Hellhound (33 page)

Most of this was rubbish. I ran through it faster, my
eyes darting very quickly to keep up with the images. Now I was at the point
where he came to my apartment to tell me that he would join me in the hunt. He
thought I looked disheveled but sexy. I grimaced. I didn’t want to know what
else he thought at that particular moment.

He acted surprised when I asked him about Lydia, but
he wasn’t truly surprised. He planned that and played the game. I fell for it,
thinking that I acted cunningly. He hated cleaning up the glass mess, but
obliged. He heard me ask who sent him, but decided to ignore me and left.
Ashton took to the skies after Demetrius, but couldn’t get a firm trace. He
didn’t care much about the hunt, but he did care that once Demetrius was back,
he would be released, free from the clan.

Before this point, Ashton was summoned by Claudius, by
way of his minion puppet, Danther. Danther told him that he had to complete
this final assignment and the Council would agree to allow him to mate
elsewhere, live elsewhere. Ashton agreed quite smugly. Danther would keep in
touch with him via cell phone.

I breathed, knowing that I inched closer to the truth
and hoped to anyone that could hear me that I succeeded in taking the memory of
the event before the jaguar stopped me.

Hours prior to the new job, Ashton approached Damares
while the trackers were being corralled. He appeared frantic. No one knew what
was going on just yet, but he did.

“If the Council asks for an alibi, what will you say?”
he asked her.

“I was home alone. Not much of an alibi. What do you
think happened here?”

He shrugged. I felt the movement and caught the sight
of his raised shoulders in his peripheral vision. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Depends.”

“Can you tell them that we were together?”

“What?” She looked mortified that he would even ask
her to do that. “I barely know you. What were you doing that was so bad that
you would even consider asking me to lie for you?”

“I was with Lydia,” he grumbled, looking past Damares
at the advancing armed sentries.

“Oh, I see.” She turned red.

“Do you know about us?”

Damares nodded.

Ashton had been sleeping with Lydia, taking her
innocence and mating with her. He wasn’t in love with her, far from it. Ashton
abused Lydia, took her admiration for him and twisted it for his gain. It was
all a part of his scheme leading up to that day. He paired a false relationship
with a false alibi based on this hideous lie.

He knew all along that Lydia would be sent down to
check the cerebral chamber. He did something to the fiber optics above it,
which was actually a simple wrench that wouldn’t take long at all to fix.
However, I doubted that I would share that little bit of knowledge and allow
the cerebral chamber to run smoothly. He informed Danther and insisted that
Lydia go down that morning to work on it.

Ashton was well aware that Lydia would walk by at that
moment. He knew when she approached because the tracker side of him smelled her
coming, and the shifter side heard her. Lydia would see him, as Demetrius, kill
Nathanial. She would confide in the Council and offer her memories of the
event. Lydia told Damares about their illicit affair, so Damares felt compelled
to help her friend out by lying for Ashton. He covered up what he was truly
doing, and he wasn’t doing it with Lydia.

The Council barely interviewed him since he had an
agreeable alibi and Lydia stepped forward.

I inhaled. All right, here came the truth. What
happened before the sentries rounded up the trackers? I watched it all backward
first. My eyes were teary already. A sudden heat hit me. My breathing escalated,
and I warned myself not to cry.

I watched it all in fast rewind so that I could get to
the beginning of this. Ashton floated down to the throne room, he transformed
into his corporal form, stood over Nathanial. Nathanial stood, Ashton pulled
out the dagger from his torso, turned to glance at Lydia peering through the
doorframe, and then turned toward my father’s corpse. My father stood. Ashton
pulled out the dagger from his body many times.

I clasped a hand to my mouth, which became wet and
warm from streaming tears.

He walked away, backward, out into the hall, up the
elevator. He met Nathanial on an upper floor. They spoke.

