Black Dog (34 page)

 Ezekiel was up and back in his black dog shape, but clearly far from his best. He crouched near Thaddeus, with Keziah on his other side. Alejandro would never have guessed that either Thaddeus or Keziah would go out of their way to protect the Dimilioc
verdugo
, but so it seemed. Ethan slid out of the fiery press of shadows to take a place on Thaddeus's other side, and Alejandro moved with some haste to join them – five Dimilioc black wolves together would still be a daunting target for Vonhausel's
callejeros
, however many of those might remain. And there was Amira after all, lamed, with slashes all down her flank and thigh, clearly unable to shift to human form or she would have let her shadow take away her injuries. But she was still on her feet, still moving.

Grayson, looming above them from his place, now uncontested, high on the burning rubble of the church, stared down at their enemies with a low singing snarl of loathing.

Vonhausel answered, and all around them dozens of his black dogs echoed that snarl. There seemed even more than before. Alejandro tried again to estimate their number and got an unreasonable answer; tried to count them in order and got a different answer, no more believable. There could not
be
more black dogs now than at the beginning of the fight – the numbers were impossible…

Somewhere near at hand, a deep-voiced motor rumbled to life, then another. And another. It took Alejandro a moment to place the sound, so unexpected: the deep roar of a bus engine. He thought first that the townspeople were fleeing, they had held a “Plan B” in mind all along.
Bueno
, good. He even wished, as far as it was in him to be concerned, that all those human people might make it out of Vonhausel's reach, get clear of all black dog wars – though this battle might end soon enough anyway, and then
Dios
protect anyone helpless on the road, away from shelter. But his shadow did not care about any of that. It wanted only to survive and to kill its enemies.

Alejandro agreed with those aims. He did not think any of the Dimilioc wolves were going to live through this battle, but if they could not survive, then he wanted to kill lots and lots of enemies. That, he thought they could do.

Along with all the rest, allies and enemies alike, he stared up at Grayson and waited for some signal to resume battle.

Then the first bus roared into the town square,
abarrotado
–
crammed with people – with shotguns and rifles bristling out the windows. The second bus followed, one of those stupid yellow ones that advertised to any black dog,
Here are children, come and kill them
.
But it was just as crowded as the first, with as many guns poking out its windows. After them came a car.

The first bus squealed to a halt beside the ruins of the church and everyone on one side began shooting. Shooting carefully, only at Vonhausel and his black dogs. It was immediately apparent that some of them had silver ammunition. The black dogs, snarling their rage, retreated from the open spaces of the town square, finding shelter behind the surrounding buildings. The shooting stopped… Alejandro guessed that the human people did not have very much silver ammunition, maybe not much ammunition of any kind. He suspected Vonhausel and his shadow pack would make that same guess very soon.

Grayson bounded down the rubble of the church amid a cascade of burning fragments of wood and shards of stone and glass, skidding to a halt a few feet from the bus. Amazingly, no one shot at him. The humans called back and forth to one another, but Alejandro had lost nearly all his capacity for human language and could not work out what they said.

A small man with fine features, a tight-set mouth, and eyes the hard clear gray of granite, leaned out the window of the car. He held a pistol in one hand, but he was not pointing the weapon at Grayson. He must have recognized the Dimilioc Master, because he said slowly and formally, in a loud voice, “We ask Dimilioc for shelter from the fell dark.”

The words sorted themselves out only gradually for Alejandro, but Grayson must have worked out the meaning more quickly, or never lost his understanding of human speech, because rather than tearing the man apart for his temerity, he tipped his broad head down in something like a nod. The sound he made was savage, angry – but not hostile. It was a sound of agreement.

 The human looked into the Master's face, ill-advisedly. So, the man was not so very experienced – he did not seem afraid, nor did he lower his gaze as he should have. He only went on, a good deal less formally but with considerable practicality, “Yours is the only road open. The road to Brighton's blocked, they've thrown trees down across it, but we hope the road to Dimilioc is clear.”

Even speaking to the Master of Dimilioc in his black dog form, the man possessed a formidable composure. And despite his lack of proper submissive manners, he was obviously right. Because Alejandro had more or less understood the human's words, he was not surprised when Grayson turned his head to glare at his remaining wolves, then jerked his head at the buses.

The Dimilioc wolves did not ride
on
the buses, of course – not even on their roofs – except for Ezekiel, who lay stretched out on the flat-topped yellow bus and sank deadly claws right through the metal to brace himself on the curves. Alejandro did not want to think about the
verdugo
's temper at being forced to show the world his weakness; he avoided even the briefest glance up at that bus.

The rest of the Dimilioc wolves, even Amira who was still injured, ran alongside the buses and car, keeping to the slow pace that was the best such cumbersome vehicles could manage. Vonhausel had apparently decided to let them go. He knew, of course, where they were going. Apparently he saw no need to risk his black dogs to stop them getting there. Anyway, he had made himself uncontested master in Lewis. If that had been his aim, he had succeeded.

If his aim had been, as Miguel had guessed, to give his shadow pack a victory, he had succeeded at that, too. If he had wished to defeat Dimilioc in battle and thus recover the pride his earlier defeat had cost him… he had also succeeded in that.

 

Dimilioc itself proved undisturbed. Alejandro had been haunted all during the run by the idea that Vonhausel's black dogs, not constrained to escort buses along the road, might make the shorter cross-country journey and be at the house long before the Dimilioc black wolves could return. However much silver ammunition Miguel might have made, however good his aim, or Natividad's, or Thaddeus's wife's, Alejandro was more than half convinced that the Dimilioc wolves would come back to find the house in flames and their vulnerable brothers and sisters and wives and children all dead. Or hostages, if Vonhausel was clever enough to take hostages, and had the control necessary to keep hostages alive. Alejandro thought the black dog was certainly that clever, but could not guess whether he had that kind of control.

