Black Dog

by Rachel Neumeier

  She had made her new aparato from Alejandro’s silver knife and from moonlight and from her maraña, the tangle of light and magic that was meant to confuse the eye and mind. She had made that over into a teleraña, an orderly web, because confusion was no longer her goal. Now she wanted to catch and bind.

  She had made this new kind of aparato with music from Mamá’s little flute and with the clarity of her intention. That clarity was hard to remember, now that she was here in the dark. But the aparato was strong. It was cold to the touch, a biting clean cold that seemed to push back against the slow-beating heat from the burned church.

  The base of the aparato was Alejandro’s knife. To her the heart of it still looked like a knife. Sort of. If you glanced at it only carelessly, or if you were thinking about sharp-edged weapons. To her, it seemed to be surrounded by a kind of shimmering haze, like mist gathered together into something long and narrow and not exactly solid. That was one thing she’d used the teleraña to do: catch the eye. To a black dog who longed to tear down his enemies, to spill their blood across the dead earth and burn their bodies to ash and their shadows to a memory of darkness… to that black dog, the aparato should look exactly like the sort of weapon that would give you everything you wanted. She hoped it would look like that to Malvern Vonhausel. She couldn’t see it that way herself and had no way of knowing for sure if she’d made it right. Except, of course, by trying it out.

  She picked it up, cradling it against her stomach. But the aparato was too cold to hold like that for long, and she put it back on the car seat next to her, though she left the tips of her fingers resting on its hilt. Or the part that had been its hilt. It numbed her hand, but kind of in a good way.

  The black dogs that had escorted her all turned their heads, looking toward the north, toward the ruined church, their hackles rising, the unholy light of their eyes dimming. They no longer looked like they were laughing at Natividad – they seemed to have forgotten her. They all lowered their heads and crouched down like nervous dogs, slinking back and away, clearing a path from her car to the burning rubble.

  Natividad knew exactly what that meant. Of course it meant that Vonhausel was coming. She took a deep breath and moved her hand to open the car door. Or she tried to. She couldn’t actually make herself move. This must be what people meant when they said they were paralyzed with terror. How strange, and not very nice. She felt as though she was an observer outside her own body, outside the car, outside all the action; like she was watching some other girl stare, frozen with fear, out through the car’s windshield into the dark. It was as if she herself was distant and not really even very interested.

  Then Malvern Vonhausel strode down the tumbled wreckage of the church, and that sense of dislocation trembled. He was in his human form. Somehow that seemed much worse than if he’d been in his black dog form. Not scarier, exactly, but worse.

  He was taller than she had expected, though maybe that was because he was still above her, walking leisurely down a charred timber and then stepping lightly to one great broken chunk of granite and then another. He moved with the weightless confidence of a black dog, never missing his footing or dislodging any rubble.

  He had a broad strong-featured face with wide-set cheekbones and a thick-lipped mouth, crooked now in amused contempt. He didn’t look like he would ever smile except when he was hurting something. He didn’t look young; his hair was black, untouched by gray. His eyes were also black, but not a clean black: to Natividad’s sight they seemed filled with the heavy black smoke of a great burning. Those black eyes caught her gaze and held it, at once fiery and contemptuous and compelling, like a black dog’s eyes but not exactly, though she couldn’t tell where the difference lay. Again, the sense of remoteness and distance she clung to trembled. She closed her eyes for a moment, until the fear became once more a remote thing, something that belonged to somebody else, something not really hers. It was sort of like the blank distance that grief put between a person and the world and she was grateful for it.

  Black dogs followed Vonhausel, one to either side. These did not slink low in fear of him like the others, but strode cat-footed and confident down from the ruins of the church. Once she could manage to force her gaze away from Vonhausel to look at them, she found they held her attention in a way she didn’t at first understand.

  Then she did understand it, and that was much worse. Horror shattered the remote detachment she had clung to and the present came crashing down on her all at once, like an avalanche of broken timbers and shattered stones.

