Black Dog(55)

“No,” Alejandro told her. His own voice was unfamiliar in his ears, harsher and deeper than it should have been, a sign of how hard his shadow pressed him. He was furious with reasonless black dog anger, hardly able to bring human words to his tongue. He was so close to the change. He knew it. But he did not change, he would not. He growled, “Come. Come,” and, still carrying the boy, caught the woman by the arm and dragged her with him back around the house.

In front of the trailer, the battle was less comic. Alejandro might have been injured by those silver knives, and never heard the last of it – a Pure woman and a little black dog pup, oh, such enemies! But Thaddeus was huge, powerful, and desperate. And he was using his black dog fury – his shadow was gathered around him, under tight control. He now did not look at all human, but he had still not fully changed, so he was able to grip his silver blade. He attacked Ezekiel, slashing.

Thaddeus was trying to kill Ezekiel, but, Alejandro realized, Ezekiel was still trying not to kill Thaddeus. He was fully changed, but he, no less than the other man, was still in full control of his shadow: even as they watched, he drew Thaddeus into a reckless attack that left him seriously overextended, but then pulled his return blow so that rather than ripping right through Thaddeus’s belly and tearing out his spine, he only left a set of incisions that, though bloody, barely sliced through the skin.

And he made it look easy. Surrounded by the dense anger and pounding heat of battle, Ezekiel still somehow looked lazy, disdainful, barely involved even when he spun away from a backhanded sweep of the silver knife that might have taken off half his face. Black ichor dripped from his shoulder, so an earlier stroke of that blade must have cut him, but he was still unbelievably fast–

“Oh, God,” whispered the woman, seeing as well as Alejandro how the fight was going.

“Scream,” Alejandro growled at her urgently. When she only stared at him, terrified and defiant, he let claws slide out of his fingertips and held his hand up threateningly near her son’s face. The boy squirmed and fought, tried to bite with blunt human teeth. Alejandro shook him hard, snarling, his shadow pressing at him as it tried to rise, and the child, at last frightened into submission, whimpered and shut his eyes.

“Con!” said the woman, half reaching toward her son, hesitating, afraid of Alejandro, terrified for her husband.

Alejandro thought his face was no longer exactly human. When he snarled, “Scream!” at the woman, he couldn’t tell whether he spoke in English or Spanish or in any human language at all. If he frightened her enough, it wouldn’t matter–

The woman threw her head back and screamed, a shriek they could probably hear both in Mexico and Vermont.

Thaddeus whirled around and saw his wife, his son, and Alejandro, with his black dog shadow thick around him and his claws threatening the boy. He made a guttural noise, half scream and half roar, gathered himself for a lunge–

“Thad, no!” cried the woman. “Oh, God, no!”

Thaddeus tried so urgently to stop that he slid sideways and nearly fell, a cloud of dust and ash pluming up around him. Ezekiel, in exactly the right position to tear out his throat and crush his spine, instead hit his arm to make him drop the silver knife and then backed away, folding himself upright, back into human shape, with his amazing smooth speed.

There was that sudden cessation of all action that sometimes happens in a fight, a frozen moment in which no one moved or spoke or sobbed, in which the whole world seemed to pause. Ezekiel stood poised and balanced despite the ugly cut across his shoulder from Thaddeus’ silver knife. Thaddeus made no move to reclaim the knife, though it had fallen only a few feet away. He was panting heavily, head lowered, blood and ichor clotting his black pelt. He should change, let his shadow carry away his injuries, but it was clear to Alejandro that he couldn’t, that he was too distraught. He tried, his black dog shadow shivered, but the moon’s hard pull supported the shadow; it would not subside willingly, and Thaddeus clearly could not, at this moment, force it down.

Ezekiel moved forward a step, young and slim and arrogant, totally in control of the situation. “Enough!” he said, without a hint of the black dog growl. “Williams, that is enough! Get your shadow down, and keep it down! Where’s your control? Well? Will you force me to kill you even now?”

Alejandro tried to imagine explaining to Grayson that they’d come this far, fought this powerful black dog to a standstill, and then had to kill him after all because he could not be controlled. It was all too easy to imagine what Grayson might say in return. Closing his eyes, he shoved his own shadow out and forward as he had done to stop the boy’s attack. He used the weight of his own shadow to press Thaddeus Williams’s shadow down and back, supporting Thaddeus’s own efforts to force it down.