Black Dog(139)

The heaviness of the furnishings and the richness of the colors might have made the suite seem close or oppressive, but the rooms were so big, with high vaulting ceilings, that they seemed instead luxurious and sort of… gracious, Natividad decided, was the word. She had not pictured rooms like these for the Dimilioc Master, but as soon as she saw them she knew they fit him. She wondered whether his wife had furnished these rooms, chosen the colors… They had probably been happy here.

And now his wife was gone, leaving the wrong kind of silence and emptiness. Natividad knew too much about that herself, but Grayson had lost so much more. She was happy to draw the signs for a different kind of silence. For peace. There were already signs on the windows: Stars of David, and, older, fainter traces of pentagrams like hers. And, even older than that, so old even Natividad could barely see them, mandalas – circles with crosses in them, but not a evenly quartered circle such as she was used to, but offset crosses more like the Christian symbol. But all the signs were alike, really. She could tell that when she brushed her hand across them. All of them were meant to bring peace. To quiet the stricken heart.

Natividad didn’t mention the older signs. She drew her pentagrams one after another, fitting them in among the others, and set them alight with wishes for peace and acceptance, with the memory of sorrow and a wish for heart’s ease. Drawing them brought her a measure of peace, at last; too much so, so that she was stumbling and yawning when she finished drawing her last pentagram on a bedroom window.

“Go to bed,” Grayson told her when she was finished. His tone was curt, but no longer inhuman. No longer dangerous. Though he did not thank her, he touched her shoulder very lightly when she went past him. Natividad lifted her hand to rest on his for a moment, and looked briefly into his face before she remembered she shouldn’t. But when he didn’t seem offended, she didn’t bother to lower her gaze.

To her, Grayson looked worn, tired. But she could not see anger in his face. “You go to bed, too,” she said to him, and waited for his nod – curt, like his tone, but still not angry – before she left. She did not remember, later, finding her way back to her own room or climbing into her pink bed or falling asleep.





18



Natividad was not surprised that Grayson wanted her with him in the morning, when he went down to confront Ezekiel. Of course he wanted her there, for lots of reasons, which was fine because she wanted to be there anyway. She felt quite fiercely that she wouldn’t have allowed Grayson to go down those stairs without her. But she didn’t have to worry about it anyway, because there was a note waiting for her when she woke up.

It was late, after 8. That wasn’t surprising, but even so she didn’t take time for breakfast. She wasn’t hungry anyway. She didn’t exactly feel sick, but she was nervous enough that she didn’t want anything to eat. But the note, signed with a strong angular “G L”, said “I will require your presence downstairs. Come find me when you are ready,” in big blocky letters. So, that seemed to mean she had time to splash water on her face and dress carefully in her best and most grown-up blouse, one without any girlish lace or frills, and a plain brown skirt. She had time to put her hair up and find her pink crystal earrings. She looked at herself carefully in the mirror as she put the earrings in. The girl who looked back at her looked so much like Mamá… but her eyes were darker now, Natividad thought. Or maybe that was her memory of shadows and darkness.

She found Grayson not in the room with the fireplace, but in his own suite, in his study, seated in a big chair behind an ornate walnut desk. He was working, a pad of paper open on the desk and a thick pen of bone or ivory in his hand, but he put the pen down when she knocked gently on the doorframe. He looked tired, but not with the previous night’s desperate on-the-edge exhaustion. He looked almost entirely human. His shadow, pooled beneath his chair, was very dense but also very quiet.

He shoved the pad away, looked her up and down without expression, nodded, and got to his feet. “You are well?”

“Yes, of course,” Natividad assured him. “Um… you?”

Grayson gave her a scant nod.

“And, um… Ezekiel?”

“That, we shall have to determine.”

Natividad nodded. “Only I meant, that is, you won’t…”

“We shall have to determine,” Grayson repeated tersely. He indicated with a gesture that she should proceed him back out to the public areas of the house.

Natividad took an obedient step backward, but she also said, “But…”