Pure Magic (Black Dog Book 3)

by Rachel Neumeier

  “She’ll be fine,” Miguel said from the doorway. “They all will.”

  Miguel could not know that, and Alejandro felt a flash of anger that his brother would say something so childish and stupid. But Miguel’s eyes were dark with exhaustion, and Alejandro saw that he only hoped it was true and hoped Alejandro would agree with him. He bit back a sharp response. He said instead, his own statement of faith, “Ezekiel will protect her.”

  “Right,” said Miguel.

  Miguel had been helping Grayson get ready for the Chernaya Volchitza. Alejandro did not know exactly what Grayson planned. He only knew what everyone knew: that the woman would come here, seeking Natividad, and perhaps himself as well. Alejandro wondered what Zinaida Alexandrovna Kologrivova would think if she knew her vampire ally had encountered Natividad, not handed over as a gift, but come of her own will to fight it.

  Probably the Russian woman would hope the vampire and Natividad would destroy each other. Probably she would think that the very best of outcomes.

  The Chernaya Volchitza was strong, and ambitious, and she did not respect Dimilioc or Grayson Lanning. Alejandro would have liked to know how many black dogs she still owned, after Grayson and his human allies had sprung their trap. He would very much have liked to believe that Valentin was dead, but he doubted it. Probably Valentin still lived. And too many of the other Russian black dogs, as well. He did not want to think of such an enemy coming against Dimilioc now.

  That was the other reason Grayson had not gone south himself, of course. Nor sent anyone else. He could not go, first because he would not get there in time to help and then also because he must guard Dimilioc against enemies closer to home. He could not send Thaddeus for exactly the same reason. Nor would Thaddeus have gone, leaving his wife and son here so little protected, nor would DeAnn lightly leave Natividad’s little Paloma, no more than she would her own son.

  And Alejandro was not yet strong enough to defy Grayson and go himself. Nor could he have gotten there in time to help her, either.

  “She’ll be fine,” Miguel said again, like a child asking for reassurance.

  “Sí,” Alejandro answered. “Of course she will. Ven acá.” He held his hand out to his brother, offering comfort as though Miguel was a child. But he turned his head sharply before his younger brother had taken more than a single step.

  Miguel stopped, his head coming up alertly.

  “She is here,” Alejandro said. He shut his eyes and braced himself against a table, reaching after the cambio de cuerpo. His shadow was slow to rise, reluctant. Alejandro’s rage called it and made it come, but it was slow, slow. Miguel was gone long before Alejandro had managed the full change. To get to a rifle and find a high vantage point, Alejandro hoped, but he did not know; he had not even seen which direction his brother had gone.

  But he knew where to find Zinaida Kologrivov. That was easy to determine. Alejandro leaped forward and loped down the hall toward the shouting. He moved stiffly, not able to fully use his right forelimb, but he would have to do. There was no more time.

  The Chernaya Volchitza had come, indeed. And in force. The Russian black dogs outnumbered the Dimilioc wolves nearly two to one, and most of them were much older and more powerful than the younger wolves Grayson had recruited for Dimilioc. Thaddeus was there, and he was very strong, but still only half Valentin’s age; James Mallory was there, and Andrew and Russell Meade, and Grayson himself. And little Amira. And that was all, besides Alejandro himself. Besides Valentin, Zinaida Kologrivova had brought ten Dacha wolves.

  Miguel and probably others in the house had rifles loaded with silver bullets, but then several human men with rifles or those big harpoon guns also accompanied Zinaida Kologrivov. Alejandro could see them back in the trees. But as yet, no one was shooting. Alejandro doubted that would last.

  No one was shouting anymore, either. The Black Wolf and Grayson Lanning had approached one another, out there in the open between the house and the forest. The Black Wolf had Valentin at her shoulder, but Grayson was alone. That made Alejandro uneasy and rubbed at his temper. He stared at Valentin with hatred, wishing his stare alone was enough to burn the other black dog to ash. Valentin looked back at him with a curled lip and then away again, dismissively.

