Must Love Hellhounds

picked my way so he caught only the mere flashes of me.
    “Don’t hide from me,” he asked.
    I ignored him.
    Suddenly he burst through the brush. I had no chance to hide. He saw all of me: my limbs, my face that was neither animal nor beast, my breasts . . .
    “You’re lovely,” he whispered as he passed me in a burst of speed.
    “You’re sick,” I told him.
    “You’ve a perfect union of human and animal: proportionate and elegant and strong. Your form is what we aspire to. How’s that sick?”
    “I’m a human!”
    “So am I. You don’t have to hide from me, Andrea. I think you are beautiful.”
    Nobody, not human, not shapeshifter, not even my mother had ever told me that the beast form was beautiful. Inside me, the human me put her hands on her face and cried.
    Miles flashed by. We passed a house in a blur of speed. Trees parted, underbrush snapped, and we burst into a clearing. A ward ignited with gold, barring our way in a translucent wall.
    Inside the ward, a dark-haired boy crouched on the ground, hugging his knees. Past him a dead vampire lay broken on the grass, its skull shattered. To the left, an unnaturally large snake was dying on the grass, a second vampire caught in its coils. The vamp’s neck was broken, its vertebrae crushed. Blood drenched the snake’s coils. With each new squeeze, more blood washed the scales.
    Past them, a ring of colonnades carved of pure white stone guarded a narrow apple sapling. Four yellow apples hung from the branches. The fifth apple, with a small piece bitten off, lay on the grass, by the hand of a dark-haired woman. She slumped on the grass. Her horribly distended stomach had ripped through her tailored slacks.
    Oh no. She ate it. We were too late.
    “Now look what you did.” A man walked up to us, his eyes fixed on Spider Lynn. “I done told you to leave the apples alone.”
    Raphael snarled. The fur on his back rose.
    The man was tall and broad-shouldered, built with strength in mind. Dark stubble peppered his face. He wore a white T-shirt, a pair of old jeans, and yellow work boots. A flannel shirt hung from his blocky shoulders. He looked like a good old boy in search of a porch with a rocking chair and a glass of iced tea. He turned to us and said, “Hi.”
    This was surreal. “Who are you?” I asked.
    “I’m Teddy Jo.”
    “You’re the man who called me about Raphael running from Cerberus?”
    “I called Kate,” he said. “You answered the phone. Do you have the bracelet?”
    “What?”
    “Doulos’s bracelet. You have it?” He saw the bracelet on Raphael’s arm. “Oh good then. We’re in business.”
    Lynn squirmed on the grass and began to cry. “What is happening to me?”
    Teddy Jo glanced at her. “You’ve brought this on yourself.”
    Raphael lunged at him. His clawed fingers closed about Teddy Jo’s throat, the bracelet glinting with steel on his forearm. “What are you doing here?”
    “Well now, you might want to rethink that,” Teddy Jo said, raising his arm. His sleeve fell back, revealing an identical bracelet, but made of gold. “Given as we’re on the same side.”
    Magic slammed my senses. Teddy Jo’s eyes turned solid black. The flannel shirt ripped on his back and two colossal black wings thrust into the night. Fire ran from his bracelet down into his hand and snapped into a flaming blade.
    “Thanatos,” Lynn squeaked.
    The angel of death clamped Raphael’s wrist and squeezed. Raphael bared his teeth and crushed Thanatos’s throat.
    Lynn’s stomach twisted. She howled as if cut. Alex’s nephew jerked.
    “Stop!” I barked at the two men. “There’s a kid in shock sitting behind that ward, locked with whatever is about to crawl out of Lynn’s gut! Raphael, break the damn ward. Teddy Jo, I swear, you don’t let go of him this instant, I’ll rip your wings off!”
    The two of them stared at me.
    “Do it!”
    Teddy Jo let go. Raphael thrust his arm into the ward and the wall of gold drained down, revealing the shrine.
    I leapt inside and swept the boy up into my arms. “Listen to me.”
    He stared at me with empty eyes. To him I was a monster.
    I opened my hand and showed him the car. He touched it gently and I handed it to him. “I won’t hurt you. Uncle Alex’s house, do you know where it is?”
    He nodded.
    “I want you to run to it and not look back. Okay?”
    He clutched the car in his fist. I set him down and he ran.
    Raphael snarled at Teddy Jo. “What the hell are you doing