Page 30 of Hounded

That first lifetime was brief. After six months, Indy burned out. Despite having been told he was a phoenix, I’d seen no sign of it prior, and was alarmed by the spectacle. I barely had time to mourn his passing before he returned, reformed from his own charred remains as a wholly new being.

He was almost unrecognizable. Bright and blissful with no memory of his ordeal or of me saving him from it. He talked, and laughed, and his smile was as blinding as if he’d stolen the sun. It made me all the more enraged to know what that cruel man had stolen from him.

Standing across from me outside the drugstore, Whitney turned toward the shop’s entrance.

“Don’t,” I blurted, then settled myself and tried again. “Whitney, don’t.”

Sweat dripped down my back, sticking my shirt to my spine.

“Don’t what?” he asked.

I blinked rapidly, fighting to keep my eyes from betraying me by seeking Indy out. “Don’t go in there,” I said. “It’s not… what you think.”

The other hound crossed his arms, and his golden collar glinted in the light. “Idon’t know what I think. How can you?”

I shifted, then tensed so hard my muscles twitched. Was it too late to run?

Whitney remained obnoxiously composed as he gazed past me at the drugstore’s interior once more. “Thatinteresting fellow is watching us,” he mused. “He looks concerned.”

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw what he did. Indy kept post by the registers, but his focus had shifted from his phone to us. He squinted through the glass with his golden eyes glittering and his head tilted.

My treasure.

“You know him,” Whitney said.

“I don’t.”

My hound paced, trying to draw a territorial line between Indy and Whitney. His growl vibrated in my throat. Protective. Possessive.

I wondered if Whitney heard or sensed it somehow because he leaned in. His nose wrinkled through a deep inhale.

“The smell…” He snorted the air back out. “It’s on you, too. Whatisit?”

He crowded so close that I began to retreat. Stumbling, trying not to scramble away and look damningly guilty.

Whitney sniffed and snorted once more before declaring, “It’s not human.”

I’d thought the same thing when I first found Indy. Had the same realization. And Whitney was the better hound between us. Savvier, smarter, more loyal to our mistress and obliged to inform her of anything he found “interesting.” Especially when it also involved me.

I sidestepped to position myself between him and the path ahead. “I-I’ll go with you,” I stammered. “Back to Hell. I’ll explain to Miss—”

“He’s waving at you,” Whitney said.

With my back to the store’s entrance, I couldn’t see. Couldn’t turn again. Couldn’t think of anything to say.

“He’s coming outside,” Whitney said.

Indy didn’t wait long for anything, and he wasn’t inclined to obey instructions. Even explicit, important instructions.

My hound’s ears pinned flat, and his lips peeled back in a menacing snarl. All of his ferocity escaped me in a single, snapped word.

“Go.”

Whitney balked. “What?”

Bowed up and bristling, I told him again. “Get away. Leave.”

He turned his head aside. Not flinching but considering as his blond brows drew down. “What’s gotten into you?”

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