Like on a synchronized mechanical cue, half the hellhound pack rears up and attacks the raiders from the back. Ambush predators. They get their steel teeth into the prey’s throat and choke them or drive them headfirst into the ground and snap their necks. Hellhounds are strange and beautiful things. Candy would dig them. I’d love them more if I were seeing them from a little farther away. Like, say, France. The part of the pack not having thieves for lunch breaks from the larger pack and heads down my way. I look like a Hellion. To their bottled peanut brains I’m part of the gang they’re turning to chum. The strategy in this situation is simple. Run the other way.
I keep the na’at open. Waving it at these clockwork poodles would be like trying to scare King Kt">scare Kong with a lit cigarette, but it’ll clear the street of slow Hellions if they get in my way.
Jack’s been following me after all. He’s in the middle of the street a block down. I think he’s hypnotized by the hounds. He’s probably never seen them at work before. When he sees me coming, it snaps him out of it and he starts running. He’s not fast enough. I pass him easily, thinking of the old joke. When you’re running from a bear, you don’t have to be the fastest runner. You just have to be faster than the guy behind you.
I hear Jack behind me whining and shouting something. I don’t look back. I can hear the hounds’ clockwork legs and jaws closing in. They’re too fast. I’m not going to make it.
I cut from the street and onto the sidewalk. We’re not back to the suicide road, but maybe we can make our own killer road right here.
I slow down just a hair. Let the hounds get a bead on me and close in. I hold out the na’at. If I’m wrong, this is going to be a messy way to go, but it’s better than old age or being poisoned by bad clams.
We’re near a block of half-collapsed houses. As the hounds close in, I hold out the na’at and let it rip through the support poles holding the walls up. At first nothing happens, but then there’s a crash behind me, followed by another and another. It sounds like the whole block is coming down, but I’m not slowing down to look.
I hear a hound right behind me. It’s scraping and clattering like it’s taken heavy damage, but it’s gaining on me. I cut to the side, hoping the huge thing’s momentum will carry it past. It does and it runs right into a support post on the side of a house. I see it just before it happens and cut back into the street so I don’t get crushed. I outrun the wall. Too bad I can’t outrun the falling debris. Something clips me right above my left ear and that’s all she wrote. Hello pavement. I love you, pavement. I think I’ll stay here a while.
WHEN I OPEN my eyes a billowing black snake is crawling over me. Its belly is a furnace and its body is the whole sky and it will take the rest of eternity to pass. I can wait. If this universe burns, I have the other one that Muninn gave me in my pocket. Let the show roll on.
I WAKE UP flat on my back and moving. I’m on a flatbed with heavy wire mesh over the top. It’s being towed by a Unimog. Someone shifts and grinds the truck’s gears. There are maybe eighteen Hellions back here with me. Some sitting up. Some on their backs. Others are leaking clear blood where they were ripped open by big hellhound jaws. I recognize some of them. They’re the Hellions that were running from the hounds.
The Unimog hits a bump and one of the leaking Hellions blips out of existence.
Someone says, “That was a good trick back there with your na’at.”
I turn my head so I’m looking up. There’s a smiling Hellion looking down at me.
“So good I coldcocked myself with a brick,” I say.
Like a lot of Hellions, he looks like a spiky horned toad after some Hollywood plastic surgery. Slim down the cheeks and neck. A chin implant that gives him a long horse face. He’s bruised and battered. It looks like the beat-down took his stubby horns, too. But his big white canines are still there. Those really hurt when they dig into you. Trying to get a Hellion off when he’s got a good hold of you with his choppers is like trying to coax a moray eel into a round of minigolf with knock-knock jokes.
I rub the side of my head. There’s sticky blood in my hair. I pull the hood back up, covering up the blood. I touch my face. Good. Mammon’s skin is still there.
I lean on my elbows and look up front. The flame job and animal skulls wired to the front of the truck look familiar. This is the same damned posse that’s been chasing Jack and me since Pandemonium. The saps caught me and they don’t even know it. If I wasn’t flat on my back being hauled around suicide roads in a wire-mesh chicken coop to who the fuck knows where, I’d feel like a real winner right now.
“Where’s the guy I was with? A damned soul.”
“Oh, him,” the Hellion snickers. “He seemed like a nice guy. When you were out cold, he stole your bag and ran off.”
I feel around for the leather satchel with my face in it. It’s gone.
“A real nice guy,” snickers the Hellion.
I reach into my coat for Mammon’s flask of Aqua Regia, but it’s not there. The little prick even stole my booze. Now he really has to die.
I should have cut Jack loose the moment we saw Eleusis. I should have let the sinkhole take him. The goddamn angel in my head softens me up at those moments. Every time I think we’ve found a balance point, it shifts its weight one sneaky gram at a time until it’s standing straight and I’m flailing around like a blind man on black ice. I will not let God’s little bootlicker win. I’m a nephilim, you haloed fuck. You’re part of me and you better learn to take the bad, me, with the good, you, or I swear I’ll put a double barrel to my head and do a Hemingway. Then we’ll see which one of us is left to Mr. Clean the wall.
“I’m Berith,” says the Hellion. “Who are you?”
Shit. For fifty points, name a Hellion I haven’t killed.
“Ruax,” I say. I wait to hear “Ruax is dead” or “He’s my brother-in-law,” but Berith just nods.
I sit up and lean against the wire-mesh enclosure.
“Where are we headed?”
“No idea. Jail I suppose.”
A Hellion with a mangled arm pipes up.