Black Dog(137)

So, really, lots of good things. Natividad sat on her pink bed, hugging a frilly pillow and staring out her window at the cloudless sky. She was horribly tired. She sort of wanted to talk to Ezekiel, she sort of wanted to know if he really thought she’d been brave, or just stupid. Maybe if he thought she was brave, maybe that meant he really might like her as a person and not just as a girl who happened to be Pure. Unless he thought she was stupid.

Of course, he would be asleep. He’d said she could wake him up. Obviously that would be stupid and pointless.

She ought to pull the curtains shut and burrow right down into this bed and pull the pink coverlet over her head and sleep for about thirty hours. She wanted to. Miguel was safe in his room and Alejandro was safe in his, they were probably already asleep, and everything was fine. Only, although Natividad was desperately tired, she knew she couldn’t sleep.

And if the aftermath of the battle was so bad for her… she wondered about Grayson. He’d lost so much. More than anybody else. Everything, nearly. And she’d so nearly pulled him into a battle where he’d have lost everything else. He hadn’t said a word about it. She knew he wouldn’t. Of course, everything had turned out alright, but that was mostly luck.

She knew exactly where he would be now. He would be alone. More alone than anybody else in the house. She remembered – it seemed like a long time ago – thinking that about Ezekiel when she’d first seen him, but really it was true of Grayson. Who would both want to intrude on the Master’s privacy and dare to? Well, Ezekiel, maybe. But exhausted black dogs, even friends, didn’t usually dare seek each other out, lest their control slip. And Ezekiel and Grayson were allies, but they weren’t exactly friends.

Natividad jumped out of her pink frilly bed before she could change her mind, and went to find something clean to wear.



She found Grayson, not exactly to her surprise, in the big room with the fireplace. Alone, so she had been right about that. She had only known him… had it really been less than a week? That was… That was really unbelievable.

Grayson didn’t glance around at Natividad. He was sitting in one of the big chairs, his hands resting on his thighs. He was staring into the fire. To Natividad, he didn’t look as though he was exactly worried. Or troubled – exactly. But he had lit a fire in the big fireplace; he, who could not be cold. He had lit it for comfort, then. Natividad hoped it comforted him. She doubted it could.

She walked across the room and, as she had the other time, sat down silently on the floor by his feet. She leaned her cheek against his knee, hoping to give him a measure of peace. Maybe she succeeded, because after a moment, he let his breath out in a long sigh and rested one of his broad hands on her hair.

She had not realized until that moment that she had stopped being even a little bit afraid of Grayson. That was kind of a surprise. She wondered when it had happened. Then she stopped thinking about it and just settled herself into the quiet stillness that was part of being Pure – so much a part that even all the violence and death of the past days hadn’t broken it.

That was how Ezekiel found them, when he opened the door and stepped into the room.

At first Natividad didn’t realize how it might look to him. Even after the warning stillness, brilliant with tension and danger, made her lift her head and turn to look at him, even when she saw Ezekiel’s eyes change from winter blue to pale flame-gold, she didn’t understand immediately. Then she figured it out, but she still didn’t understand just how bad a problem they had. Of course she knew that Ezekiel had been pressed far past any normal black dog’s breaking point, but he wasn’t a normal black dog and she hadn’t realized that he, too, had a breaking point or that he might actually have reached it. Grayson, of course, knew both those things far better than she. That was why he was on his feet and tossing her away to safety, already halfway into his own change, when Ezekiel hurtled across the room and smashed into him.

Ezekiel had shifted so fast that he was already fully in his black dog shape when he hit Grayson. Even though Grayson was the more massive when fully shifted, when Ezekiel actually slammed into Grayson, he was much bigger than the half-changed Master – and he already had jet-black fangs and terrible claws, the better to rip out Grayson’s throat or slash his spine into pieces. Which he was definitely trying to do, both, and he would have, too, except that Grayson shoved his half-human arm into Ezekiel’s jaws as he went down, and then twisted and threw the other black dog half across the room with a powerful kick delivered with legs that were almost entirely the heavily muscled limbs of a black dog. Blood and black ichor sprayed across the carpet – both of them were injured – but Ezekiel twisted in midair, flickering from black dog to human and back again before he landed, shedding his injuries and launching himself once more at Grayson before the still-wounded Master had even regained his feet.