  The taller of the black dogs, walking at heel on Vonhausel’s left, was Zachariah Korte. The other, on Vonhausel’s right, broad and massive-shouldered and moving with a heavy stride that somehow was not at all lumbering or clumsy, was Harrison Lanning. Even in their black dog forms, she knew them. Only she had no idea how, because they weren’t really the people she’d known, not really, not anymore.

  Even when Alejandro’s shadow rose all the way and he was entirely in his black dog shape, there was something still there that was him. All black dogs were like that: a low-burning memory of who they were stayed with them through the change. She had wondered if those strange, quiet black dogs might be different, might lack that kind of memory.

  But she knew beyond doubt that all memory of who they had been was gone from these. The black dogs that had been Zachariah and Harrison… the human parts of them were gone. Because she had known them, she could see that what walked toward her now was only their shadows, given physical form but wholly lacking any trace of the human identity that had once shaped and restrained them. For the first time she really understood what it meant, to recall a shadow from the fell dark and put it into the corpse of the man who had once held it. It was horrible. Worse than what a vampire did to somebody… No, it was exactly what a vampire did. Or what vampires had done, and thank God the vampires were gone, but now there were these… these shadow-possessed dead things, just as bad.

  Zachariah was dead. Harrison was dead. These shadow-possessed undead things were not anybody she had ever known. She knew that. But she couldn’t help but look again and again for traces of the men beneath. And find nothing, because there was nothing there to find. It was horrible.

  Vonhausel stepped away from the wreckage of the church and stood at last on the road amid chunks of shattered pavement. He was staring straight at her and smiling.

  Natividad’s aparato burned in her hand, but it was a cold clean burning that had nothing at all in common with black dog fire. The pain that struck into her palms and up her arms was a clean pain, an antidote to black dog burning. It cleared her mind and drove back the dark that pressed so close around her; it brought back that sense of distance and separation. She clung to it harder despite the pain, and found the courage to meet Vonhausel’s gaze.

  Malvern Vonhausel came closer to her, halting only when he was only a few feet away. Natividad was glad, distantly, that the dead black dogs that had been Zachariah and Harrison stopped at the base of the rubble and did not come forward with him. Vonhausel alone was bad enough. He was still smiling, that terrible contemptuous smile that had so much of his shadow in it and so little of anything human. But now Natividad found that she loathed him more than she feared him. She’d come here to destroy him – or to get him to destroy himself. Now she wanted to do that, especially now that she’d seen the undead things he’d made. Anyway, she was here, so she had to go forward. She had to. She would.

  She moved a hand – in a way, it seemed again like she only watched some other girl move her hand, someplace far away where nothing mattered. So, she wasn’t afraid. Not really afraid. The girl who was afraid, that wasn’t exactly her. That was why she could move her hand and open the car door and slide off the seat and down to the broken pavement of the road. The dark and the winter air rushed in at her, but it wasn’t really her who trembled with the cold.

  She gripped the aparato tightly in both hands and stepped around the car, holding it in front o
f her, like a weapon or a shield. Or an offering. It glimmered in the dark. She felt the fire that hid behind and within the shadows of the black dogs rise up in answer, almost visible but not quite, at least not to her. The earth seemed to shudder under her feet. Though maybe that was just part of the ruined church settling. But it didn’t feel that way. To her, it felt like the earth might crack open at any moment until the chasm that lay not ten feet away finally gaped wide enough to swallow the whole world.

  Vonhausel was still smiling. If he thought the earth might crack wide open, the idea didn’t bother him. He stared at her. Somewhere close by a black dog snarled, a long low vicious sound. Everything Natividad looked at seemed both far distant and incredibly vivid. The world seemed to dip and sway. All around her, the air seemed to waver like a curtain, ready to rip in half and reveal the real truth behind the looming shadows of buildings and broken church and shattered pavement.