But the house was fine. Whatever Vonhausel intended, apparently it did not include tearing down the house that was Dimilioc's heart. At least, not yet.

Natividad and DeAnn, and DeAnn's little boy ran out to meet the vehicles, which made Alejandro nervous and angry. What if someone from the buses shot at them? There was no reason anybody should, but what if somebody did? But Miguel had stayed above on the balcony with a rifle, so they were not
so
careless.

Natividad ran to the car leading the first bus and put her hands up to greet the man who swung quickly down from the bus – the human leader who had spoken to Grayson and who now said something to Natividad with similar familiarity.

Alejandro fought down a surge of black dog possessiveness that made him want to rip the human's guts out. He should be glad that Natividad knew the man, that she approved him; he must be a decent man as well as a brave one. But Alejandro resented him, almost hated him – or maybe his shadow resented the man; it was harder even than usual to tell where his black dog's thoughts and feelings left off and his own began. Alejandro, suddenly weary beyond belief of that confusion, struck out of his shadow, back toward the clearer thought and cleaner emotions of his human self.

 

11

 

At first Natividad was so glad to see the Dimilioc wolves returning to the house, so happy to see Alejandro safe among them, that she did not think too much about the buses or what they meant. Then Miguel shook his head and said, “So, that's not good.”

Natividad looked at her twin in surprise. “
Qué
?
” Then she thought again about the buses and said in a smaller voice, “Oh.”

“How many people do you guess they could cram onto those buses?”

Not very many, Natividad thought. She tried to count bus seats in her mind's eye, tried to guess how many people might be able to stand in the aisle. How many people could you cram onto a bus in an emergency? Fifty? More? She was pretty sure the answer wasn't
everybody in Lewis
.

Well, maybe the rest of the townspeople were OK, they just hadn't come on those buses, they were still sheltering in the church or someplace else in town. Except if that was right, why the buses at all? Had Grayson decided to bring a lot of humans to Dimilioc for some reason of his own? But those buses looked really crowded… and the Dimilioc wolves escorting them looked
malísimo
. They looked to Natividad like they had been defeated. They looked like… well, like refugees. And… She counted twice, then again. “I think, only five Dimilioc wolves,” she said, tentatively. Including ‘Jandro,
gracias a Dios
.

“Seven, counting Thad, thank God,” said DeAnn. “See your daddy?” she added to her son, pointing, and little Conway leaned forward, a breath away from shifting to his black dog form and leaping down off the balcony to run out and meet his father. DeAnn took a firmer hold on his belt, warning the boy, “Don't you dare!” Then the Pure woman glanced at Natividad and jabbed a finger to indicate the front of the little convoy. “Grayson's young bastard of an executioner's up on the roof of that last bus, see? And there's a black wolf behind the first bus, did you see that one? That makes it seven altogether.”

Natividad hadn't spotted Ezekiel until DeAnn pointed him out, maybe because she just hadn't expected to see him riding up on the roof of a bus. She tried to think of any reason the Dimilioc executioner would be riding instead of running. The explanations that came to mind were all bad. She also tried to think of reasons why only seven out of ten Dimilioc wolves would be escorting those buses. Maybe Grayson had sent the others on some kind of errand. She couldn't see Zachariah or Harrison. It made sense for Grayson to send one or both of his strongest wolves and closest allies on some important errand. But the cold running through her bones was fear. She just did not believe any so-innocent explanation for the absence of black wolves who should have been there.

She said with stiff reluctance, “I think they lost. I think Vonhausel won. I guess… I guess that means he broke through my mandala.” She paused, then added painfully, “It's my fault. I made them a flawed mandala and it didn't hold…”

Miguel shook his head, but he didn't disagree because how could either of them know what had happened? He didn't say anything. What was there to say?

DeAnn, leaning her hip on the balcony railing, swung the rifle Miguel had given her to a more comfortable position over her shoulder, gave her son a warning glare in case he took this for permission to slip off the balcony, and said, clinically, “Mandalas are good, strong protection. Stronger than plain circles, more resistant to demonic influence than helices. That's what my mama taught me. Your mama teach you the same?”

Natividad nodded. She felt numb. She felt sick.

“And you anchored your mandala with a church in the middle and a cross at each cardinal point, yeah? That right?” DeAnn stared out over the buses as though she might be able to see all the way through the winter forest to Lewis. “Your mama ever tell you how a vampire could take down a protective mandala?”

“
Sí
,” said Natividad, but so softly she wasn't sure the other woman would hear. She hadn't thought of that possibility. She would almost rather… She
would
rather believe it was her flawed mandala that had been at fault. But she knew what DeAnn meant. She whispered, “Yes. Yes, she told me.”

DeAnn nodded without looking at Natividad. “I guess a sister died out there today.”

Natividad, her hands closed tightly on the balcony railing, did not answer. Below, the buses growled and slid as they changed gears and headed across the open ground toward the Dimilioc house.

“No hay señas de los enemigos perros negros
,” Miguel said. But he did not seem very happy about this. He snapped the safety back on his rifle, frowning.

“I'm going down,” Natividad said, and barely waited for her twin to nod agreement before ducking through the sliding door that led back into the house and heading for the stairs. Little Con jumped off the railing at last, and DeAnn swung around and ran for the stairs with a rough urgency that showed how much she wanted to get out of the house, get out there to meet those buses with her son.

Sheriff Pearson leaped down from the first bus just as DeAnn and Natividad came down the steps. Natividad headed for him, took his hands, and looked quickly into his face. The sheriff didn't seem to have been injured, but he had been badly hurt, she thought, in ways that did not show. She took a breath, dreading to ask, to know…

“I don't think anyone could have done better,” he told her.