I couldn’t ask her anything.
Pushing the fuzzy memory of her face—smiling, soft—out of my mind, I took off running, my feet pounding mercilessly and rhythmically into the pavement, again and again and again.
You have to find them. Hunt them. Kill them.
Kill them now.
The need pounded through my temples. It slithered its way through artery and vein, claiming the tips of my fingers, the small of my back.
Canis daemonum might have been the scientific classification for hellhounds, but the human body has over 60,000 miles of capillaries, and every one of mine was telling me that ’hounds were just demons, plain and simple. And hunting demons was what I did.
Who I was.
The purpose for which I’d been born.
Besides which, I hadn’t exactly made friends at my new high school (yet), so it wasn’t like I had anywhere else to be on a Sunday night.
You’re getting closer. You have to find them.
Find them now.
The world blurred around me as I ran. Superspeed was not and had never been a part of the Kali package, so if anyone saw me as I streaked past them, all they would have seen was a normal girl—not quite Indian, not quite white—running at a sprint. What spectators wouldn’t realize was that I could have continued running at this pace indefinitely—or at least until the sun came up the next morning.
People like me didn’t get tired. We didn’t wear out. Once we got a lock on our prey, we just kept coming and coming.
“Here.” The word came out in a whisper, and I could almost see the way it rippled through the air. The closer I got to my quarry, the sharper my senses became.
I was very, very close.
Taking a deep breath, I slowed to a jog and then slipped effortlessly into a standstill, appraising my surroundings. Grass in severe need of cutting. Broken bottles with edges nearly as jagged as my unnaturally sharp fingernails. Abandoned lots, like this one, were the perfect hunting ground for Canis daemonum. My instincts had directed me to the right place.
Now, I just had to wait for the monsters to show.
In lore, hellhounds tracked down the souls of the damned and dragged them back to hell in bloody shreds. In reality, ’hounds were attracted to rotting sores, flesh marinated in dirt and grime, and certain chemical substances that found their way into the human bloodstream from time to time. They preyed on the weak, the degenerate, the homeless.
The kind of people that others ignored and forgot. The kind who weren’t missed when a government-protected species mowed them down. If the worst happened here tonight, there might be an article in the paper the next day. There might not. But either way, the rest of the world would just go on living, comfortable in the belief that it couldn’t happen to them, certain that the government had the monsters under control.
That they were the kind of thing that we could control.
Not tonight.
My heart didn’t race. My gaze never wavered. And as the fetid smell of rotting blood filled my nostrils, the unbearable pressure inside my veins fell away like a sand castle under the force of a wave. The entire world went still.
Perfect. Utter. Calm.
I crouched, reaching for my knife, feeling its weight, its balance, its edge. And then I lifted my eyes to stare directly into the blood-red irises of one beast after another as they emerged from the brush.
Three of them. Endangered, my ass.
The sound of the hellhound’s growl, like a chainsaw tearing through rusted metal, was the only warning I got before it leapt for my jugular. A human would have ducked. I leapt for its jugular.
Our bodies collided midair, and I buried my knife up to the hilt in one blood-red eye before my opponent’s superior mass and speed sent me flying backward, three hundred pounds of ugly on top of me. As my body slammed into the ground, I twisted my wrist and was rewarded with the sound of steel tearing through the hellhound’s thick, sinewy flesh. From this angle, I couldn’t get to the beast’s heart, but I had bigger problems. Like, for example, the claws digging into my shoulders and the massive jaw that had unhinged itself like a snake’s to aid and abet my prey in biting off my head.
Not so fast, Fido.
In a single, fluid motion, I jerked my dagger out of the monster’s eye and thrust my other arm into its mouth. Razor-sharp teeth clamped down over the bait, cutting through the flesh of my forearm like butter and snapping the bone.
The crunching sound wasn’t exactly pleasant, and the hellhound’s breath was killer, but other than that, I wasn’t really bothered. People like me?
We didn’t feel pain.
My blood splattered everywhere, but messy eater or not, the hellhound managed to get some of my flesh in its mouth, and the moment my blood touched its tar-black tongue, the beast froze, paralyzed. I jerked what was left of my arm out of its mouth and managed to drag myself out from underneath its carcass as it fell.