Child, p.3
Child, page 3
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
“It’s this one,” she pointed. A nice condo, two stories, with a dingy station wagon parked out front was sandwiched between comparable buildings. Jason pulled off to the side of the street and eased his seat back. Kara sat forward.
“I’m going to go for a walk.”
“In that?” Jason asked. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to pull off a stakeout?”
She laughed.
“You hang out with mice, Jason. Mice. I’m not trying to avoid attention.”
“If you go screw the guy next door, don’t even pretend like you did it for research.”
“I didn’t say what I was researching,” she said with a grin. “I’ll catch you later.”
“You got a phone?”
She held up her cell over her head as she hopped to the ground.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said.
She grinned at him and slammed the door, tossing her hair for his benefit as she walked away. He settled back in his seat again, rolling his eyes privately at her, and watched the house.
<><><>
If the black dog turned up here, there was every chance that it would sense Jason long before it made a move on the man it had picked as its next target. Jason moved Anadidd’na to the front seat, making sure he had a clean draw on her. He would have to get out of the car before he could use her - even a huge vehicle like Gwen was no place to sword fight a giant dog - but he didn’t want to lose any time to fidgeting because he hadn’t been ready. He did an inventory of his other weapons, making sure there wasn’t anything he should have added.
Handgun tucked into his belt with mixed ammunition. Just keep pulling the trigger. Kerk had actually been reasonable, researching what he could use without damaging the gun barrel and ordering it for him - some from other countries - without putting up too much of a fuss that it was a stupid waste of time. Okay, he had made a huge deal about it, but Jason had mostly just ignored that part of the conversation. Honestly, he didn’t know why Sam actually tried to argue with the tiny tyrant.
Holy water, anointing oil, hydrochloric and sulfuric acids, and RO water pure enough to burn his skin. Samantha said a lot of them were losing their power, but she still carried them, so so did he.
Hunting knife. There weren’t a lot of things it would kill, but it had gotten him out of a lot of scrapes in other ways, and he rarely went out without it.
Samantha often carried more. Sam seldom carried even that much. Kara seemed to go out with little more than a dagger and a gun until she knew what she was up against. It suited each of them in their own way. Jason liked being the heavy artillery, carrying the dragon sword on his back, hidden there by the magic Samantha had put on her. He had only rarely been intimidated before, but nothing intimidated him now. The sword had a power to her, and a thirst, that he would never be able to articulate. He hadn’t believed a piece of metal could be like that - and had often teased Samantha about her relationship with Lahn - until he had actually named Anadidd’na and bound her to himself. The magic hewed into her in her forging was subtle and complex, and Samantha still spent time going over it to try to help him understand it, when she had time.
And Anadidd’na was his.
In a way that she would never belong to anyone else, ever.
If anything was going to be able to kill a black dog, this was it.
Jason opened the glove box and found his ball cap, putting it on and drawing it down over his eyes, then lay back in his seat and crossed his arms, threading a fine line between pretending to nap and actually doing it.
<><><>
Greg was an Eeyore of a man. He walked with slumped shoulders and made half-hearted attempts to get his two girls into the house when they came back from their walk. He had bought them ice cream at one of the little too-colorful shops on the main strip, and they walked, holding hands and licking their ice cream cones in just the way that a pair of little girls should. But they didn’t want to go in. Jason saw it in the way the big one stepped in front of the little one when their father spoke to them: inside was dangerous.
Jason kind of hated seeing what he saw. Years of finding the worst in people made him see things that people with more optimistic, constructive lives would miss every time. Greg was impotent and sad. It would have been easy to think that his girls would run riot over him any time they chose. But there was more to it than that. It was in the way the girls’ posture changed when their father spoke to them, in the way they clustered around each other that made them feel even more exposed. It put Jason in a mind to pistol-whip the man, himself, even before he picked out the remnants of old bruises on the girls’ faces and arms. The black dog had picked a real winner, in this guy.
“Bastard,” Jason muttered. A few minutes after the family went inside, Kara appeared, opening the back door and rummaging through a bag.
“I just met the most interesting couple,” she said.
“What’s this guy’s story?” Jason asked.
“Hmm?”
“Two little girls. No mom. What’s his story?”
“Mom died three-four years ago,” Kara said. “He’s raising them on his own.”
“Dude’s bipolar,” Jason said. “Beating the tar out of those girls.”
“We don’t come looking for the targets of black dogs expecting saints,” Kara said.
“Why don’t they ever go after police officers? Or MMA legends? Make killing them worth it?”
Kara laughed.
“Do the job, Jason.”
He sighed.
“Yeah, yeah. You disappearing again?”
“Yup. Call me if anything interesting happens.”
He nodded, pulling his cap down once more. It would probably be dusk before the black dog showed up, if it was going to.
“Have fun.”
He heard Kara laugh as she slammed the door.
<><><>
He drowsed on and off through the afternoon, keeping his eyes open but letting his mind functionally turn off so long as nothing was going on. Kara stayed away for the next several hours, doing whatever it was she was doing. As the sun began to set, Jason’s arm fell down into his lap and he jerked awake to find a giant black dog staring at him from the middle of the road.
