Shadow Twin

by Rachel Neumeier

  On the concrete floor in front of Grayson, not far away, someone had drawn an arc and a couple of lines. No, it was part of a pentagram, Natividad realized; a big one that probably encompassed most of the floor space in this building. She could see only this little bit of it from their position. But it wasn’t like the pentagram a Pure woman would draw, of light channeled through silver and the clear intention of the maker. This one had been drawn in...in black ink, or something worse than ink. It looked shiny and wet, and it looked deep, like the shape had been incised into the concrete and then filled with ink or tar or something. She knew it was the source of the stench of rot and sulfur. Or one source, anyway. It felt wrong, too. It felt like something meant to imprison rather than protect whatever it contained. But it was strong. She could tell that, too.

  In the exact center of the black pentagram, inside a much smaller five-pointed black star, was a single body. The dead man—Natividad thought it was a man—had been laid out on his back, spread-eagled, his limbs and head arranged according to the points on the star.

  It was an ugly thing. Miguel didn’t have to explain what it was for, that black star anchored by the dead body of a man, for her to know it was ugly and terrible.

  Everyone but them was inside the outer pentagram, though nobody was too close to that central star. Natividad wanted to shout a warning: Don’t go in the pentagram, but it was too late. She hoped no one touched or entered the black star because she was pretty sure that was worse.

  She could glimpse three or four people on the far side of the building. Human, or at least in human form. Three of them looked young, gangly, like boys who hadn’t yet filled out. But she was pretty sure the other one was older. She couldn’t see him clearly, but he was pesado, with a plump body and thick arms and a round face. More than that, he stood solidly, confidently, like someone used to being important. He was a witch, she was positive, though really she could not be entirely certain. The others, she didn’t know. Students or servants or discipulos or something, maybe. One of them was laughing. She might not be able to see him plainly at this distance, but she could hear him. His laughter was as horrible as the pentagram, filled with contempt and a nasty kind of gloating good cheer.

  The whimpering person was over there also, not on his feet. Sitting slumped over, right there with the witches. She couldn’t tell whether he was a black dog or an ordinary human. Either way, he didn’t seem to be trying to escape, or even stand up. Maybe he couldn’t. He—or she, Natividad couldn’t tell—wasn’t exactly screaming any longer. The sound was more like...whimpering. It was a thin, hopeless sound, worse than all the clamor of black dog fury. She couldn’t imagine what had been done to him to make him sound like that. She didn’t want to know.

  The knot of struggling black dogs poured one way and then another within the pentagram, and suddenly Grayson shifted, setting Natividad on her feet as he took human form. His change was fast and precise, even under such circumstances as these. Reaching out, he seized Alejandro’s arm in a hard grip, shadow claws piercing through shaggy pelt so that Alejandro jerked back and snapped at the Master before remembering who he was and sinking down to listen.

  “You see Ezekiel,” Grayson said grimly to Alejandro, nodding out toward the pentagram. “If we force him back to human shape, he’ll be torn to pieces immediately. If we don’t, we’ll lose too many of the rest. We need to separate him from the others, then force his shadow down. Do you understand me, Alejandro?”

  Alejandro snarled in answer, but Natividad wasn’t paying attention to either of them, not any more. Suddenly the battle out there within the pentagram made sense to her. It mostly hadn’t until Grayson had explained what was going on, but now it did. As if by magic, the struggle resolved from confusion into clarity, and she recognized Ezekiel at last. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t known him at once, but he had been lost in all the noise and fury. She knew him now, and understood what was happening. She hadn’t realized that the greater battle was between the black dogs who had come with them and Ezekiel, but it was. Carter and Rip and two others, surely Ian and Jim Gotz, were trying to fight their way past not just Absolon, but also another smaller black dog and Ezekiel.

  They could not possibly do it. Of course they couldn’t. Ezekiel Korte had been made Dimilioc’s executioner for very good reason, not just to gratify Thos Korte’s whim. Even just on his own, Ezekiel could probably have killed all four of his opponents.

