Black Dog by Caitlin Kittredge Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t do it anymore.
    â€œTell me what you need,” I said to Leo.
    He sat back, his expression so smug it practically dripped. “I don’t care about Gary the reaper, for his own sake. He has something I want.”
    I waited, quiet. I don’t like the conversational games humans play, feeling each other out while they listen to their own voices. I’ve never been any good at verbal fencing. Leo sighed. “Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?”
    â€œI kind of wish you could tell me while wiping that smug look off your face,” I said. It was probably pointless to hope. Leo was the sort of guy for whom smugness was a chronic condition.
    â€œHis Scythe.”
    I stopped—­breathing, blinking, I think even my heart stuttered on a beat.
    â€œIf you help me get it,” Leo continued, “you can kill him with it. And your contract will be void, and you’ll be free.” He grazed his fingers down my cheek again, and I didn’t even try to move. “Help me, and Gary will never hurt you again.”
    This was insane. I’d gotten knocked around and I’d taken temporary leave of my senses, but they were back now, and I had to get the fuck away from Leo Karpov. Colluding with a nut job necromancer to kill your asshole reaper boss was one thing. Stealing a Hellspawn weapon and using it was another. If I was lucky, I’d only spend eternity in the Pit as punishment for even listening to this.
    â€œDon’t back out on me now,” Leo said. I’m sure my face was a five-­car pileup of panic. “If you go crawling back, he’ll kill you, and you’ll never have this chance again.”
    He was right, even if I didn’t want to hear it. The deep-­down memories of when Gary had found me and turned me into a hound were supplanted by every memory of every time Gary had taken out his rage on me.
    They piled up and crashed into the others, turning the inside of my head into a massacre. Fire and blood, fingers snapped, skin peeled off—­he’d even shaved my head once when I’d taken too long to bring in a hoodoo witch hiding in the Georgia mountains, then kicked me out onto the winter street in bare feet, the nicks in my scalp still bleeding.
    â€œWhy do you need a reaper’s Scythe?” I said softly.
    Leo sat back, a crooked smile on his face. There was none of the warmth I’d glimpsed. We were back to the glass-­eyed gangster who’d tortured me without a second thought. “I want to kill my father.”

 
    CHAPTER 8
    I t had been so long since I’d even let myself think there might be a way out of my contract with Gary that it felt like I was falling, my stomach pressing up against my ribs, the rest of me just waiting for the impact with the ground.
    â€œSo why can’t you kill your father the old-­fashioned way?” I asked Leo. He’d agreed to drive me back to the Mushroom Cloud so I could make the call, and we were cruising through presunrise streets behind the UNLV campus, strip malls and off-­brand casinos as far as the eye could see, blending into tract housing and then the desert.
    Leo hadn’t spoken much after he’d unchained me, and I hadn’t felt like talking. Still, silence gets thick after a while, and I hadn’t spent this much time with anyone who wasn’t another hellhound or a collection job in a long time.
    Leo’s hand tightened on the steering wheel. His sleeve was rolled and showed the dagger tat on his forearm, ink popping off the lean muscle when he tensed. I wanted to see more of his ink, the stuff under his slick white shirt, but I figured asking would probably send him the wrong kind of message. Hounds didn’t generally fool around with humans, and it was hard to remember how to even talk to a man, never mind ask him to take his shirt off without things getting weird. If I was more used to this, I’d probably also be