Pure Magic (Black Dog Book 3)

by Rachel Neumeier

  But it was an ugly house. It felt wrong. Too big, too square, dull yellow brick instead of the red more common here in the northeastern part of the United States, and a steeply-sloped gray shingle roof that looked dingy above the white-painted trim. The yard, guarded by a wrought-iron fence about as tall as Natividad, was also square. Although the yard was big enough, it looked small because of the bulk of the house and the single huge beech tree that loomed in one corner. A beech was not a bad tree, though not as good for magic as oak or pine. But this one felt wrong somehow, as though it cast too heavy a shade from its leafless branches.

  The black dog lounged beneath the beech, seeming sated with his night’s hunt, with blood and death. He was massive, even for a black dog. He looked very dangerous, but Natividad wasn’t worried about the enemies she could see.

  Natividad could glimpse the body of the Pure woman sprawled beneath the tree near the black dog, but from her place, hidden well back away from the house, she couldn’t see the body in any detail. She was grateful for that.

  Far more visible was the interior of the house, that one room on the lower floor glowing with light and a false promise of warmth and safety. Even from where she crouched, Natividad could see a high-ceilinged room of generous proportions, pale yellow paint on the walls, decorative white trim like sugar icing along the ceiling and along the top of the wide fireplace. A wide open doorway led away to the interior of the house.

  The room was filled with furniture, but it all looked uncomfortable: upright, rigid couches and matching chairs, all upholstered with cream or tan or cream-and-tan stripes, with narrow arms and legs. But in the chair farthest from the window crouched a little girl, and even from way across the yard and on the other side of a brick wall, Natividad could tell she was Pure.

  She looked back at the black dog, but she couldn’t tell whether he expected attack, whether he guessed it was coming right now, whether he was part of the trap or just part of the bait.

  Then his head lifted suddenly, and she held her breath.

  At first even Natividad wasn’t sure the movement she was seeing was Alejandro. Her brother was still in his human form when he came through the gate, but the maraña mágica she had remade draped across him and above him, half floating in the slight breeze, its indistinct edges confusing his outline so that he looked both dim and strangely outsize. As though his shadow had pulled mostly free from his body and rode above and around him. As though, Natividad realized, the threads of her maraña had tangled up with the edges of his shadow and pulled it loose. She bit her lip, leaning forward. She hadn’t intended to do anything like that, but things got strange when you used slivers of black dog magic mixed in with ordinary Pure magic. It wasn’t like following a technique you’d learned from your mamá, and she from hers, all the way back for hundreds of years. Though if her magic was hurting her brother, it apparently wasn’t enough to stop him.

  At least the enemy black dog seemed confused by Alejandro’s indistinct shape, too. He was on his feet now, his head low, black fangs showing as he snarled, wisps of smoke curling upward from his jaws. But he hesitated, and then Alejandro leaped forward. The shadow that surrounded him seemed to sink down into his body as he moved, and at the same time spread outward, a very strange thing to watch. Half disguised by the strange rippling magic of her maraña, his bones contorted and his back broadened and bowed. She could see that the hand that struck the cold earth was blunter and larger than a human hand, bear-sized, clawed. Where that hand struck the ground, the earth smoked. Tiny flames whispered up from the dead grasses, dying in the damp breeze. The smoke rippled, caught up in the shreds of her maraña, pulled into a swirling veil that streamed sideways in a wind that wasn’t anything physical; a wind, Natividad thought, that blew from one world into another, or from life into death. It looked like that: unearthly and scary.

  Alejandro snarled, a savage ripping sound. He looked so strange. The shifting insubstantial veil of her maraña blew around him and above him, shredding into darkness and starlight, pulling the edges of his shadow in strange directions.

  The other black dog didn’t seem anxious to close with him. He reared up, threatening Alejandro with long black claws and powerful jaws. Alejandro swung wide to the left, trailing tatters of light and shadow, and a long slender arrow flashed past him, drawing a line of silver fire through the air. The arrow punched right through Alejandro’s indistinct looming shape, flew ten more feet, and buried itself in the wide trunk of the beech tree. The fine silver line it had drawn through the dark followed it down like the tail of a falling kite, rippling into graceful curves along the ground, and Natividad saw it was actually a silver chain, leading back into the dark where she, with her ordinary eyes, couldn’t see. She pressed her hand over her mouth to stifle a sound of dismay. It was far too easy to see how a weapon like that, a harpoon or something, might be used against a black dog.

