Dog doesn’t feel like the right word. It’s as large as a man on all fours and hairless except for some white bristle along its back. Hound. That’s the only description that fits. It gives a huff and starts toward her in a loping, sidelong way. The distance closes between them quickly, twenty yards, fifteen. She can’t help but scream—and the hound drops down and springs into a leap. She stops mid-stride, pivots sideways, and swings her body behind a bookshelf.
She hears it clack its teeth. She hears the air swoosh, displaced by its body. She hears it hit the floor and fall on its side with a grunt. Then she hears it scrabble upright and start toward her again. She runs. She can’t see clearly—her flashlight wobbling and the shadows pressing in—but she runs as fast as she can, hoping she doesn’t catch her toe on a raised tile, slip on a fallen novel. And she can’t help but look back.
In doing so she nearly swings her flashlight into the fanged mouth of the thing. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, but she swears its tongue is black. In the split second it takes her to process this, she veers into the bookshelf—hard—knocking her shoulder into one of the dividers.
She hears something splinter—hopefully the wood—and her body spins painfully around before hitting the floor. She loses her grip on the knife and flashlight but holds the purse tight. The hound tries to slow, but can’t keep its footing on the tile. Again it slides past her, rolling over, righting itself with a snort.
She stands, and they face each other, both panting. A thick rope of yellow drool descends from its chops. The hound is too close. She can’t outrun it. So she changes her strategy. The bookshelf beside her is ten feet tall. She springs into motion and ladders her way up. One of the shelves snaps beneath her weight, and the books rain down on the hound, already below her. It doesn’t bark, but it whines in a way that sounds like metal sharpened on stone. She drags her body on top of the shelf, and rather than pause, she leaps for the next aisle.
When she pushes off, the bookshelf wobbles and groans. She hits the floor in time to see it slowly tip away from her. For a moment it appears as though it might fall back into place, but she gives it a shove and it loses its battle against gravity. With a great clack, it strikes the bookshelf beside it, which then tips into the bookshelf beside it, and then the next, and the next, dominoing onward, hundreds of books flitting their pages before thundering to the floor.
She doesn’t wait around to see if the hound survived. Before the last shelf has fallen, she is already bounding up the steps that lead to the exit on Eleventh. She hunts for the lock before realizing the door is open, gasping in and out with the wind. Something crunches underfoot. What turns out to be a pair of reading glasses. Daniel’s? Was he attacked when he left her earlier that evening?
She doesn’t have time to think, but she can’t help but feel a needle-prick of dread. She hopes he isn’t hurt, hopes he merely dropped his glasses, hopes he left the door unlocked because he was absent-minded and not dead. Because of her. This won’t be the last time she worries she’s brought harm to those close to her.
She races into the night, pounding forward, almost to her Volvo, the only car on the street. She fumbles in her purse for her keys, drops them in a puddle, and only when she crouches down to snatch them does she notice her tires. Flat. Slashed.
She regularly walks between Powell’s and The Oregonian offices. Tonight she runs. The sidewalks are gummed with leaves, and the gutters are creeked, and the streets puddled from the rain. She keeps swiping her face, everything blurred, from the downpour or her tears, she isn’t sure.
She is getting close—another block, hang a right, she’ll be there—close enough that her run slows to a stumbling walk. She breathes in ragged gasps. Her heart jitters in her chest. Her eyes pulse. She grips the purse with both hands as if it’s somehow holding her up.
Then her breath catches, though she needs the oxygen so badly. Because another hound is bounding toward her. It is one block ahead and on the opposite side of the street. This one is shorter than the other, with black spines of fur prickling its back. It does not howl or bark or snarl. There is no sound outside the splash of its paws.
Until the bus blasts its horn. The scroll of its electronic sign reads OUT OF SERVICE. The driver crushes the horn with his hand and opens his mouth into a black O of surprise. The hound tries to change direction, jackknifing in the middle of the street, but the bus catches it.
Its body strikes the grille with a wet thud. The brakes scream. The hound rolls under, thumped once, twice, by the wheels. The bus skids to a stop and leaves behind a black smear of what could be burned rubber but looks like blood. The hound won’t follow her any farther, though it wants to; its back legs remain still, while its front paws continue to twitch and claw the air.
A final burst of speed takes her around the block—to the marbled lower level of her office building. She shoves open the glass doors and enters the brightly lit foyer, where her heart jitters and the rainwater drips off her and she gulps for breath so that she might answer the security guard who stands from his desk and keeps asking, “What’s wrong, what’s wrong, what’s wrong?”
Chapter 9
SARIN SAYS THEY shouldn’t jump to any conclusions. Sure, it looks bad—a grotesque murder, the mark of a red right hand, a location proximate to the Rue. But maybe it’s a coincidence. Or maybe it’s a copycat.
She’s speaking to Juniper but talking to herself. She’s worried, he can tell. Her usual smirk has bent into a frown. She can’t decide whether to stand or sit. She smokes her way through three cigarettes in five minutes, dragging on them so hard, he can hear the tobacco sizzle. Normally, after a blood infusion, she gives off a ruddy glow, appears somehow fuller than before. Her face is caked with makeup, but the foundation seems to crack now, along her forehead, the sides of her mouth, as if she is aging before his eyes. She has unhooked from the donor bags, and her body is stamped with Band-Aids that she scratches at absently.
“But let’s say it is him,” Juniper says. “Let’s say it is Jeremy Tusk. Do we wait for the fight to come to us?”
She waves away his words as though they were smoke. “Tried that last time. Almost got me killed.”
“So what, then? Tell me what to do.”
She uses one cigarette to light another. “Did you come armed?”
He’s come a long way since that moment in the warehouse so many years ago. He holds open his jacket and shows her the shoulder holster that carries a Beretta Storm Compact and two clips. His utility belt is weighed down with a flare, a flask of holy water, and custom-made, iron-coated handcuffs. Then he hoists his pant leg, revealing the ankle-sheathed KA-BAR serrated knife.
“There’s my Boy Scout,” she says. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Where else?” The cherry burns bright and the smoke tusks from her nostrils. “When you’re hunting for demons, you go down.”
?