  Natividad didn’t recognize the other black dog who, along with Absolon, was supporting Ezekiel. Someone else bound under the witches’ control, but Natividad couldn’t tell who it was. She sort of thought she’d accounted for everyone who had come with them. That wasn’t James, definitely not, and Théo Callot could not have gotten in front of them and would surely be bigger as well. In black dog form, that stranger was not too big, but blazingly quick. If Natividad hadn’t known Keziah was far south with Justin and Amira and Nicholas Hammond, she might have thought that was Keziah. The speed and viciousness was a lot like Keziah. But this black dog was a little bit smaller, perhaps.

  Ian suddenly staggered into human form. He had tried to attack Ezekiel from the rear, not a good idea. Now he was injured badly enough that his shadow had to carry his wounds away, so she forgot about the other black dog in her sudden terror for him—she didn’t know Ian, but he was practically a child. She didn’t want to see him torn to pieces before her eyes.

  But Carter got in the way before Ezekiel could finish Ian. She knew Alejandro considered Carter a threat. Now she saw why. It was obvious he was larger and more powerful than any of the others except Ezekiel himself. Carter was older and a lot more focused, and Rip was supporting him, that was also obvious now. Ezekiel had no choice but to turn from Ian to attack Carter instead.

  Carter definitely couldn’t match Dimilioc’s executioner for long. He was already bleeding from long slashing injuries across his face and side, black ichor that dripped and smoked. If he shifted to human form, he would be dead in an instant, but if he refused to shift he would not be able to shed the wounds he took.

  And the smaller black dog with Ezekiel was driving in against Rip, who was plainly not a match for him. Her. Natividad was starting to think that one was a girl—it could be hard to tell, but she was starting to think so. The black dog seemed so much like Keziah: not as fast, maybe, and un poco bigger, but just as fierce.

  Jim Gotz came in hard and fast, attacking Ezekiel from the rear, or trying to. Naturally Ezekiel twisted, agile as a cat, and sent Jim reeling back almost immediately, forced into human form by wounds too great to survive unless his shadow carried them away.

  But Ezekiel didn’t follow up against Jim. He turned back to Carter.

  Ezekiel was going to kill Carter, Natividad could see he was. She didn’t like or trust Carter, but he was one of theirs, and there was nothing she could do to stop Ezekiel from killing him—nothing any of them could do to stop him.

  Then Grayson made a low, harsh sound and even way over there Ezekiel stumbled and went down hard. He was up again instantly, but his attention was now focused right across the room, right on Grayson. Natividad realized Grayson had tried to roll his shadow after all—no, not that exactly—but he had interfered somehow, but not so much that Carter or anyone else could drive in and kill Ezekiel.

  If Grayson were careful, maybe this fight would last long enough that Natividad would be able to end it herself. She took a tentative step forward, glancing back to make sure Alejandro was right with her. Of course he was, so that was fine.

  If she could get to Ezekiel—if Grayson could hold him just long enough—if she could make him look into her altered mirror—she would make him look and it would work. It would free him from those horrible witches and then he would kill them and everything would be fine after all.

  Except she couldn’t cross the pentagram. She had never imagined what it would be like to be on the outside of a pentagram and unable to cross it. Pentagrams were to keep out evil things, creatur
es of ill intent. They were not meant to restrict the Pure.

  But this one was different. Of course it was different. She had known that, but she hadn’t realized what it meant. And what it meant, obviously, was that she was stuck out here while Ezekiel killed or died in there.

  Way on the other side of the building, the older witch said something to the others and they all laughed, that ugly, nasty laugh. They knew she couldn’t do anything to help anybody. They thought they were going to win.

  Sick with fury and dismay, Natividad fell to her knees, reached out, set her hands flat on the concrete floor, and shoved the palms of both her hands straight across the black pentagram.

