Cat's Claw by Amber Benson

not looking good, I thought as I stepped out of the tree line and onto a grassy verge. Across from the grassed-off section, I saw a long, thin dirt trail that would lead me, hopefully, to the North Gate and to my appointment with Cerberus.
    The last time I’d been here was to steal one of Cerberus’s puppies, so there’d been a fair amount of sneaking involved. I’d had Jarvis with me at the time, but other than giving me a lecture about the different gates of Hell and what departed souls entered what gate, he hadn’t been too much help. Later, he’d been worth his weight in gold, but not in my dealings with Cerberus.
    I stepped onto the trail, picking my way across some fallen tree branches, not even daring to look down at the mess I had become. Like I said before, when visiting Hell, one does not want to wear one’s Saturday best . . . and I was living proof of that fact.
    “Poor babies,” I said out loud, looking down at my shredded boots. “My poor, poor babies.”
    There was a rustling in the underbrush to my right and I sped up, trying to get away from the sound. I didn’t want to get tangled up in any other weird business while I was in Hell. I just wanted to find Cerberus, hear him out, and then get back home, where I belonged—and by “home,” I meant my apartment in New York, not Sea Verge.
    The rustling in the underbrush got louder, causing me to pick up my pace even more. Whatever was making the noise hadn’t gotten close enough to warrant an all-out run yet, but I was totally starting to feel like one of those middle-aged, sweat suit-wearing ladies you saw fast-walking at the mall.
    Suddenly, I caught a flash of bright yellow shooting toward me from out of the brush and I took off running. I hadn’t really gotten a good look at the thing, but it seemed quick and compact and ready to bite my head off without the least provocation.
    “Leave me alone!” I screamed, too freaked-out to look back and see if it had gained any ground on me. “I don’t taste very good, I swear to God!”
    Trying to run in a pair of high-heeled boots is sort of like trying to run barefoot: You step on anything less flat than the road and you end up face-first in the dirt. It didn’t take but two seconds for me to step on something hard and round, probably a rock, and go flying. I was moving with so much velocity that I actually think I was airborne for about thirty seconds before I began my descent and landed on the ground, smacking my chin into the hard, compacted dirt. I felt my jaw slam together like a pair of those fake, plastic, windup toy teeth, the taste of blood strong in my mouth. I had impacted the ground so hard that I’d nearly bitten my tongue off.
    I ignored the burning pain in my mouth as I crawled to my feet and started running again—“limping” is really the correct term—fear making my heart jump around in my chest in quadruple time. Yep, abject terror is a really great motivator. It kept my feet moving long after the rest of my body had already given up.
    After a few minutes of run/limping, I realized that I wasn’t being followed anymore, or if I was, whoever was doing the following had no interest in catching me. With my breath tight in my chest and a stitch in my side, I slowed down to a walk and took a tentative look at my supposed pursuer.
    Sitting in the middle of the path, about fifty feet behind me, was a tiny yellow dog—not bright neon yellow like I’d thought I’d seen out of the corner of my eye, but a dusty, muted animal yellow.
    “Really?” I said under my breath. “Really, that’s what I was running from?”
    I wiped my hands on my jeans, smearing dirt and blood from my abraded palms all over them—hey, they were black, so no one could see—and hobbled back the way I had come. The poor little animal just sat there in the middle of the path, looking cowed. As I got closer, the acrid smell of urine filled my nostrils and I saw that the tiny thing had peed all over