Hellhound (A Deadtown Novel) (3 page)

“Vicky.” Daniel turned to me, and I broke eye contact with Foster. “We need your help on this.” He named a per diem rate. “Save receipts for any expenses that come up. You’ll get reimbursed. And you shouldn’t have any more trouble getting through the checkpoints. Once this goes through, you’ll be on the permanent ‘clear’ list.”

“And that means?”

“Your approved status remains the same, no matter what the code level.”

“Until revoked,” Foster added, savoring the words.

“Yes, until revoked,” Daniel snapped. “Just like your detective’s shield is good until it’s revoked.”

Foster’s snorty laugh showed how little he feared that happening.

Daniel lightly touched my arm, turning me away from Foster. We started walking toward Deadtown. “I’ll see you back to the checkpoint, then start on the paperwork right away. I’d like you to come out and interview the witnesses tonight, as soon as it’s dark.”

Behind us, Foster snorted out another laugh. I turned to glare at him. The detective’s eyes gleamed, as though he was seeing a vision of Daniel wrapped like a mummy in miles and miles of red tape.

AFTER SUNRISE, DEADTOWN BECOMES A GHOST TOWN. (Well, not literally—ghosts are one of the few paranormal beings you
won’t
find here. Arawn, lord of the dead, does a pretty good job of keeping the shades of the departed within the boundaries of his realm.) But today, even though the sun had been up for more than an hour, the streets were crowded. And the mood wasn’t what you’d call festive.

Zombies gathered in small groups, some listening to street-corner orators, others looking like they were ready for trouble the moment somebody else started it. Most were bundled up against the skin-damaging sunlight, wearing wide-brimmed hats, sunglasses, scarves or bandanas, coats, gloves. They looked more ready for a polar expedition than a political protest.

But protest was in the air. Deadtown residents were beyond fed up. And they were getting ready to do something about it.

Snatches of speeches faded in and out as I passed:

“. . . Previously Deceased Humans. Hear that?
Humans.
Unlike some others around here, we’re human, and we deserve the same rights we had before the plague . . .”

“. . . no longer willing to play the scapegoat for every crisis in Boston . . .”

“. . . take back what’s ours! Before the plague, I owned my own business and two homes. Now? By law I can’t own anything. I work as a manual laborer. How ’bout you? How many here have similar stories?”

A zombie turned to watch me walk by, then nudged another standing next to him. Their heads moved as they tracked me; even with their eyes hidden behind sunglasses, the hostility was palpable. I stopped. Putting my fists on my hips, I faced them, returning their stares. It wasn’t a challenge, simply a message that I would not be hurried on my way by a couple of zombies who didn’t like the looks of someone like me in their neighborhood.

I can’t help it if I look like a human. Most of the time.

After ten or twelve long seconds, the second zombie turned back to the speaker. The other watched me for another heartbeat or two. Then he also turned around.

I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Then I continued down the block.

At the intersection, I paused. If I turned left here, a few minutes’ walk would take me to Kane’s town house. Kane, the monster I loved . . . or thought I did. Like many werewolves who held professional jobs, he worked norm hours. Usually he’d be at his office by now. But that office was near Government Center in the human part of town, and Deadtown was locked down tighter than a maximum security prison. Kane wasn’t on any Code Red exceptions list. As a high-profile lawyer working to secure civil rights for paranormals, he had too many enemies in the Police Commissioner’s Office. So right now, he was either working from home or making his own street-corner speech, one urging calm and using the courts—not violence—to redress grievances.

I wanted to see him. Five minutes and I could be there. I’d go up to the front door and pull out my key . . . I sighed. No, I wouldn’t. Even though Kane had given me a key to his place months ago, I wouldn’t use it. I’d ring the bell. And the reason why was the same reason I stood on this corner, unable to make my feet move in the direction I wanted to go.

After years of on-again, off-again dating, Kane had told me he loved me. That he wanted to take our relationship to the next level. And I, world champion of commitment-phobes, had managed to admit I felt the same way. So why wasn’t I running to be with him now?

Why, indeed.

A couple of weeks ago, I’d followed Pryce into the Darklands, the realm of the dead, to try to stop him from recreating his lost shadow demon and reclaiming his power. I’d failed. Not only did Pryce have a shadow demon again, that shadow demon was the biggest, nastiest Hellion I’d ever had the misfortune to encounter. Although I’d killed Difethwr, the Destroyer, Pryce had managed to resurrect the Hellion, binding himself to it in the process. The Destroyer and I went way back—more than ten years ago, the Hellion placed its mark on me, the mark that made me want to smash things when I didn’t keep it under control. When Pryce brought the Destroyer back to life—bigger and nastier than ever—my little anger-management problem boiled over.

