Page 68
Story: Hounded: Ashes to Ashes
No one answered my knock, but the fragrance of amber and honey was too potent to deny. Indy was here. So close it was like I could reach through the door and touch him. Grab him and pull him to me, tell him I was sorry and that he was safe. I wouldn’t leave him again.
I’d made that promise before. Fortunately, Indy didn’t remember all the times I’d broken it.
Grabbing the knob, I rattled it side to side. It didn’t yield, but neither did I. A door made for a flimsy obstacle between my treasure and me. My hound snarled, and I echoed the sound, then reared back and kicked the slab of wood.
With a loud pop, the frame cracked, and the door swung inward.
It was dark inside, like I’d seen from the street. Dust motes drifted upward, glinting in the sunlight that cut around my silhouette. It was quiet, too, with no cries of alarm or cursing to answer my entrance.
Unease prickled up my back, and I reached into the shadows across the threshold and drew my glaive.
I softened my footsteps as I entered the living area. A dilapidated couch and a few bean bags surrounded a low table piled with ashtrays, beer bottles, and glass bongs. The bulky wooden entertainment center had once housed a television and maybe a few speakers, but those were long gone, leaving only theshell of a cabinet. The house felt like a shell, too. Or a carcass, decaying from the inside out.
The kitchen lay directly ahead, but I passed over it in favor of the hallway branching to the left. Padding across the creaky floorboards, I went down the hall with my polearm tucked tightly to my side. There were three doors in total, one on each side and another at the end. All stood open. If I had been relying on sight, I might have needed to search them all, but my nose led the way.
The room on the right. I walked into it as though pulled, drawn on stumbling steps while heavy dread sank into my feet.
A bedroom, stripped of its furniture and bare save for a stained mattress shoved into the corner. A pane of cracked glass allowed the sun to beam into the otherwise dank space. And there, slumped against the wall with his head tipped onto the low windowsill, was my doll. My darling. My heart.
Indy’s pink curls were damp with the same sweat that glistened on his bare chest and streaked mascara down his cheeks. He was half-dressed, stripped to one elbow-length fishnet glove and a miniskirt. His ungloved forearm was dotted and bruised from multiple injection sites, the purplish stains dark on his pale skin. It reminded me of how I first found him: locked in a dank basement and trailing tubes full of poison.
Sickness roiled in my gut, and my glaive wisped away as I darted forward and hit the ground on my knees. I gathered him to me, onto my lap, cradling him as his head lolled back. His eyes were closed, and his chest stirred with the shallowest breaths.
A rubber strap cinched around his bicep, denting the muscle on both sides. My lip curled at the sight, and I hooked one of my shadowy claws beneath it, cutting through with ease. I moved my hand to his face next, cupping his jaw, thumbing across his cheek, staring like the force of my gaze alone would wake him.
He didn’t even like injectables. Wasn’t his scene. But nothing was off limits when he was already high. Already lost to reason.
“Loren?”
It wasn’t Indy’s voice, and I gripped his body tighter as I spun around. Kneeling with my back to the door and the hall beyond, I was vulnerable, cornered, and my hound felt the press. A snarl ripped out of me before I saw who spoke.
A dark-skinned man with burred black hair stood in the doorway. He had his arms crossed, his head tilted, and a somber frown drew down the corners of his mouth. The sight of him made my fine hairs stand on end.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I snapped.
Evander freed his hands to raise them as he advanced into the room. He made it two steps before I growled and flashed my teeth at him, all the while hugging Indy closer. He always felt small to me, almost ten inches shorter than I was and feather light. But he seemed frail now, so limp and waifish I feared I might break him if I held on as tightly as I wanted to.
“Relax, puppy dog,” Evander cooed. “We’re on the same side.”
Heaven and Hell were as opposite as they came. By that measure, so were Evander and I.
My snort was enough of a disagreement to prompt the angel to gesture to Indy.
“When it comes to him, we are,” he clarified.
“You didn’t answer me.” My fingers twitched with the desire to resummon my glaive. I’d never raised a weapon to the angel, and I wasn’t sure what would happen if I did. But I’d never craved it like I did at this moment.
Evander heaved a sigh, and his hands lowered a bit. “Try me again?”
“Why. Are. You. Here?” I bit off each word. “Did you…” My gaze fell to where Indy curled in my embrace, and my featureshardened before I turned them back on the angel. “Did you do this to him?”
“DidIput a damn needle in his arm?” Evander’s expression went from incredulous to stoic as he answered with a succinct, “No.”
My jaw clenched as I thought of whodidtie off Indy’s arm and show him where to stick the syringe. My informant at the club didn’t give me a name or description to go on, just this address, this desolate place where Indy had been abandoned. Discarded. Forgotten.
Something in me ached; a familiar old wound that flared up sometimes. Every time, really, when I found Indy in the peak or valley of his latest relapse. This was worse, though. More visceral than baggies with colorful pills that made him giddy. Those looked like candy and, if I didn’t know better, I would believe they made him happy. All I felt here was sorrow.
“He likes pills,” I muttered, struggling to make sense of it all. “Not… this.”
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54
- Page 55
- Page 56
- Page 57
- Page 58
- Page 59
- Page 60
- Page 61
- Page 62
- Page 63
- Page 64
- Page 65
- Page 66
- Page 67
- Page 68 (Reading here)
- Page 69
- Page 70
- Page 71
- Page 72
- Page 73
- Page 74
- Page 75
- Page 76
- Page 77
- Page 78
- Page 79
- Page 80
- Page 81
- Page 82
- Page 83
- Page 84
- Page 85
- Page 86
- Page 87
- Page 88
- Page 89
- Page 90
- Page 91
- Page 92
- Page 93
- Page 94
- Page 95
- Page 96
- Page 97
- Page 98
- Page 99
- Page 100
- Page 101
- Page 102
- Page 103
- Page 104
- Page 105
- Page 106
- Page 107
- Page 108
- Page 109
- Page 110
- Page 111
- Page 112
- Page 113
- Page 114
- Page 115
- Page 116
- Page 117
- Page 118
- Page 119
- Page 120
- Page 121
- Page 122
- Page 123
- Page 124
- Page 125
- Page 126
- Page 127
- Page 128
- Page 129
- Page 130