So when I heard something odd coming up from the gulch behind us, my hackles didn’t have to go very far to be on alert.
I couldn’t identify the sounds—a faint scrabbling growing progressively louder and then the telltale crackle of something, or many somethings, working through the damp but unforgiving brush. Wiping my hands on my jeans, I jerked my head toward the Mustang, then growled at Ryder as I reached in through the open passenger-side window for the shotgun strapped into a sling behind the front seats.
“Get in. Now. Something’s—” The noise grew louder, a rushing scrabble up the gulch, and the brush growing up around the guardrail behind the automat erupted with movement. A grinding engine sound joined in—a whining, choking broken melody at odds with the snap and crackle from the brush. “Ryder! Get in!”
The gulch vomited up its chaos onto the bend, branches and weeds snapping as what looked like thousands of jackalopes crested over the rise. With cat-sized bodies heavy with muscle and plump with a growing winter pelt, they were a furry wave, cheeping and chittering in high distress, their antlers clacking together as they fled. Tiny claws scraped and tore at the ground in a mad rush to break away from whatever followed, and we were surrounded by the furry tide before I could bring the shotgun around. I fought to stay upright, nearly knocked over when one after another struck my legs. A few antler points dug into my jeans, but my boots kept most of my flesh safe from being torn open. One caught on a seam and its head nearly turned around, but it shook loose quickly, disengaging with a twist of its body.
“Here!” Ryder tossed me the leather belt Dempsey had modified for me to hold shotgun shells. “I’ll grab the Glock you gave me.”
“You’ll shoot your damned fool head off,” I retorted, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to stop him. “Stupid stubborn lordling.”
Leaning against the Mustang to support myself against the barrage of small bodies striking me, I fastened the belt quickly, letting it ride low on my hips, then braced to face whatever else was going to come up over the ridge. The spurt of a struggling motor grew louder, and the jackalopes didn’t seem to be thinning out. I was about to dismiss the whole thing as the wild-eyed mutant rabbits being chased by a bike or perhaps an anemic dune vehicle, but then came a roar, a sickly, blood-curdling scream filled with a rage and hunger I knew deep down into my bones, and my guts twisted in on themselves, caught on the seam of my life just as the jackalope had been trapped on my jeans.
An ainmhi dubh.
Both the bane of my existence and the source of a lot of my income, the damned black dogs seemed to be everywhere lately, and it was harder and harder to discredit Dempsey’s warning that they were hunting for me. Still, they’d hunted in packs or as loners long before I took up Stalking and had been the stuff of unleashed Unsidhe nightmares for an eternity, so I took Dempsey’s sharp words with more than a grain of salt—more like a whole deer lick with a Dead Sea chaser.
And there was now one coming our way, chasing a sea of jackalopes and some idiot trying to outrun it on something that didn’t sound up to the job.
“Hear that?” Ryder asked. “Can we get into the car and outpace it?”
“We can, but there’s someone in front of it.” The whining grew louder, choking and throttling on either the steep incline or a failing engine. “Get on the other side of the car. Shoot over the hood when the dog comes over the rise. And whatever you do, do not scratch the paint. Just got the damned thing back.”
“Well then you shouldn’t have brought it on the run,” he snapped back, but my glare hit the back of his head as he ran around the front of the Mustang to put a bit of cover between him and the ainmhi dubh. “Don’t get killed.”
“You’ll be fine. Keys are in the car. I go down, you get out of here.”
There wasn’t time to say anything more. Not when, still knee-deep in furiously scampering horned rabbits, a beat-up dirt bike broke over the lip of the gorge, its back wheel kicking up spurts of gravel and soil, then slammed into the thick metal guardrail running behind the automat’s pullover pad. The motorbike came to a shuddering, complete stop.
Its rider, however, did not.
He was all fractured limbs and keening, tumbling in the air toward the Mustang. The angle of his arc was high, a wide bit of air any snowboarder or skate kid would admire if only he had a board beneath him. And wasn’t screaming in terror. He smelled of blood and fear, curling up over my head, and I let him go, focused on the gulch and what he’d brought to our feet. I heard him land a bit behind me, an impressive feat considering I was yards away from the guardrail, but other than wincing at the sound of his body hitting the gravel-and-tar-patched asphalt, I didn’t give him another thought.
“Kai?” Ryder shouted over the screams of whatever was coming up the cliff behind the unfortunate biker. “What do I do?”
“Stay there and shoot at whatever pokes its head up!” I yelled back. “He’s not our problem right now.”
The bike rider had on a helmet, and from the corner of my eye I could see him moving, slowly and painfully but still at least writhing enough to assure me he was alive. Honestly, he was the least of my worries. We had to survive whatever he’d brought with him, and as the jackalope wave diminished, we were going to be the creature’s nearest source of food. I wasn’t going to pick the guy up and toss him at the monster he’d woken up, but neither was I going to bend over and kiss his boo-boos, leaving my ass open to get munched on.
He was either going to die or live long enough for us to take him to a medical center. Either way, I couldn’t spare him the time. I was too busy trying not to get us all killed.
I felt the ainmhi dubh before I saw it. Normally a black dog’s stench permeated the air before it made its appearance, but this one was different. Or least different from the ones I’d hunted down for bounties, turning their pelts in to the Post for cash. I intimately knew its malevolent aura, tasting it in the marrow of my bones and at the back of my throat. When its magic-shaped bulk finally clawed its way up the side of the gulch, I was ready for it.
Because while an ainmhi dubh was a perversion of nature, the thing coming toward us was nothing more than a pure abomination brought to life by Valin cuid Anbhás, my father’s disgraced apprentice and my older brother.
Ainmhi dubh were hungry—always hungry. Forged from magic and bits of flesh, they were the stuff of nightmares and the Unsidhe’s greatest weapon. Their powerful bodies were usually reptilian, patched with bits of fur and scale, with horns and wings, but most of all, armed with evil natures and mouths bristling with sharp teeth. Their insatiable hunger drove them to hunt, and only their creators’ will kept them in check. The more powerful the mage, the more powerful the ainmhi dubh, but there was a fine balance between pouring a lot of magic into a nearly uncontrollable simulacrum and being able to control it. The ainmhi dubh—the black dogs of the Unsidhe—fought against the restraints, eager to consume anything in their path, and all too often, they broke away from their creators, given too much power and not bound as tightly as they should be.
There were a lot of black dogs roaming the Western regions, their original hunts breaking free from their creators either from lack of control or because their master was killed during a conflict. They bred indiscriminately until the magic firing their blood died out, the litters getting weaker and weaker the further they got from the original creation.