Black Dog

by Rachel Neumeier

  “How long ago?”

  “I don’t know, I just woke up, but I don’t know how long ago she left. It can’t have been long…”

  That guess was based on hope rather than any kind of knowledge, Alejandro thought, but even so the guess was probably accurate. He looked at the window. The glass, opaque and glowing with moonlight, revealed nothing. But she would not be visible from this window anyway. He said out loud, “She could not have gone on foot. If she’s gone out of the house, she must have taken a car.” Natividad was not a good driver, and there was the snow – but then, hers was the magic that had kept the road more or less clear. If she thought she needed to drive back to Lewis, she wouldn’t let fear of the dark or the snowy roads stop her.

  Miguel’s eyes widened. “Pearson’s car. That’s the one she’d take.”

  “I’ll find out,” Alejandro said grimly. “If she took that car, I’ll follow it.”

  “She took it,” said Miguel.

  Alejandro was sure his brother was right.

  The window was not locked, but it was frozen shut. Alejandro cracked the frame forcing it open, but at least the glass did not shatter. He could scent the icy night wind through the gap. He wanted to leap out into the dark, surrender to the cambio de cuerpo, and stretch out in a long lope across the snow. But he paused, gathered his will and what he could of his wide-scattered human thoughts, and turned instead back to Miguel.

  He could not make his tone gentle, but he said, “Who would guess what she would do? Have we ever guessed from one moment to the next what she will do? This isn’t your fault. No me habría enfedado tanto si…” He realized he had shifted into Spanish, could almost hear Natividad’s scolding command: “Speak Gringo!” He shook his head and said carefully, in English, “I would not be so angry if my shadow did not press me so hard. I will find her. This cold air holds scent well. I will find her. Arreglaré las cosas – I mean, I will make this right.”

  “Lo prometes?” said Miguel: do you promise? Like the child he so seldom seemed.

  “Lo prometo,” said Alejandro. He gripped his brother’s shoulder, shook him gently. “Now, you. Maybe she has not gotten far. She is not a good driver, and the road is bad, and she does not know it well. I will go through the forest and try to catch her before she reaches the town. But if I do not return with her in half an hour, forty minutes, then you must go to Grayson – hush! You must.” He shook his brother again, not so gently. “Yes, I know he will be angry, but you must tell him anyway.”

  He was surprised, dimly, that he cared about Dimilioc enough himself to make this demand of his brother; more surprised that he trusted Grayson not to harm Miguel no matter how furious the Master was at what had happened. He did not think about this, it was too hard to think anyway, but he said harshly, “If Natividad gets to Vonhausel and she does some clever thing and destroys him, that is well. But if he takes her, she will either be dead or she will be a weapon in his hand. If I do not bring her back, you must warn Grayson so he will know. Comprendes?”

  Miguel nodded, but so unwillingly that Alejandro shook him again, not quite so gently. “Harás lo que yo te diga,” he demanded. “Prometeme que obedecerás!”

  “Sí,” Miguel said in a low voice, and Alejandro let him go and at last pushed the window wide, taking a deep breath of the winter-scented air.

  “Ten cuidado!” Miguel called after him, hopelessly. But Alejandro did not turn. He had already leaped out into the night; he had at last let his shadow rise; he fell into the cambio de cuerpo and already, with the change barely on him, had almost forgotten his human form. He did not look back.

  The forest was empty of everything but dark and cold and the moonlight that shivered through the naked branches. In better times, probably Dimilioc wolves had run out on many full-moon nights such as this – to hunt the deer or merely to run until dawn, dreaming of fire, the snow melting from the faint tracks they left behind them.

  On this night, the forest was empty. He saw nothing, felt nothing running in the forest save for himself.

  He did not really think in words, in language. He thought about his sister, about her scent, which was faint but mingled with the distinctive scent of Pearson’s car. He thought about the music of their mother’s little wooden flute, which Natividad had insisted on bringing away with them after the destruction of the village. He had not, at the time, asked, “Why that?” Now he wished he had been more curious.

