“Stupid little girl,” he said to her. “Grayson Lanning didn’t know what he had in his hand, when he gathered you up. Did all his black dogs trail after you like dogs after a bitch in season? I’m sure they did. That’s all they thought of you. Is that why you ran from them, pretty little bitch?”
Natividad shuddered, wondering desperately if she could possibly be fast enough to get back into the car and slam the door before he touched her. Probably not. He was so close. But she was poised to try it anyway.
Only then he said in a soft, absent tone, “And such a pretty little shield you’ve made. So delicate. Not very effective. But I wonder whether I might find some use for it?” He paused and then added, even more softly, speaking now more to himself than to her, “I wonder whether that little thing of yours really is nothing but a shield? Is that what your mother told you it was? It doesn’t look like a shield to me.”
His gaze had been caught at last by the aparato. It had grown brighter, she realized, and vaguer, and even colder to the touch. It numbed her hands. She caught her breath in a little gasp, and dropped it. She hadn’t meant to actually let it go and snatched after it again at once. But dropping it turned out to be the perfect tactic, because Vonhausel moved with black dog speed and precision to seize the thing before it could hit the ground.
It turned in his hand so fast that Natividad didn’t really see it turn, only knew that it had moved: it wrapped around Vonhausel’s hand and flung itself up his arm. The misty glow surrounding it flared into sharp-edged brilliance and flicked out like a blown-out match. But the thing itself was not gone. She knew it was still there, really, though she couldn’t actually see it, exactly. Vonhausel certainly knew it was there. He was trying to shake it loose, tear it off, cast it away. But he obviously couldn’t.
A short, sweet phrase of flute music danced in the air, the individual notes like sparks from a new-caught fire. The music trembled just beyond hearing, but Natividad could hear it if she sort of listened sideways. And the black dogs must have heard it, too, or at least perceived it somehow, because they had all frozen into immobility, even the soulless dead creatures that Vonhausel had made out of Zachariah’s and Harrison’s bodies. Vonhausel was screaming now, a horrible sound that scaled up and up until, like the music, it was something Natividad could only hear in her mind.
Her aparato twisted up Vonhausel’s arm and then across his whole body. It had become a silvery net of not-exactly-visible light. To Natividad, it seemed as fine and delicate and ephemeral as frost on a window. It had closed around… not Vonhausel’s body, she saw now, but his shadow. It clung to his shadow and tore it free of his body. The screaming she couldn’t exactly hear was the screaming of the shadow. It was a weapon she had made, after all, and it flared bright silver against the thick darkness of the shadow until both the weapon and the shadow went out together with a sudden snap that wasn’t exactly audible.
Natividad stared at the husk of Vonhausel’s body as it trembled and swayed and at last collapsed. He didn’t fall all at once, though, but slowly, so that at first she wasn’t sure he was falling at all and then she almost thought he might put out his arms after all and catch himself. But he didn’t. He was dead, he was gone; he’d gone into the fell dark after his shadow and his body sprawled lifeless and limp across the cracked pavement.
The soft thud his body made as it hit the ground seemed strangely anticlimactic, as though he should have fallen with a tremendous crash, as though the whole world should have been shaken by his fall. But there was nothing like that. Dead, stripped of his shadow and of his life, Vonhausel looked just like anybody. This seemed very strange and unexpectedly disturbing. The way his body sprawled bonelessly at Natividad’s feet made her stomach turn suddenly over. She couldn’t believe he was dead. She couldn’t believe she had killed him. She’d come here to do exactly this, but now that it was done, even though she knew she ought to be glad, even though she was glad, she was appalled, too. She had never killed anything before, except sometimes a chicken. This was… not the same at all.
But then her attention was jerked away from the thing she’d done because the air began to vibrate with a disturbing new sound, a sound like the howling of wolves set to music, only turned dark and bitter. This sound wasn’t just in her head: it was deep and loud and getting deeper and louder all the time. It shook dust and ash into the air. The pavement and rubble surrounding the gaping crack across the road began to break up and crumble into the chasm. The fire-edged darkness within that chasm seemed to creep out into the night. Natividad shuddered and crept back along the side of the car.