Black Dog (26 page)

Sheriff Pearson touched her arm. His hood was back; snow caught and melted in his hair, on his face. He said something… Natividad stared at him, shook her head, took a step out into the open field. The sheriff said something else, more loudly, not to her, and the deputies all got serious expressions and checked their guns.

Nothing came at them except the wind. Natividad drew her circle across the field with every step, feeling it sink down into the frozen ground beneath the snow. She felt the shape of the mandala humming in the earth, slightly discordant, waiting to be completed with this last little arc and its anchoring cross. There was so little left to do, and still the only enemy they had to face was the savage wind…

They came to the right place. Natividad knew it was right. She was surprised she had to catch Sheriff Pearson's arm to make him stop: it seemed to her that anybody ought to know that they had come to the exact eastern limit of the protective circle.

Deputy Harris brought her the cross. Natividad showed him where it needed to go, and he knelt earnestly to fit it exactly where she showed him. She touched his shoulder in thanks and he looked up and smiled at her, then got to his feet and steadied the cross as she stroked her fingers across the carved letters and smooth wood. She drew a breath and touched the top of it, reaching for the clean gift of magic to seal the cross into her mandala, and Harris suddenly staggered and fell into her. His gun spun away, into the air, lost instantly in the blowing white, which was suddenly spattered with red. Blood was on her hands, on the cross – Natividad could
smell
it, like meat and hot metal. A dark, hot magic swirled by her, so strong it shoved at her with almost physical weight. Natividad staggered, and the cross toppled over, threads of light from her shredding magic trailing after it.

Natividad tried to catch the cross as it fell, tried to catch the shreds of her light and magic before they could dissolve into the air, but the cross was too heavy or the light too delicate, and she fell instead, floundering in the snow. She was, she found, more outraged than terrified.
Her
cross, thrown down in the snow! And poor Deputy Harris was
dead
, there was death and violence all around her – someone was screaming, one of the other deputies, a male voice pitched high as a girl's, and she couldn't even get her
cross
set. She was
furious
.

Natividad gripped the smooth wood of the cross in both hands, heaved it up and whirled it around with an effort she felt all through her back and stomach and shoulders – it was a lot heavier than she'd guessed – then she staggered and fell to one knee when a shotgun blast crashed next to her. But, once kneeling, she could brace the cross against the ground, haul it upright, embrace it with both arms to hold it steady. She called light into the silver-limned letters carved into the wood, and a net of light spilled down and around the arms of the cross. She expected all the time to feel claws tear into her back, powerful jaws clamp down on the back of her neck. There was another shotgun blast followed by a heavy, coughing roar then a huge dark shape loomed at her out of the snow, and she screamed…

Sheriff Pearson strode out of the blowing snow, leveled a shotgun at the black dog, and pulled the trigger twice in quick succession: pump,
boom
, pump,
boom
. The black dog staggered back a step, but his shadow writhed thickly as it carried away injuries that ought to have killed any natural creature, that would have killed even most black dogs. He didn't even seem to need to shift to human form and back again to shed his wounds, which seemed strange, but Natividad had no attention to spare for that. The light from her cross had tangled with the black dog's trailing shadow,
that
was what she was worried about, but she couldn't see anything she could do about it now. Lunging to her feet, she hauled the cross up as straight as possible, drew a pentagram where the crosspiece met the upright, and cried, “May the strength of God fill this cross! May this cross guard Lewis and all within against any who come with ill intent! And against the fell dark!
And against all manner of evil things
!
”

She did not know whether she was shouting in Spanish or English, did not think the words in whatever language were exactly the ones her mother had taught her, but light followed her hands, running swiftly up and down the length of the cross. The light knotted where the blood spatters contaminated the wood, and everywhere it tangled up with the black dog's shadow, but it gathered strength despite that and exploded outward. Light, intertwined with blood and shadows, spilled out across the snow, reached left and right along the circle, and speared back along the cross that centered her mandala, rushing away toward the heart of the town. The power of the circle smashed out into the night as it closed, much greater than Natividad had expected; the force of it sent her staggering sideways and then she lost her balance and fell – away from the mandala, exactly the wrong way. Though she tried to scramble back toward safety, the black dog was too close and she ducked the other way even though she knew she shouldn't. But all her muscles spasmed with magic, and she fell again and then found she could not get back to her feet, couldn't even scramble away on her hands and knees, though she tried. The mandala was doing
something
, very strongly, but not the way she'd meant it to – even if she could get to it, it might not work to keep the black dog away, but she couldn't even
move
, she was helpless, and the black dog was going to kill her…

The black dog had taken several steps away from the mandala, but he had not fled from it. He was in human form now, laughing and cursing at the same time. The laughter and the curses sounded the same: aggressive and furious and savage, with nothing of humor, not even cruel humor. His human shape was tall, blunt-featured, angry. Natividad cowered down. She was sure he was going to kill her, but Sheriff Pearson stepped in front of her. His hands moved quickly to reload the shotgun.

Their enemy shifted again to his black dog shape. He showed no sign of any wounds, no fear of the sheriff's gun. He was enormous, the largest black dog Natividad had ever seen, with heavy shoulders and a thick neck and powerful jaws. His eyes were crimson, his breath black smoke that wreathed around his huge head; the snow melted away from his tracks. The cold air smelled of sulfur and blood.

Sheriff Pearson's movements were economical and quick – he had a shell in the chamber, he was lifting the gun – but even so it was perfectly clear to Natividad that the black dog would tear him apart before he could shoot again. She knew the moment the sheriff was out of the way, the black dog would tear
her
apart, too, but she still couldn't move.

