Black Dog (28 page)

“Lucifer,” I whispered, trying to get myself used to the idea enough to do something about this clusterfuck. A Fallen.
The
Fallen. Bad enough that Azrael and the others had banished him to Tartarus right along with the demons. According to Clint, anyway. If I went by Lilith, then Clint was definitely the asshole in that equation. Still, Lucifer had been the one to get them all tossed out, if you listened to the human version of things. Odds are, he wasn't a real ­people person.

The shadow started to rush past us, and I saw they were ­people, washed out and bedraggled as any deadhead. Some screamed, or sobbed, or bled from the fatal wounds that had damned them to Tartarus in the first place. The damned were flowing free, a tidal wave building to fill the entire space of the door.

I made myself move, one foot at a time, pick up the Scythe, and got to Lilith's shoulder. “I get it!” I shouted in her ear, trying to make myself heard over the howling of the damned and the droning wail of the klaxons. “I understand this a lot more than just sowing chaos! But this is insane! If you need the damned, what will you do when Tartarus is empty and the world is so overrun there's no one to repopulate?”

Lilith bared her teeth. “If you haven't figured out that my millennium of partying with Azrael drove me a little crazy, you're a lot dumber than I thought.”

“You love Lucifer, I get it!” I shouted. “But maybe he's in here for a reason!”

“Oh, most definitely,” Lilith purred. “And when he gets out, he and I are going to clean house in Hell. Then I figure a nice little honeymoon to earth to clear out the dregs of the Fallen. Then, who knows. I heard the Kingdom is ripe for a takeover.”

“Just take Lucifer and go,” I shouted. “You got what you wanted! Take him, close this nuthouse up, and go live your lives together!” I let the Scythe dangle from my fingers, showing I meant her no harm. “I won't try to stop you.”

“Ava.” Lilith dropped her head to her chest. “Ava, Ava, Ava. I've spent a thousand years letting your miserable little realm exist. Letting Hell dissolve into a petty dictatorship without its true leader. Letting you worthless little insects live your worthless little lives. The way I see it . . .” She jerked me close, so I could feel her breath on my face. “The world owes me a favor or two.”

We stood like that, an island in a stream of the damned spewing forth from Tartarus, running past us into the crossroads. I saw things that weren't human too, things with scales, things that crawled or leaped.

Where are the guards?
I thought. What kind of a prison didn't have a warden?

“No guards,” Lilith said, and smirked at me. “We're in Hell, Ava. I'm not running on half power anymore. Tartarus governs itself. No one but the inmates has ever gotten in or out until now.”

Ahead of us, the stampede parted and I saw a tall, slim figure, turned into a shadow imprint by the klieg lights burning their bright spots into the ground all around us. Lilith let go of me, rushing forward. A pack of the damned slammed into me and knocked me to the ground. I curled in a ball and tried to protect my head and ribs. I didn't think they'd be very kindly inclined toward a hellhound in their midst. I wondered how many of these souls I'd sent to Tartarus myself, never knowing or caring what happened once Gary took them to Hell.

Lilith ran to the figure and embraced him, and he pulled her to him, lifting her off the ground. From my vantage he looked like he was ten feet tall, but when he stepped into the light he wasn't anything so amazing—­just a pale platinum blond with the same piercing eyes as Lilith. Honestly, they looked more like brother and sister than anything, which just made the whole thing creepy.

“Who's this?” Lucifer asked, looking down at me. I uncurled my body as the damned gave him a wide berth, getting to my feet unsteadily. The Scythe was gone, scattered by the gang that had bowled me over. Worst of all, I wasn't useful to Lilith anymore.

“This is Ava, the hellhound who almost screwed everything for us,” Lilith said. “But she's redeemed herself. Mostly.”

“Ah.” Lucifer smiled at me. “Allow me to thank her, then.” He wasn't handsome in the way humans understand it, but there was something about his face that made it impossible to look away. I didn't have any illusions about what was going on. He was the snake and I was the mouse.

Rather that collapsing like I would have done a few weeks ago I felt angry, my gut churning at the trouble I'd gotten myself into. “Don't mention it,” I gritted.

