Page 95 of Hounded: Ashes to Ashes

When our hips bumped into each other, I felt the buzz of my phone again. This time, I answered it.

“Hey, Sully?—”

“Indy?” she blurted. “Indy, get Loren.”

Her voice was so loud Loren must have heard it because he whipped around.

“He’s here,” I said before a rush of fear almost silenced my next question. “What’s wrong?”

Rapid breaths crowded Sully’s words as she said, almost sobbed, “They found the gallery.”

Loren

My stomach had been boilingwith acid since I stepped on the stage at High Notes. Really, it started before that. It kept me awake all night while Evander’s words from the day before played on a loop in my mind.

Indy was dying.

I was losing him.

For the last time.

With his life cycle on a relatively predictable schedule, I often knew when the end was near. I put a dot on the calendar. A tiny speck of a mark he never noticed, but it loomed large to me. It seemed we were always racing toward the end. Counting down days. That was what I’d asked the angel for: a few days.

It wasn’t enough, but I planned to make the most of it. Tears and grieving could wait until Indy was gone. I would nurse my heartache privately next week, when the world would be less sunny, less whole. I would mourn my treasure then. For now, I needed to be present, and I’d managed that well enough until Sully’s phone call.

We didn’t ask who she meant when she said “they” found the gallery. She may have explained, but I didn’t hear or register itover the rush of urgency that had me dropping bills on our table and dragging Indy out of the piano bar so fast his heels must have skipped over the pavement.

We drove across town, weaving through traffic and racing yellow lights all the way to the Urban Easel. I saw it before we parked: the broken glass, the front door ripped from its hinges, the lights inside flickering and blacked out in places, the art…

Once we were inside, I got a better look. Black blood splattered the walls, the floor, and the canvasses. I recalled my thoughts of decorating the space with Joss Foster’s vital fluids a few weeks earlier. Now I realized how macabre, how wrong, it would have been.

Partition walls had been toppled and their surfaces shredded by what must have been claws. The smell of sulfur thickened the air, a lingering aura more powerful than what would have come from mere hellhounds. I’d smelled it in the motel rooms where Nero kept me prisoner for weeks on end. He’d been here. This close.

The bile churning in my gut surged upward, and I gulped it down, then pulled Indy closer to my side. He hung on with his fingers dug in around my waist and his face slack in horror.

They’d come for him. They found the gallery because I stole the witch’s bag. I led them here so directly I may as well have drawn them a map.

We made our way across the floor, sidestepping splintered frames and ripped pieces of canvas. For the first time, I was grateful Indy would be gone soon. In Ohio and now in Brooklyn, I’d put him at risk of more harm than I’d spared him. Maybe he was better off apart from me. Permanently.

The gallery should have been empty this late at night, but it was packed. Gunnar, Dottie, and Abigail huddled near the walls, away from the center of the room that bustled with uniformed police officers. In the corner by her desk, Sully and Whitneyconversed with a pair of cops. Rather, Sully talked while leaning on Whitney, who stood as staunch and solemn as ever.

The four of them were wrapping up their discussion by the time Indy and I came into earshot. Thank yous were exchanged as the policemen closed their notepads and shook Sully’s hand, then Whitney’s.

He looked settled in here, and I wondered when it had happened. I’d trusted him enough to leave him unmonitored in Sully’s flat, but I didn’t expect their relationship to be anything more than platonic cohabitation. I would have never anticipated the flirtatious glances they’d exchanged at Coney Island or the way he comforted her now, gently touching her arm and nodding as she sniffled through a mumbled string of words.

My hound wanted to growl. Scare him off. Claim what had once been mine. I was already losing Indy, surely I wouldn’t have to give up Sully, too. But I swallowed the protest and stopped at a respectful distance to wait until they spotted us.

I should have expected Whitney would notice first. Even with the magical wards muting our essences, his senses were keen. When he turned, Sully broke away from him to rush forward and throw her arms around Indy and me.

“We saw them,” she said, her face between ours and her voice as strained as it had been over the phone. “The demon. The witch. And more hounds… Mean ones…”

She drew back, tears rolling down her cheeks and making me wonder if I’d seen her cry before. Sully was typically unflappable and unbothered by things that would crawl under my skin and stick there. I didn’t realize how much I relied on her for that until I saw the fear running rampant on her face.

“Lore, they’re not like you.” Her gaze panned wide, and I realized we’d been joined by Gunnar, Dottie, and Abigail. “They’re not like any of you,” she added.

The cops continued picking through the wreckage, and I wondered what she’d told them about the splatters of black blood and dozens of art pieces ruined by savage claws and teeth. Any excuse besides the truth would have been too fantastic to be believed, but humans had a way of weaponizing logic. They used it to strike down anything that didn’t fit in the confines of “normal,” so the NYPD likely swallowed whatever lies Sully spoon-fed them without batting an eye.

She may not have been able to tell our mundane neighbors the truth, but she could certainly tell me, and I expected her to.

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