  Alejandro was too far away to hear what they were saying. He did not understand why no one was fighting. Probably Grayson had made some clever plan, but Alejandro did not know what it was and could not guess. Watching for any sign of violence or treachery, he limped slowly forward to join the other Dimilioc wolves. Turning slightly, Zinaida Kologrivova pointed to him and said something to Grayson. Alejandro, closer now, heard her harsh voice and saw the satisfaction in her cold, flat eyes, but the pain that had followed him through the change pulled at his attention and made it even harder than usual to understand human language. But he knew he did not like her to point at him, and did not like the contemptuous, superior tone with which she spoke to Grayson.

  Grayson, with a patient, unimpressed air, half turned as well and beckoned to Alejandro.

  Alejandro hesitated, thinking he might have misunderstood. Then he decided he did not care, he wanted to go there anyway, so he strode forward, trying to disguise his lame forelimb. He thought maybe he should shift back to his human form; he wanted to know what Zinaida Kologrivova said and what Grayson said in reply. And his shadow pressed at him, wanting to fight—wanting especially to fight Valentin, even more than Zinaida, even though he was still a little bit injured and Valentin was strong. But Grayson was here, Grayson would help. So Alejandro did not reach after the cambio de cuerpo. He stared at Valentin, curling his own lip back from black fangs.

  Grayson began to speak. Alejandro did not understand him, and half turned his head, determined to listen harder, to understand. But the words meant nothing. And then Valentin said something, and in his hatred of the other black dog, Alejandro forgot even to listen.

  Grayson lifted a hand and took one step forward, and the world cracked open with a sound like the sky breaking in half, and a bodiless wind that was not an ordinary wind whipped through the air. Strands of dense shadow exploded out of the abyss. The threads were part of Alejandro’s shadow, and they tangled with the greater part, and pulled at him, violently.

  For a time that seemed to stretch out endlessly and yet to pass in an eyeblink, Alejandro fought the pull. Then, when he knew he must lose that battle, he leaped forward instead. He struck Grayson hard with his shoulder, throwing him clear, but leaped with determination straight for Valentin. His right limb gave beneath him, but he carried his weight in his shadow for that stride and the next and did not falter. Valentin, shouting, was actually backing away in obvious fear. Alejandro was afraid, too, but if he could only seize Valentin, he did not even care.

  Someone was shouting—someone was screaming—Alejandro heard the flat crack of rifle fire, and frozen silver fire lashed across his face —but he crashed into Valentin, and grappled with him, and when his shadow wrenched him down and out and away from the world, he took the other black dog with him.

  He thought he screamed, but he did not know; he could not hear his own voice. If the Russian wolf cried out, he could not hear him. He clenched his enemy to him and plummeted into the dark, and his last glimpse of the world was of Grayson Lanning, grim and furious, dwindling with a kind of distance that had nothing to do with ordinary space.

  Natividad, reaching out of nothingness, caught him.

  Horrified at the thought that he might have brought her enemy directly to her, Alejandro cast Valentin forcefully away. This time the Russian black dog was the one who tried to cling, but Alejandro tore him free and threw him aside and away, wrapped himself around Natividad instead, and held fast.

  Through all of this first moment, Natividad’s presence in the dark actually seemed almost reasonable, and then Alejandro remembered she was Pure. Even if she had been killed, she should not have fallen away from the world into the fell dark. Yet she was here, with him, real and almost sol
id. Or not precisely real or exactly solid, but it was Natividad and she was here.

  She was falling, too—they were both falling, a motionless crashing fall through the endless dark. They did not fall through actual darkness; they were not actually falling. It was worse than darkness, worse than falling; it was nothing, a blank emptiness. It was the dark that waited for black dogs, that claimed their shadows when they died and which sometimes took them entire, though no one ever spoke of that—they were like children, refusing to name their fear in case it rose up about them and swallowed them alive. As it had swallowed Alejandro.

