Read Hellhound (A Deadtown Novel) for Free Online Page B

don’t have conversations. Anyway, you’re not a parrot.”
    “Damn right.” Dad puffed out his chest. “You won’t hear me begging for a cracker.” He eyed the empty popcorn bowl. “I wouldn’t mind a cheeseburger, though.”
    “If I’d known you were here, I’d have brought you one.” The white falcon had a magical ability to go anywhere he wanted—locked doors and walls be damned—but hadn’t yet mastered the art of calling ahead.
    Besides hanging out, getting fed, and watching TV, there was another reason my father spent time in my apartment. I asked about it now. “Dad, have you looked at the book recently?”
    I didn’t have to name the title. He knew which book I meant:
The Book of Utter Darkness
, an ancient volume written in the language of Hell, which outlined the history of the conflict between demons and the Cerddorion—from the demons’ point of view. It contained prophecies of how that conflict would end, prophecies that were now coming to pass left and right. It was this book that mentioned the white falcon.
    The book and I had a history. For years, it had fascinated me on Mab’s library shelf, the only book I was forbidden to read. When I was eighteen and considered myself a highly trained demon slayer, I took the book down and, leafing through, conjured a demon. I guess my intention was to show there was no demon I couldn’t take down. The demon that answered the call was Difethwr, the Hellion that marked me and killed my father. I’d vowed never to touch the book again, and for years I didn’t, but the times it prophesied were now upon us. At Mab’s insistence, I went from avoiding the book to studying it. We needed to find out what was coming and how we might counter it. But the book was full of tricks. You couldn’t read it the way you’d read a normal book; you had to stare at the unfathomable words until a meaning took shape in your mind. Sometimes the meaning didn’t come. Sometimes it came in riddles—riddles that tried to trip up and fool the reader into believing whatever meaning the book was pushing.
    Lately, whenever I looked into the book, one of two things happened: Either I stared at its pages until I went cross-eyed, getting nothing, or else the book hit me hard with a vision of destruction so terrible and all-encompassing it left me shaking for hours. Not exactly surprising, then, that I was back to avoiding
The Book of Utter Darkness
. Since Dad was willing to spend time with it, I was happy to hand it over to him. He’d perch on the back of a kitchen chair, the book open before him on the table. For hours at a time, he’d stare at the book with that predator’s gaze, turning pages with his beak.
    “I looked at it for a little while,” he said now, “before my show came on.”
    “Anything new?”
    “Hard to tell. The book doesn’t speak to me, to Evan Vaughn, I mean. Everything I get from it goes straight to the falcon part of my brain.” Mab said the book referred to the white falcon, but in all my terrible visions of a burning landscape terrorized by demons, the falcon had never appeared. “I get flashes of imagery,” Dad continued, “but they’re filtered through the falcon’s perception, so it’s hard to know what they mean.”
    “What kind of imagery?”
    “Darkness, mostly. But it’s not the kind of darkness that makes the falcon want to return to his nest. I guess that means it’s not night. It’s a darkness that grows thicker and thinner, that burns my lungs.”
    “Smoke.” There was plenty of smoke in my visions. They showed the entire East Coast in flames.
    “Yeah, smoke. It must be that. But it’s damn frustrating, Vic. The falcon doesn’t have any words for anything. He’s driven by instinct. He knows hunger, hunting, sleeping, danger.” His head turned almost all the way around, toward the TV. “That’s another reason I was watching the nature show. I was hoping it would give me some insight into how this body’s brain