Hard Luck Hellhound

  Hard Luck Hellhound

  Zoe Chant

  Published by Zoe Chant, 2021.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Epilogue | Six Months Later

  A note from Zoe Chant

  More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant

  Zoe Chant writing as Lia Silver

  Zoe Chant writing as Lauren Esker

  1

  “This song reminds me of your life.”

  Russ was dispensing a draft beer, and he leveled off the head before he passed it across the bar to George Mulaney, his best and most verbose customer.

  “You said the same thing last night,” Russ pointed out.

  “Did I?” George looked up and his eyes went misty, like he was carefully combing through his memories right then and there. “Was it a country song?”

  “It was.”

  When you owned a roadhouse bar just outside the small town of Heaven’s Limits, almost every song that came up on the jukebox was country-western. There were a couple of ritzy downtown clubs with tapas menus with no juke at all and one gay bar with pretty good dance music, but otherwise, it was country. Heaven’s Limits was a town that knew its own tastes.

  “Well, there you go,” George said. “Just about all country songs remind me of your life. You know, the fella loses his wife, his job, his house, truck, his dog—”

  “I never had a truck. Or a wife. And I didn’t lose my dog.”

  Despite his best efforts.

  Three years ago, Russ Wynn had had a completely different life, one that looked almost unrecognizable to him now. He’d been a highly skilled web designer, one who had a particular talent for streamlined design and personalized sites and add-ons for rich and grateful clients. He’d lived in a high-rise apartment, he’d had a glamorous world-traveler girlfriend he had hardly ever seen, and he’d never so much as heard of the town of Heaven’s Limits.

  Then he’d been bitten by an injured hellhound, and everything had changed.

  “I didn’t lose my dog,” he said again. “I got a dog.”

  Inside his head, his hellhound made a slight snuffling noise, like it had heard him call its name. It opened sleepy, smoldering eyes that shone with banked infernos.

  Russ’s chest tightened up as he felt the massive hound look around his life with those glimmering hellfire eyes. If it wrecked everything for him all over again—

  But this time, all his hellhound did was let out a rumbling sound of satisfaction, eerily like a gravelly purr, and then it put its head back down on its front paws and went back to its semi-doze.

  He had gotten a dog, all right. And it had decided it was in charge. When it was quiet, leashed up inside his mind, everything was fine. He just had occasional... blackouts, like the one he’d had this afternoon. He’d never hurt anyone, thank God. His hellhound was more chaotic than violent.

  But chaotic was bad enough. When it got stirred up, it was nothing but smoke, fire, and fury, and it took charge of him, not the other way around. It had made him smash up his old life, driving him to behave more and more recklessly until everyone he’d known had walked away and washed their hands of him. When the haze had finally cleared, it had felt like waking up from weeks of some feverish dream.

  Waking up with nothing.

  Now he had Heaven’s Limits, where—even though people kept it quiet—shifters were a known commodity. Now he had the bar. He had a couple of regulars, like George, who were good friends. He had too much to lose to let his hellhound trash his life all over again.

  George snapped his fingers right in front of Russ’s nose. “Anytime someone brings up that hound of yours, you zone right out.”

  “Let’s just say the country song that is my life starts playing in my head.”

  George never seemed to think Russ’s hellhound was too big a deal, but he was still a friend, and sympathy crept into his face as he looked at Russ a little longer. “You had another blackout?”

  Russ nodded. “This afternoon, when I was getting the bar set up. I woke up on the floor of the stockroom. At least nothing looked damaged.” He’d had the funniest taste in his mouth, though...

  George patted his arm. “You’ll work it out with Rover.”

  His hellhound opened its eyes, showing fiery slits. Our name is not Rover.

  Well, that was one thing they could agree on.

  “Sure,” he said to George, even though he didn’t really believe it. He wasn’t going to work things out with his hellhound. He’d just have to... manage it.

  He saw another customer come in and threw his dishtowel over his shoulder. “Hang on a second, I need to take another order.”

  “You need another waitress!” George hollered after him.

  Russ turned back long enough to point out that he was pretty sure he could handle two barstools on his own, but as the night wound on and the bar filled up, he knew George was right. He needed to get some help in here. The only problem was that he had no idea where it would come from.

  Heaven’s Limits didn’t get a lot of new blood. Aside from its high shifter population—which outsiders usually didn’t know about—it was just an ordinary small town, the kind that was the bread-and-butter of melancholy country songs like Russ’s. It wasn’t close to any big cities, and the last of the factories had cleared out years ago. From what he could gather, the town had almost fallen into an economic black hole, but they had all rallied together and gotten through the worst of it. Shifter magic helped with that kind of thing.

  Now he supposed they were in a little bit of a comeback stage, with Main Street littered up and down with gift shops and ice cream parlors that catered to the blow-in, blow-out tourists on their way to Amish country. You could scrape by happily enough in Heaven’s Limits. But people—unless they’d been dragged there with their hellhounds’ jaws clenched around their ankles—didn’t move there. And most everybody in town Russ knew already had a job—and since it was a bar, he couldn’t use any of the teenagers, either.

