Thank you so much for reading! 

I want to give special thanks to @MuniyaPyne, whose encouraging comment really helped get me out of a funk and nudge me to get this thing finished. Also a shout-out to @Eris345 and @yvonte; seeing your votes on my recent chapters kept me going. THANK YOU! 

This is the second draft of the story. The rewrite saw the addition of 7 new chapters, and most of the existing chapters were doubled in length. I can't guarantee it's perfect -- there's a lot of polishing left to do -- but this will probably be the final version for Wattpad. 

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed :) I'd love to hear your feedback. 

-- 

The Hound was inspired in part by a strange little antique shop I visited a few times in downtown Albuquerque. It was filled with oddities, most of them with a bit of a gothic sensibility, from old medical texts to refurbished coffins and creepy portraits. The strangest thing I saw there, though, was a taxidermied parrot. It struck me how strange it would be to buy the corpse of what had once been someone's pet, and how such an artifact could essentially live on for ages, passing awkwardly between generations of strangers who didn't want it but couldn't bear to just throw it away. I wondered what type of stories that bird would tell if it could. 

The shop is gone now, but I still wonder about that bird, and whether anyone ever took him home.