He never understood why people described them as wolves. They didn’t look like wolves.
A wolf would have been comforting, compared to these beasts.
Wolves were skinny and lean and shaggy in a come-pet-me kind of a way. And while they looked smart, they also looked skittish.
Black dogs were like two hundred pound German Pinschers. Heavyset ones. With eyes that glowed red.
Okay, maybe they didn’t glow, like put off light, but they certainly had a spark of violence to them that seemed to radiate. And every time Jason saw one, he would have sworn their eyes were red.
Jason sat up in his seat, keeping eye contact with the dog.
“I see you,” he said, gritting his teeth. The dog lowered his head, and Jason wondered if they shouldn’t have spent the day researching local executions, after all. If Anadidd’na didn’t work against this beast, he was going to want to have a backup plan ready. Quickly.
They stared at each other for another moment, then the dog straightened as if it had heard something, and spun over its hind legs, vanishing from where it stood as its body made a motion like it was going to run away.
Creepy.
Kara came sauntering back down the street, all leather and curves, and flicked her hair at him again. She came to stand at his window, and he turned the key to roll it down.
“I take it you’ve picked him up?”
“You got that right,” Jason said.
“Where do you want to do this?” Kara asked.
“Someplace open,” Jason said, still trying to force his fight-or-flight reaction into submission. Kara nodded.
“Merlin doesn’t like the plan, but he found a farm at the edge of its range that’s been in foreclosure for a couple of years.”
“Seekers are a bunch of babies,” Jason said. Kara grinned.
“When I walked up, you looked like you’d seen a ghost.”
“Shut up.”
She grinned wider and trotted around the car to get into the passenger seat. Jason moved Anadidd’na out of the way.
“Drive safe,” Kara said with another flirty smile.
“If you see any freaking giant dogs, stab them in the face,” Jason answered. “Which way am I going?”
<><><>
The best way to lure out a black dog, after he’d marked you, was to leave his territory. They had a pretty fixed range - one that some Rangers had successfully used to find their disturbed gravesite - that you were safe, as long as you were in it. Once you left, though, they tended to stop stalking you and just outright attack.
The problem was that, even knowing their range, the attack wasn’t instantaneous.
Jason and Kara sat on the dusty cement floor of the equipment barn, a vast building whose sole features of any interest were the oil spots on the floor and the piles of rotting machinery that had not held sufficient value to go to auction. At one end, there was a couple of straw bales that had probably been used as seating, judging from the piles of cigarettes on the floor in front of them.
Kara pulled a bottle of scotch out of her little bag and unscrewed the top. She offered it to Jason and he took a drink, passing it back. She put her head against the wall.
“We have the best job in the world.”
“How do you figure?”
“We wander around wherever we feel like it, drink a bunch, do some stuff that’s more excitement in ten minutes than most people get in their whole lives, then go drink some more.”
Jason grunted.
“Can’t argue with that.”
She grinned.
“That and we’re all hella sexy because we run around so much no one has time to get fat.”
“No carbs in good liquor,” Jason replied. She held up the bottle.
“Cheers to that.”
He chuckled and shifted his back against the wall. Kara put the bottle on the ground in between them, and over the next couple of hours, they drank half of it. It was dumb, getting drunk right before a fight, but there was little else to do to pass the time, and both of them had fought worse, drunker.
As midnight approached, Kara sat up.
“Did you hear that?”
“Was waiting for you to say something to be sure I didn’t imagine it,” Jason answered. It was the sound of sniffing, just though the aluminum paneling behind them. Kara looked at him playfully, pushing herself to her feet.
“I’m going to go look.”
He nodded, standing, himself, and checking Anadidd’na. Kara drew her gun and held it down and away from her body, covering the distance to the door on quiet toes. The lights overhead buzzed like insects.
Jason backed away from the wall slowly, stepping around the bales and made his way toward the center of the barn, watching the wall where they’d been sitting. Kara got to the doorway and peeked out, shaking her head at Jason.
Nothing.
There was no guarantee she’d even be able to see the brute. Black dogs were generally only visible to their targets, but Rangers tended to spend enough time around violent spirits that they were sometimes immune to such abilities.
The look on Kara’s face as she slowly stopped shaking her head told him that she could see the black dog just fine.
And it was behind him.
<><><>
He turned slowly, as if that were going to change anything. The thing would be toying with him, now, trying to make him make a mistake. Anadidd’na quivered, energy that Jason wasn’t sure where it came from - him or the dragonsword - vibrating his wrists.
Blood.
He wondered if black dogs had blood.
They certainly had bad breath. The creature was a scant six feet away from him, standing with the confidence and aloofness of a pack alpha, watching him with those demonic red eyes. It lowered its head again, daring him to do something, and Jason stepped into the overhead swing, committed.
Damn.
Damn, damn.
Swordfighting a ghost. How had he forgotten to take that into account?
