Taking a deep breath, I slowed to a jog and then slipped effortlessly into a standstill, appraising my surroundings. Grass in severe need of cutting. Broken bottles with edges nearly as jagged as my unnaturally sharp fingernails. Abandoned lots, like this one, were the perfect hunting ground for Canis daemonum. My instincts had directed me to the right place.
Now, I just had to wait for the monsters to show.
In lore, hellhounds tracked down the souls of the damned and dragged them back to hell in bloody shreds. In reality, ’hounds were attracted to rotting sores, flesh marinated in dirt and grime, and certain chemical substances that found their way into the human bloodstream from time to time. They preyed on the weak, the degenerate, the homeless.
The kind of people that others ignored and forgot. The kind who weren’t missed when a government-protected species mowed them down. If the worst happened here tonight, there might be an article in the paper the next day. There might not. But either way, the rest of the world would just go on living, comfortable in the belief that it couldn’t happen to them, certain that the government had the monsters under control.
That they were the kind of thing that we could control.
Not tonight.
My heart didn’t race. My gaze never wavered. And as the fetid smell of rotting blood filled my nostrils, the unbearable pressure inside my veins fell away like a sand castle under the force of a wave. The entire world went still.
Perfect. Utter. Calm.
I crouched, reaching for my knife, feeling its weight, its balance, its edge. And then I lifted my eyes to stare directly into the blood-red irises of one beast after another as they emerged from the brush.
Three of them. Endangered, my ass.
The sound of the hellhound’s growl, like a chainsaw tearing through rusted metal, was the only warning I got before it leapt for my jugular. A human would have ducked. I leapt for its jugular.
Our bodies collided midair, and I buried my knife up to the hilt in one blood-red eye before my opponent’s superior mass and speed sent me flying backward, three hundred pounds of ugly on top of me. As my body slammed into the ground, I twisted my wrist and was rewarded with the sound of steel tearing through the hellhound’s thick, sinewy flesh. From this angle, I couldn’t get to the beast’s heart, but I had bigger problems. Like, for example, the claws digging into my shoulders and the massive jaw that had unhinged itself like a snake’s to aid and abet my prey in biting off my head.
Not so fast, Fido.
In a single, fluid motion, I jerked my dagger out of the monster’s eye and thrust my other arm into its mouth. Razor-sharp teeth clamped down over the bait, cutting through the flesh of my forearm like butter and snapping the bone.
The crunching sound wasn’t exactly pleasant, and the hellhound’s breath was killer, but other than that, I wasn’t really bothered. People like me?
We didn’t feel pain.
My blood splattered everywhere, but messy eater or not, the hellhound managed to get some of my flesh in its mouth, and the moment my blood touched its tar-black tongue, the beast froze, paralyzed. I jerked what was left of my arm out of its mouth and managed to drag myself out from underneath its carcass as it fell.
Game. Set. Match.
My prey wasn’t dead, not yet, but it would be soon. Even now, my blood was spreading through the hellhound’s nervous system, a toxin every bit as lethal as a serpent’s venom. I wasn’t planning on waiting for the creature to die from the poison, though. It couldn’t move. It couldn’t fight back.
Might as well cut off its head.
But first, I had to deal with its friends, who I mentally christened Thing 2 and Thing 3. Having seen their buddy’s demise, Things 2 and 3 must have known what I was (which, quite frankly, probably put them several steps up on me, since I had nothing more than a string of educated guesses). But even with the instinctual knowledge that they were about to see the ugly end of the Circle of Life, the ’hounds didn’t turn tail and run.
They couldn’t.
My blood smelled too, too good.
Since I wasn’t keen on the idea of letting either of the remaining beasts take a nibble of Kali-bits, I pressed the flat of my knife against the already-closing wounds on my left arm, coating the blade with my blood.
There was more than one way to skin a cat/decapitate a hellhound.
With my good arm, I flung my blade at Thing 3 in a practiced motion that left it buried in my target’s throat. Thing 2 was not amused. With a roar of fury that sent the smell of sulfur, already thick in the air, surging, the ’hound charged. Left with nothing but my own bloody fingertips, I let out a war cry of my own, raked my nails over its face, and fought like a girl.
Breaking the beast’s thick, leathery skin wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination easy, even with fingernails sharper than most blades, but I managed, because the imperative—you have to fight, you have to kill it, kill it now—was that powerful, that insistent.
Flesh gave way under my nails, and my blood mingled with the beast’s. The toxin was slower when injected, so instead of freezing immediately, Thing 2 and Thing 3 both began stumbling, their limbs gummed down by invisible weights.
“Sit,” I said as they staggered and finally went down. “Roll over.”
And then I smiled. “Play dead.”
A quick glance at my watch (which I wore on the hand I hadn’t fed to the hellhound) told me that I needed to hurry this along. I had three hours until my dad got home and another six before dawn—enough time to heal, but just barely.
“Knife,” I whispered. I felt a twinge, a ping in the back of my mind that told me exactly where my knife was, exactly how to retrieve it. Being what I was meant that I had a sixth sense for weapons—once I’d laid hands on a blade, a gun, a garrote, it was mine forever. I knew exactly how to use it. I could feel its presence like eyes staring straight at the back of my head.
I’d never lost a weapon, and I never would.
“Well,” I said, smiling at the blade as I tore it from Thing 3’s throat, “let’s get this show on the road.” The fact that I was talking to a knife probably said something revealing about my character and/or mental state, but the way I saw it, my weapon and I were in this together.
We had work to do.
Three decapitations later, my own blood wasn’t the only decoration on my body. Hellhound bits had splattered everywhere, coating me in gore. Another outfit down the drain.
Story of my life.
Glancing around to make sure I hadn’t been seen, I stripped down to my sports bra and jeans and rolled the bloody shirt into a small ball. It was dark enough out that stains on denim wouldn’t be visible from afar, and I had no intention of letting anyone get close enough to notice that I’d been Up to No Good.