Pure Magic (Black Dog Book 3)

by Rachel Neumeier

  She should have known better.

  She had never guessed before just how many vicious black dogs might have fled Russia and Eastern Europe and the Middle East and everywhere, driven out by the people they had preyed on for so long. She hadn’t realized, until Grayson explained it, how the very strongest of those black dogs would come here to try to destroy Dimilioc.

  Dimilioc had stopped black dogs taking over towns and ruling like kings and eating people—so here, there weren’t any great hordes of ordinary people hunting black dogs with silver bullets. Of course the strongest black dogs would want to take this chance to destroy Dimilioc and establish a safe territory, a place from which they could find ways to re-establish their power even now that the vampire miasma was gone.

  Now that she understood that, Natividad wasn’t sure exactly how the very small number of black dogs left to Dimilioc could possibly stop them.

  From the moment Natividad realized they’d found the magic of a living Pure woman mingled with black dog shadows, from the moment she had found her trouvez prickling with moonlight as well as the too-heavy darkness of black dogs, she had known these were not ordinary strays. Stray black dogs would attack the Pure, yes. That was what strays did. But keep a Pure woman alive, take her back to the center of their territory? That meant restraint and intention and planning.

  That was why Alejandro had gone alone to make a first, careful survey of this quiet-seeming house in its apparently peaceful neighborhood.

  Natividad knew her brother was fine. She did know that. She always knew, these days; ever since the moment last winter when, in desperation, she had risked everything to take his shadow and braid it into her magic as a weapon and a shield against their enemies. Even after she had given it back, a little bit of her brother’s shadow continued to cling to her, an impossible thread of darkness woven into her light, which she did not know how to unweave again. She wasn’t even perfectly certain she wanted to be rid of that dark thread. Because now she always knew when her brother was well. At moments like this, it was a certainty she cherished.

  She said to Keziah, “I know! But, I mean . . . if this is a trap, shouldn’t we call for help? We don’t need to spring it, you know!”

  Keziah tilted her head, considering this. She had curled, graceful as a cat, on the best of the cushions that lined the floor of the van. Her long fingers were linked around one slim drawn-up knee. The heavy braid of her black, black hair and the delicate trembling of her crystal-and-moonstone earrings accented her long throat and the fine-boned beauty of her elegant, triangular features.

  If Natividad had posed like that, it would have made her look . . . well, posed. As though she were deliberately and rather clumsily trying to look seductive and sexy. Keziah, on the other hand, just looked like that all the time. Keziah was not an easy girl to like. Though they were getting along pretty well, actually, these days.

  Even so, Natividad wished Ezekiel were here instead of Keziah. Natividad wouldn’t have been afraid of traps if Ezekiel had been here. She missed his strength and confidence, and the ironic look that would come into his eyes when he realized Dimilioc’s enemies had laid a trap for him, and . . . she just missed him.

  She wondered if he was missing her, too, tonight. And then made herself stop, because that was just ridiculous. Of course Ezekiel, off on his own assignment, would only be thinking about that. He wouldn’t be thinking about her at all. If he knew how often she thought about him, he would probably . . . well, actually, he would no doubt think that was just fine.

  Not that she would let on. Ever.

  And in the meantime, she had a mission, which she ought to be thinking about. Unless she could get Keziah to agree that they should just slip away without springing any traps that Dimilioc’s enemies had set for them.

  Amira shivered again, and Keziah’s expression softened. She put an arm around her little sister’s shoulders, pulling her gently into a brief, careful embrace before letting her go again with a reassuring pat. “It does not matter,” she promised Amira. “Natividad will work her magic, and you and I, we will turn this trap back on our enemies. They will be sorry they challenged us.”

  Keziah sounded quite unafraid. Amira nodded, happier. Amira never looked really happy, but that was the scar. It ran from the corner of the little girl’s mouth all the way across her cheek toward her ear. It pulled her mouth sideways, so that no smile could look normal on her face. Natividad had no idea how Amira had been scarred like that—well, no; she knew the cut must have been made with a silver knife, and she suspected someone had cut the child deliberately. She didn’t know for sure. It was just something everyone thought, because Amira was so timid and Keziah so fierce. She hated to think of it. She hoped at least that Keziah had killed whoever had done that to her little sister. But she would never dare ask. Keziah was the last person anybody would ask about something like that.

