Black Dog (25 page)

Then someone opened the church door and people flooded out into the town square, young men with shotguns and in their midst a priest, the white collar at his throat a reassurance in any time of trouble. At first it seemed like a crowd, though when Natividad sorted them out, she saw that besides the priest, there were really only three men.

“Father McClanahan,” Sheriff Pearson said briskly. “He's worked with the Pure now and then. And my deputies – I only have one, ordinarily, but I thought it just as well to do a little recruiting yesterday. Now I'm glad of it. Shotguns may not be magic, but they slow most things down.” He opened his door and jumped to the street before Natividad could ask him what kind of ammunition those guns were loaded with.

The priest was a big man with a round, soft face and a rounder, softer body. His thinning hair was reddish, his eyes blue, his nose crooked, his mouth made for smiling. But he wasn't smiling now. He took Natividad's hands in his, looked at her with concentrated attention, and said, “Pure, are you, then? Good. That's good. God knows I spent the night praying Grayson Lanning would send us real help.” Before she could answer, he added to Sheriff Pearson, “How is Cassie?”

“Fine,” the sheriff said, clearly meaning he didn't want to talk about it. “Natividad, these men are my deputies – Belliveau, Harris, and Denoux. Well, Denoux? How have things been here? Quiet?”

The deputy addressed, a stocky man with fair hair and a round face and blue eyes set at a slight slant in his face, shook his head and opened his hands. “Not as quiet as we'd wish, Sheriff. The Stewarts found all their cows slaughtered. Torn up in big chunks, partly eaten, blood everywhere. Not an hour past. They turned around and drove right back here, seeing nothing worse than ravens on the way.”

“They're in the rectory now,” Father McClanahan put in. “Thanking God the kids weren't out making snowmen when the killers came by.”

Pearson nodded, his mouth tightening.

“That was never vampire work,” Father McClanahan said to Natividad, a faint question in his tone. “Black dogs, I guess. But we've never had trouble with black dogs before…”

“With Dimilioc right there on your doorstep, I guess not! But you're going to have trouble now. Until Dimilioc builds back its strength.” Natividad didn't want to be so blunt, but it was true. She didn't want to think about what would happen to Lewis if Dimilioc couldn't build back, if instead it got overrun by Vonhausel's black dogs.

“You trust that damned Lanning bastard?” one of the deputies, Belliveau, asked her. His tone was more than a little hostile. He was clearly the oldest of the three, a man with grizzled hair and a hard mouth.

Natividad tried not to wince visibly. She said quickly, “Some black dogs, you
can
trust. My Papá, he was a black dog, you know? And my brother, he is, too.” She looked from one deputy to the next and then the next. Their expressions ranged from intent to suspicious, though Denoux did not look actually hostile and Harris, youngest of the three, gave her a swift grin when she met his eyes. She smiled back and said to all three of the men, as firmly as possible, “If you don't want to run for Newport, you'd better trust Grayson Lanning, and Dimilioc, and me, because if you don't have us you don't have
anything
. Shotguns and prayers are both good, but they're not going to be enough.”

“That's true, by God,” Father McClanahan said. “That's true, and we know it.” He looked anxiously around at the three deputies, then back at Natividad. “We don't know you, young lady, but we know what you are. Don't worry about us.”

Natividad nodded, grateful for his support. She said, speaking quickly because she hated what she had to say, “Dimilioc beat them once, you know, those other black dogs, but I don't think they're giving up, I really don't. I think they're going to stay right here and try again, and as long as black dog strays are gathering in the woods around Lewis, you're all in a whole lot of trouble. You really
ought
to leave. Newport…” The men were all shaking their heads.

“This is our home!” Harris said right out, almost as fierce as a territorial black dog. “We didn't let those damned vampires drive us out, and we won't run from black dogs!”

Belliveau nodded with grim conviction, and Denoux said, “That's right, miss. That's how it is.”

