Black Dog (18 page)

Leo spread his hands. “I had a talent for it. I found out I could call conjuring out of blood when I touched a guy my uncles did in with a hammer. Blood everywhere, and the next thing I know half of the restaurant kitchen is on fire. I was seventeen. My father was a lot more interested in me after that, even if I was just one of seven bastards scattered all over the Triboroughs. He taught me how to make deadheads, conjure, set demon nets to keep Hellspawn out. I never wanted to be a warlock. I was happier being a cleaner, driving junkers out to the scrapyards in Jersey, putting the screws on guys when they wouldn't do what Sergei told them. But if I'd tried to back out, he'd have made sure I ended up in the trunk with those schmucks, so I dove in, and I was good at that too.” He lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly. “Point is, I see the same look in your eyes I know is in mine. You do what you have to do to survive, and that's all anyone can do.”

“I don't want to go,” I lied. “I know Clint needs my help.”

“Clint needs to grow a spine and stop pouting about some hair-­pulling that went on a thousand years ago,” Leo muttered. “You could get in that car right now and drive out of here. I wish you would. Knowing you made it out would make me happy.”

I shook my head. “I can't leave,” I said. That was only half true, I realized as I turned away from the Lexus and back to Clint's beater truck. But
I can't leave because I don't want to leave you
was a real conversation killer.

“I wouldn't know about anyone he deliberately conned into making a deal,” I said, pointing at the ledger. “All we get is a name and a past-­due date.”

Leo flipped open the ledger to a page he'd dog-­eared. The twisting scrawl of Gary's handwriting made my head hurt. “This guy might be a candidate,” he said. “Gregor Grayson. Killed twenty-­three women in an abandoned hospital on Long Island and raised them. Deadheads wandering the halls, attacking ­people out on the road . . .”

“He was mine,” I said. I remembered how cold it had been that day, too cold to even snow. Frozen grass crunched under my paws. “He wasn't afraid of me,” I murmured. “Most of them are.”

“Or a woman named Henritte LaSalle,” Leo read from another page. “Necromancer who specialized in bringing back dead children for grieving parents . . . or robbing paupers' graves for corpses when the actual kid was too decomposed. She sounds like a real charmer. Collected June 1953 in—­”

“Kansas City,” I finished. She'd been a little woman whose neighbors called her Birdie when they gave me directions to her house. She'd filed her teeth and she bit the fuck out of my shoulder when I came for her. I still had a scar there, so faint you could only see it if I spent an hour or two in the sun. The poison in her soul had seeped into my skin, just enough to burn a faint impression that never faded away.

I cornered her in her spare bedroom, dressed up to look like a nursery. The little girl lying on the canopy bed was very dead, probably a couple of weeks gone, judging by the bloat and the black and green splotches on her skin.

I'd actually enjoyed collecting on Birdie LaSalle. She'd laughed at me, spat something in French I didn't quite get, and gurgled as she died, still trying to laugh at me.

“So we have two who apparently managed to raise an obscene number of deadheads, and it sure does sound like Birdie got the real deal back for those parents,” Leo said. “I mean, if I went in expecting little Timmy and got
Dawn of the Dead,
I sure as hell would demand a refund.”

“Okay, but it's a long way from there to opening the floodgates of Tartarus and releasing Grayson and Henritte and all the millions of other ­people the reapers sent there,” I said. “I mean, Clint lived in the woods for thirty years. It only took Jack Torrance six months to lose his shit, and he had a wife and kid to keep him company.”

“Lilith sure has a hard-­on for him,” Leo said. “If this is what she's doing, it makes sense. Off the one person you know who knows your secret.”

“Also professional advice?” I said. Leo smiled.

“Someday we should have a few drinks and compare notes. I'll tell you about the government witness and the Serbian death squad leader. You can tell me how you handled working for Gary all those decades.”

“Drinking, mostly,” I said. I made a note to avoid telling Leo anything about my time as a hound if I could help it. Depressing the shit out of him wouldn't do either of us any good.

Leo paused on a fresh page. “Caleb Whitman,” he said. “In 1922, New Orleans. A necromancer who bargained for the knowledge to contact Baron Samedi, the
loa
of the Underworld. Some bullshit about the blood moon, unhallowed ground, human sacrifice yada yada . . .”

He stopped talking, which I assumed was because the blood had drained from my face and I was white as any of the deadheads called by the witches in Gary's ledger. “Ava, what's wrong?” he said, frowning at me.

I felt hands around my neck, or maybe it was just my air choking off, the heavy pressure that builds on your chest as you drown in your own blood. The dull pain you're glad for because it fades out the sharp, unbearable ache of a six-­inch skinning knife between your third and fourth rib. The blackness came with it, crawling from the edges of my eyes like the world was burning, curling up at the edges and disintegrating into ash.

Leo gave me a hard shake. “Ava!” he snapped. “Stay with me.”

I fell to the ground without realizing it. There was a terrible wheezing sound loud in my ears, and something slamming against my ribs from the inside as the weight got heavier and heavier, choking off my air entirely.

“You're having a panic attack,” Leo said from down a long, twisting tunnel, his voice echoing tinnily above the blood rushing through my ears. “You need to breathe deep. Listen to my voice and don't think about anything else. I want you to look at me.”

