Pure Magic (Black Dog Book 3)

by Rachel Neumeier

  Ezekiel’s eyes shifted to pale gold, fire bleeding into the human blue until there was nothing human left in them.

  “He’s still alive, though,” Natividad said quickly. “And I don’t think he’s so afraid anymore. And—and—I wish you hadn’t come, I wish you were there with Alejandro, but I’m glad, I’m so glad you’re here!” She put her hands over her eyes to stop the tears that threatened. She knew there was no time for tears.

  “Natividad—” Ezekiel said. “I—”

  “I know,” said Natividad. “I know. There’s nothing we can do, and anyway we have too much to deal with here anyway.”

  “I will do everything in my power to make this right,” Ezekiel told her, very quietly.

  “I know. I know you will. I know we have to—to deal with this, first. But—”

  Keziah broke the moment. She came in, stepping fastidiously wide around the contaminated knife. She had stopped in the kitchen to wash, Natividad saw: she was still carrying a damp kitchen towel in one hand. She tossed this over the arm of a chair and gave Ezekiel a challenging look, chin up and shoulders straight.

  Ezekiel took a deep breath and let go of Natividad. He stepped back and turned, his eyes once more human blue. “You could have taken the lot of them all by yourself, of course,” he said to Keziah.

  “Of course!” Keziah said. “They were all running like frightened little bunnies.”

  Ezekiel relaxed. Natividad had not even been aware he was tense, until she saw the difference. “You did very well,” he said. “That vampire was mostly dead when I finished it, and I believe I counted seven blood kin down before I came in.”

  A slow flush spread up Keziah’s throat and face. She didn’t look at Ezekiel. “I think only six.”

  “The seventh would have bled out,” Ezekiel said easily. He didn’t say what they all knew: that if he had not entered the fight, Keziah would not have survived long enough to see that one die.

  “You’re . . . not hurt?” Justin said to Keziah. He had taken one step toward her, and now looked her up and down, worried, his gaze lingering on the narrow red line that showed along the side of her neck, and then going to her side, where he knew she’d been torn up.

  “My shadow took the injury,” Keziah said. “Did you not know?” Her words were impatient, but her tone was not actually unkind.

  “A black dog has to have time to shift, though, and then shift back again,” Natividad explained, trying to focus on the moment, on their own peril. It helped that Alejandro’s pain had eased, that his fear no longer pressed on her. She knew he was alive, but thought he might be asleep or something. She was terrified for him—what if he was unconscious, what then?—but it was much better not to have his fear dragging at her attention. She tried to focus on the present moment and told Justin, “That’s why control is so important, more important even than just strength. Or if you cut their spines or tear off their heads or something, that will kill them.”

  “Ah,” said Justin. He was plainly envisioning one of the blood kin tearing off Keziah’s head. Plainly he didn’t like the image at all.

  “I am perfectly well,” Keziah assured him.

  “And a good thing, too,” said Ezekiel. He looked out the window again and then fixed Natividad with a disapproving gaze that she thought he had deliberately copied from Grayson. “As you have followed your customary habit of getting in over your head, I trust you have a plan for getting out again. But am I going to like this plan?”

  “Oh, I added you right in as soon as I saw you,” Natividad assured him. She didn’t say, Madre de Dios, I’m so glad you’re here, though she wanted to. She was trying not to be clingy and annoying, because of course he would need to think mostly about the coming battle. She shouldn’t have told him about Alejandro at all, she knew that now, only she had been so shocked by her brother’s sudden pain. He was still alive, though. Still alive. And Alejandro must know how scared she was, too. He must know that everything was wrong here, too. But even now she couldn’t be sorry for the link between them.

  She tried to focus just on this moment, this danger, and put any other fears aside. She said to Ezekiel, “But you know, it’s not like the other time. I don’t—I don’t think I can get the vampire to—to—I don’t think I can get it to kind of do it to itself, like I did for Vonhausel. Even if I can make an aparato that will work.” She looked at the knife and swallowed. She had never wanted to touch anything less.