Lucifer laughed. “You're too modest. If I don't owe you thanks, I at least owe you payback for conspiring to keep me locked up in here.”

He reached for me and I jumped backward. My feet tangled, and I went down hard on the arm I'd torn up in the car wreck. A scream wrenched from my mouth, and that made me even angrier. I'd had enough of looking weak. “You served your purpose,” Lucifer said, standing over me and cocking his head like he was trying to figure out what I could possibly be useful for. “But I think it's time you were put down.”

A shadow fell over me from the other direction, and Lucifer looked away from me, his jaw tightening at the sight of whoever stood there.

Over the sirens and the yelling, a voice I never thought I'd hear again spoke. “Leave her alone, asshole.”

Leo reached his hand down and lifted me to my feet. I stared at him. “How are you here?” I whispered.

Leo smiled at me. “Don't worry about it, Ava.” The Scythe gleamed in his other hand, and Lucifer frowned.

“This isn't possible. Lilith got rid of you. And . . .”

His lips pulled back from his teeth as he looked at me. “Well. I guess you're not just
another
hellhound, are you?”

I sagged a little. When the ultimate badass of Hell tells you you're an immortal hellhound, you sort of have to believe it.

“He doesn't matter,” Lilith said urgently, plucking at Lucifer's arm. “He's just a man.”

“He's
not,”
Lucifer snarled. “You know what he is, and it's on you that you didn't hunt him down.”

“Gary killed every warlock who could possibly be his human host!” Lilith shouted. Her voice sounded like gravel on a chalkboard, and her eyes were so wide I could see white all the way around. In a moment of almost detached amusement, I realized that Lilith was scared shitless. Not of me or Leo, but of what her charming boyfriend was gonna do to her.

“Clearly that incompetent sack of incubus cum
missed one,
” Lucifer growled. He shoved Lilith away hard, so she landed on her ass in the dirt, ruining her perfect suit pants. “Get away from me. Centuries I wait and this is the best you can do? I expected better.”

“Hey.”

Leo raised the Scythe. “Doesn't matter who I am. I'm the guy who's going to put you back where you belong.”

“How frightening,” Lucifer said. He shimmered, like a zephyr of heat had sprung up from the desert floor, and I choked as his hands went around my throat. He'd appeared behind me, and clamped an arm firmly across my windpipe. I clawed at his arm, digging deep furrows out of his skin with my nails, but he simply grunted in pain. “Stop that,” he said, giving me a shake that made black circles spin in front of my eyes as he compressed my windpipe. “And the both of you—­I defeated the Fallen's puppets before and I will have no trouble doing so again. As many times as it takes. You can become the Grim Reaper in a dozen bodies and I will always win.”

“This isn't a fight,” Leo said, but his voice had lost a lot of its conviction. Lilith watched us from the ground, a smile still playing around her lips.

“That's so cute. I send you to Hell and you show up for a reunion with Ava. She was so sad after I dropped you. She cried, like a sad little toddler.”

“This isn't a reunion either,” Leo said. “This is an execution.” He still didn't move, though, and he clearly didn't know what to do, now that Lucifer had his hands on me.

“How about this,” Lucifer said. His voice rumbled against my back. We were touching the entire length of my body. “You put down that blade and walk in the opposite direction, and I'll let you go with all your bits.” He didn't feel warm—­his skin was the temperature of the air, but his grip was rock solid. I could shift, I reasoned, and that might give me enough time to get away.

But then he'd hurt Leo. Leo was dead, sure, but there were plenty of things worse than dying once your soul ended up in Hell.

Leo looked at me, at Lilith, back at me. The Scythe turned in his grip, and he shifted from foot to foot. I knew he wasn't used to being the vulnerable one, the one not in control, and he didn't know what to do. I could see the long row of cell blocks inside the gates of Tartarus from where I stood, and as I watched the damned stream out of the gates around us I knew exactly what to do.

I looked back at Leo. “Just kill him,” I said. “Put the Scythe in him. Right now.”

Leo blinked at me. “Ava . . .”

“Are you mad?” Lucifer barked. “You'll kill her right along with me!”

