Hound and Key

By Rhiannon Held

Key has lived her entire life in captivity, forced to use her magic to kill the enemies of Ariadne, an ageless woman with powerful magic of her own. Key knows she and Ariadne are both members of the Hand of the Gods, five souls reborn through the ages, but Key remembers none of her past lives. She chafes against Ariadne's control, and longs to escape to lead a life of her own.

Eric has worked for Ariadne for years in ignorance of her secrets, but now coincidences and bad luck are piling up. When he talks his way into the compound that houses Key and the other members of the Hand, he learns the truth about Ariadne's magic—and the murders she's committed with it. Together, Eric and Key escape and set out to find Lantern, the one member of the Hand Ariadne has never managed to capture—and who may know how to stop her for good.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rhiannon Held
• Release date: Sep 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781943545032

Rhiannon Held

Rhiannon Held is the author of the Silver series of urban fantasy novels. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she works as an archaeologist for an environmental compliance firm. At work, she uses her degree mostly for copy-editing technical reports; in writing, she uses it for cultural world-building; in public, she’ll probably use it to check the mold seams on the wine bottle at dinner.

Book preview

Prologue

In the before times

When the youngest of the gods was lost

Map found her waypoint

Hound followed her trail

Key opened the gates

Lantern lit their steps

And Breath brought her back to life

Around the time their shared appetizer was cleared away, Eric started cursing himself for not having told his date the truth about where he’d first seen her. Maybe not when he asked her out, but certainly before any of their food arrived. Listening to the ebb and swell of unvoiced laughter below the surface of her anecdotes, he already knew he wanted to ask her on a second date. He needed to admit the truth as soon as possible, no matter how awkward. No sense breaking the current conversational thread, though. So you work for TendarisHerron?

Patricia threaded a hand under her fine black hair to cup the side of her neck. I guess you could say I’m scientist support and official paperwork wrangler. She paused for laughter he was happy to provide. I don’t deal with our drug trials, but I make sure the scientists follow proper procedure and keep good notes in the research stages before then. She launched into a story about shaking down people for paperwork before they left for the weekend. Eric caught himself reading her hands and the small lifts at the corners of her mouth, tracking the minutia of her mood to see if she was interested or bored, content or anxious.

He made himself stop. He was off duty. He didn’t need to read her; he could simply enjoy her story. He listened while looking out the window instead. West facing, so for dinner they probably would need the shades unfurled, but now at lunch the expansive glass allowed spring light to flood in. A deck stretched away outside, green wildness below. Eric guessed they’d made lemonade out of mandated wetland-area lemons, but that didn’t diminish the feeling of looking out over nature.

Maybe he could laugh off how he’d first seen her. Funny thing, my boss is so worried about her boyfriend, your CEO, she has me photograph his female employees. Don’t worry, though, I haven’t found anything. My boss is just paranoid. It didn’t sound very humorous when he laid it out in his mind. It sounded like a stalker trying to cover his tracks.

And you? You said you were an assistant? Patricia sipped her water, tilted her head into her bracing hand.

I’ve actually been friends with my boss since college. For a given value of friend. So assistant’s probably not quite the word, but I can’t think of anything better. The duties end up being pretty eclectic. Scheduling a venue for one of her parties or chasing one of her guest’s favored esoteric brand of whiskey all over town. Eric smiled to hide the glancing path his explanation took to the vicinity of the truth. He knew he was only piling on later awkwardness, but he couldn’t help himself.

He had actually done both of those things once for Ariadne, but the bulk of his duties for her were the strange, semilegal ones he couldn’t admit to anyone: the keys lifted, the people tailed, the long-distance photos snapped. Even if Patricia hadn’t been the subject of one of those photos, he’d have had a hard time spinning his job to sound normal. He was reminded powerfully why he rarely dated anymore.

Patricia lifted her brows, teasing. And the rest of the time? Unless she has a party every night of the week . . .

Eric hadn’t expected her to call him on the evasion. Another reason to want her to stick around: people got boring fast when you could read them and predict them too well. A woman who could surprise him—but now he’d missed his rhythm slightly. Well, I— The pause was getting too long. Shit. You know Ariadne inherited her fortune, so she uses it to fund her hobby of genealogical research?

