Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “What difference does it make? Ten minutes from now he’s a corpse. Who gives a sick? The whys and wherefores aren’t our concern.”

  “When he got tight with those assholes down in Jersey, I told the Bailiff then it’d come to this, sooner or later. A little creep like Bittern gets it in his head he’s gonna play mobster with the big boys and—”

  “Stop it,” Soldier growls and snaps her fingers a few inches from his face; Sheldon shuts up and goes back to staring at the dump. “Hell, you go on like that long enough,” she says, “and I will get the shakes.” She decides she’s had enough of the Marlboro and stubs it out in the ashtray.

  “You got your goggles, right?” Sheldon asks her.

  “I can see just fine without them. I’m going in first, but you better be right there to cover my ass; you understand me?”

  “Yeah,” he replies, crushing out his own cigarette. “I think I can handle it.”

  Soldier reaches beneath the seat and retrieves the bottle of Dickel. “Not a word,” she says before Sheldon can remind her what the Bailiff told him about keeping her sober. Then she has one last drink before it starts, before the shitstorm barreling her way, one to keep her warm, and she tucks the bottle out of sight again.

  “Let’s get this over with,” she says and pulls the black Beretta 9mm from the shoulder holster inside her jacket. Soldier pops the clip and runs her thumb quickly across the shells, counting off all eight Browning cartridges one by one.

  “Man, I hope you’re right about the lines,” Sheldon says, reaching for the twelve-gauge Ithaca and the box of shells behind his seat.

  “Tell me the last time I was wrong,” Soldier replies and slides the clip back into the Beretta, then pulls the slide, chambering the first round. She flips off the safety, presses the gun to her lips, and shuts her eyes, whispering a short prayer to Mother Hydra.

  “And no one walks out of there alive,” Sheldon says, and one of the shotgun shells slips from his fingers and rolls away into the darkness between his legs.

  “That’s what the man said. No one walks. You’ve got the gasoline?”

  “Five gallons. That ought to do the job.”

  “Yeah,” Soldier says, returning her pistol to its holster. “That ought to do the job. Try to get a few of those shells in the gun, okay?”

  “Yeah,” Sheldon replies and almost drops another one.

  “And hurry the hell up.” She reaches for the other shotgun, the massive Mag-10 Roadblocker she picked up after some asshole Thelemite wearing Kevlar body armor and seven different deflection sigils had come at her with a goddamn Sears Craftsman chain saw a few months back.

  “That’s a scary fucking gun,” Sheldon says. “You expecting something in there besides Mr. Bittern and his cardsharp buddies?”

  “You just watch my ass, Shelly. Let me worry about the big scary monsters, okay?”

  Sheldon finishes loading his shotgun and smiles a nervous smile at her. “It’s a deal, lady. I’ll look at your ass, and you’ll kill all the bad guys.”

  “Yeah, you crack me up,” Soldier says and opens her door. The rain is cold, colder than the November night, and she knows she’ll be drenched long before they reach the door of Quaker Jameson’s roadhouse.

  “Do you see it?” Sheldon shouts at her across the roof of the hearse, shouting to be heard above the storm. “I don’t see it anywhere.” She glances over her shoulder at him, and he’s fiddling about with the resolution lever on his goggles.

  “You just fucking follow me,” she says. “Forget about those things.”

  The wind wraps itself about her, giving the rain teeth, whipping at her clothes and the exposed skin of her face as though this is something personal, like maybe the storm has decided it has a vendetta against her. Soldier grits her teeth and squints into the stinging rain. She can see the path leading away through the marsh grass to a rickety, crooked catwalk and, beyond that, the low, sagging roof of Jameson’s place. There’s the faintest blue-white glow surrounding it all, a gentle, constant pulse of pale alabaster light, the last little bit of the glamour that she can’t see through. Perhaps, she thinks, if the cheapskate son of a bitch would hire a halfway decent witch, then she might need goggles, too. But she doubts it.

  “I still don’t fucking see it,” Sheldon mutters, but this time she ignores him. She’s found her frequency, the clear channel she needs to see this whole mess through, and she knows that he’ll follow her, that he’ll be where she needs him to be when she needs him there. The big shotgun is heavy and solid and comforting in her hands, and that’s something else she knows she can rely on.