“Leo,” I said, never breaking eye contact. “It's okay. Just like you told me it was okay before, in Kayla's house.” I'd die, sure. It wouldn't be the first time, but this time I got to make it count for something. In the end, that was always what I'd come back to when I thought about Caleb and what he'd done. How pointless the whole thing had been, how little I'd made my life mean.

I was older now. It was different. Even if I spent eternity in Tartarus, at least Lucifer would be right there with me, and Leo and I could be together.

There were worse deaths.

Leo hesitated, the Scythe poised, and I leaned forward against Lucifer's grasp even as he tried to pull me tighter. “Leo, do
not
let him leave this place,” I said. “You know what you have to do, so do it.”

“He won't,” Lucifer said, his lip curling. “He doesn't have the stones.”

“You're not great at reading ­people,” I told Lucifer. “Probably why you spent a thousand years as a demon's cell block bitch.”

Lucifer let out an angry snarl, but Leo stepped forward and stuck the Scythe into my gut just under my ribs, angling it up. I felt the red hot blade slice through me, and the thud as it went into Lucifer, deep enough to pierce his heart.

Leo shut his eyes. “I'm sorry, Ava,” he whispered.

The pain was indescribable, the worst I'd ever felt. I could feel every cell in my body lighting up as the Scythe took hold of the hound inside of me and ripped it back into Tartarus.

There was screaming, a lot of screaming, and darkness. Some of it sounded like Lilith, some of it like Leo, most of it from me.

I was dead, that much I knew, and my soul was burning. Hit something that's already damned with the Scythe and it goes up like flash paper. I waited for everything to stop, that last period on the page that I'd longed for so many times over the century I'd been a hound.

Instead, I opened my eyes and saw a sky full of thick gray clouds, lit by the spotlights of Tartarus in a dizzying pattern of roaming circles. A little bit of sooty rain fell, washing the dirt and blood from my skin.

It wasn't my blood, I realized, feeling myself over. I had a stab wound in my side that felt like I'd been stuck with a hot poker, but I didn't have that nauseating pain that comes with a gut wound leaking poison from my intestines into my blood. The blade had gone through the cords of my abdominal muscles and into Lucifer, who lay beside me. A vast pool of red spread around him as he lay facedown in the mud, not moving.

I got to my knees and forced myself to touch him, rolling him over onto his back. The Scythe had gone up and into his heart, a fatal blow delivered by an expert. Leo had done the good work I would have expected of him.

Finding out I was still alive was oddly anticlimactic. I'd been prepared to die for so long that actually going through with it, and then finding out I'd avoided the end by a few centimeters of blade, mostly just felt like a letdown.

But Lucifer was contained, and when I looked up I saw the doors of Tartarus were shut tight. No sign of Lilith. No Leo.

I wasn't alone, though, and before I could really freak out about what had happened I realized I had a much bigger problem than a dead Fallen at my feet.

The damned surrounded me, watching me, none of them ready to get close yet. That would change as soon as they realized Lucifer was dead. I shivered as the rain soaked me. That sidestep from dying might have been shorter and narrower than I thought. These assholes were going to tear me apart.

“Hey, girlie,” one of the closest said, a barefoot human dressed in ragged gray pants and a shirt, every inch of him smeared with soot. “You don't look so hot.”

I cast around. Stay calm, assess your surroundings, find a way out. The things I'd done a million times, only now I was stabbed, trapped in Tartarus, and there was no way out. That was the whole point.

We were in the main corridor of cell blocks by the gates, and farther in I could see a low spread of buildings, surrounded by barbed wire and topped off with the twin chimneys of a crematory that was the source of the oily jet-­black soot that clung to everything and permeated the air with cloying smoke.

“Hey,” the man said again. “I'm talkin' to you.” He came close enough to touch and looked down at me, at the gaping knife wound in my side. “Looks like you might need fixing,” he said.

“Fix-­it!” another of the crowd echoed, and the surrounding damned took up the chant. The man and others reached out and grabbed me. I swatted and clawed at them, trying to fight them off, but there were just too many.

“Fix-­it, fix-­it,” the crowd chanted, lifting me off the ground and propelling me toward a ramshackle shed leaning at the end of one cell block. A bare bulb dangled inside, and I could see a work bench and a metal table, covered with crusty dried blood.