Heroic Hearts

Oh, yes, I think that’s right. How’d you hear about that?

Right, right. Okay. I’m going straight at him because he has to go. Circle around to his flank but do not engage unless I’m in trouble.

Starbuck added.

Atticus set off in a sort of duck walk, trying to stay low and unobserved to surprise Xanax or Xaphod or whatever, I’d already forgotten his name. I nipped at Starbuck to get his attention and the two of us took a course headed to the right, which would eventually intersect the fallen angel’s path if he kept going. Atticus would engage him before that, though, and once he faced Atticus, we’d be coming at him on his left side. That was usually what you wanted if you were tracking humans, since most of them were right-handed, but I didn’t know if that was true for angels. Were they all ambidextrous?

I didn’t need to wait for a signal because there wouldn’t be one. When Atticus decided a thing had to be done, he did it. And he wouldn’t try to engage the fallen angel in negotiations to leave peacefully, because that would never happen, and he wouldn’t seek a fair fight either, because there was no honor to be had here. There was only a forest to save, and all the creatures who lived in it.

The best possible outcome would be that Xaphoo never saw Atticus coming and he’d just get an axe in the back and that would be it.

The best possible outcome never happens, though.

The fallen angel heard Atticus coming—or maybe smelled him, because what I thought was a plague mask beak from a distance was actually a super long nose—and whipped around to face him. Atticus rose and charged at that point, the element of surprise lost. But he was too far away. The beanpole arms hefted the bellows and pointed it at Atticus and squeezed the handles together. I immediately sped up to a sprint because that looked like trouble if anything did.

A powerful stream of air shot out of the bellows and ignited like a flamethrower and the evil thing laughed as Atticus was blown backward off his feet in a gust of fiery wind. He lost his grip on his hatchet and that was most definitely trouble.

Atticus didn’t make any sound, but he was rolling to extinguish the flames. I hoped his wards and cold iron aura were working properly. Xaphudge laughed, a screechy cackle, and pried apart the handles of the bellows for another go. He never saw me coming until I was a blur of motion in his peripheral vision. He made a startled noise and started to turn my way as I was in midair. It was enough to make me miss him, but I tore the bellows right out of his grasp and ran with it grasped in my jaws. His cry of outrage was epic and he gave chase, so he missed a couple of things: one was Atticus getting to his feet, his clothes all crispy and his hair smoldering but otherwise okay, extending a hand toward the fallen angel and saying something in Old Irish, and the other was Starbuck coming up behind him to nip at his chicken legs.

They weren’t really chicken legs—he had feet instead of talons, it’s just that they were super skinny and appeared to have no muscles. Starbuck’s efforts were enough to trip him up and he executed a graceless face-plant accompanied by a roar. He really did look like a large avocado that way and I dreamt for a fleeting moment of smashing him to guacamole.

I paused to look back and saw that not only had the fallen angel fallen, but Atticus had too. He’d just been standing a few seconds ago, so I didn’t understand what had happened. Xantac rose and whirled around, locating me and then Starbuck, who was barking at him not far away and calling him a terrible cat person. His scarecrow arms rose and hellfire gushed out from them, one stream for Starbuck and one for me.

There was no avoiding it.

The sulfurous heat blasted over me and I squeezed my eyes shut and hoped it wasn’t my time to die.

I said to Atticus, because if this was the end, I wanted to be grateful for the good times and not say something obvious like

I did let loose with a yipe, because it hurt more than anything ever had, and Starbuck did the same, but after a second of intense heat, most of it was gone. That cold iron talisman I wore on my collar had warded off the hellfire, leaving me and Starbuck very toasty and with lots of singed fur, but otherwise unharmed.