Natividad supposed after the vampire war, these people probably knew their own minds pretty well. She shrugged. “Then at least you've got a good church to anchor my circle. I guess you had some trouble with vampires during the war?” This was met by a grim laugh from the oldest man. She nodded. “Then you'll want to remember, black dogs aren't vampires. A church, a good solid church with Pure magic all through it, like this one you've got…” She nodded to the ornate building with its clean stone and tall bell tower and finished, “No vampire or vampire magic could get into a church like this one. But black dogs aren't vampires, you know? A church is pretty safe against black dogs, but not all the way safe. So, a protective circle will give you another line of defense. It won't keep out everything, but it'll help, and it'll give you time so you can figure out other things to do.”

Sheriff Pearson nodded, and when different people started to ask questions or argue or whatever, the sheriff lifted a hand to stop them. Then he nodded again to Natividad. “You'll draw your circle. We'll start in fifteen minutes.” Belliveau began to interrupt, but the sheriff stared him down effortlessly. “We'll move as fast as we can,” he said flatly. “Grayson Lanning didn't want Miss Toland to leave Dimilioc House. He's going to come after her soon enough, I figure. We don't want half a circle.”

“Damn black dog son of a bitch,” Belliveau muttered.

 “Don't say that!” Natividad told him instantly. “Really, don't. Black dogs walk so close to the edge of Hell anyway. Never damn a black dog, it could happen, do you see? And Grayson's not your enemy.”

Belliveau looked first taken aback, and then embarrassed. Father McClanahan said, “Good advice for us all, isn't it?”

Denoux added to the older deputy, “Don't be an ass, Frank. You know nobody would be left alive in this town – hell, this
county
– if it weren't for Grayson Lanning and Dimilioc.” He gave Natividad a firm nod and added, “We do know who the enemy is, miss – and who it isn't.”

Sheriff Pearson lifted a hand to reclaim all their attention, then turned to take a map from one of the young men. He flattened this out to show Natividad. The deputy had drawn a neat circle across the map in red ink, centered on the church and cutting ruthlessly through all other property. Natividad wished she'd thought to say not to use red. But the map was good. And red ink could stand for cheerful things just as easily as it could stand for blood, if she was careful how she thought about it. The map would do. She nodded.

 

Lewis was tiny. But when you had to go from one house or shop to another and draw pentagrams on all the windows; when you had to brush snow out of the way on all the streets between and draw lines along them; when you had to climb over fences and pick your way across a stubbled, snowy field and then across a frozen creek, it all made the town seem much larger. She already knew she wouldn't have time to make little
aparatos
for people to wear. Just laying the mandala and setting up the big crosses would take all the time there was.

Especially with the snow coming down so hard you could hardly see one building from the next. Natividad hadn't ever imagined snow could fall like this, in whirling curtains, so thick you could hardly see through it, driven by an icy wind that cut like a silver knife. Anything could be hidden behind that blowing snow. The three deputies might have shotguns, but they only had regular ammunition. Silver was expensive, Denoux said, and they'd used a lot during the vampire war, and if they wanted more, they had to buy it themselves. She bet now they wished they had.

But there was only a little way to go to find the place they would set up the first cross. This proved to be a nice warm home with a woman and a lot of children. Natividad liked them all immediately. She accepted a wedge of ginger cake the woman pressed on her – it had a wonderful cinnamon cream with it, dolloped on with a generous hand.

She let the children watch as she set up the first cross, off-center in a fancy, formal room right at the front of the house. It was a good cross, almost as tall as Natividad herself, made of some soft gray wood. It might have been plain except for the care with which it had been made. Its maker had wound a thin silver chain in a spiral around the horizontal crosspiece and painted, in silver paint, “I will fear no evil, for God is with me,” in elegant calligraphy down the front. A stand for the cross had also been supplied, but of course Natividad did not need to use the stand – she set the cross where it needed to go and drew the beginnings of her protective circle out to either side of it, and it stood firmly when she took her hands away.

