Black Dog

by Rachel Neumeier

  Grayson looked at each Dimilioc wolf in turn. They met his powerful gaze for one burning moment and then turned to stare out at the enemy. They would run out to attack; should they attack the moon-bound shifters first, because they would be easier prey; or the strongest of the black dogs, because they were the most dangerous? Either way, Alejandro saw no way they could enter such a battle with any hope of victory.

  Grayson gave a low snarling croon to make them all look at him. Then he led the way, all of his wolves falling in behind him. But he did not lead them straight out to battle as Alejandro had expected, but rather in a path that curved back and around through the woods and came out at last from the precise east – from exactly behind Natividad’s cross, Alejandro understood at last. From the direction that repelled the gaze and the attention of any black dog; the one direction in which Vonhausel’s pack was blind.

  Alejandro was ashamed he had not thought of that himself. But his black dog shadow had not wanted to look at or think about the cross anchoring this quarter of Natividad’s mandala. Besides that, his shadow was fully absorbed in the lust for battle, in the longing for blood and death. It would have preferred to hunt among a crowd of weak humans, it would have liked prey better than strong adversaries – but if faced with real opponents, it was glad enough to fight. It did not press against Alejandro’s control, it did not really want to turn against the Dimilioc wolves; it agreed that the time for that was past.

  Alejandro’s black dog also thought that maybe Thaddeus would betray them. It did not mind that, either; it thought the huge black dog would turn first against Ezekiel and then, if Alejandro was watchful, he could attack him from behind and tear out his spine and cast him into the fell dark, and thus be rid of a strong rival while putting Ezekiel and all Dimilioc in his debt. Alejandro looked forward to the moment Thaddeus turned – at least, his shadow looked forward to it. He pulled his own awareness apart from his black dog’s enough to be able to find Grayson, watch the Dimilioc Master for the cue to attack.

  Grayson gave that signal by the simple expedient of bounding out of the uncomfortable light of the cross and falling on the strongest of the nearby black dogs like a puma on a rat. He bowled the black dog over with his weight and the shock of the attack, ripping through his belly with scything black claws, tearing out his guts and shattering his spine in that same ferocious blow. The black dog died without returning even a single blow of his own. His body writhed and twisted back toward his human shape as his shadow, struggling furiously, pulled free and dispersed back into the fell dark. Grayson did not watch, but flung himself onto a second enemy.

  Though no one had talked over the tactics they would use, Alejandro saw that Harrison first, and then Zachariah, and finally Ezekiel, raced past Grayson. Each in turn lunged to attack the next closest enemy black dog, and the one after that, and the one after that – Harrison took his opponent almost as much by surprise as Grayson had and tore him up almost as quickly; Zachariah’s opponent, immediately on the defensive, also went down. Only Ezekiel’s enemy had time to fully brace himself for the attack, but Alejandro saw that it didn’t matter – the black dog might as well have been a puppy in his first cambio de cuerpo. Ezekiel feinted twice and then slid through the black dog’s defenses with an attack that looked at first like another feint, but wasn’t.

  Then Alejandro lost track of Ezekiel’s battle because he leaped into one of his own: Ethan had flung himself into a struggle with a black dog who overmatched him, so Alejandro lunged to take the black dog from behind, and then Thaddeus, though already battling an enemy of his own, crouched and spun and slashed his silver blade at their opponent, casually, in passing, opening a huge wound from his belly to halfway up his chest. The black dog screamed and scrambled backward, black ichor streaming from the slash, and then scarlet blood as the shock of the injury forced him into human form. But his human shape, though brawny for a human, was easy prey: before he could reclaim his shadow, Ethan tore his head off. The shadow writhed, crying voicelessly, then diffused like smoke in the cold air. Thaddeus dispatched his own opponent and freed that shadow as well before the first had altogether dispersed.

  Alejandro, triumphant, wanted to laugh – he wanted to lift his head and howl challenge and threat across all this frozen country. His black dog, exultant and sly, smug in the confidence of its own strength, was happy now to fight alongside Ethan and thought it was clever to use Thaddeus’s blooded knife against their enemies. When Ethan spun to face a new enemy, Alejandro separated from him only so that they could take the black dog from both sides and drive him onto Thaddeus’s silver knife.