The fallen angel couldn’t believe it. His jaw dropped open, some pink and off-white bits in there like jagged landscaping rocks, and he looked at both of us to make sure we were still alive, and then he looked down at his hands, wondering how they could have misfired so badly. He snarled and clenched his fists as he looked up at me, clearly deciding he should just try again. He said something in a language I didn’t recognize—maybe the fell speech of Mordor or something, because it sure wasn’t French—and then his eyes popped open in surprise and he belched. And shortly thereafter, he screamed, as much in surprise as in pain, as his avocado body began to bubble and hiss, and I understood what was happening: he was being consumed from the inside by Cold Fire. Atticus had gotten him after all, and that was what he’d done before he collapsed. Something about that particular unbinding drained my Druid like nothing else.

Fissures appeared in the fallen angel’s body and yellow goo squirted out from them, which caused Starbuck to leap backward in alarm. Xaphig pretty much exploded after that, quickly turning into molten yuck that cooked down into greasy slag.

Starbuck? Oberon? Are you two okay? Atticus asked in our minds.

Starbuck said, then added,

I replied, trotting over to him. He was lying spread-eagled on his back.

I’m wiped out. The hatchet wasn’t much use after all, and I had to use my own strength to cast Cold Fire.

Not much. My muscles don’t want to work at the moment, but I’ll recover eventually.

It could be a good while. Overnight, probably.

The sun had pretty much set and there was some farewell light in the sky, the kind that allowed you time to reflect and judge the kind of day you’d had before darkness fell. We wouldn’t get full dark, of course, because of the fire expanding all around us. Our little pockets of air were still okay, but it remained hot and uncomfortable.

I agree that it’s not ideal.

Starbuck hopped around.

We had to explain that no deliveries of any kind could be made to where we were, and Starbuck shivered as he realized what that meant.

Dinner can still happen. It just can’t happen here. You have to get me to where the food is. Through the fire, in other words.

I’m going to bind together some torched wood to make a rough sled—a travois, really—and you’re going to pull me out. It’s going to be a lot of work for a long time, but I’ll try to give you energy.

Some. But this fatigue isn’t something I can recover from quickly. This is why I would have preferred to use the hatchet with the sigil. Speaking of which, I need you to find that and bring it with you. The bellows too. Can’t leave those here.

I knew where the bellows was and Starbuck found the hatchet after a bit of a search. Atticus used his Druidry to move some charred wood around and bind it together into a travois, which looked like a sort of torched trellis when he was finished. That took a while, and then we had to help him roll on top of it, pulling on the shreds of his clothes. That was how weak he was.

It was designed with a couple of branch leads and then a short branch connecting them that I’d have to take into my mouth, which would allow me to pull him behind like I was a horse. As a test, I dragged him a little way to the sinkhole he’d made earlier. He pulled up more water and got us all good and soaked, and then he had Starbuck crawl under his shirt so he’d have a wet layer of cloth around him as we entered the fire.

That was the part I didn’t want to think about. When I came through it the first time, I was following Atticus. And when the fallen angel zapped me, I didn’t have a chance to think about it. But now I had to enter the fire on purpose by myself, and I wouldn’t be able to run at full speed.

There was a yippy Chihuahua voice in my head that said, Don’t do it, just go hungry for a night and maybe skip breakfast too and wait until Atticus can move on his own. But what kind of wolfhound would I be if I listened to my inner Chihuahua?

The voice got pretty loud as I got nearer the fire, though. It burned with the rage of five grizzly bears on energy drinks fighting to drink the last one of a six-pack. I was thinking that maybe this one time, the Chihuahua was wise.

But then Atticus said, I don’t think I told either of you how awesome you were back there. You saved my life and ran through fire for me, and now you’re going to do it again. You helped me protect the earth. There simply aren’t any better dogs than you. You’re the best.

Well, I couldn’t listen to the Chihuahua after that, because I was the best dog.

But fire wasn’t a Scooby-Doo villain that you cease to fear once you pull the mask off. It’s an elemental force against which my only chance of survival was to avoid it. No matter how much I told myself that I was the best hound, my instincts insisted that I run the other way.

I found the path through the fire that Atticus had made before and slowed, because I couldn’t see the end. Smoke and distance made the flames seem to close up in an impenetrable wall.