I tried, Leo's face hovering large as the moon in my limited tunnel of sight. His tattoos started to squirm across his skin, the stylized trio of skulls on his neck turning their empty eyes and rictus grins to stare at me.

I pitched violently away from Leo and threw up, mostly bile and the few sips of the horrible coffee. It burned my throat like I was vomiting bleach, but after a few seconds my heartbeat stopped punching me in the chest and the bands around my lungs let go.

“You're okay,” Leo said. His voice was still faint, but no longer so far away I had no hope of reaching it. “You're okay,” he repeated. He kept saying it like a mantra, lapsing into Russian.
“Ya zdes'. Ty v poryadke.”

I swiped the back of my hand across my face, and Leo ran his palm between my shoulder blades, the kind of slow stroke you used to calm a cat or a small child. “What was that?” he asked softly.

“Caleb Whitman,” I whispered, suddenly as cold as if I was still out in the snow. I started to shake and couldn't stop, not even when I curled myself into a tight ball, knees pressing into my ribs so hard I was amazed they didn't crack. “Caleb Whitman is the man who murdered me.”

 

CHAPTER
19

L
eo stared at me. I sighed, looking down at the page of Gary's scrawl. “I don't like saying this, but Clint might be right,” I said.

“You know something about this Caleb guy?” Leo said.

I bit my lip, bearing down until I tasted blood. It went against everything I'd taught myself during my time as the hound. Don't talk, don't tell secrets. Don't trust anyone, especially a human. Never, ever let on you remembered your life before.

“The other hounds are lucky,” I said. “They don't remember. That's the way it should be.”

I hit my fist against the side of the truck. A few flakes of rust drifted to the ground but otherwise I didn't make much of a dent. “He's who I was dreaming about,” I whispered. “Caleb. He's always what I dream about when I have a nightmare.”

I paced a few steps away from Leo. It was easier to talk looking out at the broken-­down stretch of road than into his face. “Caleb cut out my heart before the ritual even started. I was the pure soul he offered up. Except I guess I wasn't the right vintage for Baron Samedi, because the only Hellspawn who showed up was Gary.”

“That's a letdown,” Leo said.

“I always wondered why he picked me,” I murmured. I ran my toe through the dust, drawing a jagged circle. I wished I could just keep walking until the diner was behind me. “I guess he was never there for me in the first place.” Caleb had gone less than five years after I died. It seemed so anticlimactic.

I faced Leo again. He unlatched the tailgate of the pickup and sat down, gesturing at me. “Come here. You look pale.”

He was being polite—­I was sure I looked like shit, but my legs were starting to feel kind of watery talking about all of this crap again, so I levered myself onto the tailgate, letting my legs swing.

“I met him through a boy named Jasper James. They were best friends. Caleb was mixed, but nobody in our circle cared. In New Orleans back then, ­people looked the other way if you could halfway pass. Point is, Caleb's great-­grandmother, Hepzibah Whitman, was a slave on a sugarcane plantation south of New Orleans. She was a
mambo—­
a voodoo priestess. She healed ­people, delivered babies. She got them through all of the misery that their lives entailed.”

I was shivering again, like I always did when I thought about the tale of Hepzibah. Caleb had told it to me at least a dozen times as we lay under the lazy fan bolted to the ceiling of his single room. It always made me feel cold, even when I was alive, and I'd curl closer to him no matter how hot it was outside, even at midnight. I thought he told it in the first place to get me closer. I didn't realize I was wrong until his blade was already between my ribs, tight and snug as part of my own body.

I dug my fingers into the tailgate until the beds of my nails turned white. “There was another woman on the plantation, Mama Eugenie. She was big and jolly and kind, but ­people whispered if you crossed her, she'd make you sick, make you hurt. Mama was a
bokor
, a priestess who works with both hands.”

“Black voodoo is nasty shit,” Leo said. “I've run into a few
bokors
. Nobody's idea of a good time.”

“Animals started disappearing,” I said. I could practically hear the echo of Caleb's voice. It always got soft at this part, like pressure building in a steam valve. “The master's prize horse, a stud he brought from Kentucky, disappeared into the swamp. Nobody cared in particular, because, you know, fuck those slave-­owning assholes.”

“Until it wasn't just animals disappearing,” Leo said quietly. “It was children.”

“Mama affected an exchange,” I said. “A pure soul for access to the land the Baron guarded. I don't know what she was really dealing with—­Hellspawn, probably. But Caleb was convinced he could open a door to the Underworld and all the Hellspawn's power would be his for the taking if he could just find the spot where Mama worked her voodoo.”

“Moron,” Leo muttered, lighting another smoke.

“Hepzibah told her daughter the story,” I said. “The daughter was a freewoman and she wrote it all down. Caleb had the journal, with the words and everything else he needed. All he needed from Gary was the spot. He was never very good at negotiating, but he was real good at stabbing ­people in the back. Just his bad luck Gary collected before Caleb could finish what he was up to.”

“Ava, in your opinion,” Leo said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke, “do you think Lilith is really capable?”

“Absolutely,” I said, without even needing to think about it. Gary had almost certainly been helping her, the two of them snickering behind their hands at their plans to start an industrial-­level panic both in Hell and here on Earth.

I started to tell Leo this, but the whine of engines up the highway drowned me out. I saw three black SUVs turn into the parking lot, tires fishtailing on the gravel and kicking up plumes of dust three times as high as the diner roof.

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 been 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.