  Another kill, and another, and then suddenly shifters crowded everywhere. Not one could be over two hundred pounds, most much less, but they were all mad with bloodlust, and there were so many of them. There were true black dogs among them, too, some of those heavier and stronger than either Ethan or Alejandro. Everything dissolved into a whirling confusion of slashing coal-black fangs and terrible claws, furnace heat beating through the air.

  If not for Thaddeus and Ethan, Alejandro might not have survived that first wild struggle. Alejandro did not recognize this at once; he had little attention to spare for anything but battle and blood and death. But he and Ethan and Thaddeus found themselves continuing to fight as a team, foreign though that notion was to any normal black dog. Over and over, Ethan and Alejandro attacked to draw a black dog’s attention, Thaddeus ripped him up with his silver blade, and then one of them finished the enemy without difficulty.

  Several times Alejandro took serious wounds, or Ethan did, or once an enemy black dog even tore claws across Thaddeus’s back and smashed all his ribs on one side. But when any of the Dimilioc wolves was injured, he could fall out of his shadow, let his black dog carry away his wounds while his team protected him. Then he could call up his shadow again, shift through the cambio de cuerpo, and leap again for the throat of an enemy.

  Alejandro was aware, dimly, at a remove, that Grayson and Harrison and Zachariah had formed a similar team. Even though he knew how formidable the three oldest Dimilioc wolves must be, even though he would never have expected to match them, he was furiously jealous that they were destroying enemies faster than his team. But Grayson could force black dogs into their human forms, Alejandro saw him do that again and again, and though he tried to do that himself, he couldn’t now find the trick of it or else these enemies were too strong. His failure fed his jealousy, but that was alright; his rage only made him fight more ferociously.

  Keziah and Amira also fought together, which did not surprise Alejandro, except that Benedict had somehow become a part of their team. Maybe Keziah was smart enough to realize that having a third black dog for her team might keep them all alive, and pragmatic enough to ally with the only Dimilioc wolf available to fill the role.

  Whether Keziah had recruited Benedict on purpose or otherwise, her team was cutting through their gathered enemies almost as efficiently as Grayson’s triumvirate. Keziah had been right about her little sister, for Amira, though so small, was blindingly fast – and, amazingly, fearless and savage in battle. She and Benedict drove one enemy after another into Keziah’s slashing claws, for Keziah, not at all to Alejandro’s surprise, was the killer for her team. She was not so very much larger than her sister, but just as fast, and she seemed to have a real instinct for the killing blow. She cut down one enemy after another, tearing them to ribbons, leaving them to twist, dying, back into human shape. Keziah’s deadliness made Alejandro’s black dog even more furious, though he was also savagely pleased by Dimilioc’s superiority.

  Grayson had said that, about demonstrating Dimilioc’s superiority, but Alejandro had not understood. He understood it now. No wonder Grayson had not been worried about facing forty black dogs with only ten. He was sure now that they would win, would crush their enemies, would spill their blood out on the snow and howl after their dispersing shadows – part of that was his black dog’s arrogant blood lust, but part of it was his own growin
g confidence.

  Of all the Dimilioc wolves, only Ezekiel fought alone, in a deadly whirl of blood and ichor, with a clear space always around him because the enemy black dogs tried to keep away from him.

  And Ezekiel did take them down. For the first time, Alejandro really understood that the Dimilioc verdugo had never for a moment been at risk from Thaddeus, silver blade or no. He was as brutally strong as Thaddeus himself and as fast as Keziah, and so profoundly in control of his shadow that, as long as he was not killed outright, he could let his black dog carry his injuries away and then instantly bring it back – and somehow no blow he took ever seemed to be a killing blow. Twice in ten seconds Alejandro saw one of Ezekiel’s opponents lunge into a blow that should have torn him in half, but Ezekiel flicked into his much smaller human shape and ducked low to let the strike go over his head, then pulled himself instantly into his black dog form to strike his enemy from an unexpected direction. Both times, Ezekiel dealt so ferocious a blow that he left his enemy struggling and dying in human form, the freed shadow shredding away on the wind.

  Ezekiel had claimed right from the beginning that he might kill all the black dogs in the world by himself. Watching him now, Alejandro almost believed he might.

