Hounded [Wild Hunt Series: 2]

4: Proceed

A grey sheer of rain had cloaked the night in glistening monochrome. By the time I'd made it into the courtyard, hurrying past the tiny amphibian corpses, several others had already gathered around the hounds and their prey. Torches had been lofted into the air, laced with the magic to burn bright through the storm. The hounds were slickly black tonight; the torches added the sheen of burning oil to their slabbed fur. I pushed my way through the gathered demons and their servants, searching for Chiro.

One of the hound's heads turned away from their target and trotted to me.

Gabriel, ears perked, flipped his forked tongue over my hand. I made a face, started to pull my hand away when his ears shifted flat. His tail drooped into an uncertain, low wag at just the tip.  I pushed him away, letting the rain help clean my slimed fingertips. The hound watched with harvest moon eyes I might've called curious if I'd known any better, and leaned forward for another lick. He could smell Chiro's blood, I thought, smell or taste some tiny particle lingering on through my hasty rush outside.

"He's fine," I muttered, and rather doubted it. What was the hex doing to Chiro?

I shouldered past the last line of the crowd. Chiro stood hooded and soaked  among the grappling  pack, occasionally nudging gnashing teeth back from someone crouched on the ground.

Across from him, kept away from trouble by the bulky weight of the Walrus, Dakota stood beside a gaping Val. Neither women noticed me as I splashed forward with help from an elbow to my back. I caught my balance on Gabriel's shoulder. The wolf snarled and lunged at those behind me, and I stumbled in front of the someone...something captured.

It had all the structure of a humanoid creature, but it was tall and slender, figured neither quite like a man nor a woman. Crouched though it was, skeletal fingers held against its head, I could tell that its spine was limber, slightly catlike, an interesting match for limbs that suggested an apelike gait. Its body was sewn together by raw red muscle and white sinew, sticky and patched with rain and mud. Laid over the flesh in most places except joints, was a boney carapace that ended in a thick, eggshaped skull. Three horns sloped elegantly away from wide, deep cheek bones, inside whose shadowed depths there was only the faintest gleam of green. Its jawline curved into a beaky black mouth.

And it stunk.

Even in the downpour it stunk, smelled like a rose left to rot in a garbage dump.

Chiro snatched a sword from another demon. In a matter of seconds two others had wrestled it into submission, forced its muscled neck out. In between its hardened covering I could see the veins pulse.  The blade lifted.

The creature's beak opened. Trough a whistling, high voice, it called out a low, "Ah, Tay Wilson."

I darted forward with a screech to stop. The pair of demons sneered. Rolling his eyes, Chiro lowered the blade. I was mildly surprised he didn't swipe the head regardless. His fingers shifted impatiently along the hilt.

"It's from the Witch," he said, in that clipped tone suggesting there was nothing else to know.

"What's it want?"

"Your head."

"Then I should be the one getting the message, shouldn't I?"

"He's right, you know," hissed the creature.

Chiro lifted his hand in a 'told you' gesture. "Tay," he continued. "It's pouring. My hounds are hungry."

"They can wait a minute longer, and you're already soaked."

"As are you," he said, with the grin of the cat who ate the canary. "Don't you want some relief from that?"

The creature's worm-white tongue rolled over its beak. "Insolent halfbreed," it began.