Hellhound (8 page)

He nodded and retreated. Something urgent and
disturbing transpired between the two. Nathanial seemed nervous and fidgety,
which was very unlike him, and Claudius looked anxious too. 

I expected Danther to return shortly, since Claudius
was his patron Elder. I didn’t want to get caught between the two again.
Council minions were as adamant as their patron Elders. If Claudius disliked
me, then so did Danther.

I didn’t find Mother in her apartment, nor Father, so
I retreated to my room, which was also empty.

I decided to head down for the ceremony to avoid the
rush after a prolonged brunch where I awkwardly mingled with others of my kind.
I was a loner, and I preferred it that way, but trying to intermingle once in a
while seemed good enough.

People were awkward around me now. Before, I was the
highly anticipated daughter of Elders, someone whom the clan would soon follow,
someone they respected. Now, I was more of a black sheep. People didn’t talk to
me. I was an outcast.

In the elevator, I pushed the button for SL5 after
Damares pressed for the ground floor.

“I wonder what the ceremony is for.”

“What ceremony?” Damares looked at me.

Meeting her eyes, I snapped my mouth shut. Perhaps the
ceremony wasn’t meant for everyone to know about. Then again, Claudius summoned
both Demetrius and I, and Damares was his sister, a tracker as well.

Sternly shaking my head, I looked at the closed
elevator door. She knew my demeanor dismissed the topic. She exited on the
ground floor while I continued alone.

No one waited for me below ground. There wasn’t a
minion in sight to escort me to the throne room, much less a subterranean
sentry to guard the chambers. Something smelled afoul amongst the contrary conditions.
The area should’ve filled with Elders, guests, and participants for whatever
ceremony this was. Sentries and minions should’ve been on standby. Instead, the
halls were eerily void of souls.

My heart beat a little harder in my chest to the point
where it was painfully noticeable. My feet moved faster until I ran down the
corridor, stopping just short of the giant double doors, which loomed at ten
feet tall. The doors were heavy, made from silver and gold, and required the
brute strength of subterranean sentries to fully open. The right one stood
slightly ajar. I pushed against it and entered the ghastly and vacant marble
throne room. A foul odor hit my nostrils. Faint, dissipating particles lingered
in the air.

The stench of death? Open flesh, clotted blood,
spilled entrails? I gagged.

The room was bare of the presence of a so-called
ceremony. Every throne stood empty above the central floor. In the middle of
the room, on the exposed stage, were two bodies as still as the earth. I
quivered, looking around, knowing already that I was alone. I hurried to the
bodies. They were pale and gaunt, and their clothes hung from their bones.

Avoiding the pool of black blood, I hovered above the
corpses, recognizing one—Nathanial. He lay on his side, crooked and contorted,
with a dagger between him and the other body. The dagger seemed familiar to me.
Only the trackers from our clan possessed them. I didn’t think quickly enough
to ponder why a tracker’s weapon was here, or even to consider it as being the
murder weapon.

I naturally assumed that the other man was Claudius. He
was dressed like an Elder. His white robe was slashed and stained black with
blood, his white hair and beard clotted with the viscous fluid. His face was
buried beneath his arm, so I carefully bent down and rolled him over to verify
his identity.

My chest heaved, my stomach constricted in spasms to
vomit as I stepped in blood. Instead of feeling just uneasy, expecting to see
Claudius’s face, a malevolent storm seized me. I did not look down at the face
of Elder Claudius, but at the remains of
my
father!

I screamed. My shrills reverberated through the room
and created minor splinters in the walls. Stumbling back, I caught myself on my
palms, which ultimately slipped on the blood. Jumping to my feet, I looked down
at my open hands. A wave of concentrated shocks rocked my body.

Tears blurred my sight. Breaths came in choppy gasps.
I struggled to stand.

Scurrying feet sounded in the far distance, quickly
advancing until the tall, grotesque subterranean sentries appeared, crowding
the entry. I looked up at them, barely making out their bodies behind dark
tears. They rushed toward me.

Danther appeared among them, pushed through, and looked
down at the bodies. He seemed as horrified as I felt. His lips quivered for a brief
moment. He looked up at me and took me by the elbow.

“You mustn’t see them like this,” he said calmly,
almost in an eerie way.

I craned my neck to glimpse Father again, torturing
myself. Someone did this to him!

My body temperature dropped, and the darkness clawed
to the surface, demanding to be unleashed. It writhed beneath my skin, ached
for release until prickles of pain ignited my flesh.

More people filed in, namely the Elders. Their joyous
voices carried through until they saw me, the blood on my hands, which I
smeared against my pants, and the sub sentries surrounding two bodies.

I couldn’t think above the conversations, shrieks, and
cries. The Elders pulled me one way and then another to get answers, but I
shook my head, and finally ran from the madness. I bolted through the cleared
double doors, around the corridor, and down the maze of halls until I stepped
into the elevator.

Waiting to reach my floor, I rubbed my palms against
my pants so hard that I could’ve ripped the fabric off. I hugged myself and
wailed, tasting the saltiness of tears. I ran as soon as the door opened,
evading two people in the hall waiting to go down. They jumped from my way.

I expected my apartment to be empty, but it wasn’t.
Demetrius was there, throwing his clothes into his backpack. He froze when I
entered. The blood crusted on my dark jeans.

I pieced two and two together. “Did you?” I couldn’t
finish the question without wrathful tremors fighting to take control.

He started to shake his head, a bemused expression
plastered across his face, but he couldn’t deny me the truth. Demetrius was a
man greatly skilled in many things, but lying wasn’t one of them.

