Black Dog(20)

When Ezekiel Korte tried once more to hit him across the face, he blocked the blow – then found the Dimilioc executioner gripping his arm instead, shoving him back, pinning him against one of the heavy chairs. Ezekiel was strong, stronger than Alejandro, and there was a terrifying ruthlessness in his cold eyes, something harder and more deliberate than ordinary black-dog savagery. Alejandro wanted to change… He needed to change… He would not. He fought his shadow instead, struggling to hold to human shape. His shadow began to yield, began to sink down once more.

Then Ezekiel said, with deadly, unemotional contempt. “This is what you call control?” His grip tightened, close to crushing Alejandro’s arm. “If you had been there when black dogs attacked your mother, would you have fought them? I don’t think you would. I think you would have yielded to the scent of death and joined them instead. I think you would have fought the rest, but only for the chance to spill her blood yourself–”

Alejandro’s shadow flooded abruptly upward as rage jolted his control and the change took him. He snapped at Ezekiel’s wrist with savage fangs, slashed at his belly with ebony claws. But Ezekiel was not there to meet his attack. He had melted back, away from Alejandro, but he did not seem alarmed. He had not allowed his own shadow to rise, but watched Alejandro coolly from his human form, unmoved by visible fear or anger. Alejandro understood with the rational part of his mind that he was right to be afraid of Ezekiel, but his black dog, thoroughly ascendant, wanted to stalk the Dimilioc verdugo and tear his human body into bloody pieces.

“Stop,” Grayson said calmly. The Master’s power rolled out through the room, smothering all the shadows, pressing Alejandro’s shadow down flat, forcing it back into an insubstantial darkness.

This was not a thing that Alejandro recognized. It was not something Papá could have done, nothing Papá had ever described. But Grayson Lanning forced him back into human shape as though it was nothing, as though it took neither thought nor effort. Alejandro found himself on his hands and knees on the thick rug, hardly able to tell what shape he wore. He was trembling with reaction, which shamed him, but he could not stop.

He did not want to look up. The flat contempt in Ezekiel’s voice still echoed in his memory, and he knew when he looked up he would find that contempt staring back at him from the eyes of all the Dimilioc wolves. Worse, he knew that if Papá were here, he would look at his son in the same way. He would say with Ezekiel, “This is what you call control?” Alejandro wanted to slink out of this room, into the gathering dark of these strange cold mountains, and run south, a shadow hardly more substantial than the natural darkness.

Above him, having never stirred from his place, Grayson’s heavy voice asked, “Well?”

Alejandro fixed his gaze on the gray and red pattern of the rug. His shadow’s claws had scored heavy lines through the wool. He stared at his own hands. Human again. They looked like anyone’s hands. He said nothing.

“Alejandro,” said Grayson, and waited.

Alejandro did not want to look at the Dimilioc Master. But at last, having no choice, he straightened his back and forced himself to meet Grayson Lanning’s eyes. To his surprise, he did not find contempt there. There was even a kind of sympathy in that dark stare.

“Ezekiel can break anyone’s control,” Grayson told him quietly. “I would have been amazed if he had not broken yours. Did you think otherwise?”

Alejandro stared at him. He felt young and stupid, and violently resented being made to feel that way. His shadow snarled in the back of his mind. He set himself to hold his human form and mind against it.

But Grayson said, “I am not holding you now. Let your shadow rise. Let it up, boy, and let us have a look at your black dog. Ezekiel – loose your shadow as well, if you please. I would not like to have to replace the furniture in this room.”

Ezekiel tilted an amused eyebrow at the Master of Dimilioc and melted into his shadow, so swiftly and cleanly that Alejandro could not keep from staring.

Ezekiel’s black dog form was shaggy, huge, with massive bones and powerful shoulders. Its skull was broad, its muzzle blunt, its wide-set yellow eyes gleaming with fire as well as with vicious intelligence. Alejandro would have said that there was nothing of Ezekiel Korte in that malevolent stare, and yet he would never have mistaken this black dog for any other man’s shadow.

Alejandro had seen his father’s shadow form. He had worn his own like a mask that had seemed at times more real than his own body. He had wrapped himself in his shadow to run or hunt or to fight stray black dogs and the moon-bound curs they had made. But Ezekiel’s black dog was more frightening than any other he had ever seen. It was not larger than his father’s shadow body. But it seemed somehow more solid, more auténtico. More real. When Ezekiel dropped his jaw in a terrible black-dog laugh, the contained heat of his fiery eyes seemed to burn out across the entire room, until Alejandro was amazed the rug and the chairs did not catch fire.