  Alejandro roared, but he didn’t sound hurt. He sounded furious. His shadow rushed up and out, filling a huge space around him, and Natividad realized that her maraña must have done exactly what it was supposed to, fooled the eye of his enemies, thrown off their aim so they had missed. At least, with their first harpoon. She was sure they must have others. No one would prepare a weapon like that and only have one harpoon—

  Natividad’s maraña, stretched far past its limits, shredded at last into a memory of misty light and dissolved into the air. Alejandro’s shadow poured down and into him, condensing all at once as though sucked inward by a powerful vacuum, and her brother bowed under the pressure of it, collapsing involuntarily back into human form. A second harpoon flashed directly over his back as he crumpled to the ground, and Natividad couldn’t suppress a short, terrified cry because if a weapon like that hit him now, in human form, it could kill him.

  She crouched frozen with indecision, knowing she needed to do something, right now, or those people would shoot Alejandro again and this time they wouldn’t miss. He was on his hands and knees now, shaking his head, she could see that he was starting the change again, but he wasn’t going to be fast enough and, Madre de Dios, that other black dog was right there now, he was going to kill him, and she couldn’t think of a single thing she could do to stop it—

  Keziah seemed to materialize out of the night behind the enemy black dog. Natividad had forgotten all about her. Distracted by Alejandro, no one else seemed to have guessed she was there, either. That had actually been the plan, Natividad remembered now. She had forgotten all about that, too. But Keziah clearly hadn’t ever been distracted by anything. Even in black dog form, she wasn’t nearly as big as the one threatening Alejandro—but she was very fast. She tore claws across her enemy’s spine before he even knew she was there and whirled to meet two other black dogs who hurtled from an upstairs window.

  Natividad thought of the harpoon gun and looked anxiously that way, but she couldn’t see anything. It was too dark. The night was filled with ripping snarls and savage low grunts of effort, but all these black dogs and no one had even set anything on fire, at least not enough to see by, it was ridiculous. She wished Alejandro or Keziah had a real gift for bringing fire, but they didn’t and apparently none of their enemies was especially strong that way, either.

  The moon had already set, and it was just a sliver tonight anyway. But she cupped her palms together and poured starlight and the memory of moonlight into her hands like water, and then flung the gathered light out across that house and the yard. It was like trying to illuminate a whole big room with one candle; it was like trying to read by the light of the new moon. And without a pentagram or circle or anything to hold the light, it would last only a few minutes. But at least for those minutes, she could see a little.

  Someone was dead over by the harpoon gun, she could tell that at once; a crumpled, discarded body. Two other bodies sprawled in the yard father away from the gun. All of them were human now, which meant they were definitely dead.

  The light she’d made glimmered up brightly in
one last ripple of illumination, and went out. Without it, the darkness seemed absolute.

  “Wonderful,” Natividad muttered. “Perfect.” She blinked hard, waiting for her eyes to adjust, vividly aware that any black dogs nearby would be able to see her just fine. At least the wall was so broken and rough it was easy to climb, even in the dark. She was afraid a black dog she couldn’t even see coming would tear her head off, and then Alejandro would kill her. But someone had to get that harpoon gun before their enemies reclaimed it.

  She wanted to jump off the wall, but if she did that she would probably break her ankle. That would add so much to this night. She climbed down carefully. Then she ran across the yard toward the abandoned gun. Her skin prickled with the certainty that a black dog was going to leap out of the dark and tear her apart, but nothing happened, except the fight going on over by the now-burning tree.

