Black Dog

by Rachel Neumeier

  After a while, Grayson said, “Those people from Lewis…”

  “Rooms, food, warnings to stay away from wolves, all taken care of.”

  “Ah.” There was another silence, and then the Dimilioc Master began again, “Some of those people must be able to shoot…”

  “Miguel is already figuring out which ones can hit what they aim at, and I’m sure Sheriff Pearson will help us figure out which of them can be trusted to aim at our enemies.”

  “Good,” said Grayson, and was quiet once more. But now it was a quiet filled with thought as well as with grief. Natividad folded her hands in her lap and sat quietly next to his chair.

  “I want Ezekiel,” Grayson said abruptly. “He’ll be asleep. You had better be the one to wake him.”

  Natividad, momentarily disoriented, blinked. “But... wasn’t he hurt?”

  “That won’t matter,” Grayson said, and though he didn’t look at her, she could tell it was the Dimilioc Master speaking. “I want him here. Immediately.” He put a bite to that last word.

  Natividad stared at him for a second. She wanted to ask: “Don’t you care about Ezekiel at all?” But that wasn’t a question she could ask, and anyway she knew perfectly well that no one cared more about every Dimilioc wolf than the Master. She remembered, too late, that she shouldn’t stare – but of course Grayson Lanning was way too powerful to worry about a girl’s impudence.

  Jumping to her feet, she gave the Master a slight bow to show she was obeying, backed up two steps, turned, and went to the door. She did not actually run. But she didn’t stroll, either.

  Natividad had not previously had any reason to find Ezekiel’s rooms, which turned out to comprise a suite on the third floor of the main wing, above the front door. High enough, Natividad realized, to prevent any enemy from leaping to its window, but low enough that Ezekiel would be able to leap down to the balcony of the room below and from there to the open ground. If there was trouble, the kind of trouble where enemies came arrogantly to the front door, Ezekiel’s sudden appearance among them must cause almost as much consternation as a vat of boiling oil.

  When this thought occurred to her, Natividad concluded that life had definitely been much too exciting lately.

  The problem was that she couldn’t help but wonder, while studying Ezekiel’s closed door, whether he might mistake anybody who woke him for one of those not-hypothetical-enough enemies.

  The Dimilioc executioner was suffering from the lingering effects of silver injury, after all. Painful and slow to heal: exactly the sort of wound that would drive a black dog into a killing rage, and he would be embarrassed that he’d been cut, too. Then he had driven across Chicago, flown a plane halfway across los Estados Unidos, driven from Newport to Dimilioc, run eight miles across country, and then fought not only in the battle – he’d also personally fought Vonhausel. And lost.

  That last was the worst. Natividad knew all about black dog vanity. And Ezekiel was a lot more arrogant than most other black dogs. He was going to be really pissed off about losing that fight – and it would be much worse because everybody had seen him lose, and watched afterwards when he’d been forced to ride on top of a bus because he couldn’t run the distance back from Lewis to Dimilioc.

  And now Grayson said he wanted to see Ezekiel. Immediately. Right. No wonder he’d sent Natividad to fetch his executioner. Probably Ezekiel would tear anybody else who disturbed him into little tiny pieces. Like confetti, only messier.

  He wouldn’t tear Natividad into bits, though. She was pretty sure.

  On the other hand, if anybody else had turned up and volunteered to go wake Ezekiel up instead, Natividad’s feelings wouldn’t have been hurt at all.

  Sighing, Natividad put her hand on the doorknob... took a breath... rolled her eyes at her own cowardice and finally, after an embarrassingly long pause, turned the knob.

  The door wasn’t locked. Right. Who would intrude on Dimilioc’s famously vicious young executioner? Natividad pushed the door open and stepped into a big room with wall-to-wall dove-gray carpeting, low couches upholstered in black leather, and simple low tables of black-painted wood. No television, no stereo system, nothing like that. No bookshelves. A single thin bud vase stood on one of the tables, its transparent glass strangely contorted as though it had once been partially melted. There was no flower in the vase, though. She supposed this was because of the barren winter, and wondered what kind of flower Ezekiel put in the vase when flowers were available. A rose? An orchid? She couldn’t guess. Maybe he always left the vase empty. That sort of seemed like him, actually.