Patricia sat back. There, the first flicker of awkwardness. I heard that. When she first started her business partnership with TendarisHerron so we can use her data to help genetically tailor our treatments.

‘Business partnership.’ Eric exaggerated the air quotes to try to recapture a note of humor, but it earned him only a smile, not a laugh.

Patricia looked down at the empty space before her on the tablecloth that awaited her entree plate and shook her head. Anyway, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry about your work.

Eric spoke quickly, determined not to miss his moment this time. Damn Ariadne, not only for suspecting this innocent woman, but for indirectly spoiling his chances with her. Not that Ariadne could have spoiled anything if he hadn’t agreed to work for her, of his own free will. No, I’m sorry. I haven’t had to explain it in a while, that’s all. Honestly, I take care of everything organizational Ariadne doesn’t feel like doing herself.

Patricia nodded but couldn’t seem to find any particular response to that. Eric realized he needed to disclose something else important to him, and fast, even if it made her dismiss him for another reason. My avocation is stage magic, though. Eric braced for her reaction. Would she be one of the people who considered his calling juvenile, or assumed it was all a con to fleece tourists on street corners?

Wonder of wonders, Patricia returned to her position leaning on her elbow and angled her body toward him. A very good sign. Literally on a stage, you mean?

My hours with Ariadne are flexible, so I perform at renaissance faires and other summer festivals. You know how the local cheese or pickle fest will often have a stage for live music? Sometimes they invite other local acts.

That’s great. Warmth broke into her tone, paralleling a smile’s spread across her lips. Sawing pretty women in half?

Sawing my sister in half, if anyone, Eric said, dry. But usually she’s the audience plant instead. I do close-up magic, more intimate sleight-of-hand tricks than showy chains and water tank stuff. He made an ironic ooh magical twirled-fingers gesture with one hand to keep her attention while with the other he palmed a dried grain stalk, heavy with golden kernels at the top, from the table’s small flower arrangement. At this point, even if they thought magic was silly, most people couldn’t help but ask—

Can you show me something here? Patricia exhaled on a laughing note and leaned in to examine his apparently empty hands, presented palm up, then palm down.

Eric shifted his gaze to the side of her head, as if distracted from his coming trick. Oh, here, you’ve got something caught . . . He pulled the stalk from her hair, showed it to her, then tucked it behind her ear so she could wear it like a flower.

Patricia pushed his hands away, laughing, but he noticed that she didn’t remove the stalk. Instead, she kept his hands trapped under hers on the tabletop. Mr. Smooth.

Then she frowned. Oh. Her tone dropped away, like she suddenly felt ill. I— Her pupils snapped open, black swallowing brown until she looked alien and blind.

Patricia? She didn’t respond. What—?

Her pupils snapped down to pinpricks, and she slumped sideways in her chair, boneless. Eric lunged, bumping knees on the table in his rush, but couldn’t reach her before she tumbled to the floor with the splayed indignity of unconsciousness or death. He knelt, shoved her chair aside, helped her onto her back. He searched her face for some reaction, shook her shoulders. She couldn’t be—be—she had to just be unconscious. Patricia?

Someone gasped and chairs scraped across the whole room. It wasn’t until someone behind him shouted, Call 911! that Eric realized he should have done that himself. All right. Check if she was breathing. He could do that. That CPR class had been a while back, but he had to do something.

She wasn’t breathing. Start compressions. He had enough muscle memory to get his fingers laced, his body weight over his locked elbows. The resistance, the unexpectedly solid thud of a blow needed to get the chest down, he’d forgotten that, but he remembered it from the dummy now. He was doing the compressions correctly, then.

Counting. He was supposed to be counting compressions until he gave two breaths. He remembered that part: two. In a haze, Eric did another compression, checked her breathing. Nothing. She was so still. Another cycle. Keep going until the paramedics got here.

Eric kept going. Then between compressions and breaths, someone grabbed his shoulders, pulled him away. The world rushed back in: servers herding gawking diners away, beginning at the clear path they’d already carved for the EMTs and their gurney. A comfortingly uniformed man and woman already knelt over Patricia while a second man was the one who’d pulled Eric back.

Sir? Are you her boyfriend? he asked, tone kind. What happened? Does she have any allergies, health problems you know of?