  Soldier can’t hear the gravel crunching beneath her boots, not over the wind, but she can feel it. She steps across a deep puddle and into the tall grass, and the gravel is immediately replaced by mud. Even through the storm, she can smell the marsh and the backwaters of Paine Creek, that musky, fishy odor that’s not so very different from the smell of sex. And all of it makes her stronger, the gun and the storm and the marshes, the knowledge of the flooded creek flowing to the river that flows, in turn, down to Plum Island Sound. Now that she has the frequency, now that she’s so hard in fucking tune, there’s no such thing as distraction, only these sensations and her concentration growing so sharp that it almost hurts. Ten more steps carry her from the mud and out onto the catwalk; she can feel the weathered old boards squeak and flex as she moves quickly towards the roadhouse.

  “Hell, that place was stuck together back before the Revolution,” the Bailiff said once, some other night when she’d had some other business out at Quaker Jameson’s. “Started out as a whorehouse for the Masonic and Rosicrucian types, some place they could dip their wicks in whatever struck their fancies without drawing too much attention, if you get my drift. Mr. Benjamin Franklin himself had a few good pokes in that place.”

  Thirty-three more steps, and Soldier reaches the wide landing where the catwalk meets the front porch. The light from electric lamps leaks out through the milky antique windowpanes, and this is probably the only place in all of Essex County with electricity tonight, she thinks, wondering if it’s an enchantment or just a backup generator. She steals a quick look over her shoulder, then, just to be sure, and there’s Sheldon Vale in his ridiculous goggles. He motions towards the roadhouse with the barrel of his own shotgun, and Soldier gives him the thumbs-up. Sheldon nods his head, and she reaches for the door handle, something ornate cast in copper gone cancerous with verdigris, black and green shades of corrosion, and in the last instant before she touches it, the handle sparks. A single fleeting arc of sun-colored light that bridges the space between her palm and the handle, and she curses under her breath and jerks her hand back.

  “Fuck this,” she hisses and grips the handle, squeezing hard against the protective charm, collapsing it into something so small and ineffectual it couldn’t even fry an ant. She feels the magick coursing through her and bleeding off into the night, losing itself in the turmoil of the storm. And then the door swings open wide, bathing her in yellow incandescence, and Soldier pumps the shotgun once as she steps across the threshold and points it at the first thing that moves.

  A skinny, redheaded boy in a Sex Pistols T-shirt stares back at her from the other end of the Roadblocker. He drops the serving tray he’s carrying, and five or six mugs and a couple of shot glasses shatter when it hits the floor, spraying beer and whiskey at her feet.

  “On your fucking knees, faggot,” she snaps at him, and a second later the boy’s spread out on the roadhouse floor with all that beer and broken glass. Soldier swings the shotgun around and takes aim at the table where Joey Bittern and Quaker Jameson and two others have all put down their playing cards and drinks and are watching her. One of them’s a morning gaunt, perched there on a bar stool like something that would happen if a stork knocked up an orangutan, and the other, seated across the table from the gaunt, is an orchid-skinned demon smoking a cigar and looking about twice as pissed off as anything she’s ever had the m
isfortune to come across.

  “You told us the door was locked,” the demon says and turns away from her, glaring at Jameson from beneath its scaly beetled brows. “You also told us we’d hear her coming.”

  No one said anything about demons, Soldier thinks, channeling the thought the way that Madam Melpomene taught her years ago, sending it straight back at Sheldon, to the spot by the doorway where she hopes like hell he’s still standing. I’m pretty goddamn sure the Bailiff didn’t say dick about any fucking demons.

  There’s no reply, nothing rolling back from Sheldon’s mind to hers, and Joey Bittern grins like a cartoon wolf and lights a cigarette. He’s a big man, half Portuguese, half Narragansett Indian, one hundred percent asshole, and he blows a smoke ring at the rafters supporting the high ceiling.

  “You’re fifteen minutes late, Soldier,” he says and pretends to check a nonexistent wristwatch. “What held you up, Mr. Vale? You miss that turn again?”

