“I’d walk away from you in an instant,” I said, having finally decided I could afford to do just that. “I find things for a living, Devich. That’s what I do. Now that I know who else has the same information, I don’t really need you at all. You piss me off again, and I’ll go right to the source, passing you over entirely.”
He made a soft sound over the line, part amusement, part…pity? “You can’t get to the Gatekeeper, Alexandra,” he said, and I ground my teeth together at his repeated, familiar use of my first name. That was going to have to stop. “Not unless you’re willing to die again.”
Was that a threat?
“I’ll do whatever it takes,Troy.”
This time, Devich actually chuckled, while blood boiled audibly in my ears. “I’m starting to actually believe you would.”
THIRTEEN
After hanging up on Devich—who had the decencynotto try calling me back immediately—I should have gotten five good hours of sleep. Yet despite exhaustion and bruises too numerous to count, I couldn’t drift off. Maybe it was the steel cuffs still chafing my wrists. Maybe it was fury at Devich smoldering throughout my body. But it very well could have been the idea of falling asleep across the room from a rapidly healing hellhound.
Even in his sleep, Orthus was one of the scariest things I’d seen in my two-plus centuries of been not-quite-dead. He lay across the atrocious, shiny gold comforter at an angle, his stubby tail near the bottom of the mattress, his pointed ears propped on the right-hand pillow. He took up most of the full-sized bed. And he was growling in his sleep, his lips curled back from his mouth to reveal blood-stained yellowish teeth, pointed and sharp like daggers. Even the peaks of his molars were pointed, which was just plain bizarre. One bite from a mouth like that would shred skin and muscle, and as demonstrated on Berg’s spine, the hellhound’s jaws were more than powerful enough to snap bone.
By the time I climbed into the empty bed across from him, his bullet wound had almost totally closed and had long since stopped bleeding. Only the blood-matted fur around what appeared to be a dimple in his flesh betrayed the fact that he’d been shot in the head less than two hours earlier.
I was sure—based on my own experience in that arena—that as soon as he was completely healed, he’d wake up, likely hungry and in a very foul mood, and I didnotwant to be asleep and defenseless when that happened. Just in case. So I slept fitfully, waking every few minutes to make sure he hadn’t moved.
By noon, he was waking up, and I was starving. My nap was over.
I dressed quickly in layered black shirts, a snug pair of jeans, my leather jacket, and a pair of low-heeled hiking boots. When I emerged from the bathroom with clean teeth and a wet toothbrush, I found Orthus on his bed, watching me through flashing red eyes.
“Hey, Van Winkle. You hungry?”
He blinked and nodded, yawning to show off two rows of dagger-teeth as he stepped easily from the bed onto the floor. He looked as good as new.
I left my key card on the dresser because I wouldn’t be formally checking out of the Mahone Bay Inn. However, Iwouldbe using the free lunch voucher I’d found in the top drawer of the pressboard dresser. According to the coupon, I was entitled to one free quarter-pound burger with the purchase of another at the regular price.
“You like hamburgers?” I asked Orthus, closing the motel room door behind us. He blinked at me again, but this time I got the distinct impression that he was actually trying to frown. “No? How ‘bout chicken?”
As I was shoving my travel bag into the trunk of the rental car, the door to the room next to ours opened, and a man in his thirties stepped out with a life jacket in one hand and a fishing pole in the other. Orthus growled from three feet away on the sidewalk, and the man’s head swiveled slowly to look at him.
The guest’s eyes widened, and his breathing sped noticeably. Orthus stepped forward, his lips curling back from his teeth. His growl deepened so that my head buzzed with the sound. He sniffed the air—his nose easily chest high on the poor man—and took another step toward him, tail wagging back and forth slowly.
I realized with a start that the hound was stalking his breakfast—on the sidewalk in broad daylight. “Orthus, no!” I ordered, slamming the trunk shut on my luggage. “We don’t eat tourists!”
The hound turned at the sound of my voice, and the guest spun on his heels. His hotel door slammed shut, followed by two distinct clicks as both locks were set from the inside. On the concrete in front of his room lay the abandoned lifejacket and fishing pole.
“I wouldn’t have let him eat you!” I called out, but the man made no reply. Hands on my hips, I stomped onto the sidewalk, frowning down at the hound with the scariest expression I could muster. “I don’t know what the goblins fed you—” Although I could guess. “—but as long as you’re with me, you cannoteat people. Well, except for the bad guys. ButIget to say which ones are the bad guys. Got it?”
Orthus growled, but then he bobbed his head slowly. Reluctantly.
“Good. You take one unauthorized bite, and I’ll leave your ass in Nova Scotia.” For all the good that would do. For all I knew, the damn thing had his own personal shuttle service. How else could he have followed me from Tennessee to an island in fuckingCanada?
Orthus climbed into the back seat through the door I held open for him, and I drove to the fast-food place across the street to claim my free sandwich. We used the drive-through—where Orthus frightened the poor cashier right out of her paper hat and headset—then ate in the parking lot, still sitting in the rental car, while I went over the rest of our trip in my head.
I tossed the patties from two double burgers onto the back seat for Orthus and ate the remaining quarter-pound hamburger in near silence, sipping from a large Cherry Coke as I watched the hellhound in the rearview mirror. He glanced at the processed meat in disdain, then stared out the rear windshield while I finished my breakfast. Or was it lunch?
“Hey!” I called to him over the seat as I wadded my wrapper into a ball and dropped it into the take-out bag. “What are you, a food snob? You don’t like ground beef?”
He growled angrily and swatted the meat onto the floorboard, then folded one paw over the other and settled his chin on top of them.
Guess not. But if he was holding out for something fresher, he was out of luck. I probably should have let him munch on one of the goblins before we’d thrown them down the pit. But maybe I could stop for some raw meat on the way to the airport.
Speaking of which, I still had no idea what I was going to do with the dog. As far as I was concerned, anyone who’d chewed through someone’s neck to protect me had earned his place at my side, and I was perfectly willing to charge Devich the cost of the hound’s last minute plane ticket. But I was relatively certain the airline would wantnothingto do with Orthus.
Hmmmm. What to do? Evidence seemed to indicate that Orthus would show up wherever he wanted to be, no matter where I left him. But I couldn’t count on him showing upwhenI needed him unless we traveled together.