  At first Alejandro followed the road, but then, once he was sure he had truly found his sister’s trail, he went through the forest, straight as a flung spear toward Lewis.

  For some reason, when he tried to picture her there in his mind’s eye, he saw instead fleeting glimpses of the ruined church in the center of the town, of its cracked stones and splintered beams, and of Vonhausel poised atop those ruins, in black dog shape, his head tilted back, singing a terrible song to a moon that was tangled and gripped in the angular grasp of leafless branches. It was like the song of a wolf, only it was not merely wild; it contained a terrible darkness that was born of rage and hatred. It was not merely sound, for it cracked stone and burned bone and brought everything that lived to ruin; it made the simple darkness of the night into the fell dark that burned at its heart with black-edged fire.

  It had no words, that song, but nevertheless Alejandro thought he understood it. It was the kind of song that if you heard it once, you would hear it forever in your dreams. He was not sure whether it echoed only in his mind or also through the frozen air around them.

  Then, as he approached Lewis, he was sure.

  14

  The black dogs that surrounded Natividad on the road were nothing like the Dimilioc black wolves. Natividad couldn’t exactly explain the difference. Vonhausel’s black dogs looked just like the Dimilioc wolves. Powerful muscles moved under their coal-black shaggy pelts, burning eyes smoldered yellow or orange or crimson above their long black-fanged jaws, smoke trickled from their mouths when they turned their broad heads to laugh their terrible, silent black-dog laughter at her… Alejandro looked like that when he changed, Papá had looked like that, Ezekiel or Grayson or any Dimilioc wolf looked like that. Only they hadn’t, they didn’t, they never did.

  She was afraid of these black dogs in a way that she had not feared Ezekiel, not even the first time she had seen him, when none of them had been sure whether the Dimilioc executioner would kill them right there in the snow. She had known Ezekiel wouldn’t do that, even though at the time she had not realized that she knew it. She had been frightened, but she had not really been afraid, and she had not known that.

  This was different. Now she was afraid. These black dogs wanted to kill her. They really did. They wanted to kill her, but they only ran beside the car instead. That was horrible, because it wasn’t the magic on the car that stopped them – they could run her off the road and break her windshield with stones and wait for her to come out or freeze. They didn’t do that because they were escorting her.

  Vonhausel had captured a Pure woman, but he had killed her – used her up – breaking Natividad’s mandala. Of course he would want another Pure woman. That was why his black dogs were escorting her rather than trying to run her off the road. If Miguel was right, Vonhausel would especially want her. She expected that, she even counted on it, but she had not exactly realized how it would feel, to be surrounded by black dogs who hated her, to be heading toward a worse black dog who wanted not just to kill her but to use her for something awful.

  This was not like any fear she had ever felt before. It made her feel small and stupid, like a rabbit trapped against a garden wall by a dog. She wished Ezekiel was with her now, lifting a disdainful eyebrow at the rabble of black dogs surrounding her. Or Grayson, solid and immobile as a mountain, sheathed in granite, with fire at its heart. She did not know which of them she longed for more. She would be so much less afraid if either of them were here with her.

  But of course if either of them had been here with her, he would have
died. That was why she hadn’t been able to tell Grayson her idea: he wouldn’t have let her do it, and he couldn’t have helped anyway. Not all the Dimilioc black wolves together could help her do this. Not even Ezekiel could fight so many black dogs, not even Grayson could make so many run away through the sheer force of his will. It was just stupid to think about how much safer she would have felt with either of them standing behind her. It was not useful at all to think about how frightened she felt now. How alone.

  She had been afraid when she and her brothers had found Papá and Mamá – she shied away from that memory, but others crowded in at her, inescapable: the torn bodies left in the streets, the trees and flowers burned, everything burned and destroyed. But the black dogs who had done that, they had been gone. She had been afraid, but she had not even known that because her grief had been so much stronger. The grief then had weighed on her like she’d swallowed all the stones in the world.

