"Get in there!” Stygian roared. “You are both as worthless as your brother, Gash!”
Stygian shut the iron door to the cramped cage that Sever and Snare now occupied. Most of Stygian’s ‘collection’ stared aghast as he punished his two favored hellhounds. It’s not like any of them could sleep with him screaming, his booming voice echoing off the walls. In all his wrath, Stygian had grown to twice his normal size, and had beaten the hellhounds with power lines. As the prisoners looked at him now, his eyes were cold and black. His inhuman mouth hung open in such a way that it reminded Larimar of some hideous Halloween mask she’d seen. Just then he turned to see her staring at him wide-eyed. She looked away, but it was too late.
“What are you looking at, Ascender!” Stygian reached through the cage bars and wrapped his long, cold fingers around Larimar’s throat. He lifted her into the air with ease, and she struggled for air. “I hate your kind!” he snarled, shaking her as she dangled from his grip. He watched as she finally stopped struggling and her eyes fluttered and then closed. He let go of her and she fell to the floor. He stormed back over to the cage that Sever and Snare now occupied. Antonia, the triplets, and the unicorn sat in the corners of their cages, trembling. The tortoise tucked himself inside his shell. Chinasa and the liger were angry and pacing their respective cages. But Larimar was not dead, only unconscious, as Stygian knew precisely how long to choke her before he killed her. She now lay in a lifeless heap on the cold, hard concrete.
Sever and Snare tried to get comfortable, but they were so big in the small space that they could barely move past one another.
“First I find out that I’ve lost Phil, my Japanese giant hornet, then I couldn’t get past whatever blessing was put over that ugly pink house so I could snatch the Fledgling inside it, and now you two show up empty handed!” he roared in anger. “At least Phil fought to the death! And was defeated by a powerful Ascender no less! Oh, but not you two! All I asked you to do was capture Fledglings, and you couldn’t even manage that! You had one of them in your claws, and you let him get away!”
Snare grunted weakly.
“I DON’T CARE if one of them was really fast! You are hellhounds—they are Fledglings! What is the problem?” Stygian lowered his voice to almost a whisper. “How many times do I have to tell you!” he rumbled, stomping his feet for emphasis. “Shall I pound it into your thick canine craniums? This is the time to catch them—when they are on their journey and most vulnerable, because they are no longer children, and they are untrained and haven’t the safety of their division.” He yelled again. “But you—are—RUINING EVERYTHING!”
Both hellhounds stayed quiet.
“It’s taken us forever to locate all of them, and they’ve almost reached The Landing! Oh, and I almost forgot—Sage and Marlowe are out searching for them now! That just makes everything PERFECT!” he snarled. “I guess I’ll have to send for more deadly creatures from Belial since I’ve lost Phil and I can’t count on the two of you. You can both stay in there for a while and think about what you’ve done. Or should I say—what you’ve failed to do? I need to go find out how your brother, Gash, is doing. Let’s hope he can get something right, so I don’t have to fix this entire atrocity!”
Stygian stormed out of the prison and into the night.
The hellhounds lay down with their heads on their paws, both anticipating the suffering ahead. The memory of the last time Stygian had punished them was still vivid. They had failed to trap an animal he’d wanted for his precious collection. All three hellhounds had nearly captured the famous and mysterious Ogopogo, the fifty-foot sea serpent who lived in Canada’s Lake Okanagan. But Ogopogo had proven to be a much cleverer opponent than they had anticipated, and had easily eluded them. They weren’t able to locate Ogopogo again after that. Even though Stygian knew that hellhounds were unaccustomed to diving under water, he had punished them anyway. He had locked all three of them inside the tight cage for a week with no food. Sever and Snare both sighed heavily, as they thought of Gash, for they knew that he would likely fail his assignment as well, and the already confined space would be even tighter. It was going to be a long week.
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