  “Put your fucking hands down on the fucking table,” Soldier says. “All of you. Now!”

  “See, I’m thinking this game’s a little steep for your tastes, sweetmeats,” Bittern says and blows another smoke ring at the ceiling. “I’m thinking you talk like a big dog, but when the chips are down—if you’ll excuse the pun—you got nothing to bring to the table but talk.”

  “That’s a goddamn big motherfucking shotgun,” Quaker Jameson says nervously.

  “You said we’d hear the bitch coming,” the demon says again, and then it picks its cards up off the table. “I like to pissed myself.”

  “I said put your hands on the table—”

  “This is about the little Spooner girl, right?” Joey Bittern asks her. “Am I correct in assuming that those mangy curs down on Benefit Street have sent you out here to slap my paddies for pointing our friend Mr. Higginson in the right direction? That’s all I did you know, point him—”

  “Talk to me, Shelly,” Soldier says, tightening her finger on the trigger. “Tell me that you’re fucking back there somewhere.”

  “Oh, I’m back here, Soldier girl,” Sheldon replies, “but I think you better be quiet and listen to the man.”

  And there it is, presto-change-o, abrafuckingcadabra, suddenly plain as daylight, and there’s no time left to think about how fucking stupid she’s been, how she should have seen it coming, how the Bailiff should have seen it coming a mile away. She’s in the frequency, and she pulls the trigger, but the Mag-10 answers with a hollow, harmless click.

  “Very thoughtful, Mr. Vale,” Bittern says. “It’s good to see you’re the dependable sort. An eye for details and all that.”

  The morning gaunt makes a gurgling sound that’s probably meant to be laughter. The air between her and the card table has begun to shimmer and twist back upon itself, like heat rising from blacktop on a summer’s day, and so she knows that the four at the table have been removed from the reach of bullets, anyway.

  “Shelly,” Soldier says, speaking as calmly as she can still manage, “do you even begin to have any idea how much shit you’re in?”

  “You just let me worry about that,” he tells her.

  “Well said, Mr. Vale,” Joey Bittern mumbles around the filter of his cigarette. “You’re a man of few words, but you choose them well.”

  “Did you learn that from a fucking fortune cookie?” Soldier asks, her eyes moving quickly from Bittern to the orchid-colored demon, from the demon to Jameson to the gurgling night gaunt. “Give him a chance, he’ll talk your goddamn ear off. Ain’t that right, Shelly?”

  “How about we cut the fuckin’ la-di-da chitchat,” the demon scowls, “kill the changeling bitch, and get back to the game? Or maybe, Joey, you think all this drama’s gonna make me forget how far in the hole you are?”

  “See, Soldier? Some people just aren’t capable of savoring the moment,” Bittern laughs and shakes his head. “They always have to be rushing things. Some people”—and he glares at the demon—“they just don’t quite appreciate the sheer, astounding elegance of deceit done right.”

  “Whatever they decide to do with you, Shelly,” Soldier says, reaching into her jacket for the 9mm, “I just hope it’s going to hurt for a long, long time.”

  And then she hears Sheldon Vale take a step forward, the soles of his boots scuffing across the floorboards, her senses jacked up so goddamn high and tight that she even hears his index finger squeeze the Ithaca’s trigger, hears the hammer fall, and then there’s thunder—the night cracking open to show the storm precisely how it’s done, to teach it something about tempest and destruction. There’s no more than a foot between the muzzle of the shotgun and Soldier, and it tears through her easy as a hot knife through butter…

  . . and she’s stumbling, falling towards the demon’s shimmering bulletproof barrier, driven forward by the force of the blast…

  …and there’s a wet spray of blood and bone and mangled entrails moving out before her, the lead shot opening her like a butcher’s prize sow, like a bouquet of bloodflowers, like Noah’s goddamn forty-day flood…

  And seconds (tick)

  have become (tock)

  entire minutes.

  Soldier shuts her eyes because she doesn’t want to have to die looking at her own guts and stinking Joey Bittern’s ugly, fucking grin. He’s killed me, she thinks, and wonders if all that crazy shit Madam Terpsichore and Master Danaüs taught her about Mother Hydra and Father Kraken and the lives waiting for her out past death is anything more than pretty storybook tales designed to

  make…

  this…

  easier.