  And all the death had been her fault, at least partly her fault, because if she had been braver and stronger and had not run away to hide, maybe she would have been able to learn the things Mamá had tried to teach her. Then maybe together she and Mamá might have protected the village. Instead, Mamá’s magic had broken… Though she wanted now to remember exactly what Mamá had done and what had happened, though she had been trying all night to remember, she could not. She thought she would be crushed from the inside by the jagged weight of grief and memory.

  She longed to go back, to go home, but that home was gone. Her home now was this frozen territory, filled with the ancient authority that Dimilioc was trying to hold and Vonhausel was trying to steal.

  Her hands, where she gripped the high steering wheel, were cold. It had stopped snowing at last, but this only helped a little. She was not used to driving. Her shoulders ached from holding the wheel too tightly, and her neck from craning forward to see.

  It was about ten miles from Dimilioc to Lewis. She remembered that. Sheriff Pearson’s car was much better than the one they had bought with their little store of money, and the wish she had put on the road still held, and so actually it was not that hard to drive. Except for the black dogs, from which she kept trying to flinch, so that again and again she had to stop herself twitching the steering wheel one way or the other. There was no sense in flinching. She knew things would only get worse. More dangerous. Scarier. Knowing this didn’t help. Knowing that everything would be over if she did everything right and if Vonhausel did everything she expected, that helped.

  She tried not to let herself think about Vonhausel doing something unexpected instead. She definitely didn’t want to think about what his black dogs might do to her even if she did absolutely everything right. She tried not to think about that. She wouldn’t. She didn’t.

  Except sometimes she couldn’t stop her mind from going to Alejandro, to Miguel, about what her brothers would think and feel when they knew what she’d done, where she’d gone. Alejandro would be so angry, so afraid for her. It would be even worse for Miguel. He would blame himself, he would think it was his fault. She hadn’t even left a note to tell him it wasn’t, that this wasn’t something a black dog or an ordinary human could do. Only someone who was Pure. She should have left a note.

  She should have left one for Grayson, too. He had tried so hard to protect her. She should have left a note explaining that really the Pure weren’t supposed to be protected. That really they were supposed to protect other people. Mamá had taught her that. Mamá’s whole life had taught her that, and then at the end Natividad hadn’t done anything but hide. This time would be different.

  But she hadn’t left any notes for anybody. Now she tried not to think about her brothers at all. Those thoughts were bad ones. They made her feel weak and young and stupid and afraid.

  And thinking about Ezekiel was somehow almost worse. She knew he would take her death even harder, if she died. But really he hardly knew her. She told herself so, and tried to believe it. Any Pure girl would suit him, he would find another one to court, he could flatter any Pure girl and make her feel special. It was stupid that knowing that made her want to cry.

  She saw the first opening of the road in front of her, a high blackness that spread out above the denser blackness of the trees. She had come to the cleared land that surrounded Lewis. The lower blockier darkness that stood against the sky: that must be the edge of town. The black dogs came up on either side of her, keeping pace with her car. She slowed a little, and a little more, letting them think that she was afraid to arrive where they meant her to go. She did not let herself think, not ever, not for a second, that this was true.

  There should have been lights before her, showing where the houses stood and the roads lay. But there were no lights. Not ordinary lights. Only blacker shapes looming closer out of the black night, and a disturbing dull red glow behind the layers of blackness, like coals just before they guttered and dimmed and burned out. That glow did not combat the dark, but somehow made it seem darker than ever. It made the night seem dense, like a black dog’s shadow.

  She took her foot off the gas pedal as she passed the first of the empty buildings, allowing the car to coast forward under no power, only its own inertia. The car rolled past the scorched line where she had drawn her mandala. That narrow crack in the earth lay like the mark of a whip across the road. On either side, the snow was trampled and melted to show winter-barren earth that had been torn up in the fighting and then frozen again, jagged and hard as iron.

