a penny for your sins || gommorah

Zarachiel’s ear itched. She flicked it, the mild irritation of needing to do so in the first place itching half the more, and snuffed. If he thought she needed a babysitter…well. Let her new master learn himself. Rolling her shoulders, the hound crouched back and lunged from the alley, vaulting over a parked car and hitting the asphalt running. At this time of day, the gossiping whisper of neon signs and the one-sided enjoyments of paid-for-sex were the city’s white noise, and the people kept as much to the shadows as the shadows to themselves. Even if there had been witnesses, they’d have either passed it off as a bad drug trip or the magico-mundane reality of their little island.

With the perfume like a red ribbon splayed out before her in the air, Zarachiel hardly needed to sniff to keep the trail. A pug with allergies could have trailed this mark, but such were the failings of the human and certain inhuman systems, unable to pick up what God had all but dropped on top of them. Little wonder that Zarachiel preferred this sleek form, the feel of wind in her fur as her nails ground the cement to fine powder between her pads.

Here now, little human. You have something I want.

Half a mile to the mark’s coffee shop, she eased into a loping prowl, her ears swiveling for the slightest noise. Black coffee and egg sandwiches halfway between soggy and burnt assaulted her nostrils, underwritten with the sour notes of iron and oil that made her hate cities. Not wanting, nor needing, to make more of a scene than she already had in her current state, Zarachiel slowed at the edge of the block and cocked her head to the side. The girl was in there, picking at a croissant and the flakes of her nail polish. She smelled of melted mascara, disappointment, fear…Ah. Fear…That one was nice.

Licking her chops, the hound sat back on her haunches to wait.​

The raven’s call attracted her ears, but apart from a flick or two, Zarachiel paid it no mind. Ravens were common among the fae—pets, familiars, and the like—and she’d been trained at a young age to respect them. Cats, though…She smelled the feline’s musk and curled back her lip, pinning her ears. Only rigid focus on her target and hunt kept the hound from acting on the impulse to eat. He would probably give her indigestion anyway, putting off that oil slick aura. Eons of swallowing souls had soured her stomach to lower-than-hell-bound-souls.

Still, she scraped her front paw absently on the concrete, lowering her shoulders and head in anticipation. The girl was getting up from her table. She paid for her tab, adjusted her purse for the seventeenth time in one hundred and eighty seconds, and pulled a hat over her garishly blonde hair and sunglasses over her eyes. As if such simple masques could fool a human flatfoot, nevermind a preternatural hunter. When she turned the corner, the hound was waiting, lips pulled back in a farce of a smirk.

Yes, you know you’re mine now.

Before the mark could run, standing petrified in the street, Zarachiel stood and circled around her, herding her into the alleyway. The foolish girl tried to run, then, and for her troubles received a “gentle” nudge into the grime covered ground. Standing over her body, the hound placed one massive paw over the woman’s collarbone and pressed her down. A quick reconfiguration of bones later and Zarachiel crouched naked over her trembling mark, one hand pinning the girl’s throat as she squirmed and whimpered beneath her.

“Not that she is worth asking for, master, but would you like her breathing when this is finished?” she asked, though she did not look at the cat.​

Zarachiel smiled, slow and dark as the Acheron river.

“Of course, Master, but I didn’t say a thing about blood. I merely asked if you wanted her breathing.”

Reaping souls was quite the intimate business, but it was hardly visceral in the sense that the woman would not bleed. Die, perchance...Well, physical bodies, particularly mortal ones, were finicky, and accustomed to having things their way. When upset, they pitched fits, threw fevers, ran the gauntlet of illness and disease just to be set back to rights. One could hardly expect such fragile things to give up their very core of existence easily, and most victims died—not to say, of course, that it couldn’t be done. Zarachiel wouldn’t have asked, and wouldn’t be worth her alpha title, if she couldn’t do just that.

She shifted her grip, deaf to the girl’s weeping, and placed her hand against her breastbone. The girl struggled harder, then, but her movements were as inconsequential to the Cwn as the wind to a tree, and she shifted her stance with each alteration in her victim’s posture. Things would, of course, go much more smoothly if she would just be still, but it was her choice. Zarachiel would take what was due, keep her breathing, and however much other harm the woman suffered was merely collateral damage and not her concern. Pressing harder against her chest for stability, the Cwn crouched lower, close enough to feel the warmth radiating off the girl’s flushed skin, and offered a charming smile.

“You may feel a slight pull.”

Without further warning, Zarachiel flexed her fingers and sank the tips of her nails into the girl’s flesh the way you’d start to peel an orange. A whimper broke the sobs; she didn’t hear it. Narrowing her eyes, she stared for a moment at the girl’s mouth before opening her own and inhaling. The noise was like a moan caught in the wind, faint as far off thunder and sharp as the taste of lightning. Never once breaking eye contact with the trembling, gasping girl, Zarachiel kept up her inhale as a small silver string of light started to slip from the girl’s lips. When she closed them, it found its way through her nose, ears, tearducts, any opening. Spine stretching against her skin like it would crack the shell of her open, Zarachiel’s muscles twitched with the tension of maintaining her position, but she didn’t break until she could see the girl’s eyes rolling back.

Then, only then, did she exhale, leaving a single sliver of silver with the girl as she sat back, hard. Wiping her mouth, Zarachiel moved her mouth as if tasting something unpleasant and frowned.

“A jar for this would be nice,” she said.

The girl tasted like sour apple juice and watered down rum.​

As her master applauded her, Zarachiel managed a faint grin, even feeling the grey girl’s soul squirming about inside of her. A soul as tasteless as that was easy enough to ignore, hardly substantial even when she had had a body. When Gabriel suggested simply “spitting it out,” however, even Zarachiel had to frown. Not that the girl deserved better than spectral vomit, but did he know <i>anything</i> about Cŵn Annwn? He had to, or he wouldn’t have recognized her as an entity, much less a potential employee , but the thought of letting the soul simply <i>go by itself</i> was insulting. She wasn’t here to play fetch, she was here to do her time-damned job.

“Unless you have a container for it,” she said with a measured emptiness to her tone, “I’ll see the job through to its end. Master.”

Giving a stiff bow, she took a single step back from him. Her nails still gleamed with a sheen of the girl’s blood, and with little more ceremony than that, Zarachiel scraped them through the air. No noise issued from the motion, but the growling echo of a thousand groans rolled through the air like thunder as thin lines of smoke billowed into the alley. On either side of the slice of air, the alley remained in tact, but on the plane just in front of Zarachiel, five scar-like rips stood out red as blood.

“I presume this alley is not the place to continue our talk of business, regardless.” Zarachiel glanced thoughtfully at her new employer and shrugged. “The soul tastes of where it wants to go, and the blood leads the way. I’ll take her to your hell and meet you wherever you choose to exist when I’ve finished.”

Perhaps she should have been a little more polite to her new Master, but politesse was not efficient, nor within the grasps of her ego right now. Without a further word, Zarachiel stepped through the rift into sweltering heat and the cold scent of charred coals. If Gabriel followed her, so be it, but it would not take her long, and she had his scent. Her next rift would take him to his exact location regardless.​