  I’ll know in a moment, she thinks, and then all the world is pain.

  And

  then

  “And no one walks out of there alive,” Sheldon says, and one of the shotgun shells slips from his fingers and rolls away into the darkness between his legs.

  “That’s what the man said. No one walks. You’ve got the gasoline?”

  “Five gallons. That ought to do the job.”

  “Yeah,” Soldier says, beginning to remember things that haven’t happened yet, an instant of déjà vu so strong that it’s nauseating, so strong it almost seems to knock the breath from her lungs. She grips the Beretta, her hand trembling just the slightest bit, and she doesn’t return it to its holster. “Yeah,” she says again. “That ought to do the job. Try to get a few of those shells in the gun, will you?”

  “Yeah,” Sheldon says and almost drops another one.

  “Christ, you’re a clumsy asshole, Shelly,” she whispers and swallows, her throat dry as August dust, and right now she’d give almost anything for whatever’s left in the bottle beneath the seat. Sheldon slips an orange shell into the Ithaca 37 Classic and looks up at her.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “You look like you just saw a fucking ghost,” he replies and takes another shell from the box. “I told you to stay sober. The Bailiff told you to stay sober.”

  “What the hell did they offer you?” she asks, and when he looks up again, Soldier raises the 9mm and puts two in his skull, right between the eyes. Bang, bang. Easy as falling off a log, exactly what the doctor ordered. Sheldon Vale slumps back against the driver-side door of the old hearse, and his whole body shudders once and is still.

  “You sold me out, you bastard,” she whispers. “You fucking sold me out.”

  She sets the pistol on the dash and reaches for the bottle of whiskey beneath the seat and sits drinking it, listening to the rain and watching the dim alabaster glow wreathing Quaker Jameson’s roadhouse. The air trapped inside the hearse smells like cordite and blood, cigarettes and whiskey. When the pint’s empty, Soldier lays the bottle down next to her and reaches for the Mag-10 tucked behind her seat.

  “Five gallons,” she says. “Yeah. That ought to be plenty.”

  V

  Sparrow Spooner opens her eyes again when the man from Above begins to scream and pray to the Catholic god he abandoned more than
half a lifetime ago. She isn’t sure how long she’s been huddled there, alone in this muddy, dark corner of the chamber, naked and shivering beyond the candlelight. Madam Mnemosyne laid her down here when they’d finished taking two fingers from her left hand, and she told Sparrow not to move a muscle and to keep her eyes tightly shut and her mouth shut tighter still, unless she wanted worse than she’d already gotten.

  “When we are done, she must remain useful to us,” Madam Terpsichore said to the other ghouls, before the cutting began. “She still has potential, this one, despite the gravity of her recent indiscretions.” And Sparrow understood that Madam Terpsichore was the only thing left standing between her and the full wrath of the hounds. They would have seen her dead—Danaüs and Mnemosyne and that mongrel bastard Shardlace who’d sniffed out her forbidden liaisons with Mr. Higginson. They would have made a terrible example of her, something for the rest of the Children of the Cuckoo to see. Would have carved her up like a body taken for the dissection slab and then hung all the divided bits of her throughout the warren, her hands and feet and innards strung on baling wire and dried grapevines and left to rot, left for the other changelings to see again and again and again.

  Master Shardlace wanted them to take her tongue, that she might never utter another of their secrets. Madam Mnemosyne suggested that a binding geas would be more appropriate and far more effective and would not so diminish her value as a courier and messenger. But, in the end, Master Danaüs left the decision to Terpsichore, and she asked only for two fingers from Sparrow Spooner’s left hand, the pinkie and ring finger. They used one of the ceremonial knives, carved from greenish soapstone and graven with images of the writhing, many-eyed daughters of Mother Hydra. Madam Terpsichore cauterized the stumps with a pinch of belladonna and a few words of musical, alien language, some arcane tongue that Sparrow has yet to learn. The ghoul threaded the severed fingers onto plastic fishing line and hung them about Sparrow’s throat.