Black Dog Short Stories (13 page)

     Ezekiel looked around, still smiling. He said, “How nice.”

     The man flinched, but Melanie said, “Ezekiel!”

     “Don’t you think it’s nice? So very . . . ordinary.”

     The man ducked his head, avoiding Ezekiel’s gaze. He said, in a deep, harsh voice, his diction surprisingly precise, “I don’t make noise—I don’t hunt in the city—those God-damned black pups, I knew they’d draw Dimilioc attention—”

     “Then you should have run, shouldn’t you?” Ezekiel took a step forward, hoping the man would let his shadow up, that he would at least try to fight.

     Instead, the black dog took another step back. He opened his mouth, but closed it again without speaking. He was beginning to lose language, clearly. Many black dogs did, when the change took them. This one was still trying to cling to his human shape, but his face was beginning to distort, lips peeling back from lengthening black fangs; his shoulders shifting and broadening. But he neither lunged forward nor flung himself wildly away. Still mostly a man, then, and still fighting hard for control of his shadow. As though his paltry control would help him—

     Melanie suddenly moved, catching Ezekiel’s arm, dragging at him. No one else in the world would have dared get between Dimilioc’s executioner and his prey, or would have dared lay a hand on him without invitation. Ezekiel tilted his head, his eyebrows rising, making no move to shake her hand off his arm.

      “I can do the
Beschwichtigand,”
Melanie said quickly. “Ezekiel, look how good his control is already, you don’t have to kill him, I can do the
Beschwichtigand
for him,
that
would finish the job here, wouldn’t it? Thos wouldn’t have to know the details, would he? What difference would it make? Except to me, you know it would make a difference to
me
—”

     Ezekiel glanced from the girl to the black dog and back again, still smiling. “Is there something in this for me? Would Daniel approve, do you think?”

     Melanie let him go, punched him hard on the arm—the only person in the world who would dare. “
God
, Ezekiel—”

     “Ah. You’re presuming on my better nature. You think I have one?”

     Melanie didn’t hit him again, but she looked like she wanted to. “Don’t be an ass!”

     Ezekiel laughed. He said impatiently to the black dog, “Get your shadow down, cur. Show me some control. Change now and I
will
kill you, understand?” He waited while the man fought his shadow down and back, while his face and hands and body slowly recovered their purely human shape. Ezekiel waited with something approaching patience until he could see the man had his shadow in hand. Then he asked, “You’re willing to take the
Beschwichtigand?
You know what that is?”

     “The Calming,” whispered the other man, his voice thick and his words clumsy. “My father, he told me . . .”

     “But he couldn’t find a Pure woman to work the spell for you?” Melanie said sympathetically. “Well, I can do it now.”

     “Let me just add,” Ezekiel put in, staring hard at the black dog, “if you say yes, you don’t get to change your mind halfway through. You hurt her, I won’t just kill you, I’ll make you into an example for the ages. Do you understand?”

     The black dog understood. He held very still while Melanie opened the window to let in the night air and the moonlight, and drew her pentagram in silver light on the kitchen floor around him. He shuddered with the effort of forcing his shadow to submit, but he did not move out of the pentagram. Ezekiel helped by leaning against the doorjamb, looking as threatening as possible; and Melanie, occupied with braiding moonlight into a silver cord to bind the darkness in the black dog’s soul, never noticed the potential danger at all.

     And when she was finished with the Calming, once she’d reopened the pentagram, Ezekiel said harshly, “Well, dog?”

     The black dog bowed his head, glancing covertly at Ezekiel through his lashes, avoiding the direct look that might be taken as a challenge. But his voice was clearer and more human now, and he looked at Melanie with dawning astonishment—the first time in his life, Ezekiel presumed, that he’d ever seen a Pure woman without wanting to kill her. This was not a change he remembered in himself: Dimilioc black wolves had the
Beschwichtigand
done when they were infants and never experienced that visceral hatred of the Pure.

