What was stalking toward us was definitely not from a litter. I could see Valin’s hand in its creation, feel his warped intelligence and twisted magic holding it together. I’d faced one of his ainmhi dubh before, standing shoulder to shoulder with an Unsidhe Lord, and while it seemed as if Valin was getting better at cobbling together his monsters, it didn’t appear as if he had gained any control over holding them.
He must’ve been using whatever creatures’ flesh he could find down by the border between SoCal and Mexico. The ainmhi dubh was mostly feline, or at least at one time had been perhaps a mountain lion, but its grace and elegance were long gone, burned away by the disjointed lengthening of its legs and the armor plating covering the joints. Its head was elongated, almost equine except for the curled-up and acid-dripping smile wrinkling its flaccid ash-gray flesh. Speckled with black patches, its body absorbed the uneven sunlight breaking through the thickening clouds, but the array of eyes scattered across its forehead gleamed red when it spotted me, and it took a step toward me, chuckling with low coughs, the turnoff’s asphalt smoking where its spit hit the ground.
“Shoot?” Ryder yelled, catching the ainmhi dubh’s attention. Its head drifted to a spot over my left shoulder, long enough for it to assess Ryder. Then its gaze came back to me, its eyes burning brilliantly in its misshapen head.
I didn’t answer Ryder. There really wasn’t much of a reason to, because no sooner had the word left his lips than the black dog attacked.
It was on me in a few leaps, but it was a long enough time to get a shot off. I was counting on Valin being a shitty mage, and for once, my gut feeling about my half brother’s skills was on point. He either didn’t listen to our father when Tanic was droning on about how to fortify a black dog’s defenses or he just didn’t care. Either way, I got a tickle of glee in my belly when my first shotgun blast hit its shoulder and punched through the joint, sending steaming, glistening dark blood gushing from its torn-up flesh.
The ainmhi dubh twisted from the momentum of the shot, tumbling to the side and landing hard. Scrabbling at the gravel, it righted itself, favoring its shot-through shoulder, and it screamed at me, a wave of fetid and rotting flesh. The magics holding it together seemed to be unraveling, or at least that’s what it felt like. The wrongness of its creation hung heavy in my gut, curdling in my stomach. It simply felt wrong. Patchworked together with an inelegant hand and little care taken in its creation, it quivered in place, trying to get its feet underneath it. Baring its long teeth, it dug in its powerful back legs, then coughed out a warning, eyes narrowed.
A bullet came whirring over my left shoulder, too close to my head for comfort, and I risked a withering glance at Ryder to warn him off, pulling my shotgun up for another blast. I caught half of an apologetic look and a grimace on his too-pretty face as the cat circled, lowering its shoulders to take another leap.
The bike rider squirmed a few feet away from my left foot, the front shield on his helmet cracked either from landing on his head or possibly poor maintenance before he decided to become black dog bait. I couldn’t see his face, but his panic was evident. His bare hands were bloodied from scraping on the bend’s hard ground, and from what I could make out, he was pleading not to be eaten.
“Yeah, you and me both, idiot,” I grumbled, stepping between him and the ainmhi dubh, tossing a prayer to Pele in the hopes Ryder wouldn’t accidentally shoot me in the back. “Come here, you asshole dog, so I can get a good shot in.”
The ainmhi dubh struck clumsily, its front paws flailing about and its maw snapping out of time with its leap. I let loose every bit of shot I had, and when it staggered from the hits, I twisted the shotgun about and slammed the stock into its wide head, hoping the crack I heard was its skull and not my weapon. Up close, its stench was even worse, and my eyes watered with it being near, stung by its acidic blood leaking fumes and its rotten-fish-and-moldy-tofu breath. It snapped at my leg but missed by a mile. Instead, its snout dug down into a bit of gravel, and I quickly pulled the shotgun back and loaded in another round, not caring if the thing chewed on the bike rider while I lined up my next shot.
The storm was finally over the mountain, crackling lightning and rolling thunder over us when I let loose both barrels into the ainmhi dubh’s head, breaking apart its forehead and dimming its red eyes. A splatter of its brains and blood erupted from behind its low-sweeping ears, a pair of horn buds carried off on a bit of ragged flesh from the blast, landing near its twitching back legs.
I wasn’t quite sure it was dead yet. Or at least what was left of its magic in its body wasn’t ready to surrender. Its systems were slow to shut down, and its maw continued to snap and grind rocks between its teeth. The ainmhi dubh was done, and I wasn’t about to waste any shot on killing it more.
I simply stepped back and let it unravel, its limbs and spine knotting and twisting about, searching for any bit of the intense hunger driving its malformed body.
A bullet buried itself inches away from the toe of my left boot, and I turned around to glare at Ryder. Tossing my shotgun up over my shoulder, I yelled, “What the hell?”
“Wasn’t me.” He held up his hands, dangling the Glock from his loose fingers. “It was him.”
Sure enough, the damned bike rider was lying on his side, facing the dying ainmhi dubh and holding what looked like a pistol left over from SoCal’s Wild West days. It was pitted and somewhat rusty, trembling in the guy’s shaking hand. Pissed off, I took my eyes off the ainmhi dubh long enough to kick the gun out of the bike rider’s hand and spit at the smoking spot on the ground.
The ainmhi dubh was groaning its final moments, and the battered, long-legged asshole we had just saved sat up gingerly, tearing off his helmet with a stream of grumbling complaints. He was skinny and pale, more of a scarecrow than a man, and his beak of a nose was bloodied, probably broken from being bashed into the front of the helmet. His hair was longer than when I’d last seen him but still a tangle of fine brown strands. One of his eyes was nearly swollen shut, but I recognized him as soon as he got himself free from the scraped-up helmet that probably saved his brain from leaking out one of the many holes in his head.
All things considered, I was seriously contemplating giving him another one and leaving him to the vultures to be picked over.
“Well shit,” I snarled. “If it isn’t little Robbie Malone.”
“It’s Crickets. I keep telling you, they call me Crickets.” He peered up at me as best he could, his face smeared with blood and bruised to hell and back. “And I know you told me you’d shoot me if you saw me again, but I was kind of hoping you’d take me to a hospital instead.”
Eight
“I HEARD about Dempsey,” Malone muttered through the gauze Ryder slapped on his cheek to staunch some bleeding. “I’m sorry—”
“Don’t even talk.” I briefly met his eyes in the rearview mirror, scowling. “I promised you the next time I saw you I’d put a bullet in your brain pan. That offer’s still on the table.”
I was pushing the Mustang hard to outrun the storm, but it chewed and spat in our wake. It was a losing battle. I couldn’t outrun the wind no matter how hard I tried, and having Malone in the back seat made my skin crawl. Ryder gave me a lifted eyebrow when I moved all of the weapons from the back, either stowing them away in the trunk or putting them next to him on the passenger side, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. The last time Robbie Malone allegedly had my back, he’d driven a knife through my spine and tried to sell me off to a crazed Unsidhe woman with delusions of godhood.