Page 125 of Hounded: Ashes to Ashes

My hound whimpered and circled, ill at ease while I rejoiced. Indy was alive. Moving and breathing and, while I watched, slowly waking.

Golden eyes fluttered open, cutting through the darkness to fix on mine.

“Hi, baby,” he rasped.

I scooped him up, moving swiftly but carefully until I had him seated across my lap. He felt wrong somehow. Too limp. Too light. Too… cold.

He blinked again, dazed and leaning hard against me. Any other movement seemed to be beyond him, and his head lay in the hollow of my shoulder as though he lacked the strength to lift it.

“Nero’s dead.” His lips curved a wavering smile. “And I think…” He swallowed audibly, and I would have sworn I heard the sandpaper in his throat. “I think I might be, too.”

“No,” I assured him while I flooded with doubt. “You made it. You’re okay…”

The light in his eyes dimmed—pale yellow overtaking the gold. They looked faded amidst the ash peppering his face. Aged. Old.

“I’m not,” he whispered, and his smile was so, so sad.

The last few days had been spent in tears or near them, so I wasn’t surprised to feel hot tracks cutting down my cheeks.

Indy made a soft, soothing sound. I knew he would have reached for me if he could. Cupped my face. Held my hand. Instead, he stayed still.

“Don’t cry, Lore,” he murmured. “That’s my job.”

I’d seen the end enough times to recognize it. This was different, but profoundly the same. I couldn’t deny it.

“I’m taking you home.” The words cut me on the way out, and the taste of blood filled my mouth.

A flicker of brightness lit Indy’s face. Dwindling sunshine. Dying light.

“Yeah?” he asked.

I nodded, wanting to reassure him but stricken once more with silence. A touch on my shoulder made me jump, and I glanced back to see Whitney standing over us.

“We should hurry,” he said.

My head wobbled another nod as I stood, lifting Indy like he was nothing. He loved being carried like this. Loved ringing his arms around my neck and rubbing his face in my hair. But now he hung limp in my grasp.

I stumbled into the hall and found an open patch of wall. Bending carefully, I traced a doorway, then stepped back to let Whitney pass. He paused at the threshold, likely wondering as I did what happened to souls robbed from Hell. We had no guarantee he could leave this place. It seemed too simple; a power I’d not been privy to. But that was no surprise. Moira never was one to share secrets with her pets.

The brief hesitation ended when Whitney thrust one foot forward, crossing from this realm into a better one. Going home. His home, too, I supposed. And I hurried out after him.

We arrived in Sully’s flat in the aftermath of battle.

The invading hounds were gone, and Sully, Abigail, Gunnar, and Dottie were in mid-cleanup. They spun toward us, theirarms loaded with shards of broken furniture and mouths agape, but I barely spared them a glance.

Gasps and surprised exclamations bounced off my brain as Sully rushed toward us. She got one look at Indy, unresponsive with his eyes shut and his breathing dreadfully shallow, then she tugged on my arm.

“Take him to my room, Lore.”

I was already headed that way, leaving her with Whitney, who had survived his journey from Hell. As I left, my hound’s ears tuned to the sounds of their reunion, their joy at odds with my anguish.

In Sully’s room, I laid Indy on the bed, atop the quilt that reminded me of my sister. She had been bundled up and buried in something similar, and part of me wanted to strip it away because no, I wouldn’t bear witness to another death. I wouldn’t give up another precious thing.

But he felt cold, and the quilt would keep him warm, so I wrapped him in it then crawled onto the mattress beside him, tucked in close the way we slept most nights.

The light of indoors showed more clearly what had been obscured in Nero’s chambers. Indy’s skin was gray but not burned, and his purple curls were peppered with thick, black soot. He looked like a chimneysweep, like he should have been wearing a flat cap and suspenders and toting a broom on his shoulder. Instead, he wore a crop top and hip-hugging jeans that had scattered ash all over Sully’s bed. And he was so still.

I closed my eyes and breathed him in, wishing for a whiff of the honeyed amber sweetness the warding spell had long ago deadened. Now he smelled like acrid smoke and days-old perfume, and I missed him. I had been missing him since the day Evander told me he had to go.

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