Black Dog(131)

There was nothing he could do that could change what was going to happen. But he would fight anyway. He stepped toward the edge of her pentagram, hauling Natividad with him, his bones broadening, his arms contorting into the powerful forelimbs of the black dog.

“It’s not Vonhausel who matters,” Natividad cried in his ear. “Alejandro! It’s not Vonhausel who matters, it’s his magic. Stop, will you, and listen to me! Stop!”

The desperation in her voice dragged Alejandro to a halt despite himself. He tilted his head, staring at his sister in impatient anger. The meaning of her words gradually came clear to him – or at least the meaning of each word in turn. She was speaking in Spanish, which helped a little. But what she actually meant, he did not know.

Releasing him, Natividad waved her aparato under his nose. There were traces of his silver knife in the thing – the knife itself might have been useful, but Alejandro had no idea what Natividad meant to do with this indistinct tool that seemed more a dense glowing mist than a knife. Though a glowing mist mottled with blurred patches of darkness, which seemed very strange for a work of Pure magic.

“I’ve figured it out! I remember! I think I do! I think I’ve figured it out!” his sister shouted at him, still in Spanish. “Did you hear what Vonhausel said? Look what he did to this! Look at it! It’s light and shadow both! Like my mandala, do you see? And Mamá said that, about making darkness cooperate with light! I remember what she did, I remember her doing it, I didn’t understand, but now I do! I can use this, I think I can, I think I see how. It was Papá who helped her, at least he tried to, only he couldn’t reach her, but I know what she tried to do, I think I know, I’m sure I do! ‘Jandro, listen! You have to help me! Trust me!”

Alejandro stared at her. He longed for fighting and blood and death… but Natividad seemed so sure. He had tried so hard to keep her safe, but she had not come to this place tonight to be safe. He could not protect her, but she was not looking for protection. Natividad wasn’t asking for rescue, but for help. For help doing something.

And Alejandro found that he did trust her. He wanted to help her do whatever she had thought of to do, but he had no idea how he could. The kind of magic she did was for the Pure, not for black dogs.

“I need your shadow!” Natividad cried, half command and half plea. “I need your shadow, ‘Jandro! I don’t think… I think it won’t… I’m pretty sure I can… If I can’t – but I have to have it. Please, ‘Jandro!”

Alejandro had no idea what his sister was trying to say. Except that she wanted to do something with or to his black dog shadow. This seemed impossible. But she sounded very urgent. He crouched down and stared at her, waiting. But then for a long moment, it seemed she would do nothing after all. She was afraid – afraid of him, he thought at first; then he realized that she was afraid of what she meant to do, afraid of hurting him, maybe afraid that what she needed to do might even kill him. Fury and terror and a strange wild grief tangled inside of him, but though the anger was only anger, he did not understand the grief.

Then he did. It was grief for Natividad, who might kill him by what she did and then feel the horror of that for the rest of her life; and it was also grief for Dimilioc, which would surely be destroyed in a very few minutes if the magic she worked didn’t succeed. He wanted to tell her – he wanted to say – he did not know what; his mouth was a black dog’s savage muzzle, incapable of framing human words, and anyway he no longer possessed any clear command of language. But he turned his head aside, offering Natividad his throat.

She caught a sobbing breath, laid one hand on his massive heavy-jawed face, and stabbed him at the base of the throat with the aparato she had made, with the part of it that had been a knife. Alejandro was only just able to turn his instinctive leap away into an abortive twitch, and reduce his equally instinctive snap to a ferocious snarl. Natividad utterly ignored her own danger. She twisted the aparato and jerked it back out.

She had stabbed Alejandro at the base of his thick black-dog neck, which should have been a very dangerous wound because the knife was silver, only of course it was the knife she had blooded for him. But the aparato was not exactly a knife anymore, not really like a knife at all, and the injury it dealt was not exactly a normal injury. Neither blood nor ichor flowed where it had stabbed into him. The injury hurt; it burned, only not exactly, because the burn was cold instead of hot.

When Natividad jerked out the aparato, it felt to Alejandro as though all the blood and fire in him was torn out with it. Cold struck inward through his body, threaded through all his veins, froze him from the inside out. Alejandro felt his bones turn to ice. He groaned, folding to the ground – he was in his human shape again, though he had not even realized he was changing. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but neither protected him from the horrifying cold. He could not speak. He could not move.