Black Dog(118)

It had no words, that song, but nevertheless Alejandro thought he understood it. It was the kind of song that if you heard it once, you would hear it forever in your dreams. He was not sure whether it echoed only in his mind or also through the frozen air around them.

Then, as he approached Lewis, he was sure.





14



The black dogs that surrounded Natividad on the road were nothing like the Dimilioc black wolves. Natividad couldn’t exactly explain the difference. Vonhausel’s black dogs looked just like the Dimilioc wolves. Powerful muscles moved under their coal-black shaggy pelts, burning eyes smoldered yellow or orange or crimson above their long black-fanged jaws, smoke trickled from their mouths when they turned their broad heads to laugh their terrible, silent black-dog laughter at her… Alejandro looked like that when he changed, Papá had looked like that, Ezekiel or Grayson or any Dimilioc wolf looked like that. Only they hadn’t, they didn’t, they never did.

She was afraid of these black dogs in a way that she had not feared Ezekiel, not even the first time she had seen him, when none of them had been sure whether the Dimilioc executioner would kill them right there in the snow. She had known Ezekiel wouldn’t do that, even though at the time she had not realized that she knew it. She had been frightened, but she had not really been afraid, and she had not known that.

This was different. Now she was afraid. These black dogs wanted to kill her. They really did. They wanted to kill her, but they only ran beside the car instead. That was horrible, because it wasn’t the magic on the car that stopped them – they could run her off the road and break her windshield with stones and wait for her to come out or freeze. They didn’t do that because they were escorting her.

Vonhausel had captured a Pure woman, but he had killed her – used her up – breaking Natividad’s mandala. Of course he would want another Pure woman. That was why his black dogs were escorting her rather than trying to run her off the road. If Miguel was right, Vonhausel would especially want her. She expected that, she even counted on it, but she had not exactly realized how it would feel, to be surrounded by black dogs who hated her, to be heading toward a worse black dog who wanted not just to kill her but to use her for something awful.

This was not like any fear she had ever felt before. It made her feel small and stupid, like a rabbit trapped against a garden wall by a dog. She wished Ezekiel was with her now, lifting a disdainful eyebrow at the rabble of black dogs surrounding her. Or Grayson, solid and immobile as a mountain, sheathed in granite, with fire at its heart. She did not know which of them she longed for more. She would be so much less afraid if either of them were here with her.

But of course if either of them had been here with her, he would have died. That was why she hadn’t been able to tell Grayson her idea: he wouldn’t have let her do it, and he couldn’t have helped anyway. Not all the Dimilioc black wolves together could help her do this. Not even Ezekiel could fight so many black dogs, not even Grayson could make so many run away through the sheer force of his will. It was just stupid to think about how much safer she would have felt with either of them standing behind her. It was not useful at all to think about how frightened she felt now. How alone.

She had been afraid when she and her brothers had found Papá and Mamá – she shied away from that memory, but others crowded in at her, inescapable: the torn bodies left in the streets, the trees and flowers burned, everything burned and destroyed. But the black dogs who had done that, they had been gone. She had been afraid, but she had not even known that because her grief had been so much stronger. The grief then had weighed on her like she’d swallowed all the stones in the world.

And all the death had been her fault, at least partly her fault, because if she had been braver and stronger and had not run away to hide, maybe she would have been able to learn the things Mamá had tried to teach her. Then maybe together she and Mamá might have protected the village. Instead, Mamá’s magic had broken… Though she wanted now to remember exactly what Mamá had done and what had happened, though she had been trying all night to remember, she could not. She thought she would be crushed from the inside by the jagged weight of grief and memory.



She longed to go back, to go home, but that home was gone. Her home now was this frozen territory, filled with the ancient authority that Dimilioc was trying to hold and Vonhausel was trying to steal.

Her hands, where she gripped the high steering wheel, were cold. It had stopped snowing at last, but this only helped a little. She was not used to driving. Her shoulders ached from holding the wheel too tightly, and her neck from craning forward to see.