  Keziah and Amira both suddenly turned their heads toward the back of the van, and after a moment Natividad, too, heard the light rattle and click as someone turned a key in the van’s lock. Then Alejandro quietly opened the door and stepped up into the van. Natividad let her breath out with relief.

  Alejandro was much taller than Natividad, which was only fair because he was older. But he was also tall simply because he’d gotten Papá’s height, and Natividad took very much after Mamá’s family.

  But Alejandro did look very Mexican. Not as much as Natividad, but enough that it was hard to see their father’s American blood in him unless you knew it was there. But their father’s blood was important, because he had been a Toland, from one of the most important Dimilioc bloodlines. That was an advantage Keziah would never be able to claim.

  Alejandro soundlessly closed the van door behind him, glanced around at the rest of them, and said without preamble, “This is certainly a trap.”

  Keziah rolled her beautiful dark eyes. Natividad said quickly, before her brother could take issue with Keziah’s attitude, “Yes, of course! But what did you find, ’Jandro? Can we just slip away? Or is there a Pure woman here that we need to rescue?”

  Her brother, who had been staring narrowly at Keziah, allowed himself to be distracted. He crossed the narrow space and crouched down by Natividad’s side, studying her trouvez. But it showed nothing now but a faint glimmer of cool moonlight. “What did your magic show you?” he asked her. “Something different?”

  “It was hard to see,” Natividad said apologetically. “A white dove, in a birdcage made of burning wire. I saw that. The wires break and fly through the dark like arrows. There is dark all around, and in the dark, red eyes burning. Black dogs, watching from the dark. So I know they are watching for us.”

  Alejandro nodded. “There is also a feel to that house. A heaviness to the shadows. No stupid young callejero would have such a dense shadow.”

  “So there is at least one old black dog there, and this is his pack,” Keziah murmured. Her eyes glittered with anticipation. “I wonder how many black dogs he holds under his mastery? Enough that we will have a real fight after all, perhaps.”

  “A hunt,” whispered Amira unexpectedly. Her words were almost inaudible, but her tone was fierce. “A hunt and then fire, Keziah! We should burn the house down, after!”

  Keziah gave her little sister an affectionate glance. “A fire, yes. We should burn the house and let the towering flames blaze through the night as a warning to all those who would dream of defying Dimilioc.” She looked at Alejandro, tossing her head in challenge. “That should please Grayson, do you think so?”

  Alejandro grinned in answer, a fierce expression that was almost a snarl.

  Black dogs! Natividad thought. She knew she should have expected this attitude. She couldn’t say anything that might be taken as an attempt to be mandona—bossy. It was very important to let black dogs think they were making all the decisions about everything. So she said quickly, before everyone could get too carried away, “We don’t have to spring it, you know. We could just sli
p away. Come back later. With Ezekiel, maybe. With everyone. Think of springing this trap with Ezekiel and Thaddeus and everyone!” There, that idea should appeal to black dog ferocity.

  Both Keziah and Amira looked tempted, but Alejandro gave Natividad a long look, so that she saw at once he was trying to find a way to tell her something she wouldn’t like. He said at last, “There is your little palomita blanca. I saw her, too.” He glanced at Keziah. “The black dog there in the yard, he is outside the house to be seen. He is saying, Come attack me.” He looked back at Natividad and went on with obvious reluctance, “He has a woman there, dead. A Pure woman. Her blood is thick there on the earth beneath the beech tree. So you see he wants to draw attack. But your little dove, she is the house. A bebé, only little, maybe three years old, maybe four. I think that woman was her mother. I think the little one is Pure, like her mamá. She seems to be alone in the room, but—” he shrugged. “All the house is dark except for that one bright room. Of course she is bait.”

