"Before Dawn"

Chapter 29: Hellhound's Blood

It's three a.m. and Dawn is back in the Yorktown Cemetery. She's dressed like she was the first time she'd been inside the walls of the dead, save the ski-mask. She has two Sig Sauer .45s in an upper body-rig and her .22 strapped around her waist. Extra clips of holy bullets are in her pockets. Her trusty wakizashis are strapped to her back, ready to do some slicing-and-dicing but hopefully it doesn't come to that. She has flex-cuffs in her back pocket—for Wesley Price.

Dawn is standing one-hundred feet or so from the side of the tomb where Mortifer's sealed door is located. The injuries she'd sustained the first time seem to throb under her clothes as she remembers the pummeling she took that night. Wind-gusts threaten to push her over as a storm creeps meanders its way into the area.

"Aperi ianuam!" Dawn shouts.

The seal bursts into a brilliant majestic red that makes Dawn squint.

Shit!

She was not expecting such a reaction so quickly. Her legs shake. She can't stop them from shaking. She hears metal folding chairs being dragged across concrete start low, and grow louder...louder...and louder, as Mortifer nears the door from the other side. Dawn feels the hellhound's awesome presence, begins to feel his immense heat. Then, the Mortifer's ethereal form sails through the door, and takes form as his fire paws hit the ground.

The white slits immediately lock in on Dawn. "Yoouuuu!" he growls. All of Mortifier's wounds from the previous encounter are no longer evident, completely healed. He bounds toward her, his paws sounding like galloping horses as they touch down.

Dawn never truly knew what 'scared shitless' meant until now. Her bowls tighten. She wants to turn and run and she knows that's her panicked conscience talking.

Mortifer is coming at her like a fiery freight train with teeth. She wants to draw her swords, but her instincts tell her that this diminishes what she needs to handle Mortifer—conviction. She's encountered him before, gotten her ass handed to her but beaten him in the long run. That's where she finds her conviction. She stands her ground, raises her chin, and sticks out her chest. Mortifer stops short of her as if he'd run smack-dab into a brick wall.

Dawn struggles to keep her eyes locked on his intense stare. His breath is hot on her face. The hellhound circles to her left, growling. She keeps her eyes forward, fighting hard not to spin away from him or show any doubt that she feels unsafe. She feels Mortifer's snout on the back of her neck, resists the urge to shudder when he snorts steaming hot air from his nostrils onto her bare skin. "Are you done?" she said—and with conviction.

Mortifer completes his circle around Dawn in an unsuccessful intimidation tactic and sits a short distance away in front of her. The red glow from the seal fades away in the background. "You're either incredibly stupid or incredibly desperate," he said. "Or both."

"Definitely both," Dawn said. Her confidence is growing with each passing second.

"What do you want?"

"Help."

"Help? You need to be more specific."

"I need you to fight for me."

Mortifer laughed. Fire flares from his nostrils in intervals as he delights in his banter. "I fight for no one, but me. I do what I want, when I want, and how I want. Like you, young huntress, I'm a rebel, a rogue, or should use a term that you can relate to. A wanderer, "he said.

Dawn flinches. Mortifer had struck a nerve in her with his comparison between her and a filthy hellhound who had killed so many hunters. It didn't matter if some of them may have been wanderers, they were still "hunters".