—†— CHAPTER TWENTY ONE —⸸—
The Hellhounds
The truck fought me every inch of the way, wood and iron rattling like they wanted out from under me, the whole machine trembling as if it knew exactly how badly I was abusing it. The Model TT was never meant to be hurried. It was built to crawl from field to field, to haul grain and lumber at a pace that assumed daylight, dry roads, and patience. Tonight it wasn’t getting any of those things. Tonight I was forcing it along a frozen dirt road in the dark, throttle lever pulled back, spark advanced just enough to keep the engine screaming without tearing itself apart.
The skinny tires dropped into ruts and followed them like rails, solid rubber on wooden rims offering no forgiveness at all. Every bump came straight up through the frame and into my spine. The steering wheel was unforgiving, kicking back at my hands whenever the road decided it wanted to go somewhere else. I had to fight it constantly, hauling it back into line, knowing that if I lost control for even a second, the truck wouldn’t recover. It didn’t have the weight or the grip for that.
I couldn’t see worth a damn. The headlights were weak and yellow, throwing two narrow cones that jittered and bounced with every washboard ripple, carving holes out of the darkness that vanished almost as soon as they appeared. They showed me just enough road to tell me how badly I was outrunning what little visibility I had. Snowbanks loomed at the edges of my vision, indistinct and treacherous, and the cold air leaking through gaps in the cab smelled like oil, dust, and old metal.
I leaned forward, squinting, trying to read the night ahead. I was thinking about distance, about how much farther it could possibly be, about how long it would take at this miserable speed. I was thinking about whether I was already too late, about whether pushing the truck any harder would just leave me walking the rest of the way. I was thinking about—
Something filled the headlights.
A dark mass sprawled across the road, too big, too close, wrong in a way my brain didn’t have time to sort out—
“Fuck!”
I yanked the wheel hard right. The truck lurched sideways, the rear end breaking loose instantly as the skinny tires lost what little grip they had. The right side dropped into the ditch with a bone-jarring crash that slammed me into the door and sent the entire frame shuddering like it was tearing itself apart.
The impact knocked the breath out of me. The wheel ripped out of my hands and snapped back, the front end pitching hard as the ditch tried to swallow us. For a sickening instant the whole truck tilted far enough that I thought we were going over, wooden wheels lifting just enough to make my stomach drop.
I hauled the wheel back, overcorrected, and the truck fishtailed violently, as the suspension bottomed out and the engine howled in protest as the wheels clawed uselessly at frozen mud.
“Come on,” I muttered, wrestling the wheel as the truck bounced and bucked beneath me.
The tires finally bit as the truck lurched. It scraped, and dragged itself back up onto the road, still sliding sideways for several yards before it settled into a brutal, teeth-rattling bounce that told me nothing about this situation was under control.
My heart hammered against my ribs so hard it hurt.
I forced myself to breathe and look back over my shoulder.
The thing I’d almost plowed into lay sprawled across the frozen dirt behind me, a cow’s bulk twisted across the road, its insides spread wide and steaming in the cold night air.
Beyond it, the fence line came into view, posts leaning at drunk angles, and past that I could just make out the low shape of a barn and the darker mass of a farmhouse set back in the fields.
“Keep going,” Remy said.
I grabbed the throttle lever and did exactly that. The engine clawed its way back toward its miserable top end, the whole truck shuddering as if it resented me for asking. My hands shook on the wheel, and I forced them to steady as the road stretched ahead again and the rest of it started to register.
Dead livestock lay scattered through the fields on either side, bodies ripped open and half buried in snow, the white ground stained dark and ugly wherever the headlights touched it. Three cows lay to the left, torn apart and steaming. Two to the right, one of them still twitching, legs kicking weakly as if it hadn’t realized yet that it was already dead.
The yard came into view all at once.
A body lay sprawled in front of the porch, torn open, blood spreading in a wide dark stain across the snow. A boy stood over it, maybe twelve years old, both hands locked around a shotgun that was clearly too big for him. The barrel wobbled as his arms shook, knuckles white with effort, eyes wide and fixed on what was coming at him.
The hellhound was already closing.
It was built wrong. Low and heavy, its broad chest almost scraping the ground as it ran, muscles flexing and releasing. Its head looked like a crushed skull, jaw too wide for its face, lips torn back to expose thick, uneven teeth slick with blood. Each breath came out in a wet, grinding pull, black smoke pouring from its mouth and nostrils, embers glowing deep in its throat as it gathered speed.