Another black dog flung himself out of the blinding snow, trailing smoke and a hot gust of sulfurous air. He slammed into the first with such force that both were hurled backward and disappeared. A shattering roar tore through the blind snow-filled light. Natividad put her hands over her ears and tucked herself down as small as she could, like a little mouse trying to hide from a very big cat. But nothing lunged out of the snow to grab her, and after a moment she couldn't help but open her eyes and straighten cautiously, trying to see. She could still smell blood – she was sure she could still smell the blood, mixed with smoke and sulfur. But there was no sound, no movement except the blowing snow.

The sheriff stood over her, his gun ready but no enemy now to shoot at. He asked her, sharp and tense, “Can you get up?”

Natividad thought she
could
stand, maybe, now. She tried, cautiously, and found the power of her mandala had… not faded, exactly, but it had become less… less immediate. Less intense. Less something. If she couldn't get up, she could now at least crawl. The dubious protection of the mandala, whatever the contamination of the black dog's shadow had done to it, would almost certainly be a lot better than staying where she was.

The sheriff was not exactly illuminated by the light that radiated from the cross and the mandala, because that kind of light didn't exactly illuminate anything, but Natividad could see that raking claws had shredded his coat, that bruises were darkening on his face. But he seemed to be alright, mostly. He turned his head slowly back and forth, listening as he waited for her to do her part, to at least
try
to save herself. Nothing could be heard, now, but the wind.

Natividad staggered to her feet. She
could
get to her feet, now, barely, and looked for her mandala. She moved stiffly in that direction. Sheriff Pearson backed up beside her, watching not her, but everything else. The cross stood straight and firm, only a little way away. Natividad limped toward it. Neither her light, nor the black dog shadow tangled with it, were visible, now. Not exactly
visible
but she knew that both were still there.

Natividad didn't understand what she had made. Black dog magic and Pure magic shouldn't mix, though it was a little like blooding silver for a black dog. Well, not really. Had Mamá ever said anything about contaminating Pure magic with black dog magic? She couldn't remember anything like that, but everything near the end had happened so fast and she had been so scared and her memories of those last days were all in bits and pieces. She wanted to study what she'd done; she wanted to figure it out; she wanted to be able to tell the townspeople what kind of circle she'd put around them. But she was sure that she wouldn't get the chance to figure out anything – any moment, that huge black dog would lunge out of the blind white snow surrounding them and kill first Sheriff Pearson and then her.

Deputy Denoux lay, crumpled and still, just near enough to be visible. The dark heap of his eviscerated body was already disappearing under the snow, which seemed a mercy, like throwing a blanket over the dead. All the blood, too, was already chilling and being covered over by the snow. She could see part of another leg that probably belonged to Belliveau. Natividad shivered, and then couldn't stop. They were all dead, those three deputies who had come to protect her: bad-tempered suspicious Belliveau and polite Denoux and young Harris. All three of them
had
protected her, with their lives. Would they feel like that was fair?
She
didn't. She put a hand out. The cross was only a step away, now, and she could feel the magic in it like a physical pressure against her skin: not exactly Pure, but she couldn't decide whether the difference felt bad or actually sort of OK. She knew it felt strange. It felt
powerful
, though.

The snow parted like a veil, revealing a black dog who loped toward them, fluid as a lion and a lot more dangerous. The black dog moved very fast, out of the blowing snow and past the dead man. He straightened toward human form as he moved forward, and he hardly seemed less massive in his human form than as a black dog. It wasn't the same one as before. Sheriff Pearson aimed his shotgun at the newcomer's chest, but didn't fire, and at first Natividad didn't understand why, but then she saw that the black dog had caught the barrel. He twisted the gun out of the sheriff's grip, and closed his other hand, nearly human now, around Pearson's throat.

It was Harrison Lanning. There was no sign of the other black dog.

Harrison flung the shotgun aside, bore the sheriff straight through the circle of the mandala right down to the ground and pinned him flat, all in the same silent rush.

“It wasn't his fault!” Natividad cried. “It was mine!”

Harrison released Pearson, came to his feet, and swung around to confront Natividad. He was fully in his human form now, except for his fiery eyes. Behind him, Pearson came up on one elbow, not hurt at all. To Natividad's relief, he didn't get all the way up, and Harrison didn't whirl back to strike him down to the ground. Natividad realized at last – she was ashamed she hadn't understood it from the first – that Harrison had thrown the sheriff to the ground not as an attack nor even as the precursor for an attack, but as a way to
prevent
an attack. Not the sheriff's, but his own. He hadn't trusted Sheriff Pearson to know he needed to show submission, hadn't trusted himself to tolerate any show of defiance, so he'd knocked the sheriff down with enough force to remind him to be prudent. That was actually clever. Even kind, sort of. As kind as a black dog in a raging temper was likely able to manage.

It was also a reminder Natividad should not need. Not that Harrison would hit
her
, she was pretty sure, but she crouched down in the snow anyway. Well, sort of collapsed, really. It was very easy to just let her legs fold up. It might be harder to get up again. She asked, “Was that Vonhausel? Is he dead?” Her voice shook. She couldn't help that.

Harrison answered grimly, not shouting, “Of course it was Vonhausel. Of course he's not dead. But if Grayson hadn't sent me after you,
you
would be dead! We would have lost you! Reckless, irresponsible child!” Turning his head, he glared down at Pearson. “
You
brought her into this danger, when Grayson explicitly forbade it!” Harrison's black dog still showed in his eyes, a powerful echo behind his human form.

Sheriff Pearson didn't try to stand up. And he remembered not to look directly into Harrison's face, so that was alright. He stayed propped up his elbow – his other arm
was
hurt, Natividad was almost sure – and said, “I lost good men protecting Natividad. Is the circle she drew for us worth it?
You
crossed it.”

Harrison Lanning glowered down at him. “Of course it was worth it – to
you
. It's a good, strong circle. It's blazing like a bonfire.”