Page 68 of Hounded: Ashes to Ashes

No one answered my knock, but the fragrance of amber and honey was too potent to deny. Indy was here. So close it was like I could reach through the door and touch him. Grab him and pull him to me, tell him I was sorry and that he was safe. I wouldn’t leave him again.

I’d made that promise before. Fortunately, Indy didn’t remember all the times I’d broken it.

Grabbing the knob, I rattled it side to side. It didn’t yield, but neither did I. A door made for a flimsy obstacle between my treasure and me. My hound snarled, and I echoed the sound, then reared back and kicked the slab of wood.

With a loud pop, the frame cracked, and the door swung inward.

It was dark inside, like I’d seen from the street. Dust motes drifted upward, glinting in the sunlight that cut around my silhouette. It was quiet, too, with no cries of alarm or cursing to answer my entrance.

Unease prickled up my back, and I reached into the shadows across the threshold and drew my glaive.

I softened my footsteps as I entered the living area. A dilapidated couch and a few bean bags surrounded a low table piled with ashtrays, beer bottles, and glass bongs. The bulky wooden entertainment center had once housed a television and maybe a few speakers, but those were long gone, leaving only theshell of a cabinet. The house felt like a shell, too. Or a carcass, decaying from the inside out.

The kitchen lay directly ahead, but I passed over it in favor of the hallway branching to the left. Padding across the creaky floorboards, I went down the hall with my polearm tucked tightly to my side. There were three doors in total, one on each side and another at the end. All stood open. If I had been relying on sight, I might have needed to search them all, but my nose led the way.

The room on the right. I walked into it as though pulled, drawn on stumbling steps while heavy dread sank into my feet.

A bedroom, stripped of its furniture and bare save for a stained mattress shoved into the corner. A pane of cracked glass allowed the sun to beam into the otherwise dank space. And there, slumped against the wall with his head tipped onto the low windowsill, was my doll. My darling. My heart.

Indy’s pink curls were damp with the same sweat that glistened on his bare chest and streaked mascara down his cheeks. He was half-dressed, stripped to one elbow-length fishnet glove and a miniskirt. His ungloved forearm was dotted and bruised from multiple injection sites, the purplish stains dark on his pale skin. It reminded me of how I first found him: locked in a dank basement and trailing tubes full of poison.

Sickness roiled in my gut, and my glaive wisped away as I darted forward and hit the ground on my knees. I gathered him to me, onto my lap, cradling him as his head lolled back. His eyes were closed, and his chest stirred with the shallowest breaths.

A rubber strap cinched around his bicep, denting the muscle on both sides. My lip curled at the sight, and I hooked one of my shadowy claws beneath it, cutting through with ease. I moved my hand to his face next, cupping his jaw, thumbing across his cheek, staring like the force of my gaze alone would wake him.

He didn’t even like injectables. Wasn’t his scene. But nothing was off limits when he was already high. Already lost to reason.

“Loren?”

It wasn’t Indy’s voice, and I gripped his body tighter as I spun around. Kneeling with my back to the door and the hall beyond, I was vulnerable, cornered, and my hound felt the press. A snarl ripped out of me before I saw who spoke.

A dark-skinned man with burred black hair stood in the doorway. He had his arms crossed, his head tilted, and a somber frown drew down the corners of his mouth. The sight of him made my fine hairs stand on end.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I snapped.

Evander freed his hands to raise them as he advanced into the room. He made it two steps before I growled and flashed my teeth at him, all the while hugging Indy closer. He always felt small to me, almost ten inches shorter than I was and feather light. But he seemed frail now, so limp and waifish I feared I might break him if I held on as tightly as I wanted to.

“Relax, puppy dog,” Evander cooed. “We’re on the same side.”

Heaven and Hell were as opposite as they came. By that measure, so were Evander and I.

My snort was enough of a disagreement to prompt the angel to gesture to Indy.

“When it comes to him, we are,” he clarified.

“You didn’t answer me.” My fingers twitched with the desire to resummon my glaive. I’d never raised a weapon to the angel, and I wasn’t sure what would happen if I did. But I’d never craved it like I did at this moment.

Evander heaved a sigh, and his hands lowered a bit. “Try me again?”

“Why. Are. You. Here?” I bit off each word. “Did you…” My gaze fell to where Indy curled in my embrace, and my featureshardened before I turned them back on the angel. “Did you do this to him?”

“DidIput a damn needle in his arm?” Evander’s expression went from incredulous to stoic as he answered with a succinct, “No.”

My jaw clenched as I thought of whodidtie off Indy’s arm and show him where to stick the syringe. My informant at the club didn’t give me a name or description to go on, just this address, this desolate place where Indy had been abandoned. Discarded. Forgotten.

Something in me ached; a familiar old wound that flared up sometimes. Every time, really, when I found Indy in the peak or valley of his latest relapse. This was worse, though. More visceral than baggies with colorful pills that made him giddy. Those looked like candy and, if I didn’t know better, I would believe they made him happy. All I felt here was sorrow.

“He likes pills,” I muttered, struggling to make sense of it all. “Not… this.”

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