Black Dog(121)

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.