It should be. Hold on. I dropped the lead out of my mouth and turned to see what he was doing. He twitched his foot onto the ground so he could check things out with the elemental.

It’s clear, he confirmed. Even if it doesn’t look like it. Just take us through as fast as you can.

That was when I learned the true difference between courage and sausage. A big plate of sausage might fill my belly, but it wouldn’t help me take a single step toward that fire. I needed courage first, and then, if it served me well, I might get served some sausage on the other side.

I picked up the lead in my jaws again and flattened my ears against my head.

I said.

My first two steps were small things, not very courageous at all. But I realized that if I took small steps we’d all die from the heat and lack of oxygen if not the actual flames. The best hope we had was for me to use the full stride of an Irish wolfhound.

I leapt forward, startling both Atticus and Starbuck at the sudden lurch, but toppling neither. I pulled as hard as I could, fully aware that the weight was slowing me down, but still going at the top speed I could manage, right toward the most frightening thing I could think of besides a world ruled by squirrels.

I tried to think about things that made me happy, like belly rubs and poodles and gravy and every single time Atticus told me how good I was. I’ve had a very long life thanks to him, and a super delicious one, but I supposed all good things must be paid for somehow. The bill for our blessings always comes due in some fashion, and there’s no way to avoid it.

The fire did its best to burn everything away as I plunged into it, flames rising well above my head on either side. My memories, my fine gray coat, the best human ever, my snorty Boston buddy, and my courage: it wanted everything to become ashes.

The ground scorched the pads of my paws and I could hardly breathe, the flames sucking up all the air, but there was nothing to do but churn forward.

Courage, I realized, only revs your engine at the starting line. It doesn’t keep you going for the long haul. What keeps you going is something else: stubbornness, perhaps, or fear of what would happen if you stopped. In my case it was probably a whole lot of both. Once into the suffocating heat of the inferno, the only answer to any of my thoughts—like it’s too hot, I can’t breathe, or I’m so tired—was to keep going until I got through it.

It spurred me everywhere, not just on my flanks.

It toasted me from nose to tail.

It threatened to kill me. And Starbuck, despite being soaked and protected by Atticus, had trouble breathing, and let me know. he cried.

I needed air too. And if I gave up it wouldn’t just be me who burned away—my best friends in the whole world would die as well.

The path kept going and going the way pain keeps going, hot and orange and urgent, until it suddenly stopped. And when it did, the relief was so acute I almost wondered why I ever felt distress, like the pain was a hallucination or something.

When we got past the leading edge of the fire, Atticus told me to stop and he did his water trick again to cool us all down.

Thank you, Oberon. You saved us all, he said, even though he had saved me from death too many times to count.

Starbuck said.

Then Atticus declared we could move at a slower pace to get to a ghost town called Yerranderie many miles away, where there was shelter, at least, if little else. It was deep night or early morning when we got there, and we crashed underneath an old tree until dawn, when Atticus could struggle to his feet and call for help to other humans who might have food or water but mostly food.

There were only a few buildings around, but an oldish woman eventually appeared and asked what in God’s name had happened.

“Fire,” Atticus said, though he didn’t say it in God’s name, and that was enough. Nobody was unaware of the fire. She invited us back to her place, where she gave me and Starbuck sausage and gave Atticus this stuff called Vegemite. Sausage is vastly superior to Vegemite, in my opinion, so I felt a bit sorry for Atticus, but he didn’t appear unhappy.

He spoke with the lady for a long time while I lounged outside with Starbuck.

Starbuck said. His tongue licked out and lapped once against my snout. Then he turned and curled up next to me, sorting himself along my side between my front leg and my back leg.

I said.

Starbuck said, and he sighed once before settling into a comforting series of snores.

I laid my head down between my front paws for a nap, knowing that Atticus would wake us when he wanted to leave. As I drifted off, I thought: I have courage and sausage and friends. If I ever get an ass candle, I will have it all.