Page 11 of Hounded (Fire & Brimstone)

11

Loren

Brooklyn, New York April 8 th , 1922

There was a scent in the air; something I didn’t recognize. New York had changed in the time I’d been away from it. Cars rolled down the streets, and electric lights set the nights aglow. Buildings soared into the sky, and the subway rumbled underfoot. But the smell was new. It felt warm and tasted sweet, and it grew more potent the farther I roamed from the bustling city streets.

Down an alley toward a darkened doorway, the aroma became almost tangible. I strained my eyes as though I could see it leading me. The locked door should have turned me away, but my hound howled inside me, thrashing like I was a cage holding him back. He wanted to break in and see what had lured us. I hesitated.

Standing in the shadow of the building, my hound’s will overpowered mine. It took little more than a thrust of one shoulder to snap the brittle lock and allow me access to the lightless space beyond .

The smell of mold and rust with a chemical tang tempted me to cough. While my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I drew my polearm from a pocket of shadow, letting it stretch to its near six-foot length in my grasp.

The low ceiling forced me to stoop as I crept forward and almost walked into the chain dangling from an overhead bulb. I tugged on it, and the light hummed alive. Golden yellow beamed across the room, and I could discern my surroundings at last.

It was a shoddy excuse for a laboratory, with a long wooden table taking up most of the available space. Buckling leather restraints lay open atop it, and dark stains on the surface brought a fresh wave of that rusty odor I’d noticed before. No, not rust, rather the metallic notes of old blood.

Shelves lined the room’s perimeter, storing bottles of murky fluid and cups stuffed with gleaming golden flight feathers and tufts of brown hair. Crowded alongside those vessels were smaller vials filled with clear, shimmering liquid.

A scuffling sound spun me around, and I leveled my glaive, blade end glinting, toward the source of the noise. A whimper and more rustling answered my movement. Then, I spotted it.

A wire cage about three feet square sat on the floor. Through the grid of metal, I glimpsed a scrawny, wretched young man with his head crudely shaved sitting cross-legged in the cramped space. Plain, ill-fitting clothing swathed his huddled form, and rubber tubing trailed from a needle taped to his arm. He looked starved, and bruises speckled his exposed skin. A shudder shook me as I thought back to Hell’s kennels, where I had been stored in similarly squalid conditions for months on end.

The caged man met my gaze. His wide, golden eyes were sunken in the hollows of his gaunt face. He was younger than me, maybe by as much as ten years. I couldn’t tell if it was his build or the tight squeeze of confinement that made him seem so small.

I glanced around the room to ensure we were alone. My focus lingered on the wooden table and restraints while I tried to make sense of the scene I’d stumbled upon. The man—boy?—was a prisoner here, likely subjected to some manner of scientific experimentation. The inquiry that had no answer, though, was why?

The young man stayed deathly quiet as I turned toward him. A length of rubber tubing trailed from his arm, siphoning blood into a glass jar on the table beside him.

Treasure , my hound growled. Protect .

My glaive dissolved in a wisp of smoke, and I crouched to creep forward. At my approach, the captive shrunk into the corner of his cage.

The intoxicating smell I’d chased from blocks away was overwhelming now. It was coming from this trapped man. Something exotic and inhuman. I snuffled a breath, struggling to place it.

While I stalled, the fear in the young man’s too-round eyes struck a familiar chord in me. It ached.

Protect , my hound insisted.

I’d barely reached for the flimsy wire door when a commotion came from the edge of the room. Another man barged in. His arms were laden with medical equipment that he dropped in a noisy heap when he caught sight of me.

The intrusion drew me to full height or near enough to it. My head tipped slightly to avoid collision with the roughhewn ceiling beams.

While the newcomer stared, slack jawed, I produced my glaive and leveled it at him. “What are you doing here?” I demanded.

Sweat glistened on the man’s sallow skin, and his Adam’s apple bobbed through a hard swallow. “S-science,” he stammered. “Discovery.”

It wasn’t an answer. Not an acceptable one. I whipped the polearm through the air, using the bladed end to gesture toward the caged man.

“Why is he here?” I asked.

The scientist raised his hands and crept a few steps closer. “That is a valuable resource. An immortal being capable of sharing its gifts with humanity.”

Not his. Its . The distinction galled me.