  All this Alejandro saw before the intensifying press of battle claimed his attention and he lost track of the other Dimilioc wolves.

  He did not know how many black dogs and moon-bound shifters had been destroyed in the first clash – a great many, it seemed to him. And a great many more died after that first attack. Many of those were Vonhausel’s true black dogs, which he would surely find impossible to replace.

  The enemy should not have been taken so thoroughly by surprise. That occurred to Alejandro during a pause in the battle. He was contemptuous of Dimilioc’s enemies – those enemies deserved nothing but contempt. If Vonhausel had not been so entirely focused on destroying Natividad’s mandala that he forgot to watch for enemies; if he had realized someone might lead the Dimilioc wolves through the light of the anchoring cross; if the black dogs of his shadow pack had worked together against the Dimilioc wolves, especially Ezekiel – they might have won already instead of fighting and dying, each alone, right in the midst of their fellows.

  But because of the mistakes their enemies had made, the Dimilioc wolves were going to destroy the shadow pack. Alejandro knew it, he felt it, he was swept along in a wild triumphant murderous fury that carried them all with it like a spring flood pouring down an arroyo…

  Then Natividad’s mandala cracked straight through. The magic infused in the mandala trembled and gave, and the mandala itself cracked, and the rest of the magic poured out of it into the air – gone, lost, and every house and shop that lay along its line burst into flames. The earth itself cracked open, burning, along the line where it had run.

  Alejandro heard his own high, piercing shriek of terror, which slid down and down in pitch until it became a roar of rage before he understood that he was the one shrieking. Only the lifeblood of a Pure woman could have shattered Natividad’s mandala so abruptly, and he knew, he knew, as soon as it broke, that Vonhausel had somehow gotten to Dimilioc and stolen Natividad out of its shelter and brought her here and poured her blood out in the snow so that it would run out across the mandala, y prender fuego a la sangre, he had called up his shadow and set her blood afire, and the mandala had broken because she was dead…

  But then Grayson roared, and Alejandro whirled around and saw the body of a Pure woman, flung down and discarded at the foot of the burning cross, with the yellow-eyed silhouette of Vonhausel himself looming over it, blackly massive against the light and the snow, wreathed in smoke, fire glowing in his gaping jaws behind his coal-black fangs. But Alejandro also saw, even in that first glimpse, that it was not after all Natividad’s body that lay crumpled and broken at Vonhausel’s feet. Vonhausel had brought some other Pure woman to this place; he must have found her and stolen her from her home and then kept her, who knew how long – kept her in reserve as a weapon and a tool. Now he threw back his head and howled, a long singing cry of hatred and triumph and fury, and his few remaining black dogs and moon-bound curs howled with him, swept up by the heavy moon-drawn tide of his killing rage.

  Alejandro, furious at the death of that other Pure woman, was nevertheless so consumed by violent relief that she was not Natividad that he nearly forgot that Vonhausel was still there; that the battle was not ended; that the mandala was broken and all the town laid open to deadly enemies.

  Then Ezekiel went past Alejandro in a silent, intent rush.

  But Vonhausel did not stand to fight the Dimilioc verdugo. He whirled about and charged straight into the town, sweeping the remnants of his shadow pack along in his wake, racing along the path laid down by one of the crossbars of the burning mandala, heading for the center of town. What he meant to do there, Alejandro could not imagine; he had thought Vonhausel’s attack on Lewis merely a tactic to forge all his wild undisciplined strays into a real pack and maybe to draw out the Dimilioc wolves to a battle where they might be destroyed, but if that was so, why did Vonhausel not rally his black dogs and fight? He thought that Vonhausel ran, not in flight but with some target in mind. His black dogs ran with and alongside him; his moon-bound shifters scattered to hunt through the town, testing the strength of any home where human prey sheltered.

  Ezekiel pursued Vonhausel, never looking aside, utterly indifferent to the enemy black dogs who crowded him from either side. His very indifference frightened them, so they would not close with the verdugo – or maybe they had watched him fight, as Alejandro had, and that had understandably frightened them.

