Hellhound on My Trail by D. J. Butler Page A

huge BOOM! —
    And then Adrian crumpled to the floor, and the flames snuffed out.
    “Huevos,” Mike said, though he wasn’t sure why. The dying of Adrian’s magical fires made the room, if anything, slightly more normal.
    “Did you hear that?” Twitch asked. She set down the can and started walking across the room, turning her head this way and that as she went. The horse’s tail protruding from the seat of her black leather outfit swished as she walked, and Mike couldn’t help watching it for a few seconds, until he remembered that he wasn’t one hundred percent sure Twitch was a woman.
    Mike jerked his gaze away.
    Then he remembered the thud he had heard earlier.
    “You mean the explosion?” he called to her (he hoped). “I think they heard that in Dallas.” She ignored him, peering behind pews and turning over stray boards to look underneath them. “Could be rats!”
    Jim returned to the group around the rabbi. He and Eddie stood over the body of the Rabbi Feldman, who continued to writhe spastically. Mike joined them. There was a bad smell about the body that he recognized, though he couldn’t immediately place it, and its mouth seemed to be full of something black. Like caviar, he thought. Someone had stuffed the rabbi with moving caviar.
    That stank of rotting meat.
    “What’s with Twitch?” Mike asked. “She thinks she heard something.”
    “Horses have great hearing,” Eddie said dismissively. “You’re right, she probably heard a rat.”
    So she was female, then. Mike shot a guilt-free glance at Twitch’s tail again. Then he realized what Eddie had said.
    “Wait a minute,” he tried to rewind the conversation. “Horses?”
    The guitarist ignored him and talked to Jim in low, urgent tones. “Are you sure the name isn’t just a coincidence?” Eddie asked him. “For all I know, Dudael is the Hopi word for Chlamydia.” He looked around at the shattered synagogue. “Though Heaven knows it looks the part,” he said.
    The big singer took the rabbi’s right hand in his own and turned it palm-up. The old man had a tattoo on his right wrist, bright and black like he’d gotten it recently, and shaped like a candlestick with seven branches. Jim and Eddie exchanged a look.
    “We don’t have much time,” Eddie said. “If that Baal Zavuv found this place before, it’s sure as hell on its way here now.”
    “Let’s just leave,” Mike suggested.
    “Do something useful,” Eddie snapped. “Wake up Adrian, maybe.”
    Mike had just enough booze in him not to take offense. “What kind of thing are you looking for, Jim?” he asked as he crouched over Adrian’s unconscious body and slapped the other man in the face. “Maybe I can help.”
    “Jim’s not going to talk to you,” Eddie reminded Mike through gritted teeth. “And we’re not looking for a thing, we’re looking for a place.”
    “Well, did we find it, then?” Mike pressed.
    “Over here!” Twitch shouted from halfway across the room. She was poking open the trapdoor of something that looked like an oversized mail slot, built right into the wall. It was about where Mike had heard the noise earlier, he thought.
    Jim immediately ran to join her, and Eddie followed at a walk, shotgun at the ready. “What is that, the genizah ? ” he shouted.
    “What’s a genizah ? ” Mike asked, his head spinning. “And is it more or less dangerous than a Baal Zavuv?”
    “It’s a cabinet,” Eddie said as he broke into a jog, “full of books that are too old to use and too holy to throw away.” He called back to Mike over his shoulder, without looking. “Get Adrian up! We need Feldman to show us the way forward!”
    Mike went back to the scene of the failed summoning, scratching his head at what to do. Adrian snored gently, so he started by pinching the sorcerer’s nose and twisting it sharply clockwise—no effect. He thought of Twitch, and how the drummer had awoken the wizard earlier.
    “Come on, big boy,” he said awkwardly.