I glanced at the young man again. His frail body trembled, and his chapped lips parted in a look of mute horror.

“What is he?” I asked gruffly.

The scientist drew nearer. “My newest discovery. A phoenix. Infinitely valuable. Powerful.”

“And all this?” I swung my weapon in reference to the room’s contents. “What is this?”

The scientist flapped his hand toward a wooden rack of glass test tubes. “Research. Samples.”

So, it was the phoenix’s blood, extracted and stored. Possibly his feathers, though he hardly looked avian now. And the small bottles were filled with what? Sweat? No. I remembered this myth—presumed myth until now. Phoenix tears had myriad magical properties. Healing, cleansing, some even claimed immortality.

Scanning the room yet again found more evidence of experimentation: scalpels, syringes, and rubber-topped jars trailing tubes. A scent distinctly separate from the phoenix’s sweet aroma tickled my nose. It smelled like burnt syrup, an odor I’d detected near opium dens where men gathered and smoked. There was no haze in the air here, but a few of the smaller bottles held thick, brown liquid that may have been injectable.

Remembering the tube attached to the man in the cage, I looked at him, wondering if the drugs were to blame for his dazed, docile state.

My hackles rose.

“You can’t have him,” the scientist declared. His voice held unexpected grit. “This is my life’s work. The fruit of years of labor—”

“ Years? ” I echoed, my voice a growl. An actual growl followed it, along with another pang of protective instinct.

Treasure , my hound urged.

Years. The devastating reality of that word hung heavily on me. I’d been a captive, too, only recently freed. I’d felt terror and despair while enduring the endless march of time. Years of imprisonment felt like lifetimes. Or the loss of lifetimes because it was the slowest form of death to wait and want someone to come while hope of escape rotted away.

My fingers tightened on the metal shaft of my glaive, and I nodded toward the man in the cage .

“He’s mine,” I said. And I wasn’t leaving without him.

The scientist looked from my weapon to me and back, and his resolve began to fade. “If you take him… at least leave my research. I beg you.”

I surveyed his “research” one last time. Bodily fluids had been extracted, feathers plucked, and hair shorn. This wasn’t a laboratory at all. It was a torture chamber.

Another growl edged out of me, rife with bloodlust that demanded satisfaction. When I faced the scientist again, my lips peeled back in a sharp-toothed snarl.

The shake of my head should have been answer enough, but I wanted him to know: “I will destroy every bit and you with it.”

My weapon cut through the air, swift and deadly. When the scientist’s head left his shoulders, the spray of his blood blacked out the light.

The memory remained a visceral one, even a hundred years past. Besides Indy’s physical symptoms, he’d been nonverbal and cried out every time I came near him. I’d feared he would run away as I had no means of containing him in my flat. My intent had been to free him, not keep him as a prisoner of my own. But he stayed like a ghost haunting my home, quiet anytime he wasn’t sobbing or screaming in the dead of night.

At a loss of anything else to call him, I used the letters tattooed on his arm to form a name: ND62. The two letters seemed to harken back to what his captor had called him: his “newest discovery.” I shuddered to think of sixty-one sad souls before him, trapped and tormented and stripped of their essence.

That first lifetime was brief. After six months, Indy burned out. Despite having been told he was a phoenix, I’d seen no sign of it prior, and was alarmed by the spectacle. I barely had time to mourn his passing before he returned, reformed from his own charred remains as a wholly new being.

He was almost unrecognizable. Bright and blissful with no memory of his ordeal or of me saving him from it. He talked, and laughed, and his smile was as blinding as if he’d stolen the sun. It made me all the more enraged to know what that cruel man had stolen from him.

Standing across from me outside the drugstore, Whitney turned toward the shop’s entrance.

“Don’t,” I blurted, then settled myself and tried again. “Whitney, don’t.”

Sweat dripped down my back, sticking my shirt to my spine.

“Don’t what?” he asked.

I blinked rapidly, fighting to keep my eyes from betraying me by seeking Indy out. “Don’t go in there,” I said. “It’s not… what you think.”

The other hound crossed his arms, and his golden collar glinted in the light. “ I don’t know what I think. How can you?”

I shifted, then tensed so hard my muscles twitched. Was it too late to run?

Whitney remained obnoxiously composed as he gazed past me at the drugstore’s interior once more. “That interesting fellow is watching us,” he mused. “He looks concerned.”