These days, dating me was on a par with dating an active volcano. Any little thing could trigger an explosion, like when I’d surveyed the destruction in the New Combat Zone and wanted to join in. But the Destroyer’s claim on me wasn’t the worst of it.

When I’d disappeared into the Darklands, Kane followed me there, determined to bring me home. But the realm of the dead doesn’t issue tourist visas. To get in, he’d made a bargain with Mallt-y-Nos, aka the Night Hag, a psychopomp who drives wandering spirits of the recently departed into the Darklands. Mallt-y-Nos is a hunter. She loves nothing more than to chase terrified, disoriented souls through the night, her pack of hellhounds snapping at their heels. As his price of admission to the Darklands, Kane agreed to serve the Night Hag as one of those hellhounds for a year and a day.

When he made the deal, Kane had no way of knowing what he was getting into.

He knew better now.

The Night Hag’s hellhounds are creatures made of pain. Fiery, agonizing pain miles beyond anything imaginable. The burning drives the frantic hounds onward—running, running from the pain—but no relief ever comes. The hag intensifies the torture to force the hounds to obey her commands. It’s the kind of pain that pushes everything out—thoughts, judgments, even sanity—consuming all. I knew, because I’d experienced it. To enter the Darklands, I’d made my own bargain with the Night Hag. She’d forced me to shift into a hellhound and then run me across the border.

Now, Kane had experienced it, too. Just once, but once was enough to break nearly anyone. And for the next twelve full moons, his werewolf form would be twisted, over and over again, into a monstrous hound that knows nothing but pain.

The Night Hag hates me because even though I fulfilled the terms of our deal, things didn’t turn out in her favor. She’s vowed that her hellhounds will tear me to pieces. And she’s waiting until the next full moon, when her pack will have an extra member: Kane.

He’ll be forced to obey the Night Hag’s command; the pain won’t leave room for anything else. I know it, and he knows it.

There’s no way around it:
I love you
doesn’t stand a chance against
Sorry, but in a few days I’ll be forced to hunt you down and kill you
. Was it any wonder we were avoiding each other?

With a heavy heart, I crossed the street and headed home.

IN MY BUILDING’S LOBBY, I NODDED GOOD MORNING TO CLYDE, the doorman, who was stationed at his desk. He was eating, as zombies do, but Clyde’s sense of decorum was such that he never wanted to be caught snacking on the job. He stashed a crinkly cellophane bag in the desk and brushed some crumbs off his uniform.

“Good morning, Ms. Vaughn,” he said. I’d asked about a hundred times for him to call me Vicky, but to Clyde being on a first-name basis with tenants was as much a faux pas as picking one’s nose in public. “Mr. Kane stopped by while you were out.”

My heartbeat surged. “Is he upstairs?”

Clyde pursed his lips. He’d been a minister in his former, pre-plague life, and becoming a zombie hadn’t changed his moral sense one iota. Although he’d never uttered a judgmental word, he’d let me know in no uncertain terms what he thought when I gave Kane a key to my apartment. In fact, he was letting me know right now. If you’ve never gotten a disapproving look from a holier-than-thou zombie, you haven’t really lived. Still, once you get past the disapproval, Clyde’s a good guy.

“No,” he finally said. “He seemed very concerned with that business out there.” Clyde waved a hand toward the door, whether to indicate the zombie unrest in Deadtown or the state of the world in general I couldn’t tell. “He requested that I inform you he’ll telephone this evening.”

As the rhythm of my heart settled back to normal, I wondered whether it was pleasure or anxiety that sped it up in the first place. Both, probably. At any rate, Kane knew I usually slept during the day, so he was assuming I’d come home from wherever and fall into bed. Which was exactly what I intended to do.

If only he were there to fall into bed with me.

I wished. In the days since we’d returned from the Darklands, Kane and I had barely been able to look one another in the eye, let alone touch each other. It was like each of us was afraid the other would break.

Maybe we would.

A sigh escaped me before I squared my shoulders and thanked Clyde. His expression softened, as much as it’s possible for a zombie’s face to go soft. “Is everything all right, Ms. Vaughn?”

No.
These days, nothing was within shouting distance of all right. But I pasted on a smile and nodded. “Fine.”

