Black Dog (13 page)

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.”

“Leonid Mikhailovich Karpov is not a good man,” Clint said. “I can see the truth of humans, Ava, and his soul is as black as the deepest part of Hell.”

I folded my arms. “In the short time we've been together, maybe you didn't get that I don't really care much about the condition of a person's soul. They're either a job for me or they're not. Leo's not.”

Clint went with the light through a makeshift door to the priest's apartment, and I was forced to follow him or be left in the dark with a corpse. He tried the light switch, and when more sparks showered us he sighed. “I told Colin to ask for donations to fix this place up. He always said the church didn't need any more money, it needed more faith.”

“I'll be sure to drop an e-­mail to the Vatican about his sainthood,” I said. “Why does Lilith have such a hard-­on for you?”

Clint found a cluster of half-­burned saints' candles in a kitchen cabinet and lit them, making the miserable, mold-­streaked kitchenette look much better than it had any right to. “The first demons were offspring of the Fallen, twisted images of ourselves. Eventually, there were more of them than us, and in the way of unruly mobs everywhere they kicked us out. Even after we gave them the divine gift of life.”

“Demons are assholes like that,” I said.

“The Fallen scattered to the four corners of the earth,” Clint said. In the candlelight, I could easily imagine the angel's face as a vision of beauty and terror, inhuman as a shark gliding through cold, still waters.

“But you scattered to Wyoming,” I said. “No offense, but if I had the chance to go anywhere, I would not pick Wyoming. Or anywhere Wyoming-­adjacent.”

“I've lived all over,” Clint said. “Paris, Calcutta, San Francisco. I could tell you about it someday.”

“You assume I'm some hillbilly who's never been anywhere but on a tour of America's more scenic truck stops?” I said. Clint shrugged, spreading his hands. Clearly, angels didn't give a shit about offending ­people.

“I'm starting to think Lilith was right about you,” I grumbled.

Clint gave a grim smile that was more like a sneer. “She hates me. Always has, me and all the Fallen. Her mission in life is to collect us as trophies.”

“If she collects the box set, does she get a prize?” I said. Clint checked out the narrow window, then pulled the greasy yellow and green curtains tight.

“She gets to work out her pent-­up aggression on me for the next few thousand years.” He paced the kitchen, but since it wasn't much bigger than a decent-­size closet, he was limited to two steps in each direction, like a predator in a zoo. “Fallen used to be strong. Not compared to our brothers, but strong enough to take on someone like Lilith. But the longer we're out of the Kingdom, the weaker we get. And the longer Lilith has to think about how much she despises me . . .”

“I get it,” I said. “You're not gonna stick your neck out for me. Are we gonna have a problem now, or are you going to let me and Leo go our own way?”

“You understand what it's like to be ground under someone's heel with no hope,” Clint said. “I'm pissed as hell at you for leading Lilith right to me, but I think we can help each other. You're going to need me, now that your reaper is dead.” He went into the small living area and lifted the cushions off the sofa. “We don't have a problem, but I could kill that Leo guy for putting you in that position.”

“Leo's not so bad,” I said. “He took care of Billy, and he hasn't left me, even though he doesn't owe me.”

“Situations like Billy are exactly why you need to stick with me,” Clint said, pulling out the sofa bed, along with the stench of mildew. “I stayed up all night making sure you two didn't die at Lilith's hand, so I'm beat. Want to catch some shut-­eye?”

I hadn't hesitated to share the motel room with Leo, but I shook my head now. I didn't want to give Clint any ideas. If angels even got ideas. I didn't really want to think about angelic genitalia or lack thereof right then, or ever. “Somebody should keep an eye out.”

“Suit yourself,” Clint said, stretching out and pulling an afghan the color of old and new bruises over him.

I went back to the chapel and sat next to Leo on the floor, pulling my knees up to my chin. He moaned softly in his sleep, and I looked up at him, making sure he hadn't taken a turn for the worse. Before I died, I'd sat with my grandmother when she took a turn for the worse. The damp air of the bayou clamped down on her lungs, slowly suffocating the life out of her over the years. Now, of course, I could see that the foul cigarillos she smoked almost constantly for my entire life gave her emphysema, and with no oxygen tanks or inhalers to treat her, the decline was sharp and fast.

I wished more than anything there was something I could do, something to ease the terrible wheezing every time she drew breath, something to speed along the inevitable. In the end I just poured her doses of opium-­laced cough syrup until she slipped off to sleep and never woke up.

Most days, I was glad she died before I did. If she had ever seen what had happened to me, her heart would have broken.

I leaned my head back against Leo's bench, staring up at the dusty rafters of Father Colin's crappy church. The sheen was wearing quickly on the whole “being free” thing. Even if I managed to convince Lilith not to pulverize me, I was still a woman who'd been dead for ninety years. I couldn't get a driver's license or a job. I'd be stuck drifting from one town to the next on the interstate, sleeping in a blur of motel rooms if I was lucky, parking lots and overpasses if I wasn't. I'd still be nothing to anyone. And every shifter, hound, or reaper I ran across would want to be the one to take me out.

Leo's breathing stayed shallow, and he was still so pale I could see every vein under his skin, but his forehead was cooler, and he was in a deep sleep. I stayed with him until the sun was fully up, then stepped out on the loading dock. The sunrise was brilliant orange and pink, rolling forward to touch the Black Hills. My breath frosted when I exhaled and my fingers prickled with cold. I stuffed them into the pockets of my jeans and watched a few snowflakes drift around me, landing and sticking on the cracked, dirty concrete.

The snow fell faster and faster, piling around my feet. The wind blew in clouds from the plains that swallowed up the sun, until everything was the eerie gray dark of a black-­and-­white movie.

I shivered and looked up at the sky as a dim streetlamp flickered to life. Squalls weren't unheard of in the fall up here, but this didn't feel right. The flakes landing on my skin froze to it, stinging like pinpricks all over my hands and cheeks.

There were demons who brought inclement weather. Thunderstorms, tornadoes, upheaval among animals and plants anywhere in their vicinity.