  But no misstep should have brought Natividad here. That, he did not understand. Yet she was here: he knew her; she glimmered with light, or with something like light, even here, where there was no light nor hope of light. She clung to his shadow; she held strands of it wrapped around her hands; though she was no more substantial than his shadow, she would not let him go. He wrapped himself around her and held on, voiceless here in this place where there was no sound—but he was accustomed to losing language, accustomed to be patient with silence and confusion.

  Something else fell past them, reached for them, for Natividad—something cold and hungry, trying to steal her light and life. It might have been Valentin, but he thought the Russian black dog would have been hot, burning, and this thing was cold. His own shadow roared with furious heat, slashing back at that grasping thing, driving it away. It fell past and away, shrieking without sound or life.

  Natividad clung to him, and he wrapped her in his shadow—his shadow tried to tear away from him, but he held it, fought to hold it as he had fought to hold it all his life. He would not let it go. He knew only afterward that if he had lost it, he would have been helpless and alone in the fell dark, Natividad helpless with him. But by the time he realized this, it had acceded to his will, as it had long been accustomed to yield. He was afraid then, though, because he knew that eventually it would fight him again, and then again after that: it would never grow weary and he thought he would. He was not sure how long he would be able to hold it, and without it he would not be able to drive away the things of cold and hunger.

  But for now he held it. Natividad curled against his chest, and he wrapped his shadow around them both, hot and furious and strong, and they fell together through the empty dark.

  ***

  Justin hurled himself forward, but he was too late to catch Natividad’s hand. Her fingers brushed his, insubstantial as light, and then she was gone.

  Only her silver knife was left, falling faster than anything should fall, falling like a streak of light. If Justin had tried to catch it, he would never have done it. But he simply put out his hand blindly, and it smacked into his palm, and he closed his fingers around it hard. He had caught the knife by the blade. It sliced neatly across his palm and fingers, blood welling between his fingers. The cut stung as though he had caught a handful of fire. He thought he might have cried out; he did not know. He found himself kneeling in the street, the knife held safely by the hilt in his left hand, blood curling down his right wrist and spattering to the ground. All around him was noise and terror and fury, but before him was only this: the crack through the world, trembling. It narrowed even as he stared at it. It had cut through the world like a stroke of lightning, and like lightning it was brilliant but ephemeral. After it closed, he knew he would never be able to open it again. But it had not quite closed yet.

  He looked at it sideways, as he had learned to look at magic; and without thinking he flung Natividad’s silver knife through that gap in the world. It trailed a thread he could almost but not quite see, a glimmering line made of light and magic and his own blood. Getting to his feet, he flung the other end of that line down to root itself in the solid earth, because of course human magic had to be rooted in the earth. Of course it did. He couldn’t understand how he had not known that before. He stepped forward and followed the trail his blood had laid down out of the world and into the dark.

  He did not, of course, know what he was doing. He couldn’t have said what led him to step through that crack and out of the world: instinct, or a whisper of unrecognized memory, or a kind of knowledge carried in the blood instead of the brain. And then he couldn’t have said whether he had done something brave or extraordinarily stupid.

  It wasn’t like a place, on the other side of that crack. It wasn’t anywhere, and it contained nothing. Formless and void, but though it was empty, there were things that existed within it, though they weren’t exactly things and didn’t precisely exist. Something cold and hungry went by him, like the flick of an unseen whip. He flinched from it, finding the knife again in his hand, as though he had never thrown it away. The cold thing fled, though without motion. Justin did not watch it go, but studied the knife.

