Hellhound on My Trail by D. J. Butler Read Free Book Online

Chuy in the basement of the burnt-out school, Chuy getting high on the weed Mike had scored, Chuy and the girl, Chuy cut to ribbons and bleeding to death.
    Chuy in Butcher’s, taunting him.
    “I stole something,” Adrian muttered. “I’m not proud of it, but it was the quickest way to get where I needed to go. Faint heart never won, et cetera.”
    “Or in other words,” Eddie summarized, “you’re a thief, as well as a narcoleptic.”
    “As well as a wizard,” Adrian said. “Besides, if I was the kind of guy who followed all the rules, I wouldn’t really fit in on this team, would I?”
    “Touché,” Twitch admitted the point. Mike thought Jim’s eyes in the rearview mirror looked like they were smiling.
    “We’re here,” Eddie said, and Jim pulled over. The van was still going five or ten miles an hour when he threw it into Park. Mike nearly fell over as the Dodge ground to a squealing, protested halt.
    Mike would have been reluctant to get out of the van, but with Twitch and his (her?) batons pushing him from one direction and Adrian shoving from the other, he had no choice. He yanked open the van’s side door and went out gun first, looking for the Baal Zavuv, the Zvuvim, or the Hellhound.
    He landed a bit wobbly on hard-packed dirt and heard … crickets. Overhead, a lid of a million brilliant stars fell screaming to the horizon, where it clanged off the staunch silhouetted shoulders of the hills and buttes of New Mexico. Other than the starlight, and the light from the Dodge’s headlights, the night was pitch black.
    “Where’s the town?” he asked. “Is this all there is?”
    The headlights glared yellow on a building. It was a simple brick-shaped rectangle, two or three stories in height, with some kind of a dome on top. The light reflected on many colors in the glass of the high windows. Some of the windows, anyway; as Mike looked, he could see that a lot of the glass had been smashed out. The woodwork around the windows’ frames looked chewed to splinters, and the double-wide door to the building was gone.
    Not open … gone.
    “I guess now we know why the Hound showed up before the Baal,” Eddie said slowly. “The Baal came here first, ahead of us.”
    “The question is why the Baal and the Hellhound got here at all,” Twitch noted. “I thought we traveled under the famous wards of obfuscation.”
    “So did I,” Eddie agreed.
    “You can complain about my work,” Adrian said bitterly, dropping out of the van onto both feet, “when you can do better. He who is without sin, and so forth.” He held a green metal three-gallon gas can in one hand, and it sloshed when he moved.
    “Are we too late?” Eddie asked Jim, who stalked around the front of the van with his naked sword in his hand.
    Jim shrugged and went into the building. Eddie followed him, and Twitch.
    BETH RAZ NIHYEH , read a bronze plaque beside the front door, over a single row of characters that Mike guessed were Hebrew; he’d seen them before, anyway, on Bar Mitzvah programs.
    “What kind of place is this?” he asked.
    “A synagogue,” Adrian said.
    Mike pointed at the gas can. “You always carry gasoline into synagogues?”
    “This is Dudael,” Adrian told him, as if that were an answer. He set the can down, spat into the palms of his own hands to slick back his hair, and then picked up the can again. “Where God ordered the archangel Raphael to imprison Azazel and all the other rebel angels.”
    “Azazel?”
    “You know him better as Satan. Lucifer, if you want to be formal about it.”
    “What?” Mike almost dropped his pistol. “What are we doing here?”
    “Jim’s looking for something,” Adrian said. “Something in the nature of a family heirloom, you could say.” He shrugged. “I suppose you can go back, if you want.” Then he disappeared into the building, too.
    Mike didn’t wait; he jogged in close on Adrian’s heels, gun gripped firmly in one hand and the fingers of the other wrapped