He took a quick glance back over his shoulder and saw the Hound drop to all fours as he lurched into a graceless, efficient run. It wasn’t quite the same locomotion as a canine, but closer to it than seemed possible with more or less human anatomy. Slaver dripped, pink-tinged and frothy, from the narrow, scarred muzzle and splattered the ground.
Hill flinched into a misstep. His foot slipped off a low step and pitched to the side. Davy caught him with a tentacle under the arm and one under his ass. A rough shove from both straightened him out and propelled him after Davy.
“He’s catching up,” he said in a thin, tense voice.
“Good,” Davy grunted.
Hill gave the back of Davy’s neck a confused glare. “Good?” he spluttered out a challenge to that statement.
A tentacle snapped out and grabbed a nearby pole, pale flesh wrapped tight around the tar-dark, splintered wood. It tensed into a yank, and Davy gave a quick, uncomfortable shudder before he turned that way. He saw the pole just in time to throw his hand up in front of his face, but it came apart before he could touch it, ripped like paper, and stitched itself back together again behind him.
Just in time for Hill to nearly end up floored by it. He just about managed to dodge past it, swapping one set of supportive tentacles for another.
“Asshole,” Davy muttered as he swiped one hand at the tentacle without breaking stride. Some of the other tentacles joined in, a knot of pinching and pulling flesh. While they worked out—whatever that was—Davy headed on down the narrow alley. His voice was ragged and breathless as he tossed an answer to Hill over his shoulder. “And yeah. Don’t want him to catch up, but don’t want him to fall behind either. Sweet spot of about…ten feet.”
“How do you feel about six?”
The truth was somewhere in between, but a sour part of Hill wanted Davy to feel the same wet twist of fear drag his stomach toward his asshole. All he got was a grunt and a tentacle in the small of his back as Davy shoved him out in front.
“In that case,” Davy told him, “move your ass.”
Hill grimaced but did his best. He was pretty sure that his view had been better than Davy’s, but fear and the lack of lactic acid were on Hill’s side. A ragged, stained sheet flapped from a loose line strung over the end of the alley. He slapped it aside, thefabric clammy and sour, as he staggered out onto the next street and almost bumped into the Hound.
Theybothrecoiled from the contact, and the Hound flattened its ears as it flicked its pale tongue over snagged teeth and black lips. For the first time, it occurred to Hill that the Hounds had good reason to be scared of him too. It didn’t make him feel any better.
He froze for a beat, his legs no longer taking instruction from his brain, but the tentacle in his back shoved him unceremoniously into the street. Hill tripped down the curb and into the path of a black hearse-like car. He flinched at the blare of a horn and fell on his ass before he realized the helpful tentacles had abandoned him.
Shit.
The driver of the car started to open their door. Hill got a glimpse of a heavy, sour-looking face that somehow managed to look florid even in the undersaturated light of the Beyond. Something about the thickness of the skin and the shape of the nose gave the impression he’d have been choleric in his coffin. Before the scowl could be fully deployed, the Hound slammed a thick, paw-like hand flat on the window and shoved it shut. The edges of it crushed the man’s finger and split the skin. He started to scream, then saw the big canine head turn his way, and choked the noise back.
During the brief distraction, Hill scrambled to his feet and bolted.
It would havehelped, he thought as he dodged between cars that braked and those that tried to keep going out of the area,if Davy had given him any idea what the plan was.
If there was a plan yet, he supposed.
He glanced back and saw both Hounds behind him now, and an overtaken Davy lagging behind them. They had a briefshoving match, culminating in snapped teeth and snarls, to establish who took point as they moved to cut him off.
What happened, Hill wondered for the first time, if there was no spirit to put back in his body once the Invocation window closed? Would it just drop, like a puppet with its strings cut? Or would Davy, in lieu of any other claimant, just get to keep it?
The notion probably should have scared him, but…
Maybethatwas fair. Whether Davy held a grudge or not, Hill’s dad had been party to cutting his first life short. What better compensation for that than a second chance? And, if Hill was honest, Davy would probably make more of Hill’s life than Hill had to date.
The dragging self-pity in that thought tickled the corners of Hill’s brain with the static white rush that had leveled the cafe. Unfortunately, the flash of relief he felt at that banished it again.
Great. That was a fucking useless power.
Hill caught a glimpse of something gray-white and emphatic out of the corner of his eye. A glance that way showed Davy’s tentacles raised as he gestured emphatically toward…
Another alley.
More running? So far, that didn’t seem to have done much good. They’d not gained any ground on the Hounds; if anything, they’d lost it. But since Hill didn’t have any better ideas, he scrambled in that direction.
He dodged a woman coming out of a butcher’s shop, a haunch of something wrapped in dripping brown paper cradled in her arm, and threw himself into the alley. A lifetime of movies and TV shows had primed his brain to expect to see a startled arch of a cat or a spooked rat scurrying for cover.
Except he’d not, he realized, seen an animal since he got here. Just the muzzles.