  Ezekiel was frowning at her. “Natividad—”

  “Oh, but I can make it,” Natividad promised. She rubbed her hands on her arms, shuddering. “I can do it. I can, and it will work, and you know you can’t fight a master vampire by yourself, not even you and Keziah together, and anyway—” she looked at him and finished more softly, “I don’t want you to try. I don’t want to stay safe in here and watch you die.”

  Ezekiel’s gaze on hers become more intense.

  “Anyway!” Natividad said hastily. “Think what would happen if you and Keziah get heroically killed but the vampire is still alive! Those mandalas won’t stop a real master vampire forever.”

  They all knew it was true. Over the last years of the war, everyone had learned how a master vampire could break through a ward: by throwing its blood kin at it, letting them burn up, each one weakening the circle a little more until at last it broke. That wasn’t the only way to break a protective mandala, but it was one way and it would work and there would be nothing Natividad could do about it. She said softly, because it was almost her worst nightmare, “When the master vampire gets here, I don’t want to wait here and watch it make more blood kin, and more, until it finally manages to burn its way through every mandala Justin or I can make.” She stopped, swallowing, trying not to imagine the vampire making blood kin out of anyone it could catch. “I couldn’t stand to watch it do that, Ezekiel.”

  Ezekiel let his breath out. He looked faintly disgusted, but he didn’t say what Natividad knew was the truth, that he would be perfectly happy to sacrifice the whole town full of ordinary human people if it meant she was safe. To a black dog, the world divided so neatly up between your own family and house, and everybody else.

  It wasn’t like that for the Pure. And Ezekiel knew it.

  “Thus your plan,” he said finally. He jerked his head toward the contaminated silver knife. “That?”

  “It will work,” Natividad insisted. “Only once I make that knife into a proper aparato, you and Keziah will need to use it against the vampire.”

  “This is a good plan,” Keziah said smoothly. “It is very much better than the old plan, which called for me alone to use the Pure weapon against the vampire.”

  “It’s a sucky plan,” muttered Justin. And added out loud, “Just how much worse is a master vampire, compared to that one we—you—already killed?”

  Keziah shrugged, which was probably meant to look dismissive but which actually made Natividad remember that she wasn’t actually very experienced at fighting vampires.

  Ezekiel, of course, was extremely experienced with fighting everything. He said mildly, “I wouldn’t want to face one alone. Fortunately, I won’t be alone.” He gave Keziah a little nod, again reminding Natividad strongly of Grayson. Keziah gave him a sarcastic look, but Natividad thought she was pleased.

  “I imagine—” Ezekiel began, and then cut that off, his attention caught by something outside in the night. He said, in a different, light, brittle tone, “I imagine we all rather hoped dawn would catch our enemy short, but alas.”

  Natividad both wanted to go look out the window and retreat to cower in the closet. Instead of doing either, she took a deep breath and looked at the knife on the coffee table. “Todo está bien. Va a ver tiempo,” she said, and realized she was speaking in Spanish. She repeated it in English, “It is just fine. There is time. There will be time. And we—we knew it was coming. We can do this—”

  “No,” Ezekiel said.

  Natividad stopped. But Ezekiel was not speaking to her. He
was speaking to himself, or to the night itself: a grim, flat denial of fate. He was still standing by the window, staring out. He had lost all his pose of amused ease. His shoulders had gone rigid, and the painted wood of the windowsill cracked where he gripped it, raw wood showing through. He took a sharp breath and shook his head, and said harshly, “Natividad, which vampire is this?”

  Natividad had no idea what he meant, but his tone made her skin prickle with horror. She stepped forward, hardly aware of Justin on one side and Keziah on the other, to look out the window, following Ezekiel’s gaze.

  Keziah saw them first, though. She said, “Ah,” in a flat tone that was worse than a curse. Natividad thought she herself understood too, right then, just from that flat Ah. She thought that was why she recognized them instantly when she saw them, why she did not for an instant mistake them for black dogs.

  “What?” Justin was asking them all urgently. “What?”

  “Those aren’t black dogs,” Ezekiel said grimly.