  It hurt. Or it didn’t exactly hurt, but the nasty shiny blackness of it crawled up her hands and wrists. It wasn’t exactly like a physical substance, it wasn’t like liquid that you had to shove your way through. It definitely wasn’t alive, that shiny blackness, but it felt like it was alive. Natividad jerked involuntarily backward, but her touch had already damaged the pentagram—her palms had left silvery gaps in it, her fingers had traced trails of light through it. Traces of the inky blackness clung to her skin. That didn’t hurt either, but it felt just...really disturbing. Filthy. Hot, thick, slimy. The blackness clung. Even when she rubbed her hands hard against the floor and then on her jeans, it felt like she only rubbed it in deeper. And even so, she hadn’t cut all the way through it the outer circle of the pentagram. It wasn’t all the way broken. She knew she could break that pentagram, but she would have put her hands on it again and she wasn’t sure she could bear its touch a second time.

  The witches now knew she could break their pentagram, though. None of them was laughing any longer. One of the boys was cursing, and the older man was shouting in Latin—from the sound of it, he might actually be cursing too, only in Latin—and suddenly Ezekiel tore himself away from his opponents and headed straight toward her. Alejandro put himself in between them, which was not much of an improvement. But Natividad trusted Grayson not to let either of them kill the other, not now, not when she was surely going to be able to rescue Ezekiel any second—he would be right here any second.

  She wasn’t afraid. She was angry, mostly. Enraged for Ezekiel’s sake and her own. Her rage let her slap one hand down against the pentagram a second time, her fury let her keep her palm flat against the slimy blackness and shove or push or cut her way through it.

  Then, scrambling to her feet, she stepped right across the gap she’d made and held up her mirror. She didn’t look over her shoulder, but she was dimly aware of Grayson and Alejandro, one on either side of her.

  She was vividly, physically, aware of Ezekiel. He was coming so fast, no hesitation at all, crimson flames flickering up where his claws raked the concrete floor, fangs jet black against the fire that filled his mouth. She didn’t move.

  She didn’t feel it when her brother and the Master forced Ezekiel’s shadow down and under. Alejandro had told her that rolling down another black dog’s shadow felt to him like rolling a boulder over a spring where water wanted to bubble up: the water still wanted to rise, but the weight of the boulder kept it down. Of course the boulder had to be heavy enough and the rising water not too powerful. Alone, her brother could never have forced down Ezekiel’s shadow. Not even Grayson could do it alone. But together they could. They did.

  Natividad wasn’t a black dog; she couldn’t directly feel the contest. But she could see it happen. When Ezekiel shifted on his own, the change was not only smooth but also very fast, complete in less than a second, sometimes a lot less. But when Grayson and Alejandro forced his shadow down, the change was fitful, jagged, erratic, and much slower. Painful to watch, except she was so relieved to see the change cut away Ezekiel’s shadow and roll it under. Except in human form, he horrified her for a different reason. He was thin, thinner than she’d ever seen him. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the flatness of his eyes, the total absence of expression.

  Even in human form, Ezekiel didn’t stop, though he staggered as the uneven change jolted through him. His human face was blank, but even after his body was completely human, his eyes were a bright pale gold, nothing of himself in them, nothing human. And he was still coming, still trying to get to Natividad. He could kill her almost as easily in human form as in his black dog shape. She didn’t move, not because she was brave but because she just couldn’t.

  Then Alejandro surged past Natividad and bore Ezekiel down to the floor not ten steps away. He could never have stood against Dimilioc’s executioner ordinarily. But Grayson pinned Ezekiel in human form and Alejandro flung that human body to the concrete floor and held Ezekiel immobile, and just as if they’d practiced it a hundred times, as if she weren’t frightened at all, Natividad stepped around her brother, knelt down, and held her espejo in front of Ezekiel’s inhuman yellow eyes.

  “¡Que el mal salga!” she said, then repeated it in English and went on: “May evil depart, may evil be cast out, may the demon be cast out, may you be free of it!”

  When Justin’s grandmother’s priest had done this, he had saved not only himself but everyone else as well. Natividad wasn’t a priest. But she was Pure, and her espejo had both a lock and a key embedded in it, and she knew just what she wanted it to do, which was important for more complicated kinds of magic.

  But the slimy darkness that had clung to her hands now writhed up her fingers and curled around the espejo.