“Leave somebody to watch to make sure nobody moves it before I've finished,” Natividad told Sheriff Pearson, while the magic she'd begun buzzed in her ears and sparkled along her nerves. “It'll stand forever then. Nobody will be able to knock it down while the circle holds.”

“And a fine conversation piece it'll be,” commented the woman who owned the house. “But don't be telling the brats it can't be knocked down; they'll take it as a challenge, won't they?” She wasn't exactly smiling, but Natividad thought she liked the cross. “Don't you fret, young lady: no one will overset your cross. Is that done, now?”

“Almost,” Natividad murmured. She drew pentagrams on all the windows of the house, filling the signs with moonlight as she went, and then for fun demonstrated to the children how they could now throw a ball or toy against a window and it would only bounce off, the glass ringing like a bell.

“Hah!” one of the boys said triumphantly. “We can
so
play baseball in the house! Can you do Mrs Wilson's windows, too?”

“Edith Wilson's next on our list,” Denoux said, amused and indulgent, while the children's mother pretended to be horrified.

“Use your back door now, not your front door,” Natividad told the woman before they left. “Every place behind you is safer now – not all the way safe, but better – but don't go out the front, OK?”

The woman promised that everyone would remember, scowled fiercely at her children until they promised, too, and made a show of locking her front door after Natividad when she and her deputies left.

After Mrs Wilson's house there was another house, and another after that, and then a shop, and a long curving driveway, and then more houses, and finally another cross to set, directly in front of somebody's kitchen sink, which might be inconvenient for them but that's where it needed to go. Then there were more houses and shops; and annoying fences; and a brush-tangled gulley to climb down into, which was hard, and then up out of, which was even harder; and then
more
houses and shops. And more after that.

“How much farther?” she asked, foggy with weariness and magic. She felt like she must have laid signs of protection and goodwill on every house in Lewis, not just the ones set in the planned mandala. Only after she'd spoken, with the sound of her words echoing in the air and Sheriff Pearson looking at her blankly, did she realize her words had been in Spanish. This must be like Alejandro, when his shadow closed around him: this struggle with language and memory and thought… The sheriff pointed, saying something she didn't understand, and she walked that way, blindly, trusting it was the right way to go.

But alarm broke into her weariness when she saw one of the deputies – Harris – pick up the last of the crosses as though it weighed nothing. The young man started ahead, and she realized the cross needed to go right out in the middle of a field.

The cross was a good one, Natividad's favorite of the four that the townspeople had provided. Taller than she was, this one had been made of some smooth polished wood riveted together with silver fittings. She'd thought at first they must really be steel, but no: they had the clean, bright feel of silver. Across the crossbar, letters spelled out “Christ Our Light,” and down the front, “Thanks Be To God.” The letters had not merely been painted on the cross, but carved into the wood before being highlighted with silver paint that had real silver in it.

So, the cross was fine. It wasn't the
cross
that was the problem; it was the field: a measureless blind white space with snow underfoot and snow blowing in whirling curtains through the air.

The cold was horrible, much worse than when she and her brothers had walked those last miles through the forest toward Dimilioc. There had been no wind that day. Today the wind bit like a vampire: ferocious and draining. Worse, it was impossible to see through all that white, impossible to see a man who walked ten steps away. Anything could hide in the blinding snow just as easily as in the dark of night, and Natividad found herself certain that something
was
hiding out there in that field, something – someone – that knew where they were, where
she
was, by a strange kind of vision that used malice instead of light to find her.

She stopped, trying to look in every direction at once, as frightened of the blind field as she was pressed by the need to finish the magic. Behind her, a line of soft light arced out, visible despite the blowing snow. This should have made her feel better. Safer. But if she could see the light of her protective circle by using senses that didn't exactly involve sight, didn't that mean Vonhausel might see her the same way?