  “Well, well,” Vonhausel said. His voice was smooth, relaxed, even pleased in a horribly vicious way. He spoke with a faint accent that didn’t sound American. It might have been German, but maybe not. He said, “How very unexpected. Can this possibly be Concepción’s daughter? Running from Dimilioc straight to me. Rather like leaping from a burning building directly into the flames below.” He looked her up and down, amused and contemptuous.

  “Stay away!” Natividad said breathlessly. “Stay away from me!” She jabbed her aparato para parar las sombras at him with a short, stiff little movement.

  Vonhausel tilted his head, casting a quizzical glance at her aparato. “What have you brought me?” He lifted his gaze suddenly, caught her eyes as though doing so was a kind of attack.

  Natividad felt that it was. She flinched and tucked herself against the side of the car. It took no effort to look like she was too frightened to answer.

  “Do you think that will protect you?” Vonhausel asked her. “You little Pure bitches, you do amuse me. You always think so highly of yourselves. You are Concepción’s child, of course.” He paused, then, when Natividad said nothing, went on, “But your magic is weak, isn’t it? Or you were too stupid to learn what your mother might have taught you. What a disappointment to her you must have been. Though in the end even she died as easily as any other human. Though I admit that particular indulgence might have been rather short-sighted. I think you will be rather more useful to me than your mother.” He paused, studying her.

  Natividad still did not answer. Despite his scorn, Vonhausel had not reached out to take the aparato away from her. She had expected him to grab it first thing. She had made it to attract him, to attract any really strong black dog. Maybe he was right about her after all – maybe she was stupid. She couldn’t have made it right. He didn’t even care about the aparato at all, he’d barely even noticed it, she had put herself in his hands for nothing – she hadn’t learned what her mother had needed to teach her–

  “What is that?” he asked her, so suddenly that she jumped and bit her tongue. When she didn’t answer at once, he asked again, an impatient edge hardening his smooth voice, “Well, what? Speak, girl!”

  “It’s… It’s a shield,” Natividad whispered. This had seemed much more believable when she’d just imagined herself answering some question like that, before she’d left her safe pink room at the Dimilioc house. She could read both anger and contempt in Vonhausel’s eyes, in the set of his mouth, but was that because he realized she was lying or just because he was a black dog? She said, not having to try to make her voice falter and fade, “My… My mother showed me. It’s for vampires really, only it’s the strongest thing I know how to make and I thought it would work…” She let her voice trail off into helpless silence.

  There was still no clear sign that Vonhausel suspected that she was lying. Only there wasn’t any sign that he wanted the thing she’d made, either. He wasn’t even looking at it. He was studying her. She ducked her head to avoid meeting his unnatural gaze.

  “Stupid little girl,” he said to her. “Grayson Lanning didn’t know what he had in his hand, when he gathered you up. Did all his black dogs trail after you like dogs after a bitch in season? I’m sure they did. That’s all they thought of you. Is that why you ran from them, pretty little bitch?”

  Natividad shuddered, wondering desperately if she could possibly be fast enough to get back into the car and slam the door before he touched her. Probably not. He was so close. But she was poised to try it anyway.

  Only then he said in a soft, absent tone, “And such a pretty little shield you’ve made. So delicate. Not very effective. But I wonder whether I might find some use for it?” He paused and then added, even more softly, speaking now more to himself than to her, “I wonder whether that little thing of yours really is nothing but a shield? Is that what your mother told you it was? It doesn’t look like a shield to me.”

  His gaze had been caught at last by the aparato. It had grown brighter, she realized, and vaguer, and even colder to the touch. It numbed her hands. She caught her breath in a little gasp, and dropped it. She hadn’t meant to actually let it go and snatched after it again at once. But dropping it turned out to be the perfect tactic, because Vonhausel moved with black dog speed and precision to seize the thing before it could hit the ground.

  It turned in his hand so fast that Natividad didn’t really see it turn, only knew that it had moved: it wrapped around Vonhausel’s hand and flung itself up his arm. The misty glow surrounding it flared into sharp-edged brilliance and flicked out like a blown-out match. But the thing itself was not gone. She knew it was still there, really, though she couldn’t actually see it, exactly. Vonhausel certainly knew it was there. He was trying to shake it loose, tear it off, cast it away. But he obviously couldn’t.