  Yep, Suzy Lynn had put him in a little bit of a bind when she had hung up her apron last week. Russ couldn’t blame her, though.

  He had just gotten through saying as much to Luann, the town’s brassy grandma with dyed-red hair and lots of attitude, when she shook her head at him and threw back a long slug of her Harvey Wallbanger.

  “Why?” She yelled so he could hear her over the juke. “Why can’t you blame her? I blame her!”

  “Lu, she won the lottery.”

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  Russ still wasn’t over the experience of seeing a seventy-year-old woman in an embroidered kitten sweatshirt cuss at him. He liked it.

  “She did, though, Lu. I was right there when she scratched the ticket off.”

  “I bet you were, because I know damn well Suzy always had you buy her scratchers for her, and I’ll bet she never paid you back for even one of them, let alone the winner. And furthermore, the girl won twenty thousand dollars. You can’t retire on twenty thousand dollars.”

  “No, but you can move.” Not that he saw the appeal: for him, Heaven’s Limits was pretty much perfect.

  “Can’t get very far. Not these days. She just had feathers for brains, Russ, and she thought she was going to go get herself invited to yacht parties and I don’t know what all. But that’s just silly, and I can forgive silly. All right, she got excited. I can forgive excitement too. Make me another Wallbanger, honey.”

  Russ made her another Harvey Wallbanger and came back to hear what it was that Lu couldn’t forgive, because he
could tell she was getting there.

  “And she split up with that nice girlfriend of hers,” Lu added. “Dropped her like a hot potato on her way out of town, practically yelling out her car window that she wanted to see other people. And that wasn’t fair. That Emily girl may have gone a little overboard on the tattoos for my taste, but she’s a sweetheart. She didn’t deserve that.”

  “No,” Russ agreed. That part had seemed heartless to him; he’d given Emily free drinks for a week on account of it. “If they weren’t going to work out, they weren’t going to work out, but that was just mean.”

  “So I can’t forgive that,” Lu said. “And what else I can’t forgive is that she took all the tips when she left.”

  “I always gave her the tips.”

  “And I usually go Dutch with my men,” Luann said, “but I like to think if I’d just won the damned lottery, I might find it in my heart to pay for somebody else’s lunch for a change. She left you in the lurch, with no time to find a replacement, and then she stuck her hand in the tip jar on her way out of the door.”

  She examined him with her curiously bright eyes. Lu was a cat shifter, and whenever she started getting tipsy, her usually blue eyes began to give way to lantern-yellow. They were all muddled now, like summer skies streaked with lightning.

  “Why don’t you mind it, Russ? It’s fine to get angry every now and then.”

  His best excuse was that too much anger might wake his hellhound, but that wasn’t really why he could shrug off things like Suzy Lynn’s vanishing act.

  Luann was way more insightful than George as a general rule, but George was the one who had nailed this part of Russ’s life.

  “It’s just part of the country song,” Russ said. He pointed up at the ceiling, trying to indicate the music booming through the joint.

  It was perfect timing, because the twangy singer had just reached an especially miserable part of his song: And when the man came and took the house away, I didn’t know what I could say. My mama up in heaven, she’s sure ashamed of me.

  “I’ve just got bad luck now,” Russ said. “Since the hound. I could either give up getting mad about it or I could go crazy, so I gave up getting mad.”

  “That’s healthy of you.” Luann still sounded skeptical, but she waved him off so he could go deal with the rest of his customers.

  There were a lot of them. He was pretty sure the bar had never been this crowded back when he’d had help. It used to be that even on a good night, there were still a couple of unoccupied tables and one or two empty places at the bar. Now it was packed. He was getting run off his feet.

  Would it be too uncool for a country-western bartender to wear Crocs? Forget it—he was never going to give up the cowboy boots anyway. They went with the bar, and he liked them too much. They’d been the first thing he’d bought in Heaven’s Limits: weirdly, one of the first things in his life that had really felt like his.

  And for all the bad stuff the hellhound had done to him, it had also given him greater strength and resilience, so whatever happened, he could take it. Nothing was going to knock him off his feet, so a busy bar was no problem at all.

  Plus, running a bar in a shifter town often came with some pretty unusual complications, and he at least hadn’t had any of those tonight. No one had wound up shifting to mouse form to have an under-the-radar barfight, for one thing.

  All in all, a pretty good night.

  By the time he got to last call, he was down to just George and Luann.

  “I thought old people went to bed early,” George said, looking sideways at Lu.

  She blew a raspberry at him. “You’re no spring chicken, either, you know.”

  “I’m fifty-two! You’re seventy-six!” He squinted at her. “You want to have dinner with me sometime?”

  Luann evaluated him and then turned to Russ. “Is he sober?”

  Russ nodded. “He has two beers at the start of the night and then switches to Fanta.”

  “That means I taste like oranges,” George said with a suggestive look that Russ worried he could now never unsee.

  “Well, hell, let’s do the date tonight and then have breakfast in the morning,” Luann said.

