Page 101 of Hounded: Ashes to Ashes

He didn’t slow, and the world blurred. Sounds exploded behind us. Animal roars crescendoed over the clash of metal, and I shimmied until I could peek over Loren’s shoulder at the chaos.

Hellhounds were brawling in the middle of a fucking bowling alley. They swung swords like medieval knights or tangled on the floor, slashing with shadowy claws, ripping out chunks of skin and hair. I could barely separate one from another, or good guys from bad. It was the auto shop all over again, and I scraped the depths of my insides, that empty barrel that had once been full of phoenix magic.

I needed it.

Now, more than ever, I needed it.

I could end this. Save everyone; save myself.

I squeezed my eyes, clenched my fists, curled my damn toes, and dug into my core, searching for that spark. A fuse I could light. A faint glow in the darkness.

“Loren!” I snapped again through teeth gritted with effort. “Put me down.”

Bodies crowded around us, and I wasn’t sure how anyone had managed to catch up. Loren was faster than any human, and I doubted I’d done much to slow him down. Did he regret this? Could he see how wrong it was to retreat and leave our friends to fight… and die?

We were nearly to the exit when I braced both palms on Loren’s chest and shoved, kicking at the same time and internally apologizing for bruising the shit out of his shins.

He staggered, his legs tangling up in mine so we nearly fell in the middle of the rushing stampede. What I’d thought was a light crowd for the bowling alley managed to be a mob when they were tightly packed and funneling toward a single door.

Loren and I tumbled aside, out from underfoot where he landed with me on top of him, carefully cushioned so my knees barely grazed the floor.

We were down only a moment before he was scrambling to get up again, pulling on my arms to drag me along, never saying a word. His wild eyes were blind, seeing nothing but the path out, away. I knew he could fight; I’d seen him kill, but this was not a threat he was willing to face.

His fear should have inspired the same in me but, instead, it made mesad. Pervasively, oppressively sad. It made me want to pause the world and hold him, brush his hair and tell him it was okay. There was a reason he was my baby, in every version of us. My big, strong hellhound was a fragile soul. I wasn’t a strongperson—my century-long struggle with addiction was but one of the things that made me feel irredeemably weak—but I could be strong for Loren.

When I extricated myself from him, he caught my wrist andwhined. He whimpered and stared at me with his dark, round eyes, and he was so, so scared.

I bent in and kissed him, then took off, fighting the stream of people fleeing the scene.

As I got closer to the battle, I could hardly make sense of it. I was still grasping, shouting at the voice in my head to wake up. Help. Fight!

What would I do if nothing happened? I was making a target of myself, rampaging into danger without a weapon to defend myself. Someone could snatch me up. Lop my damn head off.

This was stupid. Irrevocably idiotic. But I forged on until I felt Loren’s warmth at my side. He brushed against me, clutching his glaive. The massive weapon barred across his body from shins to shoulders. I would have kissed him again because he was scared but so fucking brave, but we were close to the action now, and I needed a plan.

“Where’s the damned bird?”

A throaty male voice bellowed over the mayhem. It must have been the big man, the horned demon Nero, and I thought he was shouting at me. I spotted him with the witch, apart from the fray. The witch read from her book, chanting words I couldn’t discern while Sully knelt before them, held by an unseen force. Her body was stiff, and her skin was rapidly losing color.

Loren snarled, snapped his teeth, and surged forward with his glaive at the ready. I raced after him, struggling to keep up while my stomach twisted and flipped.

We were a few dozen feet away, and Loren was fast, but Whitney was faster. He came out of nowhere, a flash of blondwith his saber glinting. The sword sang through the air, cutting into the witch’s book and sending loose a spray of severed parchment.

The witch shrieked and stumbled back, but Whitney closed on her. So. Damn. Fast. His sword slashed again, silver blurring like a lightning bolt as it struck the witch squarely in the chest. Blood spurted in a macabre fountain.

The ensuing scream was horrific. When it petered out, I knew he’d killed her. Practically cleaved her in half. Her body collapsed on the floor in a swelling pool of red, and Sully toppled directly after, visibly unharmed but ghastly pale.

I would have kept moving, but the haft of Loren’s glaive barred across my waist and blocked my advance. We drew up short as Nero wheeled around on Whitney and gripped his throat in one mammoth hand.

Whitney swung again, burying the blade of his sword in the demon’s side where it seemed to stick. He heaved back, trying to free his weapon while Nero lifted him into the air.

I heard the crunch, though I wasn’t sure how. Amidst the racket, that sound seemed so loud, and I traced it to Nero’s white-knuckled fingers wrapping tightly around Whitney’s neck. His body twisted and jerked until he quit the sword and grabbed the demon’s arm instead. It was the slightest surrender, a last-minute bid for survival before Nero plunged his other hand forward in a punch that sank into Whitney’s middle, then pummeled straight through it.

The demon’s fist exploded through Whitney’s back, misting the air with inky black.

Loren let out a cry like I’d never heard, like he’d been struck instead. It was a howl, an eerily mournful sound, and it shook me all the way into my shoes.

Everything was blood. Red and black mingled on the ground, dripping from Whitney’s body where he hung impaled on Nero’s arm with his head lolled forward and lifeless.

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