No way to know. He had obeyed Papá’s desperate command; Papá and Mamá had died, and he and Miguel and Natividad had lived. No way to know what else might have happened…
“Could we please talk about something else?” Natividad asked plaintively, probably aware of his rising rage and grief. She put the pillow aside and propped herself up on one elbow to look at him. “‘Jandro, is your room alright? It’s awfully small.”
“It’s fine,” Alejandro said. Natividad was exaggerating the plaintiveness of her tone, but behind her teasing he could tell she was worried. She thought he couldn’t tell when she was worried about him, but he could. Deliberately shaking off memory and grief, he said, “I like it small. I like the windows.” This was true. His room, on the other side of Natividad’s, was tiny. But the windows were huge, taking up almost all of two walls, so that the room seemed suspended in the air. From the scars on the window sills, this room had belonged to black dogs before him. He wondered who had lived in this set of connecting rooms last year: siblings, friends, lovers? It was horrifying, how much space had been abandoned in this house, how many rooms waited for new tenants to move in.
The sense of dead ghosts whispering around the edges of perception was very strong in the whole suite. But these were the rooms Grayson Lanning had told them they could have. In a strange way, Alejandro was even glad of the sorrow that clung to these rooms, this house: he could not help but feel that the whole world should share his own grief. He wondered whether Natividad also felt that, and thought she did. He thanked God and the Virgin every hour, every minute, for Natividad. He was sure that only her presence had persuaded the Dimilioc lobos to accept her human brother, far less a stray black dog pup.
Alejandro only wished he thought it a good bargain for Natividad herself. But the back of his neck and his spine pricked when he thought of Ezekiel Korte’s cool, uninflected voice: If she doesn’t choose me… He wondered whether he should begin planning now for some kind of ambush, some ataque sorprendió, a surprise attack that might let him kill Ezekiel and free Natividad from his threat.
Papá had taught him about that when he was still a pequeño, a kid. “You won’t always be the strongest,” Papá had said. “Right now, if you had to fight a stray, he’d probably tear you up, right? So, you’d need to be tricky about it. For example, you could use Natividad or your mother as bait, right? Because we know callejeros haven’t got much sense, especially not when they’re chasing down a Pure woman, right? Only you don’t want to risk Mamá really, but you could bait a trap with her blanket or blouse and maybe a little of her blood.”
Alejandro had grinned. He could envision perfectly a stray black dog rushing down a game trail toward the scent of a Pure woman, completely missing a black dog hidden and waiting in ambush.
“Only you have to keep your shadow all the way down until the right time to let it up,” Papá had added. “Or ninety-nine callejeros in a hundred will scent you hiding! So, let’s play it out, right? I’ll be the stray, and you’ve baited a trap right outside the village; that’s all good, but how are you going to make sure I come along this trail and not a different one? Or right through the forest and not on a trail at all?”
Traps and ambushes and tricks, and hunting, and straight-up battle, and always, always control, because a black dog who couldn’t control his shadow was just a callejero, a stray, to be put down like a rabid dog. Alejandro had been so proud the day a trap of his own making had made it possible for him and Papá to ambush and kill a pack of five black dogs. One had got past them, but Alejandro had set up the trail to lead the callejero right in between a pentagram and the cliff face, and Miguel had shot him with one of the special silver bullets that Tío Fernando had shown him how to make. Alejandro had been even prouder of the forceful control that had let him walk out of the forest in human form to congratulate his young brother.
And now Ezekiel Korte had shown him how little control he really had.
Probably Ezekiel guessed he was thinking about ambushes. Ezekiel was hardly a callejero. Probably the Dimilioc executioner would prove, in practice, impossible to surprise.
Since he did not want to say any of his thoughts aloud, Alejandro stood by Natividad’s window, staring out at the endless sweep of sky and black forest and snow that stretched out below. People said snow was frozen water. It seemed to Alejandro that snow was really frozen light. He wondered if, when it melted in the spring, it did so with bursts of luminous brilliance as well as rivulets of water.