Мелисса де ла Круз - Keys to the Repository

“I think the correct question is, who are you? You’re in our territory.” His voice was low and musical, friendly.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“We don’t like the likes of you here. You smell like the glom,” he said, and she knew he meant that she was not quite human; that somehow, he could sense her formerly immortal stature, when she had once been an angel of fire.

“You know about the glom?” Bliss asked.

The boy laughed. “We hunt i n the glom. We are the

Abyssus Praetorium.”

Bliss startled. She’d heard the term before. The Guards of the Abyss. Also known as the Praetorian Guard. An image flashed in her mind. She saw the Visitor—Lucifer—her father —standing inside an elaborate palace, surrounded by magnificent columns of gold. A cast of thousands was gathered around his court. Was this Rome? Or ancient Egypt? She couldn’t tell. Lucifer stood at the top of a marble staircase, looking down at a creature of exquisite beauty. It was a man, but he was taller than a human male, with a certain otherworldly magnificence, wild-eyed and ferocious.

The image did not come from her memory but from

Lucifer’s. When she had been captive to his spirit, when he had taken over her soul, fragments of his memories had drifted into her consciousness. Triggered by random events, memories she’d never had would suddenly pop into her mind. So. The

Visitor knew these creatures. She closed her eyes to recall the scene once more. She could hear Lucifer speak. The language was unfamiliar, its words harsh and convoluted, but she knew she could speak them as if they were her own.

“Release me!” she cried, just as the boy’s hand tightened on her throat. The room froze and from the other side of the door, the beast howled. Then the boy’s grip eased and he fell away, staring at her in amazement and confusion, as if he could not quite understand why he had let her go.

She was as she shocked as he was, but she didn’t have any time to lose. In one fluid motion, Bliss rolled away and bolted from the room, catching her balance before she slipped in a puddle of blood. She wrenched the knife from the freezer door and ran through the doorway and back out into the shop.

What just happened? She had tracked the creature for weeks, and now suddenly it seemed that she was the one who was being pursued. Had Lucifer sent the creature to lure her here? Was he somehow able to reach her once more? Was the boy working for him? How could Allegra have led her to this hellhole? Was everything she had been told and everything she believed nothing but a lie?

Bliss pushed against the front door, surprised to find it was locked. She had purposefully left it open when she’d entered.

Who had locked it? She kicked at the jamb, splitting it in two and throwing glass out onto the street. She flung the door open and skidded out onto the sidewalk. Tiny shards of glass dug into her shoes as she stumbled across the pavement toward her car. She heard the slap of running footsteps behind her, but she didn’t turn. Grabbing the keys out of her pocket, she wrestled the door open, slid into the driver’s seat, and fired the engine. She looked ahead of her, and then behind. She was parked in from both sides, the other cars mere inches away from hers. There was no way she could get out without doing damage to either vehicle, or her own. It was obviously a trap.

She’d just have to smash her way out. She floored the gas pedal, and slammed into the car in front of her. It moved, but barely.

She slammed on the gas again, this time throwing the car into reverse, and plowed directly into the car behind her, causing a sickening crunch of metal against metal as the back end of her car crunched like an accordion and her taillights exploded in a shower of plastic and dust. She threw the car back into drive and pancaked the rear bumper of the car in front of her. Her own car popped up on the curb—that was more like it— allowing her to twist her way out from between the two cars that had trapped her in front of the butcher shop.

Sweat dripped from her forehead and into her eyes. She blinked, feeling dizzy. She was human now, and despite her strength, she would have to get used to her new limitations.

She hit the gas again and powered forward, turning the wheel, speeding wildly down the street. The windshield had cracked, making it hard to see, and she immediately crashed into a telephone pole. The windshield caved in, and the car swung sideways as it plowed into the curb. Bliss was thrown backward against the headrest. What had she done? She had gone from escape to disaster in only a few seconds. The car was demolished. She hit the gas again, but nothing happened.

She tried reverse, but the engine was dead.

Then a loud thump hit the top of the car, and the roof caved in slightly. She saw a pair of boots descend from the top of the car to the hood, followed by four hairy paws. So that’s where the beast had gone. She could see it more clearly now—its silver fur, its crimson eyes. They settled in front of her, the boy and the wolf, both of them crouched on their haunches, nimble as acrobats as they stared at her through the broken windshield.

Behind them, she could see others, a group of kids slowly circling the car. How many were they? Three? Four? More? She caught a glimpse of a fierce-looking girl with wild green hair and tattoos, and several boys who looked dark and menacing.

Someone was trying to pry open the rear passenger-side door.

The handle rattled, but all of the doors had been smashed shut.

Bliss took a deep breath and waited. “What do you want from me?”

The boy smiled. “I want you to calm down before you hurt yourself, Bliss.”

He knows my name. How does he know my name?

“I’m Lawson, by the way.”

She nodded, but her attention was elsewhere. The wolf had pushed forward, its teeth inches from her face. Spit oozed from its mouth; the odor was unbearable. Lawson coaxed the creature’s head away, so it backed off from Bliss with a whimper.

“Come on now, Scooby, lay off,” he said, giving the creature an affectionate shake.

One of the kids standing near the car—a little girl, Bliss could now see—she couldn’t have been more than eleventossed over a dog biscuit. The wolf caught the treat in midair and wandered away from the car, tail wagging.

“Scooby?” The wolf was his pet. Bliss tried not to look too incredulous. When her mother had sent her on this quest, she had imagined the Hounds of Hell as supernatural creatures.

Beasts that were half human and half animal, something from nightmares and horror movies. Hellhound, werewolf . . . same thing, right?

“Is that what you thought? That we turned into them? At the sight of a full moon?” Lawson smirked. How did he know what she was thinking? It was as if he had heard every word.

Venators could do that, of course, but she could tell he wasn’t a vampire. What was he then? And who was “we”? That group of kids around the car? Were they with him? They had to be.

Lawson threw back his head and howled. He pulled at his shirt collar in an imitation of an uncontrollable dramatic transformation. “You’re not serious are you?” he asked, looking a bit insulted. “I mean, you know there’s no such thing as werewolves, right? They were invented by some desperate screenwriter in the 1940s. We noticed you’d been following

Scooby for a while and thought it was high time we finally met.

Sorry if what we arranged was a little crude. The boys have a sick sense of humor. Comes from living in the wild, I guess.”

Bliss didn’t know what to say. Lawson was awfully chatty for someone who, moments ago, seemed to mean her quite a bit of harm. Her neck still pinched where he had held her.