  That was all there was in the room, except for one surprising painting dominating the far wall. If Natividad had thought about it, which she hadn’t, she would have guessed that Ezekiel might have chosen some horrible bloody scene of hunting or war, or else something disturbing by Dali. This painting – a real painting, she was sure, not a print – was nothing like that. It was obviously Chinese or Japanese, because there were those kinds of letters across the top and a couple more at the bottom, maybe the artist’s signature.

  At first the painting seemed totally abstract, as though the artist had just splashed ink boldly across the lower third of a blank screen and called it good. Then shapes began to suggest themselves, first an angular tree – maybe a tree and a couple of shrubs? And maybe those triangular lines below the tree were a boat? Something little, like a rowboat. Maybe there was a person – two people? – in the boat. It was hard to be sure. Smooth pale-gray washes of ink below the tree implied water and mist. In the background, rising up through the height of the painting, tall skinny mountains were barely visible through the veils of mist. But most of the space had been left completely empty, the blank space used by the artist with as much deliberation as the grays and blacks of the ink.

  It was a totally quiet, serene landscape, and it changed the whole character of the room. Without the painting, the room would have been stark and… What? Kind of soulless, maybe? Especially because there weren’t any other personal touches anywhere: nothing cluttered the tables or had been tossed carelessly aside on either of the couches. But with the painting, the whole room took on a kind of serenity. It was sort of Zen, Natividad thought. Not that she had any idea what Zen was, except something Chinese. Or Japanese. Whatever. Anyway, she thought it meant something like peace, something like acceptance. Certainly nothing she would have expected from Ezekiel. Except now that she saw it, she sort of thought it fit him after all.

  Two doors led out of this first room. Natividad walked across to the nearest and put a hand on its knob – it was unpainted metal, cold to the touch, and it, too, was gray. A dark gray, neither steel nor aluminum. Pewter, maybe. Did they make doorknobs out of pewter? She wondered whether the door would open into the bedroom or some kind of study or just a closet. In a way she hoped not to find Ezekiel too quickly because she was now much more curious about what else she might find in his suite, what other surprising things it might tell her about him. On the other hand, though she no longer really felt that she might be in actual danger, she was ashamed to be intruding into a privacy she was sure Ezekiel valued.

  But the door turned out to open into the bedroom. The room was dim, not only because of the early-evening hour, but because, although there were windows in two of the walls, the curtains were all drawn. Natividad hesitated in the doorway, to let her eyes become accustomed to the muted lighting and also just to look for a minute.

  After the first room, this one was not such a surprise. There was very little furniture, only the bed and a single table with a tall, angular lamp standing beside it. The table was very plain, like the ones in the other room, but painted in a pale color. Not white, though. A pale gray. A statue, maybe eighteen inches high, stood on the table. It was not exactly like a Buddha because the figure was standing and slim instead of seated and fat, but it sort of reminded Natividad of a Buddha anyway – although it held a spear in one hand, which didn’t seem very Buddhist.

&nb
sp; The bed was low, raised less than a foot off the floor, which was carpeted in the same dove-gray as the other room. The bedcovers – sheets and blankets and bedspread alike – were all a dark charcoal gray. Ezekiel lay in abandoned exhaustion across the bed, on his back. His hands lay empty and open, one arm crooked back by his cheek and the other flung out straight. His head was thrown back, his throat exposed. He didn’t stir. That he hadn’t woken when Natividad entered the room told her even more clearly how desperately he needed sleep.

