Shadow Twin

by Rachel Neumeier

  Ezekiel attacked Grayson, who grappled with him. Alejandro visibly tore his attention away from the demon to help.

  Then there was a huge violent tearing, crashing sound—Natividad jumped, her heart pounding, but that turned out to be Carter, tearing into one of the big roaring machines. Metal screamed as he tore into it, peeled the casing open and attacked the engine within.

  “I should have thought of that,” Miguel muttered beside her. “Not a stupid guy, Carter.”

  “Yeah, I still don’t like him,” Natividad muttered in Spanish. “What are those things even for?”

  Her twin shrugged, answering in English. “Who knows? If the witches want them running, I bet we don’t.”

  “The demon-thing doesn’t seem to care.” It truly didn’t, unfortunately, though Natividad watched it anxiously, hoping it would retreat or get smaller or something. Nothing like that happened.

  The priest shouted again, indistinct but probably Latin. Natividad was pretty sure she knew what he was saying; it was probably something like Get out, demon! The problem was, the demon was out. Out of Ezekiel. But that didn’t mean it was harmless. At all. It was still right here, and unfortunately, despite the priest’s efforts, it showed no signs of going. It seemed to be getting larger every time it attacked somebody. And the light in this place seemed to be dimming. She didn’t think that this was an illusion. She felt that the dimming light was kind of like the sunlight itself filtered through the smoky presence of the demon and was weakened, or changed into something that wasn’t exactly light anymore.

  Natividad pulled away from Miguel and dropped to her knees. She drew a pentagram about a foot across right onto the concrete floor, right at the gap where she’d broken the great black pentagram. Hers was made of light and clear intention. It glimmered on the concrete like moonlight on water; its light trickled sideways into the wide black line of the black witch’s pentagram, producing rivulets of sparks that ran across the floor like tears.

  “You sure that’s a good idea?” Miguel’s tone was diffident. He knew when Natividad tried to work out something new, she relied mainly on impulse and instinct and what felt right, not on actual theory or careful planning. “It might fix up the black pentagram, do you think? Which in some ways might be good, right, I know that,” he added, glancing over at the demon-thing. “On the other hand, we can be pretty sure this is one nasty pentagram.”

  Natividad shook her head, not disagreeing. She didn’t know. But she pressed her palm and outspread fingers into the center of her pentagram and looked first left and then right along the wide outer circle of the black pentagram. The nasty pentagram couldn’t touch her now. Her own small pentagram protected her.

  Could she put the big one to use? It was magic. Not Pure magic, but she’d already proved that she could touch it, affect it, make it react. The idea of trying to use it turned her stomach, but if she could figure out something that might contain the witch’s demon...shouldn’t she try? She’d never imagined anything like this demon thing. Nobody seemed able to attack it. She had no idea how to protect herself or anybody else against it, except by keeping it away from everyone.

  Another crump, and another after that, told her that the Special Forces people were still trying to capture Ezekiel alive. But someone fired a regular gun, too, deafeningly close. Natividad couldn’t help but look up quickly, afraid to see who might have gotten shot. Nobody screamed, she didn’t see anybody fall, but anything could have happened, could be happening right now. She looked for Ezekiel, needing to see that he was all right, or at least that he hadn’t been shot.

  She knew just where he was. That hadn’t changed, at least. She always knew, and just at the moment he was way too close for a black dog with an ascendant shadow, hardly thirty feet away. He felt so different, so distant, so...out of reach, even though he was right over there. But the Special Forces people had him at last. She was so glad. The Special Forces people had wrapped him up in a net, so he was safe, or at least not hurt, or at least not dead. And Grayson was safe and Alejandro was safe. She could deal with anything else, so long as that were true.

  Actually Ezekiel was wrapped up in two nets, each bound to a slender cord, each gripped by a couple different Special Forces guys who wound the lines around their hands and leaned back hard to keep pressure on the nets. Even all of them together seemed just barely capable of holding Ezekiel right there in that exact spot, even though he was now almost completely back in human shape.

  Those nets were like something a Pure woman might make, though Natividad had never heard of anybody Pure working for the Special Forces. But still, those nets were like that. The cords were thin, hardly thicker than fishing line, but of course silver provided more than a physical constraint. Besides, fishing line was actually much harder to break than it looked. As far as she could tell, Ezekiel wasn’t going to be able to break those cords. Not without considerable effort and some time to work at it.

  She couldn’t imagine how any ordinary human could have had the reflexes to shoot that net around Ezekiel, but she was so glad somebody had managed it. Especially since Grayson was looking just grim. Probably he’d helped the Special Forces people capture Ezekiel. That made sense—

  Then the demon bent down again.

  Without thinking about it Natividad jumped to her feet and stepped across the small pentagram she’d drawn into the giant black pentagram. Immediately she felt stifled, like the air inside the black pentagram was...thick, or polluted. Hard to breathe. She hesitated.

