Hellhound

I stopped and asked if he was okay.

He shrugged. “Business is a little slow tonight, I guess.” Hope stole across his face. “You want a hot dog?”

I didn’t, really. But I bought one.

The hot dog seller got busy, slathering on mustard and onions. “You know,” he commented, “most nights I eat a dog or two for every one I sell. But tonight . . .”

A group of zombies passed on the sidewalk. The smell of onions and steamed hot dogs wafted from the open cart, but not a single head turned. It wasn’t just eerie; it was downright weird.

I overpaid for the hot dog and told the guy to keep the change, which got me a zombie grimace-smile. As I walked away, I bit into the hot dog. A little salty, but not bad. Maybe I should’ve made the guy’s night and bought two.

ONCE AGAIN, I DIDN’T TURN DOWN KANE’S STREET. ONCE again, I thought about how much I wanted to see him, imagined the feel of his arms around me. And once again, I turned away.

Excuses? I had a fistful of ’em. It was late. He’d be sleeping. He had a million things to do before his rally. With the restriction dropping to Code Yellow, he’d be up extra early to make up for work he’d missed today. The last thing he needed was a middle-of-the-night drop-in from yours truly.

I was in my building, waiting for the elevator, when I finally admitted the real reason I was avoiding Kane. We needed to talk. And I had absolutely no idea what to say.

9

MY APARTMENT WAS EMPTY—AND QUIET. NO TV BLARED. As I’d thought, Juliet was out hunting. Dad was probably roosting somewhere out in Needham, near Gwen’s house. I kinda wished they were here, staring at the screen and scarfing popcorn, because then I could hang out with them and not do what I knew I had to do.

Strange things were happening. The Morfran was possessing zombies and driving them to acts of violence before consuming them. My father had brought the prophesied white falcon out of the Darklands and into the human world. Even the fact that Deadtown’s zombies had lost their appetites en masse seemed like some kind of omen.

I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had to consult the book.

Please, I thought, not knowing who or what I was beseeching, not another vision.

The Book of Utter Darkness waited on the kitchen table, where it had been since Dad’s last attempt to read it. You’d think it would look innocent, ordinary. An everyday sight. Just a book lying flat on a tabletop.

Not this book. It pulsed with menace—literally—like some kind of force field emanated from it, rippling the air. When I hovered my hand a couple of inches from its cover, icy sparks snapped against my fingertips. The snapping resolved into a rhythm, like a beating heart: duh DUM duh DUM duh DUM duh DUM.

The pulse traveled up my arm—buzzing through my demon mark, then going past my elbow, through my shoulder, down into my chest. It swirled around my heart, as though it were trying to hijack its rhythm.

Duh DUM duh DUM.

I shivered and pulled my hand away. The pulse faded. Feeling ill, I let both hands drop into my lap. I closed my eyes and rested my left hand on my right. The right was cold, stinging with the book’s energy, but the left covered it like a blanket. Warmth dispelled some of the iciness.

I got up and went to the sink, where I grabbed a pair of rubber gloves. Juliet had bought them, not that she’d ever washed a dish in her life—or her undeath, for that matter. She’d seen on TV that the gloves would keep your hands soft and, later, was disgusted to learn they only performed this magical feat in the context of doing housework. She’d tossed them aside and forgotten about them.

But I’d discovered that the gloves were good for something else. They insulated me from The Book of Utter Darkness.

I pulled them on. They were hot pink—not what you’d call my color—and clumsy. But they let me touch the book without feeling like the damn thing was trying to grab me and pull me into its pages.

Of course, the gloves were also the most likely reason I’d gotten nothing from the book lately. They insulated me from the book’s power—great—yet they probably also broke the psychic connection that let the book transfer information to its reader. I almost didn’t care. The last several visions the book had given me had been horrible and so overwhelming they knocked me out of my chair. Boston in flames. Corpses littering the streets. Demons rampaging—attacking women, children. Smoke. Blood. Screaming. Death, death, and more death. I’d wake up on the floor, curled tight in the fetal position, covering my ears against the shrieks and demonic laughter. For one blessed moment I’d feel relief, like when you wake up from your worst-ever nightmare and realize it was only a dream. But relief fled as I remembered that what the book was showing me was real; it just hadn’t happened yet.

That vision—Hell throwing open its gates, sending an army of demons to destroy the human world—was the final goal of Pryce’s schemes. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t just a vision. It was his plan.

So I had to try. If I could find out how Pryce would turn those horrible visions into reality, I’d have a chance of stopping him.