  George beamed. “I’ve still got it,” he said to Russ. “Let me just go freshen up, sweetness.”

  He didn’t technically turn his head, so he said that to Russ too. He hopped down off the barstool and made his way to the bathroom to grab a spritz of cologne from the machine.

  “He doesn’t still have it,” Lu told Russ. “Whatever ‘it’ is. But he’s got a cute butt, and one time at the Barnes and Noble over in Fairfield, I saw him rifling through a guide to the top two hundred positions.”

  “I don’t really need all the details.”

  Two hundred, really?

  George reappeared, carrying with him the pungent smell of the seventy-five-cents-a-pump bathroom cologne. Russ really needed to see if he could convince the vendors to fill those machines up with something that didn’t fry up everyone’s sinuses.

  “You’re closing up, right?” George said. He slung his arm casually around Lu’s shoulders and seemed to preen when she allowed it. “We’ll walk you out.”

  The three of them left the bar together. And it was funny—even though Russ was the third wheel to the oddest couple he’d ever seen, and even though it was two in the morning and he was dead tired, he felt a huge sense of peace, like the inside of his head was as crisp and clear as the starry night sky.

  He liked his life in Heaven’s Limits a lot more than he had ever liked it before. It was strange to realize that, but it was true.

  He waved Lu and George off on their “date,” wondering idly if the two of them would actually make anything work long-term. There was something about seeing love—or even flirtation or chemistry—that made him wistful. He wished he could have that again. He’d always thought there was no way to risk that with his hellhound still slumbering inside him, but he felt so good tonight that maybe, just maybe, his luck had changed.

  He reached his car. He had three flat tires, all of them gnashed ragged and slippery with hellhound slobber.

  Rubber, Russ realized belatedly. The weird taste in my mouth was rubber. Good to know.

  Clearly the country song was still playing.

  2

  If Anita could just manage to sweet-talk her car for another hundred miles, she could start her new life.

  In a hundred miles, she would reach her cousin Melanie, who was remodeling a sprawling old Victorian house and was willing to let Anita crash in it until it was fully fixed up and rented out. Maybe she had never planned on getting to thirty-five and having the highlight of her life be a sleeping bag on the floor of a house that was currently missing its hot water heater, but hey, plans changed. Right now, cold showers and an aching back sounded like a pretty good deal. She just had to get to them in her car that was held together with primer paint and plastic tarp.

  As the engine made another ominous noise, Anita reached down and petted the gearshift.

  “You can do it, buddy. You’ve got this.”

  The car seemed to sigh, as if to say, All right, Anita. For you, I’ll try.

  “You’re the best,” Anita said, giving the gearshift a reassuring squeeze.

  She knew most people would say you couldn’t make your failing car limp on a little longer just by being nice to it, but Anita’s view of reality had always been a little more... flexible than that.

  When you were cursed, you learned early on that life was weird and the rules didn’t always apply.

  The curse would follow her to the crumbling, drafty Victorian, of course, but that didn’t mean the change wouldn’t be a chance to reboot her life in other ways. And by this point, that was all she wanted. A chance to breathe free, away from her overprotective family who loved her but couldn’t see that she didn’t want to be defined by the curse. A chance to discover who she really was.

  She couldn’t spend her whole life wrapped up in co
tton and loving family, just trying not to get hurt. She needed something more.

  Around two-thirty in the morning, her dying car apparently decided, Screw the Victorian remodel. You’re going to have to discover who you really are in—Heaven’s Limits? Is that name sweet or ominous?

  She was going to have to keep her fingers crossed for sweet.

  She shifted into park and gave the steering wheel one more pat. “It’s not your fault. You did your best. I know I was asking a lot.”

  Now... what was she going to do?

  She probably shouldn’t have kept driving through the night, but her bank balance was pretty low, and even a cheap hotel room would have taken a sizeable bite out of it. And she wasn’t tired. If anything, she felt alive and bright, her nerve endings sparking with a kind of jangly excitement. That was what four cups of trucker coffee and a brand-new sense of hope would do for you.

  I sound like an infomercial, she thought, smiling. You too can change your life and drink strong, cheap coffee! Ask me how!

  In any case, two-thirty in the morning was a bad time to start rethinking your choices. She needed to just keep moving forward.

  She didn’t have AAA, so she would just have to call a tow truck herself. If it turned out to be the battery—though realistically, she knew the problem in this case was “mostly everything”—they could even give her a jump and get her back on the road. If they couldn’t, then she guessed she was going to be hanging around in Heaven’s Limits for a while.

  She’d been worried about the cost of a hotel room, but that would be nothing compared to the cost of a new car. There was no way she would have enough cash for even a Rent-a-Wreck. She would just have to figure out something else. Maybe she could find a short-term job around here, one that would let her rent a room and sock every spare dollar away for repairs. There were about a billion reasons why it might be hard to pull this off, but she wasn’t going to think about them right now. She was just going to keep going.

  She took out her phone to look up towing companies, and then she noticed something in the mid-distance.