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw what he did. Indy kept post by the registers, but his focus had shifted from his phone to us. He squinted through the glass with his golden eyes glittering and his head tilted.

My treasure.

“You know him,” Whitney said.

“I don’t.”

My hound paced, trying to draw a territorial line between Indy and Whitney. His growl vibrated in my throat. Protective. Possessive.

I wondered if Whitney heard or sensed it somehow because he leaned in. His nose wrinkled through a deep inhale.

“The smell…” He snorted the air back out. “It’s on you, too. What is it?”

He crowded so close that I began to retreat. Stumbling, trying not to scramble away and look damningly guilty.

Whitney sniffed and snorted once more before declaring, “It’s not human.”

I’d thought the same thing when I first found Indy. Had the same realization. And Whitney was the better hound between us. Savvier, smarter, more loyal to our mistress and obliged to inform her of anything he found “interesting.” Especially when it also involved me.

I sidestepped to position myself between him and the path ahead. “I-I’ll go with you,” I stammered. “Back to Hell. I’ll explain to Miss—”

“He’s waving at you,” Whitney said .

With my back to the store’s entrance, I couldn’t see. Couldn’t turn again. Couldn’t think of anything to say.

“He’s coming outside,” Whitney said.

Indy didn’t wait long for anything, and he wasn’t inclined to obey instructions. Even explicit, important instructions.

My hound’s ears pinned flat, and his lips peeled back in a menacing snarl. All of his ferocity escaped me in a single, snapped word.

“Go.”

Whitney balked. “What?”

Bowed up and bristling, I told him again. “Get away. Leave.”

He turned his head aside. Not flinching but considering as his blond brows drew down. “What’s gotten into you?”

My hound howled, and I knew Whitney’s hound heard it because he finally stepped back. A vein jumped in his temple, showing a measure of the tension that had bound me up since the moment I spotted him.

“What is he, Lorenzo?” he demanded.

I’d asked the scientist the same. Insisted upon it. He’d told me, but I refused to tell Whitney anything. He already knew too much.

“Loren?” Indy’s voice snuck up from behind me, and my taut muscles loosened. Even my hound relaxed at the familiar sound.

Whitney could have seized upon the moment of weakness. My guard was down, and he must have known it. But, rather than barrel past me and get the answers to his questions, he gave a huff .

“Keep your prize.” He waved his hand before fixing me with a scowl. “But do your damned job so I can do mine. It’s tiresome having to follow you around.”

With that, the other hound spun on his heel and began a rapid retreat. Relieved as I was to see him going, there was more to be said.

What if he told Moira? Rather, what would he tell Moira, because he had to give her some explanation for his whereabouts and mine.

I should have asked him not to. I may not have been able to persuade him, but I should have tried.

A tap on the shoulder spun me around to find Indy holding his bags and frowning.

“Who was that?” He nodded in the direction Whitney had gone.

Rather than reply, I lunged forward and threw my arms around him. The embrace was a first for this lifetime and, while Indy’s body stayed stiff, I held on until my nervous jitters stopped and Indy mumbled into my chest.

“So, for lunch, I’m thinking drive-thru?”

There was a Chinese takeout place a mile or so from here he always liked.

I nodded, brushing my jaw against his hair before forcing myself to pull away. My thoughts scrambled, fitting together events that shouldn’t have been related but could too easily connect. Moira was making more hounds. She sent Whitney to keep tabs on me. He smelled Indy and knew immediately the same thing I had. My phoenix was precious and rare. A prize. If more hellhounds were being trained—it only took a few weeks—they would soon be prowling the Earth, sniffing out wayward souls and other interesting things.

Something had to be done, and I knew just the witch for the job.

Indy watched, waiting for me to move toward the car or do something more than stand and stare blankly at passing traffic.

I remembered what he’d said in the checkout line about his phone being wiped and having no contacts besides mine.

“You do know other people, Indy,” I said.

He brightened.

“At least one,” I added. “After we eat, I can introduce you.”

At my offer, Indy beamed. “That’d be great.”

I didn’t need people like Indy did. The numbers I’d deleted would soon be replaced with strangers he met and friends he made. I couldn’t stop that, but I could guide it, and Sully was as safe a starting place as any.