Page 1 of Hounded

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Loren

When he told megoodbye that morning, I wondered if he knew.

Did he plan the scene I would return home to? A pile of ashes on the bed and the smoke detector screaming?

My phoenix was gone.

The blanket and sheets were scorched in a ring around what had been his body, burned through to the coiled metal springs of the mattress. He’d complained about that; said memory foam was better. I’d seen no need to replace it till now.

The air was thick and stifling, still hazy. It reeked of singed linens and the plastic headliner of the RV melting in the bedroom loft. I choked on it, gagging until I fell against the wall, dry heaving.

I didn’t understand. We should have had years left together.

Then I found the pills.

A baggie on the bedside table next to an empty bottle of water.

Sorrow shifted into searing rage, and I wished I couldhave burned, too. Instead, I screamed. I screamed at Indy for leaving me too soon, and at myself because I couldn’t stop it. I screamed, but the anguish wouldn’t leave, so I sobbed and sat on the floor so tucked up I could rest my head on my knees. I thought he was happy.Wewere happy. Why did he want to die?

When I could breathe again, I called the hospital. The woman on the other end of the line waited for me to get my thoughts in order, to ask questions without hearing their answers, to confess how profoundly I had failed.

Clutching the phone, I nodded through my half of the conversation as though the woman from the hospital could see me. Despite her talking, discussing things like success rates and duration of stay, the trailer felt quiet. She was still talking when the gray, ashen spot on the bed began to glow with new life.

I sobbed again, a strangled sound, and the woman asked if I was all right. I nodded. She didn’t see.

Tears soaked my face, and my nose ran, leaving me sucking snotty breaths and wiping my mouth and cheeks with my shirt sleeve. It was soggy by the time Indy’s bones began to reform. They snapped into place one vertebrae, rib, and joint at a time. His body reassembled the way it had a dozen times before.

Organs sprouted from nothing. Red lumps of meat filled his torso and nestled inside the cage of his ribs. His lungs didn’t inflate. His heart didn’t beat. Not yet.

Muscles knit together, canvassing his body with lean strips of sinew. When they reached his face, filling his cheeks and surrounding sightless eyes, I turned away.

“We’ll be there in two hours,” I told the woman on the phone. Then I hung up.

When Indy was fully reformed, I helped him get dressed. We packed a bag with comfortable clothes and a toothbrush and toothpaste… Other things I wasn’t sure they would let him have.

The woman on the phone had said there was a list of approved items we could bring with us on the website. I didn’t read it.

Indy’s hair was soft and brown as I ran a comb through it—never a brush, it ruined his curls—and he let me wrap my arms around his shoulders. I hung off him, draped across his back with my head ducked so he wouldn’t see me crying in the bathroom mirror. He must have felt my tears soaking through his shirt, but he didn’t ask why. He didn’t say anything.

Once he could stand and walk, I led him to the parking lot, holding his hand too tight. My palms were sweaty when I released him to open the passenger door of my Chevy C10. As I guided him up the step side, he looked at me with trust in his warm, golden eyes. I couldn’t hold his gaze.

The hellhound within me had been distant throughout the ordeal. He had smelled the smoke before I did, knew before I entered the trailer that we would be walking into disaster. But he’d seen this cycle repeated same as I had, and perhaps he understood what I didn’t. While I mourned, he sat silent in the recesses of my mind.

Car rides excited him, though. He was like a real dog that way. He wanted me to hang my head out the window so he could scent the breeze. But it was cold and foggy, soI kept the windows rolled up and cranked the defrost on high, flooding the truck’s cab with wet heat.

In past lives, Indy liked to turn on classic rock so loud the truck’s speakers rattled and my sensitive ears ached. He sang along to Journey and Queen and gushed about how Freddie Mercury was an icon.

Today, there was no music. We rode in silence.

I was sweating by the time we pulled into the parking lot of Hopeful Horizons Rehabilitation Center. My fingers felt numb as I turned off the ignition and pocketed the keys. They jingled against my thigh while I grabbed Indy’s duffel bag from the backseat and shouldered it. Sliding out onto the ground, I walked around to the passenger side and opened the door.

Indy was distracted, studying the glittering feather that dangled from the rearview mirror. He didn’t recognize it as one of his own.

“Ready, Doll?” I asked.

My palm grazed his thigh, and he glanced at me, freckle-faced and so damn pretty that it stirred fresh pain in my heart. The rehab center loomed across the lot. The pictures online made it look like a nice place. Easy to fake that stuff, past life Indy would have said, ever the skeptic. He would have scoffed at the photos of smiling staff members and amenities like the activity center and butterfly garden, would have told me how lame it all was, and that the lame would rub off on him if I left him here.

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