Must Love Hellhounds

way, swung his legs like a gymnast on a pommel horse, and smashed his clawed feet into Cerberus’s right head.
    I snapped the Weatherby up, anticipating Cerberus’s recoil.
    The huge head swung back, as if in slow motion, the ruby eye clear and bright.
    Steady. Aim.
    An ancient tie stretched between Cerberus and me, vibrating like a live wire. The bond between the hunter and her prey.
    The head reared higher and higher.
    I have time.
    I fired.
    Blood burst from the back of Cerberus’s head. The head jerked straight up, its nose pointing to the sky. Fire leaked from its ruined orbit. The flames surged, engulfing the head. As it crashed down, bouncing once on the hard dirt, Raphael leapt to the ground. Behind him the last head shuddered and fell, catching the flames. Raphael straightened, a dark demonic figure silhouetted against the orange fire, his eyes two points of red light.
    If I weren’t a trained professional, I’d have fainted from the sheer overload of his badassness.
    I pointed my rifle straight up, resting the butt against my hip, and put on my Order face. Move along, nothing to see here, I do this every day. I thought of blowing imaginary smoke from the rifle barrel, but the Weatherby was long and I’m barely five feet four, so I’d look pretty stupid.
    Raphael strode to me. His voice was a ragged growl torn to tatters by his fangs. “Are you alright?”
    I nodded. “A bit scratched up. Nothing major.”
    We walked away, slowly, trying to maintain our coolness. A greasy stench of charred flesh tainted the air currents.
    “That was a hell of a shot,” Raphael said.
    “Thank you. That was a stunning display of hand-to-hand.”
    We killed a damn Cerberus. Kate would turn green with envy.
    Then the magic wave drowned us, and we paused in unison as it penetrated our bodies, awakening the inner beasts.
    A bright blue glow surged from the ground. It flashed and vanished—the ward, a strong magic barrier, going active. Approaching the house during magic would be problematic. We’d have to somehow break through the ward.
    A ghostly white light ignited in the wall right in front of us. It struggled free of the house and approached us, moving in sharp jerks. Its fuzzy radiance halted just before reaching the boundary of the ward and solidified into a translucent older man with kind eyes and pale hair.
    I jumped back and snapped my gun up on reflex. Not that it would do anything with magic up.
    A grimace strained the ghost’s face, as if he were pulling a great weight. “Raphael,” he gasped. “Not safe . . .”
    A spark of magic snapped from the house. It clutched the ghost and jerked him back into the wall. Raphael lunged at the ward. The defensive spell flashed with blue, twisting a snarl of pain from his lips. I grabbed him and pulled him back.
    “Is that Doulos? Your mother’s mate?”
    He nodded, fury boiling in his eyes. “We must get him out!”
    An odd sucking sound rolled behind us. I looked over my shoulder. Inside the ball of flames, Cerberus’s skeleton rose upright. The fire flared once more and vanished, snuffed out like a candle. Flesh spiraled up the colossal bones. Oh shit .
    “Run!” Raphael snarled. We dashed down the ravine.
    We were halfway to the wall when the first growl announced the hellhound giving chase.
     
     
     
    “And you’re sure Doulos was dead?” I drove like a maniac through Atlanta’s troubled streets. Next to me Raphael licked a burn on his arm.
    “He was embalmed. Yeah, pretty sure.”
    “Then what was that ?”
    “I don’t know. A shade? A soul on its way to Hades?”
    “Is that even possible?”
    “We’ve been almost eaten by a giant three-headed dog. There is not a hell of a lot that I consider not possible at this point. Watch out for that cart!”
    I threw the wheel to the right and barely avoided a collision with a teamster, who flipped me off. “We need a bigger gun.”
    “We need a shower,” Raphael said.
    “Gun first. Shower later.”
    Ten minutes later I walked into the Order’s office. A group of knights standing in the hallway turned at my approach: Mauro, the huge Samoan knight; Tobias, as usual dapper; and Gene, the seasoned former Georgia Bureau of Investigations detective. They looked at me. The conversation died.
    My clothes were torn and bloody. Soot stained my skin. My hair stuck out in clumps caked with dirt and blood. The reek of a dead cat emanated from me in a foul cloud.
    I walked past them into the armory, opened