The dog glitched and charged him from the side, Jason’s body off-balance. He hit the ground rolling, finding his feet quickly and looked for the dog. It was gone. His hand found his side where the animal had struck him, but it had been intended to disorient him and to intimidate him, not hurt him. Not yet. It had headbutted him and vanished. He looked at Kara, who had a wry grin as she approached carefully.
“Please don’t tell me you thought it was going to be that easy.”
“Does it show?” he asked. She grinned wider, then jerked her chin.
“Eight o’clock.”
He spun.
<><><>
The creature had tactics. He’d give it that. It appeared and disappeared, all teeth and slobber and mass with an art that rivaled the gorgeous Amazon of a demon who had been hunting down Samantha to take her bag of powdered angel.
“He’s good,” Jason said, taking a knee after a furious bout of just barely holding his ground.
“Wish he’d go ahead and put you down so I could take a crack at him,” Kara said. Jason looked up at her and she winked. “He’s waiting for you to make a mistake.”
“Maybe this is a two-man job,” he said, lunging to the side as he heard the sound of breathing over his shoulder, and the sound of lungs grunting air as the beast leapt.
“Might be,” Kara said, walking a ring around the two of them as Jason got Anadidd’na up, holding the black dog at arm’s length. “Too bad you don’t have another man to help.”
“Good thing I’ve got you instead,” Jason said, parrying a charge and twisting quickly over his toes to find the dog again as it vanished.
“You fall on that pretty sword and kill yourself with it, I am not going to be the one who explains it to Sam.”
“You kidding?” Jason said. “Three to one, Sam is watching, now.”
Kara looked at the ceiling.
“Like god?”
Jason snorted, making an attempt at a stab.
“Don’t give him ideas.”
“You watch us last night, Sammy?”
“No chance,” Jason grunted as the dog hit him in the shoulder and pinned him to the ground. He rolled again as he fell, twisting into the slobbery stench, slicing air as he regained his feet. “He’s always had too weak a stomach for that kind of thing.”
Kara re-crossed her legs on the straw bale.
“Any time, Elliott.”
Jason was still in great form, his body acting on years of intense training, but he knew he couldn’t go on forever. He needed a new idea. He let Kara see the change in his face.
“Focus,” he murmured. Her nod stretched on as he bent time, pulling himself closer to the hell boundary and away from the frenetic pace of the earth plane. This, of all the tricks Samantha had taught him, this one was the best.
The dog’s muscles bunched as its hind feet reached for the ground and he spun to turn back on Jason again. Jason felt the easy rush of air into his lungs, slow, even relaxed, and the space between heartbeats where he had room to think.
The dog wasn’t going to wear him out any time soon. That just wasn’t going to happen. But sitting in the middle of an abandoned pole shed in Missouri, jousting a freaking huge dog wasn’t one of the stories he wanted Kara telling everyone when they got to Chicago later that fall. He wanted them to hear how he had definitively smashed the thing, blasting it into its respective little ghosty bits, whatever those were. He moved the sword through a smooth curve, fending another attack from the dog, and turned his attention to Kara.
He couldn’t actually look at her. That was one of the classic mistakes of bending time. You couldn’t try to do anything that you weren’t already doing, because you ended up just jerking your body around and not accomplishing anything. Or slapping yourself in the face, as the case may be. Samantha wasn’t a brutal trainer, in the context of her little culture, but she was spiteful in her own way.
No, he couldn’t look at Kara, but he knew what she looked like, and what she was doing. She was waiting. Playing coy to keep from pushing him into doing anything stupid, keeping him engaged in the fight and protecting him as best she could from getting frustrated. It wasn’t something he particularly needed, but that was what made her a great partner. She was a great wingman even when he wasn’t depending on her.
He did need her, though. That was his ace. He’d been ignoring her, in his quest to best the dog on his own, but having two of them to tag-team him, when they both knew exactly who he would be going after, this was Jason’s advantage.
He jerked his chin at her, something that took minutes of his mental focus with time bent, and saw her posture begin to straighten out of his peripheral vision. She was ready. He rolled, feeling the skid of his shoulders across the dusty floor, smelling the aged bits of old grain and motor oil, ending up on one knee facing the dog with Kara behind him. One arm out, motion her to the side. The dog’s eyes followed her, just for a moment, and then it vanished.
He let go of his grip on time to speak - he had never gotten the hang of actual speech while he was doing it. It sounded like he was in the middle of a massive stroke.
“To the middle.”
She followed his lead without hesitation, and he went knee-over-knee across the floor and behind the straw bales, putting his back to them. He rolled his head to be able to see around them, and the dog reappeared, distracted for just another moment by Kara.
“What do you think of that?” Kara asked, backing away. The dog glanced around, finally turning back to Kara as she jogged backwards. It tensed and Kara barked at him, literally.
“Come and get me,” she yelled.
She scrambled, ducking to the side as the dog chased her, primal instincts overpowering his prime purpose for the time being, and Jason waited, watching as the dog grew more intent on catching Kara. She was quick on her feet, but he kept getting closer and closer, now even glitching out and reappearing. Kara was dancing as fast as she could, but she needed the next step.
