Black Dog (47 page)

There was nothing he could do that could change what was going to happen. But he would fight anyway. He stepped toward the edge of her pentagram, hauling Natividad with him, his bones broadening, his arms contorting into the powerful forelimbs of the black dog.

“It's not Vonhausel who matters,” Natividad cried in his ear. “Alejandro! It's not
Vonhausel
who matters, it's his
magic
. Stop, will you, and listen to me!
Stop
!”

The desperation in her voice dragged Alejandro to a halt despite himself. He tilted his head, staring at his sister in impatient anger. The meaning of her words gradually came clear to him – or at least the meaning of each word in turn. She was speaking in Spanish, which helped a little. But what she actually meant, he did not know.

Releasing him, Natividad waved her
aparato
under his nose. There were traces of his silver knife in the thing – the knife itself might have been useful, but Alejandro had no idea what Natividad meant to do with this indistinct tool that seemed more a dense glowing mist than a knife. Though a glowing mist mottled with blurred patches of darkness, which seemed very strange for a work of Pure magic.

“I've figured it out! I
remember
!
I think I do! I think I've figured it out!” his sister shouted at him, still in Spanish. “Did you hear what Vonhausel said? Look what he did to this!
Look
at it! It's light and shadow both! Like my mandala, do you see? And Mamá said that, about making darkness cooperate with light! I remember what she did, I remember her
doing
it, I didn't understand, but now I do! I can
use
this, I think I can, I think I see how. It was Papá who helped her, at least he tried to, only he couldn't reach her, but I know what she tried to do, I think I know, I'm sure I do! ‘Jandro, listen! You have to help me!
Trust
me!”

Alejandro stared at her. He longed for fighting and blood and death… but Natividad seemed so sure. He had tried so hard to keep her safe, but she had not come to this place tonight to be
safe
. He could not protect her, but she was not looking for protection. Natividad wasn't asking for
rescue
, but for help. For help
doing
something.

And Alejandro found that he did trust her. He wanted to help her do whatever she had thought of to do, but he had no idea how he could. The kind of magic she did was for the Pure, not for black dogs.

“I need your shadow!” Natividad cried, half command and half plea. “I need your shadow, ‘Jandro! I don't think… I think it won't… I'm pretty sure I can… If I can't – but I have to have it.
Please
, ‘Jandro!”

Alejandro had no idea what his sister was trying to say. Except that she wanted to do something with or to his black dog shadow. This seemed impossible. But she sounded very urgent. He crouched down and stared at her, waiting. But then for a long moment, it seemed she would do nothing after all. She was afraid – afraid of him, he thought at first; then he realized that she was afraid of what she meant to do, afraid of hurting him, maybe afraid that what she needed to do might even kill him. Fury and terror and a strange wild grief tangled inside of him, but though the anger was only anger, he did not understand the grief.

Then he did. It was grief for Natividad, who might kill him by what she did and then feel the horror of that for the rest of her life; and it was also grief for Dimilioc, which would surely be destroyed in a very few minutes if the magic she worked didn't succeed. He wanted to tell her – he wanted to say – he did not know what; his mouth was a black dog's savage muzzle, incapable of framing human words, and anyway he no longer possessed any clear command of language. But he turned his head aside, offering Natividad his throat.

She caught a sobbing breath, laid one hand on his massive heavy-jawed face, and stabbed him at the base of the throat with the
aparato
she had made, with the part of it that had been a knife. Alejandro was only just able to turn his instinctive leap away into an abortive twitch, and reduce his equally instinctive snap to a ferocious snarl. Natividad utterly ignored her own danger. She twisted the
aparato
and jerked it back out
.

She had stabbed Alejandro at the base of his thick black-dog neck, which should have been a very dangerous wound because the knife was silver, only of course it was the knife she had blooded for him. But the
aparato
was not exactly a knife anymore, not really like a knife at all, and the injury it dealt was not exactly a normal injury. Neither blood nor ichor flowed where it had stabbed into him. The injury hurt; it burned, only not exactly, because the burn was cold instead of hot.

When Natividad jerked out the
aparato
,
it felt to Alejandro as though all the blood and fire in him was torn out with it. Cold struck inward through his body, threaded through all his veins, froze him from the inside out. Alejandro felt his bones turn to ice. He groaned, folding to the ground – he was in his human shape again, though he had not even realized he was changing. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but neither protected him from the horrifying cold. He could not speak. He could not move.

But he saw his sister leap to her feet, silver mist and black shadows trailing like water from her fingers. He knew she had somehow taken his shadow. She was doing something with it, braiding her light and his shadow together into a thick rope that sparkled and flashed and dripped with darkness, whirling this over her head and casting it up and out, like a
vaquero
with a lariat, so that it twisted as it rose and then settled as a huge loop, broadening as it fell, broadening far more than seemed reasonable, so that by the time it fell, it encompassed half the town and the whole surging pack of embattled black dogs.

Then she knelt down by Alejandro, her hand warm on his cheek. She was weeping, he realized. She thought maybe she had killed him, and he wanted to tell her he was alright, but though the words were there on his tongue, he could not make his numb mouth make the sounds. But he was shaking with cold, so she must have realized he still lived. She put one slim arm around him, helping him sit. So then they sat together, shaking with cold and fear, and watching to see what exactly would happen.

Natividad's magic did not seem, in that first moment, to touch the true black dogs. But all across the battleground, the moon-bound shifters were suddenly forced into human shape. Alejandro saw it with Cass Pearson first: the little shifter was fighting with Keziah and Amira, the trio supported by Thaddeus on one side and Ethan on the other. Cassie held her place in the trio with silent, vicious intensity, the tight teamwork keeping her alive when so many other shifters had been killed. But when her corrupted shadow was torn out of her by the shadowed circle Natividad had flung around them all
,
she staggered abruptly into human form and stood, fragile and dazed and helpless, in the midst of the battling black dogs.

