and just be grateful you’re still here.”
“I don’t know if I am grateful,” Clint said, sitting down on the edge of the sofa. He put his head in his hands. “It’s gone, Annabelle. Almost everything I knew from the Kingdom. Even most of Hell. The crossing ripped it out of me. I don’t know who I was. Just who I am. And that Azrael isn’t afraid to die.”
“Maybe you’re not,” I said, feeling a swell of anger like a pebble in my throat. “But I am. And I’m stuck with you, so pull your head out and think of a way to get Lilith here that doesn’t involve being the juicy steak dangling in front of the Doberman.”
Clint shook his head. “I’m sorry, Ava.”
I opened Annabelle’s screen door and stepped onto the porch. “Then so am I,” I said. I let the door slam and walked across the gravel of Annabelle’s drive to the dock. I wasn’t sure where I was going. I just had to get away from Clint and his sad, vacant stare where a fiery angel should be.
The dock extended far enough into the water that I could see other boats moving farther out, small white hulls stark against the water. Shrimp boats, mostly—people in the small delta towns didn’t usually boat for pleasure. Leo came out onto the porch, but I waved him off, and he listened to me, thankfully. He was just human, but he was so much more useful than Clint right now.
The first time I saw the Gulf, I took off my shoes and stockings and stuck my toes in the sand. A wave sloshed over my knees and soaked the bottom of my dress. Women and men alike gave me dirty looks, but I didn’t care. It was warm and vast, and it was the first time I felt like I’d really left home.
I’d helped my grandmother during the week after I came here from Tennessee. She taught me how to drive her coughing Model A, and we kept an eye out for revenuers when her still was running. My grandmother brewed real homemade corn whiskey, not the poisonous crap that most bootleggers passed off as booze, and soon I had enough money to move into New Orleans. It had been a happy few months before I met Jasper and Caleb.
And then things were bad, and they never got good again.
“You gonna come inside, or what?” Annabelle was behind me again. I hated that she moved so quietly. I didn’t like people who could get that close to me without warning. She grinned. “Relax, honey. If I was gonna do you harm it’d have happened already.”
She had a point there. “I just need a minute,” I said. “This has been a long couple of days.”
Annabelle followed my gaze out to the water. “Hell is loud,” she said. “Noise all the time, even if it’s just the wind blowing around the corners of everything. Here is quiet. I like it here better.” She folded her arms. “I don’t blame the demons for what they did. I was against it, which is probably why they’ve left me alone so far. But Lilith was never one of the ones I felt for. She’s bad. You best watch your ass
.”
“I figured that out fast,” I muttered. “Believe me.”
Annabelle laughed. “You’re not really a hound, are you?” She stepped close enough that she was in my personal space, but if I backed up I’d fall into the water.
“I’m a hound,” I said, aware of the hound itself, waiting just behind my eyes to flash tooth and fang, make Annabelle back off me. Fast as I thought of it, Annabelle reached out and grabbed me by the chin. My fangs sprouted of their own accord and sliced into my lip, blood trickling down my chin. Annabelle whistled at the sight. “Those sure are some pig stickers you’ve got, girl.”
“Let me go,” I said, fighting the urge to snap my jaw closed on her fingers. If the jolt I’d gotten from Clint was any warning, Annabelle would fry me like a squirrel on a high tension wire.
“It’s still in you,” she murmured, staring me in the face. “Hell’s still in you. Even without a reaper, you could still take a soul easy as breathing.” I tried to tell her she was wrong, but before I could say anything she let go of me, taking a black blade from a nylon holster strapped to her calf, under her canvas pants.
Electricity flowed across the backs of my hands, up my arms, trickling down my spine. The hound recognized the tool of a reaper, even if this Scythe was rough and old—as far from the graceful curved blade Gary had used as an ax from a fine chef’s knife.
“How . . .” I started, but Annabelle turned the blade in her hand, then faster than I could see pulled me to her by the arm and stuck the blade against the notch between my third and fourth rib. If she applied a little pressure, it would slide up and into my heart. I knew how sharp it was. Gary had demonstrated plenty of times with his.
“You here to kill me, hellhound?” she whispered in my ear. I tried to stay absolutely still, which wasn’t easy with the crackle of the Scythe crawling over my skin and a pissed-off Fallen huffing in my ear.
The screen door creaked and slapped the frame as Clint came outside. He gave us a wave and started down the steps. Annabelle waved back. From a distance, it’d look like we were gossiping, the best of friends. “I smelled this Hellspawn magic on you the minute you rolled up to my house,” Annabelle continued. “Give me a good reason not to gut you from crotch to neck.”
I breathed in, out. It felt like a rock was sitting on my chest. “I remember what it was to be human. I killed my reaper and I’m planning to kill Lilith. I didn’t know you existed until Clint brought us here, and I don’t give a shit. I also don’t have any Hellspawn magic. I’m powerless without Gary.”
Clint was at the end of the dock, about twenty feet away. I shot a glance at him, and back at Annabelle. She was still staring at me, calculating something. “Not all of us lost our groove like Azrael over there,” she whispered to me. “If you’re lying to me, I know.”
“I’m not,” I said evenly. If Clint got between us, I had no doubt she’d cut him, and then I’d be back to square one finding Lilith, because her prize Fallen would be bleeding out like a fish on this dock.
“No, you’re not,” Annabelle agreed. “But you are damned, little girl, even more than you realize.”
“I don’t care,” I muttered as Clint approached. “Please let me go.”
“You should care,” Annabelle whispered, removing the Scythe from my ribs and sticking it back in her boot. “Clint may have gone native, but I know what you are.”
