Pure Magic (Black Dog Book 3) (37 page)

Natividad clung to him, and he wrapped her in his shadow—his shadow tried to tear away from him, but he held it, fought to hold it as he had fought to hold it all his life. He would not let it go. He knew only afterward that if he had lost it, he would have been helpless and alone in the fell dark, Natividad helpless with him. But by the time he realized this, it had acceded to his will, as it had long been accustomed to yield. He was afraid then, though, because he knew that eventually it would fight him again, and then again after that: it would never grow weary and he thought he would. He was not sure how long he would be able to hold it, and without it he would not be able to drive away the things of cold and hunger.

But for now he held it. Natividad curled against his chest, and he wrapped his shadow around them both, hot and furious and strong, and they fell together through the empty dark.

***

Justin hurled himself forward, but he was too late to catch Natividad’s hand. Her fingers brushed his, insubstantial as light, and then she was gone.

Only her silver knife was left, falling faster than anything should fall, falling like a streak of light. If Justin had
tried
to catch it, he would never have done it. But he simply put out his hand blindly, and it smacked into his palm, and he closed his fingers around it hard. He had caught the knife by the blade. It sliced neatly across his palm and fingers, blood welling between his fingers. The cut stung as though he had caught a handful of fire. He thought he might have cried out; he did not know. He found himself kneeling in the street, the knife held safely by the hilt in his left hand, blood curling down his right wrist and spattering to the ground. All around him was noise and terror and fury, but before him was only this: the crack through the world, trembling. It narrowed even as he stared at it. It had cut through the world like a stroke of lightning, and like lightning it was brilliant but ephemeral. After it closed, he knew he would never be able to open it again. But it had not quite closed yet.

He looked at it sideways, as he had learned to look at magic; and without thinking he flung Natividad’s silver knife through that gap in the world. It trailed a thread he could almost but not quite see, a glimmering line made of light and magic and his own blood. Getting to his feet, he flung the other end of that line down to root itself in the solid earth, because of course human magic had to be rooted in the earth. Of course it did. He couldn’t understand how he had not known that before. He stepped forward and followed the trail his blood had laid down out of the world and into the dark.

He did not, of course, know what he was doing. He couldn’t have said what led him to step through that crack and out of the world: instinct, or a whisper of unrecognized memory, or a kind of knowledge carried in the blood instead of the brain. And then he couldn’t have said whether he had done something brave or extraordinarily stupid.

It wasn’t like a place, on the other side of that crack. It wasn’t anywhere, and it contained nothing. Formless and void, but though it was empty, there were things that existed within it, though they weren’t exactly things and didn’t precisely exist. Something cold and hungry went by him, like the flick of an unseen whip. He flinched from it, finding the knife again in his hand, as though he had never thrown it away. The cold thing fled, though without motion. Justin did not watch it go, but studied the knife.

The silver knife was without heft or form in this place, but his blood glimmered like moonlight. It trailed away from him, a pale thread that ran back through the crack in nothingness. Light and air came from that crack, immediately dissolving into nothingness. But that gap cast a sort of shadow, almost an anti-shadow, an echo of something more real than anything in this non-place. The line of his blood led into that shadow of reality and back into the world, through a veil that stretched between the world and this non-place. He could sort of see that veil. It looked insubstantial as cobweb. He could hardly believe it hadn’t torn in a hundred places from what he had done, what Natividad had done before him. He could
see
how delicate it was—

Though that wasn’t exactly right, because he couldn’t exactly see anything, not in this place beyond light or dark; nor could he feel the knife in his hand. If he still possessed hands. But he held the knife somehow. He tried not to think about it, afraid that if he questioned his own existence too persistently, he might cease to exist.

He ran the knife through his hands, or through what he thought of as his hands, and, fascinated, watched silver beads of blood scatter like droplets of mercury into the emptiness. He felt no pain, which seemed reasonable since he had no physical hands. But the blood was real. Or real enough. He could work with it; he could make it into a net, like . . . this. Into a filigree shield of light, beaded with silver. The light wasn’t actually real. But the geometry of the figure he made . . .
that
was real. That was
perfect
, pure and infinite. He looked at the filigree sideways and thought he could actually
see
the mathematical function that built that shape out of numbers and nothingness. That wove it out of a memory of light and magic. It was real. He didn’t have to imagine or invent it, only see it. It was an unbounded function. It ran out forever in every direction, infinite and beautiful. He thought suddenly of his mother, a thought for once not touched by grief. She would have
loved
this function. Justin thought of her and smiled.

The knife dwindled, the silver running away along with his blood, some of it going into his function and some of it dissolving into the no-place. He had the idea it might be protecting him from dissolving away himself, though he didn’t know how or even whether that was true. But in the end, he held it in his hand, his mathematical filigree. Insubstantial as cobweb. He wondered what it was for, and looked vaguely for Natividad, because she was the one who explained magic.

He couldn’t see her. But when he thought of her, when he looked for her, he could see that the cold, hungry things were approaching and then flinching away from something else, a sharp glimmer of light that was fiercely itself, but all tangled up with fire and heavy darkness. He thought that this must be Natividad, but he was not sure. He wanted to call her, but he had no voice in this place. This non-place. He wanted to approach her, but there was neither movement nor location here.

Which meant she was here already. Right here. They were in exactly the same place. So that was not a problem. This whole place was like an equation that had an infinite number of solutions. There were
any number
of equations that had infinite solutions; there was nothing hard about
that
. So the closing crack that led away into the world, that could be right here as well. Justin held his cobweb of light and blood in one hand, and reached out his other hand to that gap, following the line that led through it to the world. As he stepped through the gap, he caught both the light and the fiery dark and brought them with him, and with his other hand flung out the net he had made, and saw it stretch out all along the veil between the real world and the non-place, shining, though not with light. And he stepped through the crack back into the world, and jerked free the line of blood and light he had buried in the earth, and with that line knotted the filigree that was also his mathematical function. He let his knot define just
one
solution so that the filigree was closed and complete, and then he threw the line into the crack behind him.