  A short, sweet phrase of flute music danced in the air, the individual notes like sparks from a new-caught fire. The music trembled just beyond hearing, but Natividad could hear it if she sort of listened sideways. And the black dogs must have heard it, too, or at least perceived it somehow, because they had all frozen into immobility, even the soulless dead creatures that Vonhausel had made out of Zachariah’s and Harrison’s bodies. Vonhausel was screaming now, a horrible sound that scaled up and up until, like the music, it was something Natividad could only hear in her mind.

  Her aparato twisted up Vonhausel’s arm and then across his whole body. It had become a silvery net of not-exactly-visible light. To Natividad, it seemed as fine and delicate and ephemeral as frost on a window. It had closed around… not Vonhausel’s body, she saw now, but his shadow. It clung to his shadow and tore it free of his body. The screaming she couldn’t exactly hear was the screaming of the shadow. It was a weapon she had made, after all, and it flared bright silver against the thick darkness of the shadow until both the weapon and the shadow went out together with a sudden snap that wasn’t exactly audible.

  Natividad stared at the husk of Vonhausel’s body as it trembled and swayed and at last collapsed. He didn’t fall all at once, though, but slowly, so that at first she wasn’t sure he was falling at all and then she almost thought he might put out his arms after all and catch himself. But he didn’t. He was dead, he was gone; he’d gone into the fell dark after his shadow and his body sprawled lifeless and limp across the cracked pavement.

  The soft thud his body made as it hit the ground seemed strangely anticlimactic, as though he should have fallen with a tremendous crash, as though the whole world should have been shaken by his fall. But there was nothing like that. Dead, stripped of his shadow and of his life, Vonhausel looked just like anybody. This seemed very strange and unexpectedly disturbing. The way his body sprawled bonelessly at Natividad’s feet made her stomach turn suddenly over. She couldn’t believe he was dead. She couldn’t believe she had killed him. She’d come here to do exactly this, but now that it was done, even though she knew she ought to be glad, even though she was glad, she was appalled, too. She had never killed anything before, except sometimes a chicken. This was… not the same at all.<
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  But then her attention was jerked away from the thing she’d done because the air began to vibrate with a disturbing new sound, a sound like the howling of wolves set to music, only turned dark and bitter. This sound wasn’t just in her head: it was deep and loud and getting deeper and louder all the time. It shook dust and ash into the air. The pavement and rubble surrounding the gaping crack across the road began to break up and crumble into the chasm. The fire-edged darkness within that chasm seemed to creep out into the night. Natividad shuddered and crept back along the side of the car.

  At her movement, all the black dogs, who had been staring fixedly at Vonhausel’s body, turned and looked at her. She froze. She thought it was fading, it was fading. She knew the black dogs would do something as soon as it had stopped. Some of them, the weaker ones, would just run, put distance between themselves and all the magic and power that had been loosed here. But a lot of them would probably fight. That was what black dogs did if no one stronger controlled them: they fought for dominance and for the pleasure of killing, and then they went out and hunted helpless prey because they loved slaughter better even than fighting with one another. Without Vonhausel, there was no one strong enough to hold so many black dogs.

  Or… maybe there might be, sort of. Natividad turned her head the tiny degree necessary to look at the dead shadow-ridden black dogs that had been Zachariah and Harrison. They, too, were staring at Vonhausel’s body. She’d hoped they would collapse when their master died, but of course they hadn’t. That would have made everything too easy. What they would do now, she could not begin to guess. Would they want to butcher the ordinary black dogs, or would they want to rule them and use them as Vonhausel had, or would they want something else entirely?

  There were more undead black dogs scattered here and there among the ordinary ones, too. Natividad recognized them, now that she knew what to look for. They were more completely still than any living black dog could be. They were more… more something. Or less something. More foreign, maybe, and less human.