“I’m sorry,” Natividad offered, because she was, although it was hard to say for what, exactly. Just for everything. She could see what Ezekiel meant. She liked him better and better – she was beginning to feel flattered that he wanted her. Only then it occurred to her that when she’d accused him of only wanting her because she was Pure, he hadn’t actually denied it. She took a quick breath and went past him quickly, not looking at him.
Grayson stood up, expressionless, when Ezekiel opened the door. Ezekiel walked into the room, faced him directly, dropped without hesitation to one knee, bowed his head, and said coolly, “Master. I beg your pardon for the delay.”
Grayson nodded curtly, still grimly expressionless. He said to Natividad, “Everyone, here, in an hour. Your brother as well. Both your brothers.”
Natividad nodded, startled and uneasy. But Grayson gave her a dismissive little jerk of the head, and she ducked and fled.
She also decided that if Grayson wanted everybody, all his black dogs, well, somebody else could tell them so. Ezekiel had definitely constituted her quota. She would find Alejandro, and he could wake up sleeping black dogs.
12
Natividad had thought her brother would be in his room, but he wasn’t. She found him at last in a basement room she hadn’t previously known existed. This basement had its own stairway hidden behind a forbidding door of iron-bound black wood, which suggested disquieting things about what might lie below. Natividad would never have tried it, only when she couldn’t find Alejandro, she made a mirror in the entranceway of the house into a trouvez, a spell of finding. A hand mirror would have been easier to use – she could hardly carry the hallway mirror around with her – but once the glass shimmered with light, she caught the light in her hands, shut her eyes, turned in a circle, thought of Alejandro, and then walked briskly forward without paying any attention to her direction. When she found herself in front of the iron-bound door, she stood blinking at it, sure it would be locked. But its latch gave easily to her hand, revealing a dim, narrow stairway.
The stairway was angular and steep, with uneven treads. It led to a narrow, long, cold room with naked light bulbs dangling on thin chains, casting a harsh too-bright light across walls of unfinished granite and a whole row of cages like the one where they’d spent their first night in this house. All of the cages were much smaller than that one, and all but one were totally bare of furnishings. That one cage, nearest the door, contained a thin mattress and a single prisoner: a small, savage-eyed moon-bound shifter, who lifted her lip with silent loathing, fangs glinting dangerously.
Natividad resisted the urge to retreat back up the stairs. She said to Alejandro, who, beside Ethan Lanning at the far end of the room, was turning to her with surprise, “I guess that’s Cass Pearson?”
“Sí,” Alejandro said wearily, with a not-very-interested glance at the shifter. “I guess we could move her back to the big cage now. Unless Grayson wants it free for some reason.”
“We’ve got more important things to worry about than any moon-bound cur, whoever’s kid she is,” snapped Ethan. He was almost as worn-looking as Alejandro, but far less welcoming; his eyebrows had drawn down in a disapproving expression when he saw Natividad. His father had just died, though, and Natividad knew exactly what that was like, the horrible days right afterward. She didn’t want to think about it, but he had a right to be angry and upset with the world.
She also, however, made a mental note to remember to feed the little shifter, afraid that, if Ethan’s attitude was characteristic, no one else would. She gave her a wary look. There was no sign, in Cassie’s shadow form, of the fragile-seeming girl Natividad had glimpsed. She was crouching very still, but it was not the stillness of patience or resignation or surrender. Her fiery eyes gleamed malevolently. If anybody opened the cage door, Natividad bet Cassie wouldn’t just sit there quietly. Miguel had been right: Sheriff Pearson definitely did not need to see his daughter right now. If her father reached between those cage bars – and he probably wouldn’t be able to resist – she was pretty sure Cassie would rip his hand off.
Alejandro turned back to what he had been doing, which was, apparently, something to do with Miguel’s guns.
Miguel’s new rifles were neatly racked in one of the empty cells, his equipment for making ammunition arranged on a table in another cell. Two of the remaining cells were occupied by stacks of dusty boxes. Nothing she saw explained to Natividad why she hated the room, which she did. It wasn’t just poor Cass Pearson. This was something else, a feeling, as though she could feel echoes of old despair and rage leaking from the walls and through the silver-laced bars of all the cells. She looked uneasily at the way the shadows of the rifles stretched, long and black and spidery, across the walls. She said, more or less involuntarily, “What an awful room.”