With a kindness that Alejandro would never have expected, and with startling aplomb, as though shifters that suddenly turned human during the full moon were perfectly ordinary, Keziah caught the girl's arm and flung her out of the way, against the shelter of a broken wall. Many of the other shifters were immediately killed by the black dogs who surrounded them. Only the black dogs were then distracted by the collapse of one shadow-possessed undead black dog, and then another. And another.

The shifters were just an accident. Something about the magic that corrupted their shadows must be like the horror Vonhausel had made of dead black dogs, because really those undead black dogs had been Natividad's target all along. Alejandro understood this at last, and then was ashamed it had taken him so long to grasp it. She had woven her
aparato
with his shadow and made both together into a
literal
tool for catching shadows. The shadows of the living black dogs must be too much a part of them to be torn away, but somehow Natividad's
aparato
was ripping the shadows away from Vonhausel's dead black dogs. The Zachariah-creature collapsed almost last, a heartbeat before it might have finally torn Ezekiel in half, and Ezekiel, at that moment in human form, stared down at his uncle's body without expression. Everything had paused, all the combatants hesitating in wary disbelief as they tried to understand what had happened and what it meant.

Vonhausel himself, in human form, turned in a circle, staring around in outraged dismay. Alejandro saw the exact moment when he realized who had done this to him. He turned to stare across the broken ruins of the town at Natividad, who straightened her shoulders and returned his stare. Alejandro was briefly afraid Vonhausel would rush across the field of battle and attack her.

But Vonhausel did not come. He could not. He, like all the black dogs in which he had invested shadows, was actually dead. Alejandro saw him realize this, too, and what it meant. He flung back his head and stretched out his hands to the dark, to the crimson fires that still smoldered through the town and in the depths of the shattered earth. He might have done something, worked some corrupted magic, if he had had time. But he did not have time. He lost his shadow last of all the dead black dogs. But he lost it. Alejandro almost thought he could see the shadow tear itself free and disappear, or dissolve into the darkness – or maybe fall into the glowing chasm that gaped at Vonhausel's feet; he could not exactly tell. It almost seemed to somehow do all of those things at once. Vonhausel's body, left untenanted, collapsed slowly. There was no question about what happened to it. It fell into the break in the street and disappeared without a sound. The ruddy glow from the fires below flared up, dully crimson, and then went out, leaving only darkness.

Or not quite only darkness. In the east, beyond the ruined church, the first pale glimmer of the dawn shone across the winter sky, magically transmuting the smoke and ash of burning to silver and pearl.

 

Once they lost the unkillable shadow-possessed black dogs, and especially once they no longer had Malvern Vonhausel to drive and rule them, the remaining black dogs were after all nothing but strays. Alejandro was surprised, despite everything, to see how utterly overmatched they were by the Dimilioc wolves.

All of Vonhausel's black dogs now gave back, and back again, searching from side to side for a way to flee. But the circle Natividad had flung around them, of moonlight and silver and magic and Alejandro's black dog shadow, closed off all lines of retreat.

Alejandro sat on a half-burned timber, his arm around his sister's shoulders, and watched as the black dogs of Vonhausel's shadow pack forgot their advantage of numbers. As before, if they had supported one another, if they had fought together, then they might still have been able to defeat the Dimilioc wolves, especially as it seemed that the gunmen could not shoot through the shadowed circle. But fighting together clearly didn't occur to them at all. Alejandro watched, fascinated and disturbed, as the uncontrolled violence and treacherous nature of the black dogs drove them instead to turn on one another. Though he had been a black dog all his life, he could not at this moment exactly remember the way black dog instincts
felt
. He was uneasily conscious of the
locura
,
the madness, to which those instincts now drove Vonhausel's strays.

Furious and panicked, one black dog would turn and fight to clear a way past his neighbors, even though there was no point to his efforts because no line of retreat existed. Even so, he would snap left and right, until a black dog stronger and more brutal than he drove him back – and then half the time this small fight would spark a savage melee that spread right through half the remaining black dogs.

Ezekiel drove all this violence. He deliberately threatened the remaining strays, one and then another, touching off small, vicious conflicts within each group. They were too afraid of him to face him, even all of them together, and so Ezekiel shaped the violence and more or less directed it, prodding the black dogs to defeat themselves. To be fair, Ezekiel did look very dangerous, even now. He showed no sign of weakness save for a very slight catch in his gait when he turned to the left. Even so, Alejandro would have been ashamed to let anyone manipulate him that way. He would have been ashamed of that when he was a child. But only a few of these black dog strays resisted the
verdugo
's
threats, staying quiet and still and well away from their fellows, refusing to meet any threat or return any insult, only waiting to see what chance might come to escape. Alejandro did not expect they would find such a chance, but at least they showed decent control.

It was very strange to watch all this and feel only weariness. He was not possessed by burning rage, nor furious contempt, nor a hot desire for blood and violence. He felt empty. Peaceful. This must be the part of himself that was real, that was
him
. The part that was still here when the black dog shadow was gone. He had fought all his life to get a space narrow as a knife-blade between himself and his shadow, to understand what
he
was. All his life, he had wished to know what it would be like to be ordinary, to be human.

Now his shadow was gone, and he
was
human and ordinary, and he found he
hated
the cold and empty peace that had replaced his shadow. There was nothing in it to fight against, and without that struggle, he couldn't catch his balance. He kept reaching after the anger he
ought
to feel, and there was
nothing there
. He felt as though some power had reached into his mind and heart and soul and pithed him like a hollow reed. It felt like the winter wind could blow right through him. Anger was hot. He had never in his life really felt the cold. Now he felt as though he might never be warm again.