Black Dog(94)

Grayson moved forward, crimson-eyed, heavy-shouldered, his fury as dense and implacable as his shadow. He did not answer Vonhausel’s howl, but stalked him, head low, smoke trickling from his jaws. Then Grayson gathered himself and bounded up onto the ruins of the church toward his enemy. His power spread out around him, forcing the shadows of lesser black dogs back and down.

Vonhausel snarled, a low sound that ached with fury and frustrated hatred. But he leaped from his high perch, skidding down the opposite side of the piled rubble. His black dogs scattered back and away from the Dimilioc Master, who stared around at them contemptuously.

Once he had ceded control of the ruined church, however, Vonhausel did not continue to flee. More black dogs – an impossible number – were even now sliding out of the flames of the church, flinging themselves up from the cracked and broken earth. Alejandro counted Vonhausel’s callejeros twice and then again, and although he came up with different numbers each time, he was sure there were more than thirty. This seemed impossible, but when he counted a third time, he counted thirty-two enemy black dogs.

Against those numbers, even Grayson hesitated. Alejandro looked for, but still could not find, either Harrison or Benedict, and now he could not see Zachariah, either, or Amira. He could not believe Zachariah had been killed – he could not believe Dimilioc had lost both Zachariah and Harrison – but neither could he see them anywhere among the living, though he rose on his hind legs to search.

Ezekiel was up and back in his black dog shape, but clearly far from his best. He crouched near Thaddeus, with Keziah on his other side. Alejandro would never have guessed that either Thaddeus or Keziah would go out of their way to protect the Dimilioc verdugo, but so it seemed. Ethan slid out of the fiery press of shadows to take a place on Thaddeus’s other side, and Alejandro moved with some haste to join them – five Dimilioc black wolves together would still be a daunting target for Vonhausel’s callejeros, however many of those might remain. And there was Amira after all, lamed, with slashes all down her flank and thigh, clearly unable to shift to human form or she would have let her shadow take away her injuries. But she was still on her feet, still moving.

Grayson, looming above them from his place, now uncontested, high on the burning rubble of the church, stared down at their enemies with a low singing snarl of loathing.

Vonhausel answered, and all around them dozens of his black dogs echoed that snarl. There seemed even more than before. Alejandro tried again to estimate their number and got an unreasonable answer; tried to count them in order and got a different answer, no more believable. There could not be more black dogs now than at the beginning of the fight – the numbers were impossible…

Somewhere near at hand, a deep-voiced motor rumbled to life, then another. And another. It took Alejandro a moment to place the sound, so unexpected: the deep roar of a bus engine. He thought first that the townspeople were fleeing, they had held a “Plan B” in mind all along. Bueno, good. He even wished, as far as it was in him to be concerned, that all those human people might make it out of Vonhausel’s reach, get clear of all black dog wars – though this battle might end soon enough anyway, and then Dios protect anyone helpless on the road, away from shelter. But his shadow did not care about any of that. It wanted only to survive and to kill its enemies.

Alejandro agreed with those aims. He did not think any of the Dimilioc wolves were going to live through this battle, but if they could not survive, then he wanted to kill lots and lots of enemies. That, he thought they could do.

Along with all the rest, allies and enemies alike, he stared up at Grayson and waited for some signal to resume battle.

Then the first bus roared into the town square, abarrotado – crammed with people – with shotguns and rifles bristling out the windows. The second bus followed, one of those stupid yellow ones that advertised to any black dog, Here are children, come and kill them. But it was just as crowded as the first, with as many guns poking out its windows. After them came a car.

The first bus squealed to a halt beside the ruins of the church and everyone on one side began shooting. Shooting carefully, only at Vonhausel and his black dogs. It was immediately apparent that some of them had silver ammunition. The black dogs, snarling their rage, retreated from the open spaces of the town square, finding shelter behind the surrounding buildings. The shooting stopped… Alejandro guessed that the human people did not have very much silver ammunition, maybe not much ammunition of any kind. He suspected Vonhausel and his shadow pack would make that same guess very soon.