Daily routines went across the screen: showering,
eating, drinking, waiting in his apartment alone without Lydia. Days passed,
perhaps a few weeks. He made love to Lydia several times, enchanted her. He
wooed her, convinced her. He spoke with Nathanial again.

There were thoughts of rebellion, flickers of hate
toward the Council, and toward me. Why?

I was destined to be one thing, an Elder, but rebelled
in my own way by becoming a hunter and mating with Demetrius. I defied the Council
and the clan, and they tolerated me. They didn’t banish me or make an example
out of me, or even discipline me.

I groaned. He wanted to make his own life choices the
way I had, and hated me and all those who were biased enough to allow me
unrepentant freedom. He wanted to leave the clan, go to a place where he could
be both a shifter and a tracker without anyone demanding things from him, or
telling him what to do. He desired to be a free agent, a solitary Mythian
without an organized clan to call home.

Well, Ashton. I could’ve told him that there was no
such thing. Even I faced my price, more dearly than I could have ever
anticipated.

The memories splintered right about there, tapered off
in his sea of hate and envy. Holes appeared in bright blotches like a burning
film reel. This was as far as I’d gotten, which was very good in the short
amount of time I had, and despite the arrow lodged in Ashton’s brain.

I swallowed and played forward. Yeah, yeah, I got the
part that Ashton despised me. I never thought that I was seen as an exception
to the rule. I never thought that I rebelled that badly, either. I took a new
position than the one assigned to me by my birthright, and I took a different
mate than the one arranged for me. It wasn’t that I was trying to bring down
the pillars of clan society. I just wanted what I loved, and I loved being a Hellhound
mated to Demetrius.

Nathanial had wondered where Ashton often went to,
since he knew that Ashton’s assignments were few and far between. So he
followed him, and discovered that not only was Ashton pulling up skirts in
other clans, but that he went there under the guise of a lone shape-shifter.
There were some Mythians out there who didn’t live in clans and domiciles. They
weren’t rebels or rogues, per se, so these clans admitted Ashton. A clan could
always use another sentry. Females in heat always flocked toward shifters, and
he had his pickings.

Nathanial black-mailed Ashton into doing one feat of
rebellion and then he would be allowed to leave our clan without a trace of him
ever having been here.

“Yeah, Council boy? What do you want me to do?” Ashton
asked.

“You despise the Council, right? You hate that Selene
gets to rebel, gets her freedom in choices without actions against her
insurgence?”

“Sure. That doesn’t seem fair to me.”

“I have a way for you to disrupt the hierarchy of
things here, and tear Selene away from her good life.”

Ashton was scrupulous about what he said to Nathanial.
After all, Nathanial would be an Elder. “Why do you want to compromise
anything, future Councilman?”

Nathanial seemed to be a bit torn. He reluctantly
replied, “I’ve been made a fool by Selene and her flamboyant relationship with
the tracker.”

Flamboyant? That wasn’t the word I would use, perhaps candid.
I didn’t push my life into anyone’s face, but I didn’t hide it either. It was
there out in the open, and people took it for whatever they thought it was
worth.

Ashton agreed with Nathanial.

“This is what I propose to do, tracker,” Nathanial
started. “Since you have a very useful combination of gifts, you will serve in
the greatest capacity.”

“What’s the plan?”

“I’ll bring Elder Augustus down to the throne room and
you’ll enter as Demetrius. Augusts will think that we’re there to discuss the
matter about Selene like men, between adults, and without her consent or
knowledge. Augustus doesn’t want Selene to be with Demetrius, but he’s too
loving of her to force them apart, though not for a lack of trying by getting
into Demetrius’s ears. I’ll convince you, in the guise of Demetrius, to leave
Selene alone and allow her to fulfill her requirements. The conversation will
be quick, it doesn’t matter how far we get. When he lets his guard down, you’ll
stab him with Demetrius’s dagger. Can you get a hold of it?”

Ashton nodded.

