But then Grayson roared, and Alejandro whirled around and saw the body of a Pure woman, flung down and discarded at the foot of the burning cross, with the yellow-eyed silhouette of Vonhausel himself looming over it, blackly massive against the light and the snow, wreathed in smoke, fire glowing in his gaping jaws behind his coal-black fangs. But Alejandro also saw, even in that first glimpse, that it was not after all Natividad’s body that lay crumpled and broken at Vonhausel’s feet. Vonhausel had brought some other Pure woman to this place; he must have found her and stolen her from her home and then kept her, who knew how long – kept her in reserve as a weapon and a tool. Now he threw back his head and howled, a long singing cry of hatred and triumph and fury, and his few remaining black dogs and moon-bound curs howled with him, swept up by the heavy moon-drawn tide of his killing rage.
Alejandro, furious at the death of that other Pure woman, was nevertheless so consumed by violent relief that she was not Natividad that he nearly forgot that Vonhausel was still there; that the battle was not ended; that the mandala was broken and all the town laid open to deadly enemies.
Then Ezekiel went past Alejandro in a silent, intent rush.
But Vonhausel did not stand to fight the Dimilioc verdugo. He whirled about and charged straight into the town, sweeping the remnants of his shadow pack along in his wake, racing along the path laid down by one of the crossbars of the burning mandala, heading for the center of town. What he meant to do there, Alejandro could not imagine; he had thought Vonhausel’s attack on Lewis merely a tactic to forge all his wild undisciplined strays into a real pack and maybe to draw out the Dimilioc wolves to a battle where they might be destroyed, but if that was so, why did Vonhausel not rally his black dogs and fight? He thought that Vonhausel ran, not in flight but with some target in mind. His black dogs ran with and alongside him; his moon-bound shifters scattered to hunt through the town, testing the strength of any home where human prey sheltered.
Ezekiel pursued Vonhausel, never looking aside, utterly indifferent to the enemy black dogs who crowded him from either side. His very indifference frightened them, so they would not close with the verdugo – or maybe they had watched him fight, as Alejandro had, and that had understandably frightened them.
Then Grayson leaped away after Ezekiel, and Zachariah followed him, and belatedly Alejandro and Ethan and Thaddeus, and Keziah and her sister – Alejandro could not see Harrison or Benedict anywhere, but there was no time to look for them. His black dog shadow wanted to strike at any nearby enemy, wanted to fight, struggle, kill. But none of the other Dimilioc wolves turned aside to grapple with enemies. They all raced after Ezekiel, who pursued Vonhausel. No one turned either to the right or to the left; they went straight over fences and, almost as quickly, up and over houses – once Alejandro heard a human’s terrified scream from one of the homes they passed, but Ethan ran at his left and Thaddeus at his right and he did not turn to look.
The church at the center of Lewis, the heart of Natividad’s mandala, was burning. Like all Catholic churches, it had been made of stone expressly to withstand hellfire and then every stone had been blessed against demonic malice. Even so, it burned. The heat had broken out the windows; shards of colored glass glittered across the snow: red and purple, blue and gold, reflecting the hot light of the flames that roared through the open windows and crawled across the vaulted roof and charred the stones of the wall black.
The people who had been sheltering in the church were now huddling in the surrounding streets, staring up at the snow hissing into the flames. No one was trying to put out the fire, maybe because it was obviously too late or maybe because they knew that hellfire would irrevocably corrupt a church – or maybe because they knew the fire was not their biggest problem. They were turning toward the onrushing black dogs, but they moved so slowly – they looked like prey even to Alejandro, though he remembered even in the midst of bloodlust and battle fury that his own sister had made her mandala to shelter these people and would not want them torn down, torn apart, strewn across these streets en fragmentos ensangrentado… Fury poured through Alejandro like a substance with weight, with a presence of its own. His shadow thickened around him, dense and bloody, so that the whole world took on a crimson hue.
Vonhausel, black as pitch, surrounded by a miasma of smoke and fury, rushed toward the gathered humans. They scattered, but too slowly, like prey, like penned sheep. Vonhausel struck left and right among them – human screaming sounded so different from the dying screams of black dogs; their screams were sweeter and more satisfying. Their blood would also be sweet. For an instant, before he caught himself and remembered that he was Dimilioc and had a human brother, Alejandro wanted to turn on them himself.