Clyde tilted his head skeptically, as if trying to see inside mine. “If I can be of any assistance. I’m a trained counselor, you know . . .” He blinked, as if suddenly remembering his place, and nodded sharply.

“Thanks, Clyde.” My words seemed to embarrass him. He shuffled papers on his desk and wouldn’t meet my gaze. “Well, have a good day,” I said. He didn’t reply.

Walking across the lobby to the elevators, I wondered how long it had been since either of us had had a truly good day. Was there such a thing in Deadtown?

I COULD HEAR JULIET’S MOVIE SCREEN–SIZE TV BLARING through the front door as I inserted my key. One of the disadvantages of having a 650-year-old vampire for a roommate was her simultaneous fascination and boredom with contemporary life. Juliet was intrigued by modern technology, which was why she bought the biggest, flattest, highest-definition television she could find. But during her many centuries of undeath, she’d seen it all—aside from intermittent “fascinations” (her word) with home shopping channels or the latest reality show, she couldn’t sustain interest in what was on. In other words, she loved her TV but couldn’t care less about the content. She’d turn it on, crank up the volume in all six speakers, marvel at the quality of the picture and the sound, and then wander off to find something else to do. Seeing as the sun had come up hours ago, she was undoubtedly tucked into her coffin, dead to the world, leaving me to risk going totally deaf in the time it took to cross the living room, pick up the remote, and turn the damn thing off.

Good thing our neighbors are vampires, too,
I thought, opening the door and wincing against the assault of sound. Once a vampire resumes the shroud for the day, nothing disturbs him until sundown. At least I didn’t have to deal with angry neighbors pounding on—or more likely through—the walls.

To my surprise, Juliet was still up. She sat in the dark room, blackout shades drawn, her face tinged by the flickering bluish light from the screen. She didn’t notice me come in; she was absorbed in some nature program, absentmindedly eating popcorn from a bowl in her lap.

I switched on the overhead light, and she turned toward me, blinking.

“Can you turn that down?” I shouted.

She leaned forward and picked up the remote. Several clicks later, I could actually hear myself think.

“What did you say? I couldn’t hear you over the television.”

Before I could think of a suitably sarcastic reply, a large white bird hopped onto Juliet’s shoulder. “It was a little loud, I guess,” the falcon said. “But those surround-sound speakers are brilliant.” He cocked his head and fixed his sharp gaze on the bowl in Juliet’s lap. “May I have some more popcorn?”

“Hi, Dad,” I said, as Juliet offered a kernel to the hooked beak.

Yes, my father is a white falcon. A
talking
white falcon with rainbow-colored eyes.

He hadn’t always been a bird, of course. Although I come from a race of shapeshifters, Dad’s condition was unheard of, even among our kind. For one thing, only Cerddorion females have the ability to shift (it arrives with all the other joys of puberty). For another, when I change shape, the animal brain takes over. If I shifted into a falcon, I wouldn’t be sitting in anyone’s living room, watching TV, eating popcorn, and making conversation. I’d be out hunting mice or whatever it is falcons do. Real falcons, I mean.

But my father had done something that no one among the Cerddorion—hell, no one of
any
species—had ever managed to do. He’d hijacked the body of a falcon to come back from the dead.

After my father, Evan Vaughn, was killed by the Destroyer, whom I’d foolishly summoned in my eighteen-year-old know-it-all mode, Dad spent ten years in the Darklands, first serving in Arawn’s court and then, when his shade had been marked for reincarnation, hiding out in a cave. More than anything, Dad wanted to keep his spirit from being cleansed of its memories and recycled into the body of a newborn infant. When I followed Pryce into the Darklands, Dad helped me track him down. But the closer we got to Tywyll, Arawn’s capital, the stronger the pull of reincarnation became. The magic that gave Dad a body in the Darklands drained away from him, and his spirit was in danger of dispersing into nothing. In fact, I thought I’d lost him forever.

But no Vaughn has ever quit without a fight. Dad knew that the Night Hag required three items as my price of passage out of the Darklands. One of these was the white falcon of Hellsmoor, a magical bird that could enter places from which others were barred. The hag demanded I bring her the falcon, along with a magic arrow and Lord Arawn’s hunting horn, to make her nightly hunts more amusing. To Dad, the falcon looked like an escape plan. He bound his spirit to the bird’s body and hitched a ride back to the world of the living.

A brilliant idea, with one big downside. That downside was currently sitting on my living room sofa pecking popcorn from my roommate’s hand.

