Seven Kinds of Hell by Dana Cameron Read Free Book Online Page A

soil beneath. Sean held up the flashlight. I brushed off the surface, tried to wipe away the smears of dirt and rust.
    A blur of blue and gold. The letters OY and NSK were visible.
    It was a tin for Danish butter cookies.
    It took me a minute to realize it probably wasn’t cookies, not if my mother had buried them in a cemetery, having sealed the top with duct tape. Not even Ma was that crazy about cookies.
    I shook it; it didn’t rattle, just a slow
thunk…thunk
as something heavy—wrapped—shifted inside.
    I tried to find an edge of the tape to remove it, but kept slipping. Age had caused the tape to melt into itself. The cold and wetness did nothing for my dexterity. My hands were shaking; I set down the tin and grabbed my fingers, trying to stop the trembling. Then I pulled out my knife.
    “Zoe, wait.”
    I looked up.
    “It’s too wet out here. Whatever’s in there might be fragile. Let’s find someplace dry, get some light before we open this.”
    It took me a minute to realize he was right. I nodded and handed the tin to him so I could put my knife away.
    I froze. Something was out there. Suddenly I felt as though we were surrounded, but I couldn’t see a thing through the rain.
    I felt the call of the Beast.
    Five of them, I knew without knowing how. Closing a circle around us. “Sean, we need to get—”
    A twig cracked.
    “Zoe!” Sean grabbed my arm.
    “Run!”
    “The hell I will,” he said. “I’m not leaving you!”
    “Sean! You can’t let them get this!” I shoved him in the direction away from whoever was out there, willing him away. “Get out of here, now!”
    He shook his head but took off. That was a first; he must have heard something in my voice, because Sean almost never did what he was told.
    Didn’t matter. I needed to keep the tin from them. They’d leave Sean alone, surely, if they were after me?
    I felt a rippling down my spine. Two of the men I sensed…weren’t there anymore. There was something else out there now in the spaces they’d occupied. The air all around me felt just like last night.
    The men were gone, but now I sensed
wolves.
    I knelt down, stowing my knife and my trowel. I stepped out of my shoes and rolled up my jeans. And then I tried to recall the feelings I’d had when the Beast came before. I
needed
the Beast.
    I heard a shout. It was Sean.
    Did I want them to get Ma’s last bequest to me? The hell I did. I thought about them opening the tin, seeing what was in it before I did—
    The Beast arrived.
Arrived
was too small a word: a roaring in my ears, a riot in my soul. I welcomed it, for the first time in my life.
    Good. If anyone deserved the Beast, they did.
    Two wolves were chasing Sean. I tore after them. I got close enough to bite one in the haunch, and he yelped, staggered, and plowed over into the other. Lucky for me, Sean never looked back, just booked out of there.
    The two wolves untangled themselves, one reddish, one with a dark black pelt. I ran. In and out and around and among the gravestones and monuments, it was easy to dodge and duck.
    Suddenly, on an intersection of two roads, I was surrounded: two wolves behind me, a wolf-man and a sort of horrible walking snake before me.
    The snake-man’s face was barely human: two enlarged nostrils instead of a nose, yellow-and-brown scales instead of skin and hair. He walked upright, wearing a tracksuit, but he was a monster, fangs gleaming in the rainy night. His large black eyes were the deadest things in that acre of burials.
    But the half-wolf, half-man was even worse. His ears stood up on his head, his face and jaw elongated, full of sharp teeth. I’d seen wolf-headed gods in the museum, but never one wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt and jeans. He was the one I’d seen in Salem.
    My growl turned to a whine. My tail wagged, involuntarily, and I paced a step or two, uncertain of what I was seeing, of what to do. They were just like me, and they couldn’t be.
    Maybe this is it,
I