Black Dog (43 page)

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.

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 of 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.