Eric shook his head, kept shaking it until he finally found words again. It’s our first date. I don’t know much about her at all. She was just talking normally, she wasn’t even eating to choke on anything, then she fell— He craned around the EMT. The others were busy over Patricia, models of efficient action, but something was missing about their body language. Some sense of—hope. Will she—?

The EMT grimaced, more than enough for an answer from someone of his training and experience. We’ll do our very best, sir.

Dead. She couldn’t possibly be dead. She was young. She’d seemed healthy. Eric gave the EMT her full name, hardly heard anything else. There must not have been any other questions, though, because the EMT turned away and Eric found himself herded out of the way by the restaurant manager, toward the crowd of other diners.

Suddenly he couldn’t bear the idea of joining the crowd in staring at her unmoving body. He pushed outward through the gawkers, movements getting increasingly rough. He needed air. You never expected someone to just die in front of you. What had even happened? Heart attack caught at his attention from the surrounding murmur of frightened conversation, though he lost the rest of the sentence in the muddle.

He reached the deck, clenched his hands around the nearest railing, new pressure-treated wood. She was too young for a heart attack. But that—that was familiar. Someone else he’d heard about recently had been too young. As a mental exercise to make his thoughts move in one direction, rather than spinning everywhere at once, Eric tracked the thought until he dragged up a name. It had been a young man whose keys he’d stolen. Part of the prep for getting close enough to lift someone’s keys or tail them without being noticed was getting to know them, their daily routine, and what part an undistinguished man should briefly play in it. So when he’d recognized the name later in the news, he’d known how strange it truly was, how apparently healthy the man had been. Heart failure. Too young.

Now he’d found the connection, Eric couldn’t get it out of his head. Two people whose lives he’d intersected, for his boss. Two people dead. He twisted to look over his shoulder into the dining room. He couldn’t see Patricia through the crowd, but their energy was souring from hope into shock. The paramedics pushed into view, leaving through the front doors, but the body on the gurney was very still.

With shaking hands, Eric pulled out his phone and searched the Internet for every name he could remember that Ariadne had pointed him at, over the four years he’d worked for her.

Obituaries. Memorial notices. Every one. And he knew there were names he wasn’t remembering. Eric shoved his phone away, like that would change the search results.

She’d told him his job was to help her compile her genealogical data even when sources were reluctant. That explanation had been lame enough to insult them both, so Eric had thought—that seemed like such a thin excuse now, but how could he have guessed something like this—he’d truly thought Ariadne had wanted to check up on her boyfriend and his employees. A few of the names had been directly connected to TendarisHerron, more had been people in the industry, regulators. So it had made a sort of sense on the surface, to assume the photos of female employees were to catch infidelity in progress, the other photos and keys to check for stolen trade secrets, either in a handoff or in people’s apartments, but he hadn’t found anything compromising. His photos, his sessions of tailing, showed only mundane activities, if no one was perfectly innocent. After his initial wariness, he’d justified the job to himself with that fact. If Ariadne wanted to dig up dirt on people with nothing to hide, Eric didn’t mind the generous paycheck. Maybe it gave her a sense of control, to know she could find dirt when she wanted it.

He should have guessed that there had to be more to it. He longed to cling to the idea of failed surveillance and coincidental death, but the surveillance excuse made too little sense. Not that a hit list made any more.

This close, the greenery below the restaurant’s deck lost its illusion and looked ragged, weedy, and swampy. So everyone he followed for Ariadne ended up dead. How? Patricia was too young and too obviously healthy for a real heart attack. Poison? No one had touched her, they’d shared the same appetizer, and their water had been poured from the same pitcher into crystal-clean glasses. He’d touched her chair. She hadn’t visited the restroom . . .

Eric leaned forward until his forehead touched his hands so he didn’t have to look at the weeds anymore. A conspiracy theorist could still posit a tasteless, odorless, invisible poison coating the inside of her water glass, but he doubted those kinds of poisons existed in reality. Nor did he see how she could have been exposed to something before arriving that would show no effect for hours, then kill in instants.

And that left . . . what?

Eric pushed himself up and forced himself to turn back to the dining room. Even with Patricia’s body gone, a representative of officialdom might want to talk to him. He should stay findable. And someone official would inform her family, right? Should he—but he hardly even knew her. He didn’t know anything about her family, or if she even had any she was close to. The contradiction of death so close to him, yet not touching him, made Eric’s stomach twist, acid.