I stared at my rubbery, neon pink hands. I’d probably have to do this without the gloves. I knew that, and the knowledge made the sick feeling in my stomach expand to fill my whole body. I did not want to touch that book. I’d rather jump into a pit of cobras.

But maybe the gloves didn’t really do anything. The book sometimes remained silent for days or weeks at a time. Maybe it was in one of its sulky moods. I’d try once more with the gloves. If I didn’t get anything, I’d bite the bullet and go bare-handed next time. Tomorrow. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it now.

I reached out and lay my gloved hand on the cover, testing. No pulse. No icy sparks. The sight was absurd—bright pink plastic on the pale leather cover. That cover had been crafted from the skin of some poor human who’d died centuries ago. He’d been flayed alive—the book had made sure to show me that in vivid detail.

Now, though, no visions rose up as I opened to a random page. It didn’t matter where I began. It was impossible to read The Book of Utter Darkness like a normal book. For one thing, it was written in the language of Hell—a language forbidden to anyone outside the infernal regions. Google Translate doesn’t do Hellish to English. But even if it could, it wouldn’t have helped, anyway. The Book of Utter Darkness was enchanted. It released its secrets when it wished, as it wished. The book taunted anyone who opened it. It teased, it hinted, it tried to trick would-be readers. It didn’t lie, but it fed out bits of information designed to confuse, to nudge toward false conclusions. The book knew I was its enemy, and it wanted a demonic victory every bit as much as Pryce did.

If I couldn’t decode its secrets, they’d win.

I shoved such thoughts aside. Breathing slowly, I tried to let my mind go blank. I stared at the incomprehensible jumble of strange letters. The ink was a faded rusty brown, and I had a flash of insight—it had been made with the blood of humans. Many humans. They’d been destroyed to create a book foretelling the destruction of their world.

It was an ugly thought, one that weighed in my gut, hard and cold, as if I’d swallowed a lump of lead. But I put it from my mind. People had suffered and died to make this book, but their tragedies happened long ago. I couldn’t do anything for them now. I was trying to protect others, people who lived and breathed and loved and hoped and walked the Earth now. Those who hadn’t yet come to harm.

My mind settled back to blankness as I made myself stare. The letters blurred, then doubled. I blinked to uncross my eyes. Damn, I wished this thing had an index. Then I could just flip to the back and look up Zombies, possession of by Morfran or Maddox, Pryce, how to thwart his evil plan. Save a lot of time.

Turning the page sometimes helped. The new set of letters would be equally impossible to read, but sometimes a fresh page would send a flood of understanding into my mind. Or there might be a picture; the book was illustrated, but the illustrations seemed to change and move around at will.

Worth a try. I reached out with a hot-pink-gloved finger.

The page wouldn’t budge.

I licked my finger—the rubber tasted gross, like licking a tire—and tried again. Nothing. I laid my hand flat on the page and slid it, but the page still refused to turn. I tried going back a page. Nope. Neither the right-hand page nor the left would move at all. It was like somebody had glued them down.

Damn it.

I knew what I had to do—not tomorrow, but now. My hands were sweating inside the stupid gloves, anyway. I yanked them off and threw them on the floor, where they lay like two beached pink whales.

“Talk to me, damn you!” I grabbed the page with my bare hand. I yanked it so hard I jerked the book off the table.

The page flipped easily. For a fraction of a second, I stared at another block of reddish-brown letters, my fingers resting on the page I’d turned. Then the book’s energy slammed into me like a lightning bolt. A charge shot up my arm. Fireworks exploded in my demon mark. The room went black, then crimson, and then I was no longer in my kitchen. I wasn’t anywhere at all.

Rage. The feeling seethed inside me like lava. It surged, filling me—hot, angry pressure building in my head. I wanted to explode. I wanted to smash something, anything, and my arms flailed around in the nothingness, searching for a target. Smoke, hot and yellow and sulfurous, billowed around me. Smoke that emanated from the hellfire blazing inside me.

I coughed, waving both hands through the smoke, swiping it away. As the billows parted, I smelled the coppery scent of blood. Lots of blood.

I stood on Boston Common, but the site looked more like a battlefield than a city park. I sniffed, tracking the source of the blood. On the ground before me lay a man, a human, his intestines spilling out of a gaping wound in his gut. His sightless eyes stared at nothing; his mouth hung open in surprise or horror or maybe just the slackness of death. Blood soaked his clothes and spread in a puddle around him. It reflected the light of nearby flames.

A scream made me look up. A woman in running clothes fled from a demon. She was fast, but the demon was closing in on her. It leapt in huge bounds, shaking the ground with each step.