  Natividad closed her eyes briefly in sorrow for that little girl, torn out of her safe childhood by monsters, her mother no doubt murdered in front of her eyes. It was horrible. It was the worst thing that could happen. She shuddered.

  Alejandro touched her cheek, a light, careful touch with the backs of two fingers. His hand was almost but not quite a human hand. His fingers were a little too blunt, the bones of his hand a little too broad, the fingernails a little too much like claws. His shadow was very close to the surface, too close for him to touch her easily. But he saw she was upset, and he tried. Natividad wanted to take his hand, but she knew he needed his shadow to be strong right now.

  She rubbed her palms across her face instead, and let her breath out. She could mourn for that little girl and her loss later, when everyone was safe. She said determinedly, “We have to get that girl out. But this trap—”

  “We will break it and take the girl safely,” Alejandro assured her. He went on, speaking now to Keziah, “The room I saw is bright, all the windows open to the night, anybody can look in and see the little one.” He shrugged, a scornful gesture. “They think we’re fools.”

  Keziah said coolly, “Or maybe they think we are a different kind of fool. Maybe they think we will say, This is a trap. And so we will know that there is an ambush, that there are more than a few strays. Only there is really something else also. Another layer to this trap that we will not see until it is too late.”

  Natividad blinked. She hadn’t thought of that, and she knew Alejandro hadn’t. She was suddenly glad Keziah was part of this mission. Most black dogs just flung themselves straight ahead into any battle, but Keziah was twisty in her head. Even if she was angry and distrustful and a little bit scary, she was also always thinking, always clever.

  Keziah stood up, smooth and elegant like a movement from a dance, and set her hands on her hips. “We must spring this trap,” she said to Alejandro. “How else will we know what teeth it has? You can spring it. Then Amira and I will break all the teeth out of the trap and kill all our enemies.”

  Amira ducked her head and smiled around from behind her sister. Despite the child’s nervousness, it was not a shy smile, but a predatory one. It was the smile of a black dog who is watching her enemy make a mistake. Keziah glanced down and ruffled her sister’ short-cropped hair, a gesture that was almost human-fond. It was gestures like that that made Natividad want to like Keziah.

  Alejandro grinned. “We will do that,” he said. “But I think you are not used to working with a Pure girl.” He glanced over at Natividad. “You tell us,” he said. “What can you make, that will blunt the teeth in this trap?”

  Natividad nodded quickly, knowing they were committed. “Even if we don’t know exactly what the trap is, I think I can make something. I’ll use my maraña mágica as a base and make something that will fold over and around you, something to confuse the eyes of our enemies. But I don’t know if I can make it big enough to work for Keziah and Amira as well as you—”

  “That does not matter,” Keziah said smoothly. “We shall slip the eyes of our enemies without your little magic tricks, Pure girl.” She gave Alejandro a mocking look. “You should go out before us, as I said. Your little sister, she can give you this magic thing. Then you can go out to puzzle our enemies. When all eyes look toward you, Amira and I will come out and kill them all.”

  “That isn’t exactly what I had in mind!” Natividad protested, but Alejandro was smiling a dark, fierce black dog smile. He liked the idea, she could see.

  “Make your mágica,” Alejandro told her. “We do not have so much time before dawn, not so much we can think of many different ideas. But this is clever. This will work.”

  Natividad threw up her hands. “Black dogs!” she said, like a swear word. She pulled her maraña mágica out of her pocket and shook it out, stalking away toward the front of the van to get her little silver knife.

  A maraña mágica was a tangled net of light, looking more than anything like a spiderweb of luminescent silk. It had neither mass nor shape, but, flung across the path of an enemy, it was very effective in confusing his steps. Natividad held her maraña mágica up and studied it.

  Pure magic was defensive. She knew that. Everyone knew that. But, her mother had taught her, some kinds of defense could be aggressively defensive.