But it had touched him. He wasn’t going to go back to his lame excuses and justifications. Something was going on here, and he was going to find out what the hell Ariadne was doing. And how.

And stop her.

Chapter 1

––––––––

Being late but not too late required careful calculation. Normally on a job, Eric was always early and included in his plans a point where he could watch and wait for his moment without being observed. But Ariadne wasn’t stupid, and turning his skills back on her took more finesse. A month had passed after Patricia’s death before Ariadne had given him his next assignment, and he’d spent every minute of it researching, thinking, planning, so he could play the next fifteen minutes perfectly.

He parked, off-kilter in his hurry, beside the garages at the side of the house where employees were supposed to pull their vehicles. The garages themselves had undoubtedly been intended for boats and ATVs and other rich adults’ playthings, but Ariadne had filled them instead with her sleek luxury cars, inexplicably numerous flavors of transportation for someone who never drove herself.

Eric slammed his door and sprinted for the front of the house. Her chauffeur had opened the door of a silver BMW, and Eric was indeed late but not too late because Ariadne was striding toward it, not driving away out of reach.

Got them. He raised his voice to carry across the remaining stretch of curved gravel drive and held up his hand, key ring over his middle finger and bunch of keys splayed over his palm. From here, she wouldn’t be able to see he’d removed the house key, preventing a break-in and presumably neutering the worst harm the rest could do in another’s possession. She’d said to have the keys to her by today, and so he had, though he hoped she wouldn’t examine them herself or reflect that in the four years he’d worked for her, he’d never shaved a deadline so close before.

Ariadne paused with her hand on the car door. For once, with the car for scale, she looked as short as she really was, barely five feet tall. The recent daylight saving jump couldn’t help her this late in the evening, so her skin was merely sandy in the splashed porch and window light from the house, without the ephemeral glow sunlight could give it, like sand heated not quite far enough for glass. Her black hair was loose around her shoulders, sumptuous. He supposed she was off to late dinner or drinks with her business partner, Clive Herron, CEO of TendarisHerron. Eric always thought of him with his full title, since that was how news articles invariably referred to him when reporting how the local company had made it to the big leagues.

Ariadne was quiet for several beats, eyes on Eric’s face, not on the keys as he would have expected. He didn’t want her digging into his motives, even if he was certain all that showed on his face was the exertion of his sprint. He didn’t look guilty, and besides, what could she possibly guess he’d be guilty about? The one brief footnote of a report on Patricia’s death hadn’t mentioned anyone eating with her at the restaurant.

Then Ariadne’s lips curved. Next time, don’t be so late. She withdrew her phone from a highly fashionable clutch purse and ostentatiously checked the time. It has to be done tonight. Get Hank to let you in at the cottages. She slid elegantly into the car and let her chauffeur shut the door.

Eric returned the keys to his pocket and drew a deep breath to counteract both the panting and his relief. You could nudge, control as many elements in a situation as you could touch to remove other options, study past behavior until predictions zeroed in, but you could never be absolutely certain someone would make the choice you wanted them to. But she had. And now he had an in, tracking someone’s lifted keys into the inner layer of Ariadne’s empire. Or her web, perhaps, with Ariadne standing as a spider in the center of it all, attention on each thread-twitch.

He knew now that inner layer had to be something more than a server farm or office park space for more researchers. Something to do with how she accomplished all those deaths, because Eric had no doubt by now that she’d accomplished them. With any luck, the fact that the house key was gone wouldn’t stop the process until after he got a few hints as to why people had had to die, as well.

Eric jogged back to his car. He watched his speed along the twisting roads among the houses—perhaps better called estates—along Lake Washington out of habit, but impatience got the better of him as he headed north on the freeway. After a month spent with the knowledge of what he’d been party to, he was so close to a few answers. Foolish, perhaps, but Ariadne could make tickets disappear as easily as sneezing if she was in the right mood and you could make a case for having acquired them in the line of duty.

And maybe he could do something with those answers when he got them. Eric couldn’t plan any farther than that, not knowing what Ariadne hid at the cottages, but in the weeks since Patricia’s death, he’d become increasingly certain that was what he needed to do to live with himself. Stop the deaths.