     Melanie met the man’s eyes and smiled. She smiled at Ezekiel, too. For that alone, he supposed the trouble and time spent here, even the
risk of trouble with Thos, had been worthwhile.

     “Don’t draw Dimilioc attention,” Ezekiel warned the black dog. “Keep clear of stray black dogs who might draw our attention. I don’t have to tell you that if I find you again, I’ll kill you.”

     “Yes,” whispered the man. “No. I understand.”

     “Get out of Madison. Go south, or west. Or both. There’s room here and there for a quiet black dog. So stay quiet. Understand?”

     The black dog met his eyes for an instant before looking down again. “Believe me,” he said, his deep voice husky, “putting a great deal more space between me and Dimilioc is my new ambition.”

     “Good,” said Ezekiel, and beckoned to Melanie. “Home by noon tomorrow,” he reminded her. “Unless we get stopped for speeding on the way to the airport.”

     “You could let me drive,” Melanie said, though with resignation because she knew he wouldn’t. She smiled at the black dog once more, nodded, and headed for the door. “
Much
better than just slaughtering everyone,” she said to Ezekiel, over her shoulder.

     “Not for me,” Ezekiel said, but the black dog didn’t attack him when he turned his back, so he regretfully gave up any chance of a fight and followed Melanie out of the house.

     Dimilioc was set amid the Vermont mountains, in the part of the state sometimes called the Northeast Kingdom, though the humans who called it by that name had no idea how apt a name it was. At this time of year, the maples were still dormant, the firs and spruce black-green against the barren hardwoods.

     The Dimilioc house stood alone on a rise amid the forest, the trees cleared back around it to open up all the approaches. It was a huge structure with two wings and three stories, large enough to house nearly a hundred humans if they were friendly, or perhaps half so many black wolves, who seldom were.

     Ezekiel swung the big SUV around the long curve of the drive and parked in front of the generous porch. The plane flight had been fine, but the drive from Newport had been unpleasant: sleet and freezing rain all the way, every road worse than the one before, until he’d been genuinely tempted to abandon the SUV and run the rest of the way to Dimilioc in his other form. But Melanie couldn’t run across country and he could hardly leave her in a Newport hotel. So he had cursed the weather and had driven ever more slowly and carefully because if he wrecked the SUV, he would have to kill the first fool who laughed. Which was fine, but Melanie wouldn’t like it.

     Stupid to care, when she cared only for Daniel. But he drove carefully anyway, and was absurdly relieved when he could finally take his foot off the gas and coast gently to a halt directly before the wide porch.

     “Mind the steps,” he warned her.

     She rolled her eyes, cheerfully scornful. “Do you want to hold my hand while I brave the treacherous ascent?” Then, as his crooked smile told her how that had sounded, she added hastily, “Too bad!” She leaped out of the car and fled up the steps without assistance, laughing. Happy. Happy to be home, happy because, of course, Daniel was waiting for her.

     Ezekiel left the SUV for someone else to put away in the garage and followed more slowly.

     But Daniel wasn’t waiting for Melanie in the atrium, though Ezekiel had called ahead from Newport. Nor was he waiting in the hallway beyond, nor in the kitchen. Melanie, enthusiasm undimmed, turned toward the stairs that led up to the private apartments on the second floor, but one of the Lanning cousins caught them before she could run up the stairs. The cousin was human, a boy barely out of his teens. He flinched away from Ezekiel, but that was nothing unusual. But then his eyes slid away from Melanie’s as well, and that was strange. Ezekiel frowned. Melanie said, questioningly, “Matt?”

     “Thos wants you,” the cousin muttered. “As soon as you came in, he said.”

     Ezekiel sighed.

     “Poor Ezekiel!” Melanie said, laughing, but she meant it, too. “I’ll put some hot chocolate on for you, shall I, as soon as I find Daniel—”

     “I meant, you,” Matt said. “Both of you.” He ducked his head at Ezekiel’s sudden sharp glance. “Don’t know anything about it,” he protested, and backed clumsily through the door, tripping over nothing in his hurry to escape.