  That, she hadn’t expected at all. If had been finished properly, if it had been blessed, she was pretty sure that wouldn’t have happened. But now it was just a mess. She tried to shake the clinging darkness away, but of course that didn’t work. She tried to hold the espejo the mirror, between the palms of her hands without touching it with her fingers, but that didn’t work either because the darkness oozed and dripped from her fingers toward the glass and metal and light. She wanted to drop the espejo, she wanted to hold it fast, most of all she wanted to make Ezekiel look into it, but she was positive the contaminating demon-magic would do something dreadful to her magic and she couldn’t think how to make that not happen—

  Stéphanie Callot reached past her, took the espejo out of Natividad’s hands, and held it firm before Ezekiel’s face. She spoke a few emphatic words, not in English. French, Natividad assumed.

  Despite Stéphanie’s muffled, inhibited magic, the aparato must have at least sort of worked, because Ezekiel’s face suddenly took on expression. Stark, blazing fury; horror; desperation. He had been snarling, even in human form. Now he stopped fighting Alejandro, stopped fighting Grayson. He held still. Not relaxed. Every muscle was taut. But unmoving. His eyes turned pale human blue. Yellow again. Blue. Fiery yellow. It was hard to tell what he was thinking, feeling...even seeing, with his eyes shifting back and forth like that.

  Théo Callot closed his hands on his wife’s shoulders and lifted her smoothly out of the way, putting her behind him. Ezekiel showed no signs of noticing either of them; no signs of noticing any of them. Natividad longed to touch him, but didn’t dare, not with the black shadow still clinging to her hands. She wanted desperately to help him, to say something comforting to him, but she had no idea what she could possibly say or do.

  Ezekiel’s head went back hard, his back arching. His mouth opened, and Natividad saw with dismay and revulsion that though his jaw and teeth were human, his mouth was filled with the same horrible black tarry stuff that the pentagram had been made out of—something very like it, anyway. Turning his head, he spat. Stéphanie made a disgusted sound, jumping back farther. Natividad couldn’t even blame her, that black goo was horrible. But Ezekiel’s back arched again—he was choking on inky blackness. On black magic. On whatever nasty black witchery held him. He struggled against Alejandro’s hold—he was struggling to breathe, but Alejandro didn’t let him go and Natividad knew he couldn’t, that even if Ezekiel suffocated right here, her brother wouldn’t dare let him up with that black stuff in him.

  She first thought of her silve
r-alloy letter opener, but she was afraid to touch anything silver in case it might get contaminated. She was afraid to touch anything, afraid the stuff clinging to her hands would get everywhere, get anywhere, though so far it stuck to her skin and didn’t seem to contaminate her bag. But there had to be something she could do, something she could use...she looked around once more. Then she remembered one more thing she had, one thing that was right here. She tore the gold bracelet off her wrist with her teeth, as carefully as she could, and dropped it into her hand, cupping it in her palm and letting the sticky black stuff roll over it. But as she had more or less expected, the contamination fell away from the bracelet rather than clinging.

  “What are you doing?” Stéphanie demanded behind her. “Gold is no use in magic!”

  Gold was no use in magic, that was true. It wouldn’t hold or channel any kind of magic, but that seemed exactly what Natividad needed. If she could only tangle her own magic kind of around it. It might work, she thought she could see how it could work, it was like the way traces of her brother’s shadow, and Ezekiel’s, wove through and around her own magic without ever quite touching. She had to use something physical to channel her intention. She wasn’t Justin, to bring patterns of light and magic to life all of an instant just by holding their equations in her mind.

  Gold, then, and forget Stéphanie’s disbelief. And light. There was plenty of light here, so that was good. Clean sunlight, pouring in through the broken windows. Natividad was used to catching light in her cupped palms, braiding it with her fingers. But that was just the way a Pure woman imagined magic. Obviously no one actually touched light. So she held up the gold bracelet, stared with narrowed eyes into the sunlight, braided light and gold together with a breath, with an intention, with a feeling about what ought to work. Without ever letting the nasty black magic stuff get involved in her working at all.

  Then, grabbing Ezekiel’s chin, she dropped light and gold together directly into his mouth and cried forcefully, “¡Que el mal sea expulsado, que el demonio sea expulsado, que usted sea libre de él! ¡Reclame tú mismo y sea que sea destinado ser!”