  She knew what she wanted. That was important. She didn’t have her mother’s little flute, nor any aparatos, the tools used by the Pure to capture and weave light. But she had her silver knife and she had this maraña, and she knew what she wanted. Biting her lip in concentration, she began to cut one strand here and another there, freeing just a little bit of moonlight, tying the strands back into a different shape. Some of the light would be lost. She couldn’t help that. It was good that the maraña need protect only Alejandro; she didn’t think she could weave its new shape wide enough to cover two black dogs, certainly not three . . . her eyes burned. She hadn’t blinked in some time, she realized. A child’s mistake. She should know better. She blinked hard and rubbed her face, tangles of luminous spidersilk wavering in her mind’s eye.

  “Well?” Keziah said behind her. “The night is passing. How much longer will your magic take, girl?”

  Natividad glanced up, embarrassed, but Alejandro, scowling, was already shouldering Keziah back out of the way. Keziah was showing her white teeth in a smile that had a lot more temper in it than humor. So was her brother.

  “Anyway, it’s done!” Natividad said hastily. She didn’t think they would fight, not now, not with real enemies out there, but sometimes black dog tempers were unpredictable. She held out the insubstantial web. It clung to her fingers, rippling gently in an unfelt breeze. “It’s a turn-the-eye spell,” she explained. “If I did it right, it is! It’s to confuse anybody looking at you. It won’t last long, your shadow will tear it up, but . . .” she hesitated, then went on more softly, “Maybe it might help that you have that tiny bit of my magic wrapped up in your shadow.”

  Because that was the other lingering effect of what she had done, of what they had both done: she might have the thinnest possible thread of her brother’s shadow braided into her magic, but Alejandro also had a just a trace of her moonlit magic clinging to the edges of his shadow. That shouldn’t have been possible, either, but it seemed permanent. At first Natividad had been afraid her magic might hurt him, like the touch of silver. But he did not complain, and eventually he had told her he liked knowing where she was all the time, so she had stopped worrying.

  He nodded now, not seeming surprised or offended, and she went on, “Even after you change, even if they look right at you, they’ll see something, but I think they won’t see you clearly. I think they will have difficulty seeing exactly what or where you are.”

  “Very good,” Alejandro told her. “Very clever.” He brushed the back of his hand lightly across Natividad’s cheek, smiling at her with human warmth only a little harshened by black dog ferocity. “You will see,” he said. “I will use
your magica and confound all our enemies. And then Keziah and Amira will kill them all, except for those I kill. And we will take your little paloma and go. She will be safe at Dimilioc.”

  “Mostly safe,” said Keziah, smiling.

  But Amira said seriously, “I’ll keep her safe.”

  There was a little pause. Keziah quit smiling. “Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, of course you will, habibti.”

  Natividad was not supposed to risk herself. Grayson had been very stern about that. But of course she couldn’t just hide in the van, because then what if the others needed help?

  She had her trouvez, which probably wouldn’t be much protection, but she also had her cross tucked down under her shirt, a cross made of copper and zinc with a single thin silver wire wound around it. It wasn’t the silver that really mattered. What mattered was that the cross was hers. She’d made it herself, infusing it with light and a bright-burning clarity of intention, but along with the silver, she’d also wound a thin tracery of dense shadow around and through it.

  Pure magic wasn’t supposed to be contaminated with black dog magic. By any reasonable understanding of Pure magic, that sliver of darkness ought to ruin any working she did. But she’d done it anyway, drawing on the fragment of Alejandro’s shadow that clung to her now, and on intuition and the half-remembered teaching from when she’d been very little. If it worked the way she’d meant it to, that cross would keep black dogs from realizing she was here, or at least from being able to tell exactly where she was. Black dogs hated the Pure and tracked them whenever they could. Well, not Dimilioc black dogs who’d had the Aplacando worked on them, but ordinary strays. But they shouldn’t be able to track her, not now, now so long as she wore this cross. She thought it would work.

  If she’d made it right.

  Even with her special cross, even though she knew Alejandro was a good fighter and Keziah was deadly and even little Amira was very dangerous, Natividad was scared. They knew this was a trap, they expected an ambush, they were ready for it, so it shouldn’t be very dangerous really, but she was scared anyway. It was a good thing she didn’t believe in premonitions.