  Then Grayson leaped away after Ezekiel, and Zachariah followed him, and belatedly Alejandro and Ethan and Thaddeus, and Keziah and her sister – Alejandro could not see Harrison or Benedict anywhere, but there was no time to look for them. His black dog shadow wanted to strike at any nearby enemy, wanted to fight, struggle, kill. But none of the other Dimilioc wolves turned aside to grapple with enemies. They all raced after Ezekiel, who pursued Vonhausel. No one turned either to the right or to the left; they went straight over fences and, almost as quickly, up and over houses – once Alejandro heard a human’s terrified scream from one of the homes they passed, but Ethan ran at his left and Thaddeus at his right and he did not turn to look.

  The church at the center of Lewis, the heart of Natividad’s mandala, was burning. Like all Catholic churches, it had been made of stone expressly to withstand hellfire and then every stone had been blessed against demonic malice. Even so, it burned. The heat had broken out the windows; shards of colored glass glittered across the snow: red and purple, blue and gold, reflecting the hot light of the flames that roared through the open windows and crawled across the vaulted roof and charred the stones of the wall black.

  The people who had been sheltering in the church were now huddling in the surrounding streets, staring up at the snow hissing into the flames. No one was trying to put out the fire, maybe because it was obviously too late or maybe because they knew that hellfire would irrevocably corrupt a church – or maybe because they knew the fire was not their biggest problem. They were turning toward the onrushing black dogs, but they moved so slowly – they looked like prey even to Alejandro, though he remembered even in the midst of bloodlust and battle fury that his own sister had made her mandala to shelter these people and would not want them torn down, torn apart, strewn across these streets en fragmentos ensangrentado… Fury poured through Alejandro like a substance with weight, with a presence of its own. His shadow thickened around him, dense and bloody, so that the whole world took on a crimson hue.

  Vonhausel, black as pitch, surrounded by a miasma of smoke and fury, rushed toward the gathered humans. They scattered, but too slowly, like prey, like penned sheep. Vonhausel struck left and right among them – human screaming sounded so different from the dying screams of black dogs; their screams were sweeter and more satisfying. Their blood would also be sweet. For an instant, bef
ore he caught himself and remembered that he was Dimilioc and had a human brother, Alejandro wanted to turn on them himself.

  Some of the humans, not such helpless sheep as the rest, were shooting, but either they did not hit Vonhausel or they were not using silver ammunition, or both. Vonhausel did not turn aside but raced straight toward the burning church; he had some aim in mind, but Alejandro could not tell what it was–

  Ezekiel caught him before he reached the church.

  The yellow-eyed black dog had no choice but to whirl around to meet Ezekiel’s rush. The impact of their meeting seemed to shake the earth. They tore at each other, a blur of bulk and flashing claws and snapping jaws; the bitter scents of ash and black ichor filled the air; they were locked in a battle that had suddenly become not merely a fight but also a duel. Vonhausel’s remaining black dogs crouched in a semicircle along one side of the street, all of them watching with avid, burning eyes.

  The Dimilioc wolves matched them along the other side of the circle. Both Harrison and Benedict were missing, and though Alejandro would have said Dimilioc had been winning the battle, wasn’t there a word for a victory so hard-won it destroyed the victor? But Alejandro could not remember that word either in English or Spanish.

  The townspeople had mostly fled, which was the best thing they could do, though where they could go, with the church destroyed, Alejandro did not know; but he did not really care, either, and forgot them at once. Only a scattering remained, armed with their useless guns, but not shooting; they covered the retreat of the rest and maybe wanted to fight, but the man leading them kept them from shooting, wisely avoiding the attention of Vonhausel’s black dogs. And even those were retreating slowly, which was also wise.

  To Alejandro’s amazement and fury, he saw that Vonhausel was matching Ezekiel. The black dog was heavy, strong, powerfully muscled and extraordinarily fast, even faster than Ezekiel – then Alejandro finally remembered that of course the Dimilioc verdugo had come into this battle already tired and injured. Then he saw that Vonhausel was not merely matching Ezekiel, but overmatching him. Vonhausel took injuries fearlessly and they closed instantly – he somehow seemed to rid himself of wounds without needing to shift to his human form, which was impossible, but it was happening. Alejandro understood suddenly that Ezekiel might actually lose this fight, and with it the battle, and maybe the whole war…