Page 25 of The Hellhound's Mate
I didn’t believe him, but I pulled him into my arms anyway.
That was when a distant howl cut through the quiet of the evening. Oisian, my enslaved counterpoint from Ravensgate, had just issued a warning.
Gaufrid was coming.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
“What kindof machete-wielding freak owned this place before you?”
I stared into the drawer full of huge knives right there in the kitchen, looked back at LaRhonda, and then down at the knives again. “I honestly don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s a collection?” Rosie offered in her typically optimistic way. “My aunt collects salt shakers. And you know how Ivan is about his Legos.”
Maybe the former Mister Dodge had collected knives or maybe he’d known about chopping up ghouls during a war with a necromancer. I wasn’t going to judge him. After all, this was a huge windfall for us all.
“Regardless,” I said as I picked up a blade, “he’s given us a lovely cache of weapons to help us fight the ghouls and Oisian.”
LaRhonda leaned in. “Who’s Ocean again?”
I didn’t bother correcting her pronunciation. “He’s the other hellhound.”
“But won’t Saph be the one fighting him?”
I hated to say it and dim their light, but they needed to know the truth. “Saph seems to think he’ll be enslaved by Gaufrid right away and that that’ll mean we’ll have to fight him, too.”
Rosie gulped so loudly I heard it. “Oh, goddess, that’s bad.”
“I’m going to choose to believe he won’t hurt me.” I held aloft the two-foot-long machete with curlicues etched along the dark blade. “The rest of you can do what you feel is right, but I’m going after Gaufrid.”
LaRhonda paused in handing out… I was just going to call them swords. They were honestly the closest I’d ever come to holding a sword, so that’s what they were.
LaRhonda paused in passing out swords to everyone else and said urgently, “You can’t do that byyourself. You’ll have to get through the ghouls and everything before you can get anywherenearGarfield.”
Celestine snorted and started twisting her long blonde hair up on top of her head. “It’s Gof-rid,” she corrected.
LaRhonda gave her a dead-eyed stare. “Like I’m worried about pronouncing the devil’s name correctly.”
To stop Celestine from correcting LaRhonda about Gaufrid not being a devil like I knew she would, I said, “Bozboq told me that if we cut the ghouls up, they’ll have to find new bodies before they can rejoin the fight. Our cemetery is really small, so I figure that’ll only work for, like, six of them. And I bet that’s only if there’s enough left of those bodies to reanimate.” I chose another blade, this one shiny and silver. “It’s possible they’re just piles of bones by now, no flesh at all, and I imagine that matters.”
Rosie made a gagging noise. Theo accepted two swords from LaRhonda while making a face like he smelled something terrible. Neither of them was going to be of much good if they couldn’t even handle imagining the smell of death. Bozboq had stunk in a way I’d never experienced before and his borrowed corpse hadn’t been that old.
“Something to remember,” Morning said as they stepped up for a sword as well. “Gaufrid is just a dude with a skill. He got sent to Hell once, so it can happen again.”
Celestine eyed them skeptically. “A dude with a skill?”
“Yep, being a necromancer is atitle. I looked it up.”
Theo groaned. “And we’re just going to trust a search engine? Please tell me you skipped over the AI summary.”
Morning gave him a disgusted look. “I looked it up in ourgrimoire, thank you. My five-times great grandmother had a whole section about Gaufrid specifically. Necromancers are human people who’ve learned necromancy. Just a human spell caster. He can totally be killed.”
“Okay, see,” I said with a smile, “that’sthe kind of information we need! None of this doom and gloom crap I’ve been getting.” From Saph. He’d been there for Gaufrid’s last uprising, but he hadn’t said the bastard had been killed, just that he’d been stopped. “So if I get to him and chop off his head…”
Morning smiled. “Dead necromancer.”
“Why, then,” LaRhonda asked, “wouldn’t they just run around in pairs? Kill one, the other brings him back.” She clicked her tongue. “Men never think long term.”