The boy fired.
The blast echoed across the fields and snapped the hellhound’s head back just enough to throw its stride off, but it didn’t stop. It barely even slowed, correcting instantly and surging forward again, the distance between them collapsing in a heartbeat. The kid froze, shock locking him in place, hands clenched uselessly around an empty gun.
I hit the brakes and shoved the door open before the truck fully stopped. Cold air slapped me in the face as my boots hit frozen dirt and my shotgun came up in my hands. The hellhound was already mid-bound, committed, muscles coiling as it launched toward the boy.
I fired.
The shot caught it in the air, twisted its body hard, and dragged its attention away from the kid. I didn’t stop. I worked the shotgun as fast as I could, recoil hammering my shoulder as I emptied it into the charging mass. The blasts ran together in a violent blur, each one slamming into charred hide and tearing smoke and black ichor into the night. The hellhound shrieked, staggered, hit the ground hard, and kept coming anyway.
I kept firing until the Winchester ran dry.
On the last round, the creature finally broke. It skidded, claws gouging frozen dirt, and turned, ember-bright eyes locking onto me with a sound that felt like hatred given breath.
“Run!” I screamed at the boy.
The word tore out of my throat. The kid finally moved, boots slipping on snow as he bolted into the darkness, and the hellhound came for me instead.
I dropped the empty shotgun and drew both Colts as it closed, firing as I backpedaled. My Colts bucked hard in my hands, the reports sharp and brutal in the open air. Rounds punched into its skull and chest, tearing chunks free, but it barreled through the impacts like they were nothing more than insults.
Then it hit me.
The collision knocked me off my feet and slammed me into the ground, air driven violently from my lungs as its weight crushed my chest. Claws tore through coat and vest and into flesh, raking my ribs as we went down together. We rolled, snow and blood smearing beneath us, the hellhound snapping and thrashing as I fought to keep its jaws away from my throat.
I jammed one Colt under its jaw and pulled the trigger until the slide locked back, bone and black ichor spraying across my face. I switched hands and did the same with the other as we crashed into frozen ground again, my back screaming as something tore open my shoulder and claws punched through to bone. Pain flared white-hot, sharp enough to blur the edges of the world.
It still didn’t die.
The Arcane blade materialized in my hand.
I drove it into the hellhound’s chest and twisted, screaming as burning ichor splashed across my skin. The creature bucked and fought, dragging itself along the blade before tearing free and staggering away. It made it ten yards before its legs finally gave out and it collapsed into the snow.
I lay there for a moment, gasping, the night tilting and sliding as my body shook with pain and cold. That was when the sounds reached me. A sudden, sickening realization that the noise I was hearing wasn’t coming from the yard at all.
Something inside the house was coming apart.
The sound of timber tearing loose hit me first, deep and wrong, followed immediately by a woman’s scream. Underneath it all, thin and terrified, were children’s voices, high and breaking.
“No,” I breathed, the word dragged out of me as I forced myself up. Every instinct I had screamed at me to get inside, to get to them before whatever was in there finished what it had started. I took a step toward the porch, blade clenched tight in my hand, already forming the thought that I had to—
—the side of the house exploded outward.
The wall blew apart in a storm of shattered boards and dust as the second hellhound burst through, bigger than the first, broader, its hide split wide with fire leaking through cracks that ran the length of its body. It hit the ground already moving and slammed into me before I could even turn.
The impact crushed the air out of my lungs again, and drove me flat onto my back, the frozen ground slamming into my spine hard enough to make my vision smear. Claws raked across my chest and shoulders, tearing through coat and flesh alike, and its weight settled on me with a deliberate, grinding pressure that told me it wasn’t rushing this. It didn’t need to.
I tried to bring the blade up. My arms shook and barely answered. The thing’s breath washed over my face, hot and foul, smoke curling past my eyes as its chest rose and fell against me. Its teeth closed in, inch by inch.
I couldn’t breathe. Blood filled my mouth, hot and metallic, and the hellhound’s weight crushed me into the frozen ground until something in my chest gave with a sharp, ugly crack. Pain tore through my back and shoulders and down my spine. My vision narrowed, the edges going dark as my body started to lose the argument.
This was how it ended.