  The top sheet – to Natividad’s relief, more or less, now that other possibilities abruptly suggested themselves to her – lay across his legs and hips and came halfway up his stomach. His hair, damp from a bath, was a pale yellow: the exact color of mantaquilla – rich butter. His shoulders and neck were white against the dark sheets, except where the line of that nasty cut from Thaddeus’s knife showed. Someone had stitched it up. The black stitches looked awful and ugly against his pale skin, but no other wounds marked him. Ezekiel might have sustained horrible injuries – of course he must have – but obviously nothing else dealt by a silver weapon. Nothing his black shadow had been unable to carry away.

  Though Ezekiel might not show many wounds, the hollows of his face had deepened over the past couple of days. He looked thin and worn. It was easy, usually, to forget how young he was. But, asleep like this, his shadow hidden by the dimness of the room, his air of impatient disdain eased away by sleep, Ezekiel looked not only young, but also vulnerable, even helpless.

  If she just strolled across the room and tapped him on the shoulder, though, Natividad suspected he would suddenly not look young or vulnerable or harmless at all. There was probably a better way to wake him up. A way that didn’t involve getting too close.

  Though, looking at Ezekiel like this, she didn’t want to wake him up at all. Not just because he obviously needed sleep or because he might be angry when he woke, but also because then he would know that she had intruded on his privacy. Natividad might be safe to wake him – more or less safe – but she found she bitterly resented Grayson’s order to do it.

  Her embarrassment at her intrusion deepened as she hesitated, yet how could she just sneak away? Grayson would look at her and want to know why she hadn’t got Ezekiel for him like he’d ordered, and what would she say? That she’d been too embarrassed to wake him up?

  Natividad took a quick breath and switched the lights on, then clapped her hands and immediately dropped to sit cross-legged on the floor so she would look as harmless as possible.

  He was across the room so fast that she barely saw him move, didn’t have time to duck, barely had time to flinch. His eyes were a pale burning yellow with wicked pinpoint pupils, utterly inhuman. One long hand closed hard on her shoulder, pinning her back against the wall. Long black claws glittered on his other hand, foreshortened now into something that was almost a paw, ready to slash across her face or throat.

  Natividad closed her eyes.

  The blow didn’t fall. She had known he wouldn’t hit her, she’d known it from the first, but it still took a few seconds to make herself open her eyes again.

  He knelt on one knee in front of her. His eyes, looking into hers with an intensity she could not read, was not sure she wanted to read, were again a completely human blue. Natividad had to force herself to look away from the concentrated ferocity of his stare. This was harder than she’d expected – harder than it should have been. Once she had lowered her eyes, she saw that though Ezekiel might not have let go of her, he had dropped his other hand to rest on the floor, and now that hand, too, was completely human again.

  “Natividad,” he said. His tone was light, cool, faintly mocking – utterly at odds with the violence of his response to her clap. Releasing her, he stood – an economical, fluid movement, but not nearly so fast as his initial lunge off the bed.

  He was wearing shorts, Natividad was relieved to see. Well, more or less relieved. He didn’t seem embarrassed to find her here in his bedroom. But then, he didn’t seem angry, either. Or offended, or surprised, or even much interested. She didn’t believe all this lack of response.

  She said, trying to match his coolness, “I’m sorry to disturb you. But Grayson sent me to say he wants you. Immediately, he said. In the–”

  “I know where he is,” Ezekiel said. He didn’t exactly snap the words. Turning, he walked unhurriedly across the room and, opening a door she had not noticed, reached in for a robe. The robe was medium gray, with here and there touches of odd off-tones: ash-gold and rose-gray and gray-lavender, the colors of the earliest dawn on a stormy day.

  The robe looked Japanese to Natividad, but maybe that impression had simply been created by the painting in the other room and the sculpture in this one. It ought to have looked too fancy for Ezekiel. Or maybe not too fancy exactly, but too… too something. But, anyway, whatever she meant, it didn’t. It looked exactly right for him. It occurred to her for the first time that everything he wore always looked exactly right for him. She wondered if he chose clothing on purpose to have this effect or whether he would simply look good in anything, including, say, torn blue jeans and a faded plaid shirt.