Demetrius ran to me, took me by the shoulders, and
said, “I didn’t kill him. I would never do that to you. I was set up.”

I threw his hands from the hold. My eyes flickered.
“You obviously know about the murders, then. How could you know about them if
you weren’t there?”

“I didn’t kill him.” he repeated.

 “Did you kill Nathanial, then?”

He neither confirmed nor denied, so that led me to
believe that he murdered at least one man. I expected Demetrius to vehemently
deny the crude accusation, something that an innocent man would do. He did
nothing.

“What happened?” I demanded, feeling my body chill and
my essence darken into hollow blackness.

Demetrius shook his head and released me. “I tried to
find you, but the sentries came after me. I have to get out of here. They won’t
let me talk or explain anything. Come with me.”

“Where are you going? And why are they after you when
I
just
found the bodies? There’s something that you’re not telling me,
so you better start.”

“I can’t explain here. The sentries are after me. Come
with me, quickly.” Then he mumbled something about timing and mid-day. Turmoil was
evident on his face.

I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around.
“Tell me now. Why would they be after you already? What aren’t you telling me?”

“No time to explain here.”

My right hand reached around to my back for the
crescent, my most prized possession and the rarest of weapons. I would make him
speak one way or another. I didn’t want to use it against him, but he left me
with little choice.

The yells from the hallway caught my attention as I
whipped my head toward the front door. I hadn’t locked it. By the time I got to
it and returned to the bedroom to face Demetrius again, he was long gone.
Racing to the bedroom window, I leaned out of the broken glass in time to see
my lover sprint through the thickest parts of the woods.

The sound of arrows slicing through the air buzzed in
my ear. With narrowed eyes, and advanced sight, I watched half-revolted as two
arrows embedded themselves into Demetrius’s shoulder, drawing out black fluid.
He winced, reaching over to yank out the projectiles, and kept running. He
wouldn’t fly and expose his secret ability, and he couldn’t transform into a
cloud during daylight.

I found it odd that the sentries were on an order to
capture him already. I found it unnerving that the archers were on a stop
order, and perhaps the sentinels were too. They took orders from the Elders, so
someone from the Council worked fast. Less than half an hour from when I found
the bodies to now meant that something was not right here.

The man was in deep trouble.

The archers were good, and would continue shooting for
several more feet. Shape-shifting sentinels surrounded the compound, armed and
deadly, and viciously violent. The keepers waited at the edge of the woods in
the form of flesh-demolishing fog. Trackers would take to the skies in a
relentless hunt. And if he survived them all, he would have to contend with me,
self-proclaimed Hellhound to the clans of Mythos.

Demetrius was a dead man.

Chapter Seven

Someone pounded on my door, dragging my focus back to
the apartment.

I wiped tears from my face before opening the front
door.

“Where is he?” a sentry demanded.

“No one’s here.”

He didn’t believe me, pushed me aside and searched the
apartment.

After securing the area, the sentries moved on to
another apartment. I stepped out and stood in the hallway in the middle of
chaos. All trackers were taken.

The dagger from the throne room was the murder weapon,
and the Council suspected a tracker was the killer. Since word moved fast, the
archers must’ve been on an order to prevent anyone from leaving the compound. That
was the only logical assumption.

“You, too, Selene,” the sentry ordered me.

“I have to clean up first,” I muttered, and closed the
door in his face.

A scourge of anguish crawled across my chest, making
my throat raw and my head ache. I was close to my father as a child, what many
humans considered a daddy’s girl. He treated me like a princess, and it seemed
that I could do nothing wrong in his glittering, blue eyes.

When I forsook my bloodlines to become a hunter, he
kindly admonished me. When I took Demetrius as a lover, he carefully
enlightened me. Even when I moved out of the domicile, or wandered to unsecure,
forbidden places on the territory, he dealt with me compassionately.

I leaned against the closed bathroom door, blinded by
bloody tears as the small room blurred. Placing my hand to my heaving chest, I
clutched my shirt, crinkling it in my tightened fist. Melancholy drowned me in
subservient abuse.

How could my father be dead? Knowing that I would
never see him again rattled my brain as if this new reality were unfeasible.

I didn’t have time to mourn. I had to find out why
Demetrius fled, why he acted guilty, because I couldn’t believe that he was.

I wiped my eyes and washed my face, then changed my
clothes and commanded myself to take control over my emotions.

Stopping by a mirror near the front door, I stared at
my reflection. My eyes clouded over with blackness from the unholy rage that
bubbled deep within the chasms of my soul. Even the whites of my eyes were
black, and I could see why humans once mistook me for being a demon. I wasn’t a
demon. I was just exceedingly upset.

Along with the smoky black eyes, a birthmark appeared
on my left temple above the eyebrow to just below the cheekbone.

With a deep inhalation and a gritty sigh, I left,
meeting my brethren on the first floor. The clamor in the conference room died
as soon as I appeared. The sentries closed the doors behind me, locking us in.

In the front of the room, four steps led up to a stage
with a long oak table and enough plush seats for each of the Council members.
They were all filled, minus one. I cringed and tears welled up again.

Fight it
.

Chairs surrounded the large table in the center of the
room. Trackers filled all but two seats. I took one right in front of the door,
at the back of the room, and faced the Council. The other remained empty.

Sitting upright and rigid, I tightened my fists in my
lap. My nails pressed into my flesh. My heart was heavy, barely beating in my
chest. This was a hearing.

I looked from one person to another, recognizing
everyone here, Damares, Ashton, Juno, Antony, and Jaden to name a few trackers.
To my surprise, Lydia was present. She was an engineer and worked on many of
the electrical designs. Why was she here?