  There were four of them. The vampire itself drew the eye first, but then when Natividad flinched from looking at it, the black dogs caught her attention immediately. But they weren’t black dogs, not really. They were so much more horrible. They looked like black dogs, they moved with the same powerful grace as real black dogs, but they were different. They lacked the essential humanity that always lay at the core of a black dog, even when he let his shadow rise. For those monsters with the vampire, the shadow was all they were.

  Two of them paced on one side of the master vampire and two on the other, all much closer to the vampire than any ordinary black dog would be willing to get. They didn’t look around at the blood kin, which were creeping out into the open now that their master had come. They didn’t look at the vampire itself. They didn’t look at anything.

  “What are they?” Justin asked, his voice tight.

  Natividad could not have answered to save her life. But Ezekiel said, expressionless, “They are the bodies of dead black dogs, possessed by their shadows. I think we know exactly which vampire this is. This is the one Vonhausel allied with. We knew he had learned to use vampire magic. Now it’s clear he taught this vampire something about black dog magic, too. Damn his soul to Hell. I thought we were done with these.”

  Justin stared at him.

  Natividad said, in a too-calm voice that didn’t sound exactly like her own, “I guess we know what happened to Christopher. And the others.”

  “They should have run,” Keziah said, cool and disdainful. But behind the cool disdain was fear, not quite hidden.

  Natividad shook her head. “I bet they couldn’t,” she said softly. “I bet they were trapped. I bet it took hold of their minds—even before Christopher called that first time, maybe. Before they knew it was there.” She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering again. She hadn’t ever even met them. Her cousin, Christopher Toland, she’d never even had a chance to meet him. Those Hammond black dogs, Nicholas and Carissa. The young Lanning, she couldn’t even remember his name—oh, Jonathan, of course. Jonathan Lanning. A young black dog who would have found it so hard to live up to the Lanning name, who would probably have been aggressive and difficult, but she would never know, he would never have a chance to grow up into someone like Grayson Lanning. The vampire had made him into one of those monsters instead. She thought of how Grayson would feel, learning what had happened, and that was almost worse than thinking about the young wolves themselves.

  “You know, I don’t remember anyone saying anything about zombie werewolves,” Justin said through his teeth. But he also put his arm around Natividad. She tucked herself gratefully against his solid human warmth, saw Ezekiel looking at her, and flinched.

  But Ezekiel only said, “We might have asked ourselves where Vonhausel learned his little trick. We might have guessed that a vampire who turned up to challenge us might be his vampire.”

  Natividad knew immediately he was right. She should have guessed. She shook her head, not in denial, but in self-disgust and horror. “I couldn’t—I didn’t—I wasn’t thinking,” she said helplessly. “I don’t know—” She looked at the silver knife, streaked and clotted with vampire blood, that still lay on the coffee table. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe I can do something with that. But I was thinking of vampires, not—” she could hear her own voice rising, but couldn’t stop it.

  “Oh, hysterics, is it?” said Keziah, sounding disgusted, which was her way of hiding her own fear and horror, which Natividad understood perfectly well, but Ezekiel gave Keziah a deadly look. The black dog girl turned aside, a sharp, angry motion.

  Natividad shook her head because she knew Keziah was right. She couldn’t just stop, she couldn’t give up, what kind of baby was she, everyone was depending on her. But she couldn’t make the kind of aparato she had used the other time, against Vonhausel’s undead shadow-possessed black dogs, the aparato para parar las sombras, because this time all she had was this one silver knife and it was already clotted with vampire blood rather than tangled with black dog magic. Even if she cleaned it off and used it to make the right kind of aparato to use against undead black dogs, what about the vampire?

  Justin turned to take Natividad’s hands in his, turning his back on the black dogs and on that horror out the window. His hands was warm and firm. His touch made her feel better, more secure in herself, and he looked into her eyes with a direct, confident look and gave her a nod that said, You can do this. He had no idea what Pure magic was supposed to do and what was impossible, and so he trusted her to do something. She nodded back, shakily. He was right. She could. She had to, and so she could. But she didn’t know what.