Compound would have been a better name than cottages. Or subdivision, maybe, tucked as it was among other raw, new developments in Woodinville. They all had coy names like Evergreen Glen. Ariadne’s cottages were only distinguished by being a gated community among open subdivisions that kept their own restrictions invisible as homeowners’ association regulations.

Eric eased up to the gatehouse beside a ridiculous Arbor Cottages brick sign. He wouldn’t be surprised if the locals assumed it was an Alzheimer’s care facility, with walls and a name like that. The lights around the gatehouse were bright but aimed to pool close and not disrupt the soft darkness beyond among the houses, dotted only with standard suburban streetlights.

Eric rolled down his window to speak to the man on duty in the small booth, someone he didn’t recognize. Hank should be expecting me. Eric found the most obvious camera and faced it straight on. Hank knew him, after years of pleasantries over coffee as they passed each other outside Ariadne’s home office, Hank giving security reports and Eric receiving assignments. Easier to let Hank identify him directly on a monitor now than to fuss with ID to make it up through the lower ranks to reach him. It wasn’t like Eric had a badge for hit list support.

He wondered idly how much Hank knew of the hit list. This plan—and frankly, good sense—didn’t call for trying to drag the information out of him, though. This was the time for smooth smiles and playing along, Eric’s real motives locked farther below the surface than usual.

The man in the booth listened to his walkie-talkie and punched the button so the steel gate, black paint not really succeeding in making it appear cast-iron, rolled aside with stately speed. Eric drove in at a similar speed and, as he’d expected, met Hank coming out of the nearest house. It was the one with the grandest landscaping and a water feature, undoubtedly built to serve as the sales office until it was sold last. The black man had a bit of a gut, but honest muscles showed in the bulk of his arms under the security uniform sleeves.

Hank waved Eric toward a visitor parking lot with a fence and gate worthy of a police impound lot. Eric tried to imagine why. To make sure anyone who entered and caused trouble had to escape on foot? Did they have people imprisoned here?

Hank strolled in after him. By the time Eric had parked and walked over to join him, Hank was waiting in the driver’s seat of a golf cart. Eric weighed how well he knew Hank, then risked an honest opinion as he swung into the passenger seat. You’re shitting me.

Hank barked a laugh and scrubbed a hand over his buzzed-short hair. Murder on the dignity, I know. But Key bribed someone into teaching her to drive about a year back and there’s obviously nothing we can do to keep her out of any vehicle she wants to get into. So the best we can do is keep everything in sight of the gatehouse except things that aren’t enough fun to tempt her to joyride.

Eric’s mental brows rose at the unexpected flow of information. It was what he wanted, yes, to know what the hell was going on in here. That was exactly why he didn’t trust it when it came too easy.

And Hank must know that as well. Eric cast him a sideways glance and let the merest trickle of his real thoughts onto his face. Hank barked with laughter again. The Boss said if you’re determined to stick your nose into a higher security clearance, as it were, I don’t need to stop you. I’m well aware that if I decide I want out of this job before I’m literally too infirm to continue, my severance package is a personalized, untraceable heart attack. I assume you know the same, so I won’t insult your intelligence.

Eric had to admit to himself he hadn’t considered it in quite those terms, but maybe he should have. The same way he should have considered illegal and invasion of privacy in those terms way back when Ariadne had offered him the job. And complicit and murder now. I believe aneurism is also a common diagnosis. Patricia’s death had been called an undiagnosed heart defect. Too young for a heart attack.

Anyway, I don’t mind my job. They’re good kids, even if you could make the case for the Hound never having been much of a kid. The way Hank’s expression softened made Eric wonder about opportunities for a family lost to long hours, safety paranoia, and living inside the compound simply because it saved on commuting.

Hank twisted in his seat to check a canvas grocery store bag of books was settled securely on the floor of the back seat, then set off at a brisk—for a golf cart—clip. If you don’t mind— his tone suggested Eric better not, we’ll do the library run for the Hound before I take you to Key.

Humanizing them? Eric said. He didn’t know who they were, other than kids with codenames, apparently, somehow connected to untraceable deaths. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but kids sure hadn’t been it. He’d been—still was—so angry at himself, he supposed he’d been hoping for a more righteous target to transfer the anger to.