I had to stop for a moment. I couldn’t believe that my
intended husband had been this cruel, this barbaric.

Nathanial went on, “I’ll act as a witness to this
crime. You’ll turn into a cloud of black smoke and leave through the vents. A
ceremony will be arranged that day, so the halls will be clear and most people,
including the Council, will be upstairs in preparation. The timing has to be
perfect because we’ll take advantage of the changing of the subterranean
sentries, a good five to ten minutes.”

Ashton came up with the part about Lydia without
involving Nathanial. He seduced her into loving him, confiding in him, trusting
him despite their affair being illegitimate in the eyes of the clan. She served
as a witness and a foundation for his false alibi. He rigged something simple
to throw off the cerebral chamber, a literal wrench in the works, and informed
Danther. Danther, like a predictable puppet, told Lydia to fix it before the
ceremony.

Ashton and Nathanial met just before meeting my
father.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw Father. Ashton, as
Demetrius, walked in after him. The throne room door was slightly ajar. The
three men talked for a minute or two.

“You’re a powerful Elder, how can you allow this? Am I
not good enough for Selene? Did you not tell me that you see me as your own
son?” Nathanial asked, heated.

Father turned away; his hands clamped behind his back
as he looked down and shook his head. “It’s just not that simple to force her.
Besides, you don’t want her to take it out on you if she is forced to marry
you. Now you, Demetrius, you can change all of this by letting her be.”

I clutched the arms to my recliner. Demetrius’s words
haunted me. If Mythians could shape-shift, why couldn’t one shift to look like
another man?

Ashton pulled out the dagger, which he stole from
Demetrius several days prior and stabbed my father over and over. My father
didn’t stand a chance when he was stabbed in the back with the brutal force of
a shape-shifter.

My hands clasped around my mouth to prevent my
screaming.

Father fell to the floor on his knees, and Ashton
stabbed him in the head. He was so violent! My father laid on the floor in a
prone position, his thick, black blood pooled around him quickly.

Nathanial muttered, “I’m glad someone could do it.”

“Will you let me leave alone now? Can I leave the
clan?”

“One more thing. We’ll send Selene to hunt down
Demetrius. She’ll kill him, and return to me, naturally. When Demetrius is
dead, you’re free.”

“Those weren’t the terms.”

“Hmmm, new terms then.”

A wave of sadistic anger washed over Ashton, but he
waited, as if considering. He could smell very well thanks to his tracker
bloodlines, but mixed with the olfactory senses of a shape-shifter, he caught
Lydia’s scent even further away. He sniffed nonchalantly. She was near.

Ashton raised his voice and asked Nathanial to repeat
himself.

“Quiet down, tracker. You should leave now so that I
can claim what I saw.”

When Ashton knew that Lydia peered in, glancing her
momentarily, he whipped around, faced Nathanial, and killed him. He dropped
Demetrius’s dagger in the pool of blood between the bodies. Ashton tilted his
head toward the door so that Lydia knew who he looked like, but refrained from
actually looking directly at her.

When her small feet scurried away, he looked up.
Ashton went to the door and peered out into the hallway. No one was at the
door, no one that he could see or smell. Ashton walked around the room,
observing things to make sure the Council still refused to use mortal
technology, such as cameras and microphones. He didn’t find anything of the
sort.

Returning to the bodies, he bent down to make sure
that my father was dead. He was. He crouched by Nathanial and maniacally spoke
with him.

Nathanial cursed him. “You’ll pay with your life.”

“Looks like it’s you who will pay with your life. You
had a good thing going here, shouldn’t have messed it up by turning on me. By
the way, I don’t like anyone knowing my secrets, much less hording them over
me.”

He smelled someone coming. Ashton transformed into a
cloud of smoke and wafted out of the vent.

This was enough time for Demetrius to take the
elevator down. It must have been Lydia who used the elevator to go up to her
floor, where she locked herself in her apartment until she spoke with the Council.