     “What do you suppose?” Melanie said. She had gone pale. She looked at Ezekiel. “Thos found out we didn’t kill that last stray? But—”

     “He hasn’t had time to find out. But if he has, it was my decision, not yours.”

     Melanie took a quick breath and nodded. It was like her to say
we
, to claim part ownership in that defiance of Thos Korte’s order. It was a measure of her fear of the Dimilioc Master that she was willing to let Ezekiel take the blame for it now.

     “Thos won’t punish
you
for anything,” Ezekiel said flatly. He meant that
he
was Dimilioc’s executioner and he wouldn’t carry out any such order. He meant more than that: he wouldn’t permit anyone else to punish her either. Not even Thos Korte himself. He touched her hand: not a black dog gesture, but the kind of gesture a human might use to reassure a friend—a gesture he’d learned from Melanie, in fact.

     And she
was
reassured. She understood what he had not quite said, or else the gesture was the right one. Her heartbeat, which had picked up, slowed nearly to normal. She laid a hand on his arm, drawing reassurance from that touch—the only woman in the world who would. “All right,” she said. “All right. Into the black wolf’s den, I guess . . .”

     But Thos hadn’t heard or didn’t care about the details of the Madison run. He listened without changing expression as Ezekiel reported, briefly, that the black dog problem in that city had been dealt with.

     “Good,” he said, without much apparent interest. “Four cities cleaned up this month. We shall assume the stray population properly cowed for the present. Write a report for Zachariah.” Zachariah was Ezekiel’s uncle, Thos Korte’s brother, and the man responsible for tracking blood kin and black dog strays.

     “Now,” said Thos. “Sit down. We shall discuss an unrelated matter of possibly greater immediate importance.” He paused.

     “Master?” Ezekiel asked politely, in case Thos was waiting for that acknowledgment. The disinterested tone was not reassuring. Thos sounded like that when he expected trouble. It was impossible to guess, now, what kind of trouble the Master expected, or why.

     The Master of Dimilioc was a tall, thin, colorless man who sounded exactly the same whether he was barely paying attention or about to tear out someone’s throat. He did that, sometimes, to a black wolf who defied him. Sometimes he did it himself and sometimes he ordered his executioner to do it. Thos liked to have the world fear his executioner. The Master was a great believer in Machiavelli’s dictum about love and fear. Ordinarily Ezekiel approved. But Ezekiel knew Melanie was afraid, too, now. That, he did not like at all.

     “Where’s Daniel?” Melanie asked abruptly. She was perched on the edge of her chair.

     Ezekiel glanced at her, surprised. It had not occurred to him to wonder.

     Thos did not seem surprised at all. Nor  did he seem disturbed by Melanie’s sharpness, though he would never have permitted any Dimilioc wolf to speak to him in that tone. He said briefly, “Downstairs. Be quiet. Sit down and listen.”

     Melanie, who had jumped to her feet and opened her mouth, sank back again. She darted a look at Ezekiel: appeal and something else. Fear. Not for herself. For Daniel. Because if her fiancé had somehow offended Thos Korte, then whatever he had done and whatever punishment Thos had decreed, it was very likely Ezekiel who would punish him.

      “I don’t care for disturbance in the house,” Thos said, which was even true. He didn’t like disturbance and he didn’t allow it. He simply demanded total, unquestioning compliance from everyone, black wolf or human or Pure. He said to Melanie, “Daniel is not being punished. He is simply a guarantor of your cooperation. A match with a human man is, of course, an absolute waste of a Pure woman.”

     He had said this before, when Melanie had announced that she would marry Daniel. But Ezekiel had believed the Master of Dimilioc had accepted her choice, as Dimilioc law required.  Now he didn’t know what to believe.

     “Your children by Ezekiel would be far more valuable,” Thos said, his tone flat. “You may marry Daniel: I don’t care. But first you will bear a black dog son and a Pure daughter to Ezekiel. So that there will be no confusion as to the parentage of your children, I will release Daniel only when we are certain you are carrying. If you want him free, I suggest a certain alacrity about your duty.”