The opposite, in a way. Hank shook his head. You’ll see. He zoomed up the gently curving street. With no one parked on either side, it was ridiculously wide for only a golf cart. The March air hadn’t been too bad to walk around in, but even at golf cart speeds, it bit hard.

They pulled up in the driveway of one of the neutrally painted houses, no different than any other. Hank snagged the bag of books and knocked perfunctorily on the front door before letting himself in. Another anonymous man in the same security uniform looked up from watching a game at low volume on a tablet at the kitchen table and nodded.

Got a job? A teen boy of fourteen or fifteen laid his arm over the back of the couch so he could twist to face them better. He’d gotten his height, but his face still showed obvious baby fat over what would probably be a strong jaw line eventually. He reminded Eric of a couple of his cousins at that age, in an undistinguished teen boy way, muddy brown eyes and golden brown hair.

No job. New books. Hank thumped the bag of books on the kitchen table. The boy looked at them expressionlessly for a beat or two before closing the book on his lap with a snap. He set it on the coffee table, walked over, and unpacked the grocery bag into a single towering pile so carefully, Eric started to wonder if he had OCD.

But that wasn’t it, either. When his pile of books shifted, glossy cover slipping on glossy cover, he didn’t stop and straighten it. He apparently was simply so unexcited about the books that he didn’t feel inclined to pause and examine or open any of them before he’d unloaded the whole bag.

They were all travel books, united only in that and their glossy pictures. The wine country of France settled on top of ghost tours of Chicago with no visible reaction from the boy. When the grocery bag was empty, the boy lifted the stack and turned for the hall. A beat late again, he spoke, uninflected. I’ll take these upstairs and read before bed. He sounded like he’d been taught he had to tell someone where he was going, but didn’t understand that some destinations were unimportant or obvious.

When the boy was gone, Eric realized he was more than a little creeped out. Sullen silence and resistance to interaction, he would have understood, but this kid had been so . . . emotionless, Eric supposed.

Quiet day? Hank asked the guy at the kitchen table, who shrugged.

He worked out for about two hours in the morning, spent some of the afternoon tracking a crow around the yards. Same old. He waited for further questions. When Hank nodded and headed for the front door instead, he turned the volume up on his game and went back to watching.

On the walk to the golf cart and the drive to the next house, Eric considered and discarded a number of possible comments. Definitely not particularly humanizing, as Hank had said, and with no clear connection to the deaths. Asking outright who the boy was felt beneath them both, so in the end Eric kept his mouth shut and waited to see what kind of kid had the codename Key.

I’m surprised we haven’t seen you out here before now. Hank’s easy-going tone didn’t even bother concealing that he was digging. Rumor says you were sleeping with the boss, back in the day.

Way back in the day.

Reviews for Hound and Key

[katlers · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This cover is giving me Lara Croft / Tomb Raider & National Treasure vibes, and I LOVE that! Based on the cover, I would have thought this would have had more of an adventurous, treasure hunting story to it. Even though it did not go that way, I still really enjoyed it.The story is very unique, and mysterious. It revolves around a myth about "The Hand of God". I have heard of the Hand of God, but never knew there was a myth behind it. I found that to be very interesting, and liked the little snippets from various tales over the years. I do wish the author went more into detail about the myth and the different powers associated with the Hand. The powers I thought were different, and would have liked there to be more experimenting with them, but I think Rhiannon will go into that further in the series.Eric is an investigator by day, self proclaimed magician at night type guy. He tries to solve a series of mysterious murders that he thinks he is somehow linked to, and ends up in the middle of a mythical, century old, fight against the Gods.Key I just adored! She was very innocent, and couldn't wait to get out in the world to discover who she really is. She was feisty and sexual, and that really clicked with me.The reincarnation of the powers I thought was cool. It's interesting to think that you could have many lives, but possibly remember them when something triggers a memory. That's definitely something new that I have never read before.Overall, I enjoyed this book, and look forward to reading more into the series. It will be fun to see how the characters progress, and figure out their powers. If you like mysteries, mythology, urban fantasy, and just unique reads, this is for you.**I was given this e-book in exchange for an honest & unbiased review**