It flashed like lightning, and there was a soundless crash of thunder, and then the crack snapped shut, and the ordinary dark of an ordinary night closed down around him.

Justin staggered and sat down hard. He tried to catch himself, but there was something wrong with his hands. They hurt, suddenly and sharply. He bit his lip and looked, cautiously, and found a dozen shallow slashes across each palm, probably not dangerous, but painful. Here in the real world, his blood wasn’t silver or made of light, and he couldn’t weave it into a construction of mathematics and magic. He could only watch it drip painfully out onto the ground.

Then, as though a protective bubble had suddenly burst, the world crashed in with a roar and a scream and a long blood-curdling shriek. Justin flinched and tried to get up, but fell back—it wasn’t just his hands, he was weak as a kitten. But Natividad
was
here with him, he hadn’t even been sure, not even at the last moment, not even when he’d found his way back into the real world through that crack. She knelt on the ground, her eyes wide with shock and terror, her hands flat on the earth, trying to make herself small, but there was nowhere to hide, not right here, and Justin could not immediately see the vampire anywhere, but there were plenty of blood kin, he could see
them
just fine—

A black dog he didn’t know leaped straight over Natividad, barely touched the ground, and leaped again. It tore the nearest of the blood kin entirely in half, ribs and tendons and vertebrae popping and tearing. The torso half hit the ground not far away, and the creature screamed, an appallingly human scream, and beat at the earth with its hands for a long time before it grew still. It was one of the worst things Justin had ever seen. He was, under the circumstances, more than willing to see it again, but the black dog was gone, out of sight in the night. Other screams echoed out there, not nearly far enough away, but the combatants were invisible in the dark. The
normal
everyday
dark, and Justin had never appreciated before how ordinary and familiar and comfortable a dark night could be, but this one had definitely gone on long enough and just
where
was the dawn? He tried to get up, but still couldn’t. He was horribly thirsty, and hot—something was burning—the house was burning, it had gone up like a torch, an adobe house burning like tinder, and how was that even possible? But if it was going to burn like that, he and Natividad were much too close to it, and he couldn’t even get to his feet.

***

Natividad barely understood what had pulled her and Alejandro out of the fell dark and back into the world. She knew Justin had done it—somehow. She knew
she
was the one who had dragged Alejandro into the dark, because she’d held just a little bit of his shadow. That was her fault. But it wasn’t too awful after all because Justin had gotten them all out again. Justin had done something else, too, something she understood even less, but she’d seen it, the great shining net he’d made—not that it had been exactly shining. Or a net, exactly, because a net was meant to catch things and this was meant to drive things away. Or she thought maybe that was what it was for.

She wanted to ask Justin about it, about what he’d done, about what he thought he might have done. But even though they were back in the world, they weren’t safe. Everything was happening so fast, and it was so hard to tell what any of it was. The house was burning violently, black dog fire that burned viciously hot, the adobe melting like glass, the flames shedding light and leaping shadows that confused the eye. It was dangerous, she knew she and Justin were much too close to the fire, but Justin didn’t seem able to stand up and she wasn’t strong enough to drag him, even if she had dared to touch him, which she thought might be a really bad idea just at this moment.

Alejandro was fine, though. He had gone entirely into the
cambio de cuerpo
. That didn’t surprise Natividad at all: he must be just
so glad
to fight ordinary, understandable enemies. Of course blood kin were dangerous, stronger than ordinary human people, and cunning, too, and they didn’t feel pain or fear death. Worse, the claws of blood kin could tear not only a black dog’s flesh but also his shadow, so that was scary. But Natividad could see that her brother’s shadow was actually a little bit strange, and she almost sort of thought maybe the blood kin were tending to flinch away from him. It wasn’t just that he still had a tiny bit of her magic tangled up with his shadow: she thought a little bit of the silver net Justin had made clung to him still, to them all, all of them who had come back from the fell dark. She could almost feel it, like a faint pressure against her skin; she could almost feel it tangling with and pressing against the traceries of black dog shadows she also held.

Because she didn’t hold only a bit of her brother’s shadow. She had owned that long enough to know how it felt. No, she also held the slivers of
Ezekiel’s
shadow that the vampire had stolen; she’d gotten those back and she held them now, wrapped around her fingers, trailing in the air around her hands, wavering around her.

That was why she didn’t dare touch Justin. Because she held too much of Ezekiel’s shadow. She had no idea how she held it, and understood still less what it might do to Justin’s Pure magic if she let it touch him. So she knelt helplessly a little away from him, trying to see how dangerous the fire might really be and trying to keep an eye on Alejandro and at the same time trying to find Ezekiel in the confusion of the battle.

She saw Ezekiel at last, and Keziah, and stared for some time, trying to make sense of what she saw in the confusing light of the leaping flames. He and Keziah were fighting two other black dogs, not real black dogs but those horrible shadow-possessed undead black dogs. That was bad enough, but she could see how badly Ezekiel fought, not at all with his usual ease and confidence. He hadn’t entirely shifted even yet, and he was fighting defensively, like he was afraid of being hurt. He
had
been hurt; savage wounds gaped across his flank and hip, but he had not shifted to let his shadow carry away those injuries. Keziah was protecting him. Natividad didn’t realize that at first, but once she saw it, it was unmistakable. Keziah was protecting Ezekiel, and he was allowing her to protect him.