I blinked at her. I was dizzy from the pain of the Scythe and just wanted to curl up in a ball until she went away. “I’m one of my reaper’s mistakes. I never should have been a hellhound.”
“You’re right,” Annabelle said. “Because you’re the black dog. Death’s hound.”
“Hey,” Clint said as Annabelle stepped back and gave him a radiant smile. “Can I talk to Ava for a second?”
“Sure thing, honey,” she said, starting to back away and head inside.
I grabbed her by the arm. She showed me her teeth, but I didn’t reconsider the move. “Just what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that once upon a time, when the demons had their shit on lockdown instead of the cage fight for control of Hell it is now, they had a single reaper to oversee all the damned. That reaper got pretty popular among the meat puppets. Usually rode a pale horse, and Hell followed with him.” She jerked her arm from my grasp, brushing at the spot where we’d touched. “And that’s you.”
She walked away, and I stared after her, at a loss. Clint waited until he saw the inside door shut and then looked down at the gray, splintery boards of the dock.
“I’m sorry.”
I sat down hard on a battered metal cooler at the end of the dock, grabbing my knees so my hands would stop shaking. “It’s fine,” I muttered. “I just . . .” I didn’t know what I wanted. Annabelle didn’t have a reason to fuck with me that I could see, but she could have plenty of reasons I didn’t know about, the chief being that she was really with Lilith and this was all an elaborate con to throw me off and send me to ground. Make me so scared and desperate I’d give up.
Or maybe the blood conjuring I’d done with Leo had messed up her Fallen radar, made me seem more juiced with black magic than I really was.
Or maybe the fact I remembered being human and dying, the fact I’d been able to take out Gary, meant something after all.
That scared the shit out of me so much I couldn’t even give it voice. “Can we please go?” I said to Clint. My voice was so low I could barely hear it over the waves brushing against the dock. “I don’t care where. I just need to be away.”
Clint frowned, and then sat down next to me. “Just because I can’t toe up against Hellspawn doesn’t mean we can’t still do this,” he said. “I should have told you. I figured between you and Karpov I’d be safe. You’re both pretty scary individuals. That’s why I stuck around.”
“Is it?” I whispered. I didn’t scare easily, but Annabelle had rattled me. I could write off what she’d said as a Fallen batting around a low-level hellhound for the fun of it, but she hadn’t seemed like she was joking. I was pretty sure I’d escaped being stabbed by a heartbeat or two.
“Of course!” Clint said. “I saved you to save myself, really. Listen . . .” He rubbed his hands over his thighs like we were on a date, and he was working up to copping a feel. “When I came through the crossroads something happened to me. I can’t do what Annabelle can do, but more than that . . . I don’t even remember much of who I was before. I remember Hell, snapshots of the Kingdom, but about myself?” He shook his head. “Blank. Like somebody took an eraser and swiped it across my memory.”
I stayed quiet. I was still trying to calm down and I didn’t trust myself to say the right thing. Not that I ever really did. I would never fill out a dating profile with “People say I’m a great listener.”
“So I feel a lot of empathy with hellhounds,” Clint said. “I know what a torment that is, to have who you really are ripped right out of you by the root.” He laughed once, lowering his head. “Not that I was such a prize, I’m sure. I enforced the laws of the Kingdom. If the ruling council saw a worthy soul to join the ranks, I went and collected it. Whether the person was happy about it or not.”
“If Annabelle is an example of how the Fallen really act, I think I prefer you this way,” I said. Clint rubbed his hands together and then stood up, toes hanging over the edge of the dock like he was about to lift up and float across the water.
“She’s not bad. She has compassion for life, at least. In the Kingdom she wasn’t a combatant. She was a diplomat, a scholar. That’s how she knows so much about Tartarus.”
“She knows a lot about a lot of things,” I said. Clint was too preoccupied to catch the bite in my tone.
“I’m sorry I can’t do what she does. Fallen can read minds, they’re strong and fast, they can get from place to place using the crossroads. I’m sorry you have to look out for me.”
He turned back to me and smiled. Even to my eyes, it looked forced. “But it’ll be worth it.”
“When we kill Lilith,” I said. Clint nodded. He was having a hard time sitting still. I bet if he’d had the room, he’d be pacing.
“Then I’ll be free,” I said. “We can go our separate ways.”
Clint nodded, his eyes darting back toward Annabelle’s house. “Right.”
I stood up, kicking over the cooler. “You are so full of shit.”
Clint blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You knew I was coming for you,” I said. “Back in Wyoming. Annabelle said you knew something.”
Clint held up his hands. “Whoa. Annabelle says a lot of things. What did she tell you?”
“It doesn’t even matter,” I said. I turned and stomped back to the car. Clint ran after me, grabbing on to the window frame of my door as I gunned the engine. Leo was already waiting in the backseat, and he touched my shoulder.
“Ava?”
“Don’t,” I snarled, so viciously he jerked his hand away and actually pulled in on himself, like I’d scared him. That fit. I was scared as shit myself right now.
“Stop!” Clint shouted, reaching in the window and grabbing the wheel as I started to put the car in gear. I growled, low and hot in my chest.
“Ava!” he said. “Tell me what I’m supposed to know!”
“I told you I knew who I was before I died,” I said. “You acted like that was normal. But it’s not, and I know it’s not. I’m certainly not special, I’m not the Harry Potter of hellhounds, so what is it? What’s wrong with me?”
“Turn off the car and I’ll tell you,” Clint said. “I don’t want you to go running off on me.”
“Jesus.” I hit the steering wheel, feeling the impact vibrate up my arm. “It’s that bad?”
“You were right about Lilith and me.” Clint sighed. “We were close. She was my personal valet. It’s an intimate relationship.”
Black Dog Page 22