The pressure finally broke as something ripped out of my core.
Heat tore through my chest, sharp and absolute, and my body convulsed as blood was dragged out of me in a violent rush, spraying across the snow. It felt like being gutted from the inside. Like whatever had been keeping me alive had just been torn loose with no intention of stopping.
He tore free of me like his caged essence had finally broken from its restraints, ripping up through my core in a violent surge that dragged blood out of every pore. It felt like my body had finally failed at holding itself together. Vast, black wings unfolded as he rose, immense, ethereal arcs of shadow edged in pale light, their presence bending the night around them as if the world itself were being forced to give way.
The hellhound barely had time to register what was happening before those wings stabbed outward, passing through the space it occupied and pinning it there all the same, ethereal frames spearing into its sides from either direction and locking it in place as it thrashed uselessly, smoke and fire pouring from its jaws. Az kept rising, the motion relentless, and a black blade formed in his hands as part of that same upward surge, his arms drawing it through a wide, sweeping arc that started low and ripped straight up through the hellhound’s body.
The force of the strike carried everything with it. Blood and black ichor exploded outward in a violent spray, fire and gore flung across the snow as the creature was torn apart from gut to skull, the sound of it ending mid-snarl as if something had simply reached up and cut it off. For a fraction of a second he held the two halves there, each one caught against the vast, unreal span of those wings, the night bowed inward around him under the sheer weight of his presence.
Then he flung them aside.
They hit the frozen ground hard and slid, steaming, before coming to rest in ruin. Az lingered for a heartbeat longer, wings still spread, his shape already thinning at the edges, and then whatever force had been holding him together failed. He came apart, collapsing inward and vanishing, and the blood that had been torn out of me to give him form spilled down in his absence, slapping wetly into the snow beneath where he had been.
I hit the ground at the same time he disappeared.
The pain came roaring back all at once. My body folded in on itself as the world pitched and spun, every nerve screaming as the cold seeped up through my spine. I lay there shaking, barely conscious, blood pooling beneath me and steaming faintly in the night air. Every breath was work. Somewhere deep inside, I could still feel him, but diminished now, shattered down to something thin and distant, whatever he’d done having cost us dearly.
Sound crept back in slowly.
The front door of the house opened. A woman tried to speak and broke instead, her words collapsing into sobs. The boy answered her, thin and shaking, alive.
Remiel’s voice cut through the fog in my head.
“The first hellhound escaped,” he said. “It is returning to the aperture.”
“No,” I rasped.
I rolled onto my side and the world lurched hard, pain flaring bright and fast as the ground tilted away from me. My vision tunneled, the edges going soft and dark, and for a moment it felt almost easy to let it happen. To let the night close in and take what was left of me with it.
“Get up, Nephilim.”
Remiel’s voice tore through the fog, loud and furious, leaving no room for distance or doubt, and my eyes snapped open as if something had reached inside my skull and yanked me back by force.
Air burned into my lungs. The pain came roaring back all at once, sharp and immediate, and my body convulsed against the snow as awareness slammed home. The truck was still there. The church was still out there. And I was not done.
I started crawling.
I reached forward, grabbed at snow that didn’t want to hold me, and pulled. My legs dragged uselessly behind me, every inch tearing at my spine like broken glass. I didn’t think about it. I couldn’t. I just kept moving, hand over hand, toward the dark shape of the truck waiting twenty feet away.
Blood steamed beneath me. The truck was right there now. I clawed at the frozen ground and dragged myself forward again, hand over hand, until my fingers finally closed around the running board. I latched onto it and hauled myself up, arms shaking so badly I nearly slipped back down.
The door handle fought me. My fingers didn’t want to work. It took three tries before the latch finally gave, and I spilled myself into the cab and collapsed across the seat.
I slammed the starter with my foot. The engine coughed once and quit, the vibration shuddering through the frame before dying away. I tried again, jaw clenched, easing the controls the way I remembered. It caught for half a second, sputtered, and stalled harder than before.
“Start,” I muttered. “Start, you piece of shit.”
On the third try it started. The engine shook itself into a rough idle, uneven but alive. I dragged myself upright, pulled the throttle back, adjusted the spark, and hauled the lever into place.
The truck lurched into motion, boards rattling and the frame shuddering as it crawled forward, the lights of St. Cloud bleeding into view through the smear of blood across my vision.