  The gun was bigger than she’d expected, longer than Natividad’s whole arm from elbow to fingertips. It was heavy, so heavy that she had to hold it cradled in both arms. And loaded; the deadly silver point of another harpoon gleamed in the starlight. She could not immediately understand how to fire it. The trigger was obvious, but there were all kinds of other bits she didn’t understand, and she couldn’t tell whether just pulling the trigger would shoot the harpoon or whether there were other things you had to do first.

  It wasn’t just the harpoon to worry about, either. A silver chain lay in disordered loops alongside the gun, hanging down in a heavy curve when she lifted the weapon off the ground. Not pure silver. She could tell from the feel of it. An alloy of some kind. But there was enough silver in that thin chain to give a black dog a lot of trouble.

  It was a scary, scary weapon. Not for itself, though it was scary enough that way, too. No, it was a lot more frightening for what it implied. Natividad looked down at the dead man lying nearby. She couldn’t see his face. She was grateful for that. It felt wrong to be glad he was dead. But he’d tried to shoot her brother with a harpoon, pin him down with a silver chain. She was glad.

  Somewhere near at hand, a black dog roared. Somewhere farther away, but not too far, the shrill tones of sirens cut through the night at last. Natividad hefted the heavy harpoon gun and hurried toward the lighted window.

  The little girl seemed to be speechless with terror, or at least speechless. She stared at Natividad with huge eyes, crouching in her chair with her feet drawn up under her and her hands gripped together in her lap. She looked to be three or four years old, but she had delicate bones and fine features, so she might have been older. Natividad could see at last why the child had stayed so still through everything: there was a thin silver collar around her neck, fastened to a chain that was riveted straight into the back of the chair. That was horrible.

  Behind her, Alejandro snarled a wordless comment about Natividad’s presence by the window. She settled the harpoon gun in the crook of one arm and buried the fingers of her free hand in his shaggy pelt, leaning against his reassuring bulk for a long self-indulgent moment, glad just to find them both alive and unhurt. So far, anyway. She said, “I’m sure it’s a trap, but I can’t tell how. You hear those sirens?” She couldn’t tell whether he understood her, he often lost language when he changed. Sometimes it helped if she spoke in Spanish, so she added, “No podemos esperar más tiempo. Do you understand? Entiendes?”

  He only gazed at her, his black dog stare completely inhuman.

  Natividad said, “We can’t wait any longer! We don’t have time to figure it all out. Think of all those bodies the policia are going to find here, ’Jandro! We better not be here when they come! But we have to get the little girl.”

  Keziah, sleek and beautiful even in her black dog form, slid by Natividad and leaped through the window. She made no sound when she landed, but black dogs, huge as they were, could be amazingly light on their feet when they chose, lighter than any natural creature. She swung around at once, crouched low and ready to spring in any direction, looking for threats. Her eyes were a fiery deep gold shading to orange, hot with anger and bloodlust, but then she shook herself and straightened and cast a contemptuous look over her shoulder at Natividad, so plainly she didn’t see or smell anything that worried her.

  Natividad hesitated, still half expecting another trap to snap closed. But nothing happened, except that those distant sirens got closer.

  Amira hopped up on the windowsill and then down into the room, following her sister. Natividad gripped the windowsill with her free hand, put one of her feet on Alejandro’s massive foot, and stepped up and forward as he lifted her. As Keziah had, she looked around quickly, but so far as she could see the room was empty except for the little girl. The harpoon gun dragged at her shoulder. She heaved it up on one of the tables near the window, moving out of the way so Alejandro could follow the rest of them into the room. Though Natividad cast another nervous glance around, it was hard to be too frightened with three Dimilioc black dogs right here in the room with her.

  The little girl still looked petrified, though. And no wonder. “It’s fine,” Natividad told her, coming forward and bending to look at the chain. Silver, yes, which wouldn’t burn a Pure girl, but would certainly keep any ordinary black dog from getting her free. Natividad pulled experimentally on the chain, but felt no give in either the chain itself or the rivets or the chair. She frowned. She said out loud, “It doesn’t matter, though, because I can always blood it, and then Alejandro can break it easily.” She looked carefully at the child, who had barely reacted to any of them. She touched her cheek, tilting the little girl’s face to make her look at her. “I can blood it,” she said. “Do you know how to do that? Did your mamá show you? Every Pure girl should know how to blood silver, in case she has a black dog brother. Like you will, bebé, lots of black dog brothers and sisters who will protect you and keep you safe even in the dark.”