  The silver knife was without heft or form in this place, but his blood glimmered like moonlight. It trailed away from him, a pale thread that ran back through the crack in nothingness. Light and air came from that crack, immediately dissolving into nothingness. But that gap cast a sort of shadow, almost an anti-shadow, an echo of something more real than anything in this non-place. The line of his blood led into that shadow of reality and back into the world, through a veil that stretched between the world and this non-place. He could sort of see that veil. It looked insubstantial as cobweb. He could hardly believe it hadn’t torn in a hundred places from what he had done, what Natividad had done before him. He could see how delicate it was—

  Though that wasn’t exactly right, because he couldn’t exactly see anything, not in this place beyond light or dark; nor could he feel the knife in his hand. If he still possessed hands. But he held the knife somehow. He tried not to think about it, afraid that if he questioned his own existence too persistently, he might cease to exist.

  He ran the knife through his hands, or through what he thought of as his hands, and, fascinated, watched silver beads of blood scatter like droplets of mercury into the emptiness. He felt no pain, which seemed reasonable since he had no physical hands. But the blood was real. Or real enough. He could work with it; he could make it into a net, like . . . this. Into a filigree shield of light, beaded with silver. The light wasn’t actually real. But the geometry of the figure he made . . . that was real. That was perfect, pure and infinite. He looked at the filigree sideways and thought he could actually see the mathematical function that built that shape out of numbers and nothingness. That wove it out of a memory of light and magic. It was real. He didn’t have to imagine or invent it, only see it. It was an unbounded function. It ran out forever in every direction, infinite and beautiful. He thought suddenly of his mother, a thought for once not touched by grief. She would have loved this function. Justin thought of her and smiled.

  The knife dwindled, the silver running away along with his blood, some of it going into his function and some of it dissolving into the no-place. He had the idea it might be protecting him from dissolving away himself, though he didn’t know how or even whether that was true. But in the end, he held it in his hand, his mathematical filigree. Insubstantial as cobweb. He wondered what it was for, and looked vaguely for Natividad, because she was the one who explained magic.

  He couldn’t see her. But when he thought of her, when he looked for her, he could see that the cold, hungry things were approaching and then flinching away from something else, a sharp glimmer of light that was fiercely itself, but all tangled up with fire and heavy darkness. He thought that this must be Natividad, but he was not sure. He wanted to call her, but he had no voice in this place. This non-place. He wanted to approach her, but there was neither movement nor location here.

  Which meant she was here already. Right here. They were in exactly the same place. So that was not a problem. This whole place was like an equation that had an infinite number of solutions. There were any number of equations that had infinite solutions; there was nothing hard about that. So the closing crack that led away into the world, that could be right here as well. Justin held
his cobweb of light and blood in one hand, and reached out his other hand to that gap, following the line that led through it to the world. As he stepped through the gap, he caught both the light and the fiery dark and brought them with him, and with his other hand flung out the net he had made, and saw it stretch out all along the veil between the real world and the non-place, shining, though not with light. And he stepped through the crack back into the world, and jerked free the line of blood and light he had buried in the earth, and with that line knotted the filigree that was also his mathematical function. He let his knot define just one solution so that the filigree was closed and complete, and then he threw the line into the crack behind him.

  It flashed like lightning, and there was a soundless crash of thunder, and then the crack snapped shut, and the ordinary dark of an ordinary night closed down around him.

  Justin staggered and sat down hard. He tried to catch himself, but there was something wrong with his hands. They hurt, suddenly and sharply. He bit his lip and looked, cautiously, and found a dozen shallow slashes across each palm, probably not dangerous, but painful. Here in the real world, his blood wasn’t silver or made of light, and he couldn’t weave it into a construction of mathematics and magic. He could only watch it drip painfully out onto the ground.

  Then, as though a protective bubble had suddenly burst, the world crashed in with a roar and a scream and a long blood-curdling shriek. Justin flinched and tried to get up, but fell back—it wasn’t just his hands, he was weak as a kitten. But Natividad was here with him, he hadn’t even been sure, not even at the last moment, not even when he’d found his way back into the real world through that crack. She knelt on the ground, her eyes wide with shock and terror, her hands flat on the earth, trying to make herself small, but there was nowhere to hide, not right here, and Justin could not immediately see the vampire anywhere, but there were plenty of blood kin, he could see them just fine—