Black Dog(103)

The top sheet – to Natividad’s relief, more or less, now that other possibilities abruptly suggested themselves to her – lay across his legs and hips and came halfway up his stomach. His hair, damp from a bath, was a pale yellow: the exact color of mantaquilla – rich butter. His shoulders and neck were white against the dark sheets, except where the line of that nasty cut from Thaddeus’s knife showed. Someone had stitched it up. The black stitches looked awful and ugly against his pale skin, but no other wounds marked him. Ezekiel might have sustained horrible injuries – of course he must have – but obviously nothing else dealt by a silver weapon. Nothing his black shadow had been unable to carry away.

Though Ezekiel might not show many wounds, the hollows of his face had deepened over the past couple of days. He looked thin and worn. It was easy, usually, to forget how young he was. But, asleep like this, his shadow hidden by the dimness of the room, his air of impatient disdain eased away by sleep, Ezekiel looked not only young, but also vulnerable, even helpless.

If she just strolled across the room and tapped him on the shoulder, though, Natividad suspected he would suddenly not look young or vulnerable or harmless at all. There was probably a better way to wake him up. A way that didn’t involve getting too close.

Though, looking at Ezekiel like this, she didn’t want to wake him up at all. Not just because he obviously needed sleep or because he might be angry when he woke, but also because then he would know that she had intruded on his privacy. Natividad might be safe to wake him – more or less safe – but she found she bitterly resented Grayson’s order to do it.

Her embarrassment at her intrusion deepened as she hesitated, yet how could she just sneak away? Grayson would look at her and want to know why she hadn’t got Ezekiel for him like he’d ordered, and what would she say? That she’d been too embarrassed to wake him up?

Natividad took a quick breath and switched the lights on, then clapped her hands and immediately dropped to sit cross-legged on the floor so she would look as harmless as possible.

He was across the room so fast that she barely saw him move, didn’t have time to duck, barely had time to flinch. His eyes were a pale burning yellow with wicked pinpoint pupils, utterly inhuman. One long hand closed hard on her shoulder, pinning her back against the wall. Long black claws glittered on his other hand, foreshortened now into something that was almost a paw, ready to slash across her face or throat.

Natividad closed her eyes.

The blow didn’t fall. She had known he wouldn’t hit her, she’d known it from the first, but it still took a few seconds to make herself open her eyes again.

He knelt on one knee in front of her. His eyes, looking into hers with an intensity she could not read, was not sure she wanted to read, were again a completely human blue. Natividad had to force herself to look away from the concentrated ferocity of his stare. This was harder than she’d expected – harder than it should have been. Once she had lowered her eyes, she saw that though Ezekiel might not have let go of her, he had dropped his other hand to rest on the floor, and now that hand, too, was completely human again.

“Natividad,” he said. His tone was light, cool, faintly mocking – utterly at odds with the violence of his response to her clap. Releasing her, he stood – an economical, fluid movement, but not nearly so fast as his initial lunge off the bed.

He was wearing shorts, Natividad was relieved to see. Well, more or less relieved. He didn’t seem embarrassed to find her here in his bedroom. But then, he didn’t seem angry, either. Or offended, or surprised, or even much interested. She didn’t believe all this lack of response.

She said, trying to match his coolness, “I’m sorry to disturb you. But Grayson sent me to say he wants you. Immediately, he said. In the–”

“I know where he is,” Ezekiel said. He didn’t exactly snap the words. Turning, he walked unhurriedly across the room and, opening a door she had not noticed, reached in for a robe. The robe was medium gray, with here and there touches of odd off-tones: ash-gold and rose-gray and gray-lavender, the colors of the earliest dawn on a stormy day.

The robe looked Japanese to Natividad, but maybe that impression had simply been created by the painting in the other room and the sculpture in this one. It ought to have looked too fancy for Ezekiel. Or maybe not too fancy exactly, but too… too something. But, anyway, whatever she meant, it didn’t. It looked exactly right for him. It occurred to her for the first time that everything he wore always looked exactly right for him. She wondered if he chose clothing on purpose to have this effect or whether he would simply look good in anything, including, say, torn blue jeans and a faded plaid shirt.