  “Make us something that will let us take care of that vampire,” Ezekiel said, quiet and confident. “And we will find a way to deal with the shadow-possessed black dogs.”

  His confidence was . . . not encantador, exactly. It probably wasn’t even real. But it made Natividad feel better, all the same.

  The silver knife was the base, of course. Natividad had already put her own blood and magic into it, and Ezekiel’s blood, and Alejandro’s, and now Keziah’s. She had made the knife tolerate their shadows, because that was what one did when one blooded silver.

  That wasn’t exactly the same as what she had done when she’d made the aparato para parar las sombras, but the knife’s tolerance for black dog shadows was a start, in a way. Natividad wondered, in the back of her mind, whether maybe Mamá had also known that blooding silver was a way to begin tangling a thread of black dog magic into a Pure working, and that maybe that was a good thing to do, at least a useful thing.

  Vampires weren’t the same as black dogs, though. Vampire magic wasn’t the same as black dog magic. This time she did not need an aparato para parar las sombras. For a vampire, she needed something else, a different kind of aparato. She knew what she needed: she needed a tool that would drive a vampire right out of the body it possessed and back into the fell dark, a tool that would bind it away from the world and not let it back to reclaim the body it had used. Una herramienta para unir las luz, a tool for binding light and not shadow, because if she could bind light to the vampire’s mortal body, she was sure that would drive the vampire out of that body. And the binding would have to be permanent, because she sort of thought that if the light faded from the body, the vampire might be able to return. A permanent binding, then, or at least a binding that would hold until the body decayed so far not even a vampire could use it.

  “That will work,” she muttered out loud. “I think it will work, only I don’t . . .” She looked at Ezekiel. “It will just work against the vampire. Not the others.

  “Make something we can use against the vampire,” Ezekiel told her, his voice smooth and confident. “and we’ll take care of the . . .” he hesitated.

  “Hell hounds?” suggested Justin.

  “The pets of the vampire,” said Keziah. “That is what they are. The vampire’s soulless hounds.”

  Ezekiel said, with considera
ble force, “We don’t need a name for them, because we’re going to destroy that vampire and after that we will never see creatures like this again.”

  Natividad hoped he was right. She reached out, not quite touching the blood-clotted knife. She didn’t dare touch it. The vampire blood smoked against the silver, pitting the metal, wearing it away. If she touched it, the blood would burn her, too. She knew what she needed to do. She needed to make that knife tolerate the blood, though how she could do that she had no idea; the two kinds of magic were utterly opposed. But she had to do it somehow. Maybe she could make some kind of veil that would keep them apart? Maybe she could use threads of a black dog shadow for that? But even then she would need to teach the silver in that knife how to reach through any shadowy veil and corrupted blood to capture vampire magic. Not just vampire magic, but also the . . . soul of the vampire. Though soul wasn’t the right word, because vampires didn’t have souls. The esencia of the vampire, then. Yes. She needed to teach the knife to capture that essence, and she needed the knife to force it out of the world and back into the fell dark where it belonged.

  She drew a circle around the coffee table with herself inside, to keep any strange magic from bleeding out and harming anyone else. Then she down cross-legged on the floor and looked steadily at the silver knife. And lifted her hands, palm up, and summoned light.

  -15-

  Justin tried to understand what Natividad was doing with the blood-slicked knife. He wondered if he was supposed to be able to understand, since he was Pure. He could see that Ezekiel was watching him, that Keziah was watching him as well, and supposed they both probably wanted to ask if he understood what she was doing. Unfortunately, he had no idea.

  He could see that the silver in the knife hated the vampire’s blood. No wonder the blood was smoking: the knife was inimical to it, almost actively hostile, if you could impute feelings to a knife. Or the magic in the knife. Over and around the knife, clinging to it, he could see a crimson-shot clotted blackness that wasn’t the blood, exactly, but more a shadow cast by the blood—not like the shadows of the black dogs, but not completely unlike, either. He could see how that congealing blackness flinched away from the light that coalescing around Natividad’s hands and especially around the tips of her fingers.