Juliet scattered some popcorn across the coffee table, and Dad hopped over to peck at it. Juliet stretched and stood. “My coffin calls,” she said. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Nearly eight.”

“No wonder I’m tired. I should have reinterred myself hours ago. But the program your father and I were watching was just so . . . fascinating.” Uh-oh. It sounded like Juliet was starting a new television obsession. Well, at least it would be cheaper than the time she bought every single product labeled “As Seen on TV.”

She waved good night and went down the hallway. A moment later her bedroom door clicked closed.

I sat down on the sofa where Juliet had been and picked up the popcorn bowl. Only a few crumbs left at the bottom. I set the bowl on the table.

“What were you guys watching?” I asked my father.

“A show about birds of prey. Their habitats, behavior—that sort of thing.”

“Feeding habits?” I doubted wild falcons had much popcorn in their diet.

“Let’s gloss over that part,” he said, popcorn spilling from his beak. “I figure, though, that if I’m going to be in this body, I have to be able to pass myself off as an actual falcon when needed. If I act like myself, I’ll end up as a sideshow attraction.”

“Or the Night Hag’s pet.” Dad had escaped from the Night Hag, but she was a huntress at heart and would never quit trying to get him back. Although she didn’t know the falcon was my father—almost no one did—she’d offered me a trade. If I returned the white falcon to her, she would release Kane from his servitude as a hellhound.

Kane, free of pain and subjugation.

Her offer was tempting, I had to admit. I’d take her up on it in a heartbeat, except for two things. One: The falcon in question was my father. And you just don’t hand your dad over to an evil, vindictive spirit, even if it means freeing your boyfriend from same. Two: Obscure, ancient prophecies hinted that a white falcon had a role to play in the coming war among the realms. Unfortunately, said prophecies were obscure enough that we didn’t know exactly what that role would be—or even if Dad was the falcon referred to. But when hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake, you don’t sit around playing guessing games.

Still . . . there was Kane. The warmth that made his gray eyes glow when he smiled. His courage, the courage to go to hell and back—for me. His sense of fair play. His belief in justice. The Night Hag wanted to destroy all that, to strip away everything that made Kane who he was, leaving nothing but a shattered, empty shell.

It almost made me think it would be worth it, worth
anything
, to wrest Kane from her power.

For three weeks, my thoughts had circled in that endless loop: Dad . . . the prophecies . . . Kane. Over and over again. I thought I’d have time to plan a strategy. But now the full moon was approaching, and I still didn’t see any way out of this mess.

It didn’t help that Dad had made me swear to keep his return a secret. I hadn’t told a soul, not even Kane. Not even Mab, my aunt and demon-fighting mentor—and I told her
everything
. Mab knew I’d brought the white falcon out of the Darklands, but she didn’t know Dad had come with it.

Dad, done inspecting the coffee table for popcorn kernels, perched on the back of the sofa and preened his feathers.

“Have you told Mom yet?” I asked. When Dad wasn’t hanging out at my place watching TV, he spent most of his time staking out the suburban neighborhood of my sister, Gwen. Mom had left her retirement condo in Florida to move in with the Santini family for a while, helping Gwen’s daughter, Maria, adjust to the shapeshifting abilities she was starting to manifest. Mom and Gwen had both remarked several times on the large white falcon nesting in the area. But my promise to Dad kept me silent. As far as I could tell, Juliet was the only one besides me who knew—and I suspected that had something to do with her willingness to make popcorn.

“Of course I’ll tell your mother. I’m waiting for the right moment.”

“Dad, there
is
no right moment. When a bird opens his beak and starts talking, it’s bound to be a shock. When that bird says, ‘Hi, honey, I’m home. Did you miss me?’ it’s guaranteed to up the voltage.”

“I don’t see what’s so strange about a talking bird. Parrots talk.”

“But they don’t have conversations. Anyway, you’re not a parrot.”

“Damn right.” Dad puffed out his chest. “You won’t hear me begging for a cracker.” He eyed the empty popcorn bowl. “I wouldn’t mind a cheeseburger, though.”

“If I’d known you were here, I’d have brought you one.” The white falcon had a magical ability to go anywhere he wanted—locked doors and walls be damned—but hadn’t yet mastered the art of calling ahead.

Besides hanging out, getting fed, and watching TV, there was another reason my father spent time in my apartment. I asked about it now. “Dad, have you looked at the book recently?”

I didn’t have to name the title. He knew which book I meant:
The Book of Utter Darkness
, an ancient volume written in the language of Hell, which outlined the history of the conflict between demons and the Cerddorion—from the demons’ point of view. It contained prophecies of how that conflict would end, prophecies that were now coming to pass left and right. It was this book that mentioned the white falcon.

