Black Dog(132)

But he saw his sister leap to her feet, silver mist and black shadows trailing like water from her fingers. He knew she had somehow taken his shadow. She was doing something with it, braiding her light and his shadow together into a thick rope that sparkled and flashed and dripped with darkness, whirling this over her head and casting it up and out, like a vaquero with a lariat, so that it twisted as it rose and then settled as a huge loop, broadening as it fell, broadening far more than seemed reasonable, so that by the time it fell, it encompassed half the town and the whole surging pack of embattled black dogs.

Then she knelt down by Alejandro, her hand warm on his cheek. She was weeping, he realized. She thought maybe she had killed him, and he wanted to tell her he was alright, but though the words were there on his tongue, he could not make his numb mouth make the sounds. But he was shaking with cold, so she must have realized he still lived. She put one slim arm around him, helping him sit. So then they sat together, shaking with cold and fear, and watching to see what exactly would happen.

Natividad’s magic did not seem, in that first moment, to touch the true black dogs. But all across the battleground, the moon-bound shifters were suddenly forced into human shape. Alejandro saw it with Cass Pearson first: the little shifter was fighting with Keziah and Amira, the trio supported by Thaddeus on one side and Ethan on the other. Cassie held her place in the trio with silent, vicious intensity, the tight teamwork keeping her alive when so many other shifters had been killed. But when her corrupted shadow was torn out of her by the shadowed circle Natividad had flung around them all, she staggered abruptly into human form and stood, fragile and dazed and helpless, in the midst of the battling black dogs.

With a kindness that Alejandro would never have expected, and with startling aplomb, as though shifters that suddenly turned human during the full moon were perfectly ordinary, Keziah caught the girl’s arm and flung her out of the way, against the shelter of a broken wall. Many of the other shifters were immediately killed by the black dogs who surrounded them. Only the black dogs were then distracted by the collapse of one shadow-possessed undead black dog, and then another. And another.

The shifters were just an accident. Something about the magic that corrupted their shadows must be like the horror Vonhausel had made of dead black dogs, because really those undead black dogs had been Natividad’s target all along. Alejandro understood this at last, and then was ashamed it had taken him so long to grasp it. She had woven her aparato with his shadow and made both together into a literal tool for catching shadows. The shadows of the living black dogs must be too much a part of them to be torn away, but somehow Natividad’s aparato was ripping the shadows away from Vonhausel’s dead black dogs. The Zachariah-creature collapsed almost last, a heartbeat before it might have finally torn Ezekiel in half, and Ezekiel, at that moment in human form, stared down at his uncle’s body without expression. Everything had paused, all the combatants hesitating in wary disbelief as they tried to understand what had happened and what it meant.

Vonhausel himself, in human form, turned in a circle, staring around in outraged dismay. Alejandro saw the exact moment when he realized who had done this to him. He turned to stare across the broken ruins of the town at Natividad, who straightened her shoulders and returned his stare. Alejandro was briefly afraid Vonhausel would rush across the field of battle and attack her.

But Vonhausel did not come. He could not. He, like all the black dogs in which he had invested shadows, was actually dead. Alejandro saw him realize this, too, and what it meant. He flung back his head and stretched out his hands to the dark, to the crimson fires that still smoldered through the town and in the depths of the shattered earth. He might have done something, worked some corrupted magic, if he had had time. But he did not have time. He lost his shadow last of all the dead black dogs. But he lost it. Alejandro almost thought he could see the shadow tear itself free and disappear, or dissolve into the darkness – or maybe fall into the glowing chasm that gaped at Vonhausel’s feet; he could not exactly tell. It almost seemed to somehow do all of those things at once. Vonhausel’s body, left untenanted, collapsed slowly. There was no question about what happened to it. It fell into the break in the street and disappeared without a sound. The ruddy glow from the fires below flared up, dully crimson, and then went out, leaving only darkness.

Or not quite only darkness. In the east, beyond the ruined church, the first pale glimmer of the dawn shone across the winter sky, magically transmuting the smoke and ash of burning to silver and pearl.