Page 95 of Hounded
“Focus, man!” he exclaimed. “You can’t just drop this shit on me and then make yourself a snack.”
The jam jar lid twisted off with a pop.
“You hungry?” I asked.
Indy sucked a breath, then shuddered like he had feathers to ruffle. Turning, he leaned back against the counter and massaged his fingers over his temples.
“You’re not making any sense,” he said. “People don’t just die. Shouldn’t I have been in the hospital or something?”
With a grunt, I set out a row of crackers and started slicing the cheese. “Peopledon’t just die,” I agreed. “But we aren’t people.”
I placed a piece of brie on each cracker and was nibbling the last bit off the blunt side of the knife when Indy asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
My stomach growled, and my head felt light, but I couldn’t delay this any longer. “You’re not human, Indy.” I faced him. “Neither am I. Neither is Sully, for whatever that’s worth.”
“Not human?” Indy echoed. “Are there alternatives?”
Dipping into the fig spread, I dropped a dollop on the first cracker. “You’re a phoenix.” I stuffed the bite of food into my mouth and chewed slowly.
Indy’s golden eyes narrowed. “Like a bird?”
Still chewing, I loaded the next cracker. “Like a bird. And I’m a hellhound.” I didn’t wait for him to question before adding, “Like a dog.” My finger tap on the links of my collar deepened his frown.
“Are you sure you’re not fucking with me? Because I’m not stupid, just…” He cast his gaze away. “Forgetful.”
I looked him over from his crown of soft curls to his bare toes adorned with glitter nail polish. I didn’t want him to feel stupid, or sad, or miserable. I wanted to pull him close and kiss him and hope against hope I would feel some spark of the past. Pretend that this honest talk would bring him back to me and restore what we’d lost.
“It’s like that every time you die,” I said in a softer voice. “You forget everything that happened before. And everyone.”
Indy didn’t respond as I swallowed the last bit of cracker before going to the fridge for a drink.
A forgotten can of sparkling water was tucked amidst the condiments in the door bin, and I cracked it open with a hiss. After slaking my thirst, I turned toward Indy and held out my hand.
“May I have my phone now?”
His glossed lips twisted before he pulled out the device and gave it to me. I unlocked it, then clicked into the photo gallery.
I never quite took to cameras. It felt strange to put a lens between myself and the world, a filter on what I could better see with my own eyes, but Indy captured moments. It might have had to do with his memory loss, needing tangible things to hold onto when his mind failed.
He stood by, apparently lost in his thoughts until I offered the phone back to him.
Taking the cell, Indy cradled it as though it were a fragile thing. He stared and scrolled and the blue-white glow of the screen illuminated the tears lining his eyes.
The tears had a hint of glitter—of magic. They wereprecious things that demons were willing to hunt and kill him for. While the rest of his powers dwindled, they remained.
The sadness on Indy’s face took a sudden turn. His nose scrunched, and hard lines cut across his features. He fished his own phone out of his pocket and opened it beside mine, holding them in close comparison. After a tense moment, he tipped both toward me.
“Why’d you delete it all?” His voice trembled. “Didn’t you think I would want to know I was loved? Why would you take that from me?”
The can of sparkling water chilled my palm while I stared at him, then the phones. The vacancy on his screen strummed a chord of guilt in me. I never meant to take from him. It was only to protect him, to prevent him from being burdened by the past and anchored to things he was better cut loose from. My phoenix deserved to fly. How could he with all that weight holding him down?
I stammered through a reply. “Youareloved, Indy.”
“Then why would you make me live this way?” he demanded, tears like liquid gold in his eyes. “Weren’t we happy together?”
My chest constricted, spurring an ache so deep I thought it might cut through me. I’d been hit, stabbed, and shot, but none of it compared to the pain of hearing him ask the same question I thought when I found him burning up.
Weren’t we happy?