  “What time is it?” Ezekiel asked over his shoulder. He put on the robe and belted it. He still didn’t seem embarrassed, but on the other hand he didn’t turn and face her again until the robe was belted, either.

  “Um,” said Natividad, and looked at her watch. Her stupid pink kitten watch. It had never before occurred to her to be embarrassed about that watch, which Alejandro had bought her because they were running out of money and it was cheap and she needed a watch. She had even thought it was sort of cute. Now, one glimpse of Ezekiel’s elegant robe and suddenly she was dying to own a nice watch, something tasteful.

  She cleared her throat. “Almost… almost 5. In the afternoon. I think you’ve had about two hours of sleep. Maybe.”

  “Feels like it,” muttered Ezekiel. He studied the contents of his closet for another moment. “Immediately, is it?”

  From his tone, this was not exactly a question, but Natividad nodded. Then, because he wasn’t watching her, she cleared her throat and said, “Yes.”

  Ezekiel turned his head, one eyebrow rising in mocking comment on her nervousness. He walked right into the closet, which must be a lot bigger than Natividad had guessed. His voice emerged, muffled, but now without that frightening edge to it. “I frightened you. I’m sorry. I wasn’t properly awake. You don’t need to be afraid of me.” He came out of the closet again, now clothed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, the robe draped across his arm.

  Natividad had never seen him in jeans and a T-shirt before. The casual clothing, it turned out, did in fact look just as exactly right on him as everything else. “You didn’t frighten me,” she told him, which was sort of the truth.

  Ezekiel tilted a skeptical eyebrow at her and tossed the robe across the bed. Natividad suppressed an urge to ask him if she could borrow it. When he looked at her, she remembered only belatedly to drop her gaze.

  “Natividad…” But then he stopped.

  Her gaze was drawn upward by that pause, until she remembered again not to look at Ezekiel’s face and made herself look aside. “Um?” She didn’t hear him move, didn’t know he was right in front of her until he put a finger under her chin and tipped her face up, gently. Startled, Natividad met his eyes. There was no anger in his face, none of the edgy temper that usually rode black dogs. There wasn’t any of his usual mockery, either. She could see the weariness in the hollows of his face, in the shadows around his pale eyes, and knew it was a weariness of spirit as much of body.

  “Look at me,” he said softly. “Look at me, if you wish. I don’t mind.”

  He let her see his weariness, his grief – it was a deliberate lowering of defenses. He could have hidden all his weakness from her if he’d tried. He was allowing her to see right through his hard-held privacy. This was frightening – or not exactly frightening. She felt somehow both vulnerable and oddly po
werful at the same time. She said, a little breathlessly, “Grayson did say, not till my birthday…”

  He did not lift his hand away from her face. “Of course. Of course he did.”

  “Ezekiel – you don’t even want me anyway. You only want me because I’m Pure and almost the same age as you…” She stopped, startled and a little shocked because she hadn’t meant to say that. Even though it was true.

  “Is that what you think?” He began to lean forward – he was going to kiss her…

  Then his eyes widened. His thin mouth twisted with a strange kind of bitter amusement that Natividad did not understand, and he said, softly but with some force, “Hellfire and damnation.”

  “Ezekiel…” Natividad said again, and again did not know what to say, but this time managed to say nothing at all. She had no idea what was going on with him.

  He dropped his hand. Took a step back. Another. He looked away from her, looked back – ran a distracted hand through his pale hair, still disordered from sleep. He said, “I have to obey him.”

  “Well… yes?”

  He glanced at her impatiently. “Not because of that! Because… look. Without… Without Zachariah and Harrison, he can’t force me to do anything. He knows that, I know it. So I have to obey him. Damn!” He took a sharp breath and repeated, more softly, “Hellfire and damnation. I can’t…” He stopped. She watched the mask of light, unconcerned mockery settle back across his face like he’d never shown her anything else. Then he took a smooth step sideways, opened the door, and stood back, inviting her, with a tip of his head, to go out before him.