The book and I had a history. For years, it had fascinated me on Mab’s library shelf, the only book I was forbidden to read. When I was eighteen and considered myself a highly trained demon slayer, I took the book down and, leafing through, conjured a demon. I guess my intention was to show there was no demon I couldn’t take down. The demon that answered the call was Difethwr, the Hellion that marked me and killed my father. I’d vowed never to touch the book again, and for years I didn’t, but the times it prophesied were now upon us. At Mab’s insistence, I went from avoiding the book to studying it. We needed to find out what was coming and how we might counter it. But the book was full of tricks. You couldn’t read it the way you’d read a normal book; you had to stare at the unfathomable words until a meaning took shape in your mind. Sometimes the meaning didn’t come. Sometimes it came in riddles—riddles that tried to trip up and fool the reader into believing whatever meaning the book was pushing.

Lately, whenever I looked into the book, one of two things happened: Either I stared at its pages until I went cross-eyed, getting nothing, or else the book hit me hard with a vision of destruction so terrible and all-encompassing it left me shaking for hours. Not exactly surprising, then, that I was back to avoiding
The Book of Utter Darkness
. Since Dad was willing to spend time with it, I was happy to hand it over to him. He’d perch on the back of a kitchen chair, the book open before him on the table. For hours at a time, he’d stare at the book with that predator’s gaze, turning pages with his beak.

“I looked at it for a little while,” he said now, “before my show came on.”

“Anything new?”

“Hard to tell. The book doesn’t speak to me, to Evan Vaughn, I mean. Everything I get from it goes straight to the falcon part of my brain.” Mab said the book referred to the white falcon, but in all my terrible visions of a burning landscape terrorized by demons, the falcon had never appeared. “I get flashes of imagery,” Dad continued, “but they’re filtered through the falcon’s perception, so it’s hard to know what they mean.”

“What kind of imagery?”

“Darkness, mostly. But it’s not the kind of darkness that makes the falcon want to return to his nest. I guess that means it’s not night. It’s a darkness that grows thicker and thinner, that burns my lungs.”

“Smoke.” There was plenty of smoke in my visions. They showed the entire East Coast in flames.

“Yeah, smoke. It must be that. But it’s damn frustrating, Vic. The falcon doesn’t have any words for anything. He’s driven by instinct. He knows hunger, hunting, sleeping, danger.” His head turned almost all the way around, toward the TV. “That’s another reason I was watching the nature show. I was hoping it would give me some insight into how this body’s brain works. So I can interpret its images and feelings better.”

I nodded. “So this darkness, or smoke—does it come with a feeling of danger?”

The falcon cocked his head as Dad considered. “Yes. The burning feeling in the bird’s lungs makes him want to fly higher. But he doesn’t want to flee. He’s not afraid. Instead he’s . . . excited. And hungry. But . . .” For a moment, I could almost see Dad’s face—his real face—superimposed on the falcon’s, frowning as he struggled to express his meaning. “But not like the kind of hunger that wants a cheeseburger or, you know, a rat. The feeling isn’t in the bird’s stomach; it’s . . . I don’t know where it is. But the only way I can describe it is hunger.”

“Weird.” I understood how hard it was, trying to use the human mind to interpret an animal’s perceptions. When I came out of a shift, I had exactly the same problem. “In your visions, is the falcon’s hunger ever satisfied? Does it feed?”

“That’s a good question. The short answer is no, it doesn’t. But there’s a jolt of attention, followed by excitement. The feeling a falcon gets when its vision locks onto a mouse or a rabbit or whatever moving in a field below.”

“When it spots its prey.”

“Exactly. Then everything blacks out. The book drops the curtain, so to speak, and I can’t see what caught the bird’s attention. I’ll tell you one thing, though. When I come back to myself, I’m ravenous.” His hooked beak opened and closed. “In fact, I think I’ll go out and get that cheeseburger now. Maybe a couple.”

“Munchies?” Dad may have been stuck in a falcon’s body, but he didn’t share his host’s taste for raw, still-squirming meat. Dad’s favorite hunting ground was Munchies, a fast-food restaurant in Deadtown, where one of the zombie short-order cooks had taken a liking to him. Dad hadn’t spoken or anything, but whenever the white falcon appeared, the cook would toss a cheeseburger upward and watch admiringly as the bird caught the food in his talons and climbed into the sky.