  Amira growled very quietly, an oddly gently growl. She crowded close to peer around Natividad, her fiery eyes fixed on the little girl.

  The paloma blinked, her eyes focusing on Natividad’s face at last and then moving to Amira. She made a tiny sound and shivered all over, but it was not a sound of terror, and she reached confidently toward Amira’s face. Amira growled again, even more gently, and Natividad smiled in relief, patting both little girls at once, the little Pure child and the shaggy-pelted black dog. “Good,” she said, all her relief in her voice. “Good little bebé. You know we’re friends, don’t you? Paloma, palomita, little dove. Your mother protected you until she could not protect you any longer. But she called to us and we came.” Well, not exactly, but it would be better for the little girl to think it was true. She said firmly, “We’ll protect you now. We’ll protect you. Nothing will harm you now.”

  “Overconfidence will get you killed,” said a new voice, a human voice without a trace of the black dog growl but heavy with some accent she didn’t recognize. There was a man in the doorway, old, fifty at least, big and bald, with a seamed face and a short grizzled beard and flat eyes. In his arms, he held a harpoon gun. There was a black dog with him—no, at least two black dogs—one loomed behind the man, completely blocking the large doorway that led out to the main part of the house, and another crept forward from farther back, visible mainly because of the heaviness of the dark around him.

  But there was another sound, too, not a voice but a sharp metallic sound. Turning quickly, Natividad saw a third black dog in a narrower doorway that led into some other room, a female. That one was a lot older than the others, judging from her shadow, which was extremadamente dense. Her eyes burned with a smoldering crimson fire, her jaw dropped with savage amusement; fangs like obsidian glinted in the light. Next to her stood yet another human man, younger than the first, with buzz-cut dark hair and a pockmarked face and a tense, scared expression. He, too held a harpoon gun, loaded with a harpoon tipped with silver and trailing a silver-alloy chain.

  With the man’s first words, Natividad had twitched, reaching for her own harpoon g
un—the one she’d stupidly put down on the table near the window, the one now much too far away. She turned again, helplessly, looking for something to do, some way to protect herself and the little Pure girl. Beside her, Amira crouched and snarled. Alejandro, too, snarled a savage threat, suddenly finding a new menace in every direction, unable to get between all of these new potential threats and Natividad. She gripped the shaggy fur at the side of his neck, though it would be impossible to restrain him if he wanted to shake her off. On the other side of the room Keziah crouched low, her head swaying as she measured their new enemies. She wasn’t snarling at all: she was absolutely silent. Natividad had a flashing thought that Keziah was the single scariest black dog in the house, and was terrified the men would think so too, and shoot her immediately.

  The older man looked at Alejandro and then at Keziah, then said something in an unfamiliar language filled with consonants. He was staring at Keziah. Natividad understood nothing he said except the name Ezekiel Korte. That was scary, that he knew enough to mention Ezekiel by name, that proved these black dogs were here to destroy Dimilioc. But she couldn’t decide whether the man was saying that Keziah wasn’t Ezekiel or whether he actually thought she was—in black dog form, they were a similar size, and with the clouds of menace rolling off Keziah, she could see someone who wasn’t familiar with either making that mistake.

  But there was no time to think about it. The younger man nodded as though to a command and swung his harpoon gun to point at Keziah. The other black dogs were moving, too, which was very scary, and the older man, the bald one, stepped forward and sideways, angling to get a clear shot at Alejandro.

  Natividad drew breath to shout or scream, she didn’t know, maybe she should jump in front of her brother, anything to distract the men with the guns, but Alejandro reared up and then thudded down again, both front paws striking the floor hard. The whole house seemed to shake, and the boards under the carpet cracked, but that wasn’t the point. Alejandro was staring with burning eyes at the largest of the enemy black dogs, and that one paused, head down, rumbling in threat and fury but unable to press any attack because, beneath his pelt, his bones were trying to shift.