  The red glow was not exactly brighter here, but it was more distinct. The air smelled of ash and burning even through the car’s closed windows; of charred wood and smoke and a deeper, grittier scent, like burned earth and stone. Two of the black dogs ran in front of her car, turning their heads to stare at her, snapping at the air to frighten her. Or maybe that was a kind of black dog laughter. They wanted her to turn and drive into the center of Lewis. She had to remind herself very firmly that she wanted that, too. Now that she was here, this seemed so unbelievable that she half wondered whether she had just dreamed her plan to come here. Maybe she had dreamed this whole unspeakable drive. Maybe she was dreaming now.

  But she knew she was not dreaming. She steered cautiously because it was dark and the streets here were filled with chunks of things: broken bricks and shattered stones and pieces of timber; the town’s sole octagonal stop sign that glowed red as blood in her headlights, uprooted like a young tree so that she had to drive across it… Natividad turned carefully around one last corner and found the ruined church before her, dozens of black dogs gathered at the base of the rubble. She took her foot off the gas again, coasting gently to a halt. Nearly all the waiting black dogs turned their broad heads to stare at her. Their lips curled back from shining jet-black fangs in snarls that were also laughter; their eyes flared with all the colors of fire. Some of them were true black dogs, she saw; but some were the smaller moon-bound shifters and others were different again: too quiet and still and just, well, different. She studied those black dogs uneasily, wondering if they could be the kind Miguel had guessed might exist: dead black dogs, possessed now only by their shadows. She stared at the closest of the too-quiet creatures. Was it just her imagination that it seemed to lack something undefinable that any black dog, even a stray lost to bloodlust, ought to possess? An essential humanity, a memory of having been human? She wasn’t sure, but looking at that black dog made her uneasy. She looked away from it, trying to find Malvern Vonhausel instead. He had to be here somewhere, surely.

  Fragments of the church walls pierced through the tumbled wreckage. The rubble had burned. It still smoldered. That smoldering, of course, was the source of the red glow she had seen from the edge of Lewis. Smoke and powdery ash and glinting sparks still drifted in the air. Even from within the car, the bitter smoke coated the back of her throat.

  The huge stones and cracked bells and broken cross from the church’s highest steeple, thrown down before her, blocked the road completely. But maybe it was just
as well the way ahead was blocked, because beyond that obstruction the road itself was cracked. Not just cracked: that was too simple and small a word for the gaping fissure that ran right across the road and away out of sight to either side. It looked wide enough to drive even Sheriff Pearson’s car right into it. It looked deep enough to lead straight down to Hell. The bloody light from the smoldering ruins of the church seemed to run across the ground and down into that fissure, pooling in it like light, or like blood. Maybe it really did go down to Hell.

  Natividad released her fierce grip on the wheel for the first time since she had begun this drive, and turned the key in the ignition. The sudden hush as the engine fell silent made her twitch with nervous startlement, and she reached out at last to lay her hand on the aparato para parar las sombras she had brought with her.

  It was a new kind of aparato, not one Mamá had ever exactly taught her. She had thought and thought about all the magic Mamá had taught her. The Dimilioc wolves had taken her in and she had drawn all this danger right to them, and they had protected her anyway and wanted to go on protecting her even now. And she had known it was time to stop hiding and being protected and go out to face Vonhausel herself.

  So, then she had thought of this, and she believed it would work. But now that she was here, where was Vonhausel?

  He wanted her, Miguel said – her especially. Mamá had told Miguel she had a gift for making darkness cooperate with light, which Natividad didn’t understand at all, but what Mamá had told Natividad herself was that she had a gift for making things. If that gift was enough, if she had made this aparato right, if it did what she had made it to do, then the thing she had made would destroy Vonhausel and then everything would be alright after all.