He stood with his hands on the sill of a window in his sister’s room. It was a large, airy, cluttered, pink, frilly room that Natividad clearly loved, although she pretended to scorn pink as girlish. The room boasted pretty tables and chairs and a nice couch, and a bed with pink muslin curtains onto which Natividad’s whole room from home would almost have fitted. Alejandro wondered whose room it had been last year, and how that unknown girl had died.
Miguel had immediately claimed the larger of the adjoining rooms. It was much plainer than Natividad’s, with a narrow bed tucked into one corner next to an equally narrow window – no curtains around that bed – and, in the opposite corner, a big sturdy desk with one chair. The computer on the desk was the thing that had caught Miguel’s eye. He had gone to it immediately and was now scrolling through the news, calling out the most interesting headlines. “‘Vampires in retreat’?” he quoted, and laughed, looking over his shoulder into Natividad’s room through the adjoining door. “Well, more or less! If being all dead and burned counts as ‘in retreat’. But, here, here’s somebody who’s figured out the war’s over. It’s Fernandez, you know, that tipo from New Zealand. He says he thinks the fighting now is all infighting between ‘werewolf’ rivals. That’s pretty good, for a human.”
“You think he’s really un perro negro?” Alejandro asked.
“No, no.” Miguel’s eyes were back on the screen. He pulled the chair around and dropped into it, clicking rapidly as he followed one link after another. He said absently, “Fernandez is no black dog. He writes all from his head, you know? I think he’s just a sharp guy who puts things together. He was one of the first to figure out about the vampires, I mean about what their magic had been doing to ordinary humans all along, and then last August he worked out some good tactics for clearing vampires out of inner city slums without firebombs. You remember what happened in Russia.”
Natividad groaned. “How can you stand to read about things like that?” She lay flat on her bed and put a pillow over her head.
“Oh, now he’s just writing this great series of articles about possible vampire influence in the Ottoman Empire and France during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Anyway,” Miguel added, a little apologetically, “he’s human, alright, and I’m not surprised he’s also one of the first to figure out the war’s over.”
“The first war,” Alejandro said.
“What we have now, this isn’t a war. Except it’s kind of a war of all against all, I guess. And Vonhausel against us – but I guess we’ve left him behind now, alright.”
Miguel sounded very satisfied about that. Alejandro wasn’t so confident they’d traded the greater danger for a lesser. Though… Natividad had. Miguel, too, probably. That, at least, they had achieved with their flight.
But it had been a flight. A defeat. When they had been attacked, Alejandro had abandoned the battle and run. He closed his eyes, hearing Papá shout in memory, Run, ‘Jandro! Lead those bastards off us! He had obeyed, the raw desperation in Papá’s voice overwhelming his shadow’s bloodlust. Maybe that had done some good. Some of Vonhausel’s black dogs had pursued him. He had run and dodged all night and all the next day, fighting when he was brought to bay amid the broken country at the base of the mountains; he had killed one and another of Vonhausel’s black dogs and broken away and run again and never known whether Mamá had succeeded in hiding his younger brother and sister, whether Papá had managed to win time for Mamá herself to run.
When he had at last made his way back to the burned village, he had believed at first that everyone was dead. Everyone. That everything was lost. He had longed to scream out his rage and grief, to let his shadow rise and never try again to chain it. Only then he had found Miguel, pale with shock and fear, hiding in the hole beneath the root cellar, his scent masked by the stench of charred coffee and chilies. And then Natividad had crept out of the ring of burned pine-stubs which were all that remained of Mamá’s circle, covered with ash and blistered where burning pitch had rained down on her. She had been shaking, unable to speak at all for days, but she had hidden there somehow, by some trick of Pure magic, and was not hurt.
But Mamá was dead. And Papá. Both dead. They had found pieces… Alejandro flinched from the memory. If he had stayed… If he had disobeyed Papá and stayed to fight… He knew there was no logic to those doubts. Vonhausel had brought too many black dogs against them. If he had stayed, he would be dead, too. But… if he had fought, maybe he and Papá together could have won enough breathing room for them all to run. If Edward Toland had brought them here himself… if he had brought his Pure wife… obviously Grayson would have welcomed them all.