  Miguel caught her arm, pulled her back. She was aware of her twin exclaiming, but she paid no attention. She couldn’t let the demon-thing touch anyone else. Definitely not Grayson. Definitely not Ezekiel. But everything was all wrong inside this pentagram and she didn’t know what to do.

  All around her, within the black pentagram, the light dimmed and dimmed. Shadows thickened, and the air stank of rot and rust and something worse than either, and...Grayson shifted into human form. Natividad didn’t understand that. Alejandro had shifted as well...every black dog in the pentagram seemed to be shifting...Grayson, only a few strides from Ezekiel, went heavily to his knees, every muscle in his back and shoulders visibly straining, neck corded with effort. His shadow stretched out along the concrete floor, not the shadow of a man. Bigger, shaggier, with fiery eyes.

  It was the demon. Natividad understood that suddenly. The witch’s demon was doing something horrible to the black dogs. Maybe her mirror had started it, in fact she knew her mirror had started it, sending a crack between the human soul of each black dog and his shadow. But now the demon was taking advantage of that crack. Forcing them all into human shape, but that wasn’t the only thing it was doing to them, she was sure of that, she could feel it. It was pulling their shadows out of them. Forcing their shadows into ascendance? She didn’t know, but something terrible. Alejandro was down, too...everyone was down. Ezekiel, wrapped up in those silver nets, was making an awful sound. Not screaming. Too much like the sounds those other victims of the demon made. The Special Forces men were dragging him toward the edge of the pentagram, toward Natividad, as fast as they could. She didn’t know what she would do to protect any of them, even if they reached her, but she definitely had to try.

  There was no time to think, no time to try one thing and then if that didn’t work try something else. Natividad flung herself down by her little pentagram. She buried her hands in what seemed the only clean light in the whole building. It cleared her mind, or she thought it did. But she could hear the demon better, too. It was laughing.

  Fumbling in her bag, Natividad found the silver letter opener, jabbed its blunt tip into her left palm, dragged it along the meaty part of her thumb, said rapidly in Spanish, “Let blood and life be light!” and flung her own blood to the right and to the left along the broad curve of the black pentagram’s outer circle.

  Her blood spattered the darkness, and every drop of blood was light and the memory of light. The black pentagram tried to smother the l
ight; she could feel it choking her, choking her magic. But her blood glimmered with sunlight, with moonlight, with clean firelight, and the light sort of...reached out...along the black lines of the pentagram. The pentagram was on fire. Where the fire burned out, the concrete was clean, unmarked by ash or tarry blackness or light or anything. Just plain concrete, with no sign that magic of any kind had ever been laid across it.

  Which should have been good. Natividad thought it should have been fine. She knew destroying the black pentagram had been a good thing to do. Except the demon was...stretching. Unconstrained, she realized that. Now that the black pentagram had been destroyed, it was totally free. It had turned away from her, and seemed to be measuring the light coming through the windows. It picked up one...limb, and another, picking its way through the space where the black pentagram had lain.

  Her fault, whatever it did now that it was free, but what else had she been supposed to do? Everything about this had just involved stumbling from one impulse to another and she had never yet known what she was actually doing. And now she was out of inspiration.

  Maybe she could draw another pentagram, a better one, and stop the demon again. She looked frantically for Grayson, for Alejandro, but she couldn’t tell if they had been freed from the demon’s influence or not. Grayson was shaking himself, first of all the Dimilioc wolves to get to his feet, but his eyes burned and his shadow was still the shadow of the monster. Alejandro was feeling...stretched, drawn apart, afraid. Natividad scrambled up and took one step toward her older brother.

  Miguel grabbed her hand and pulled her back. “It’s not over, they’re not all right,” he said urgently. “Look at Grayson.”

  The Master had turned to stare at his own shadow, which as far as Natividad could tell, had nearly pulled free of him. It was almost its own creature, almost free. If it got all the way free—she didn’t want to even imagine what might happen then. “Oh, not good!” she exclaimed, and looked urgently at her bag. “I can make something for that—I’m sure I can make something for that—a little like the Aplacando, but different—”

  Miguel continued to pull her backward, rapidly.

  The demon took one more step and shredded into greasy smoke or fog, drifting away, up. Way too much greasy black smoke.

  “A prudent retreat seems in order,” Colonel Herrod agreed with Miguel, his manner unhurried despite the urgency of his gesture waving his people back and out. His wary glance moved from the insubstantial demon to the besieged black dogs. “Until we have, or make, an opportunity to assess the outcome of these startling events.”

  Despite the colonel’s deliberate manner, his people moved with decisive haste, and Natividad found herself bundled along between two black-uniformed men without ever deciding whether she ought to go with them or not. She might have protested even then, except that Miguel was right beside her, and Ezekiel, wrapped in silver netting and now seeming unconscious, was being carried along by two of the other men. So she cast one more desperate glance back, at Grayson facing his monster and Alejandro just struggling to his feet in human form, at the others, at the demon shadowing them all. She was torn, she didn’t know what to do, but the Special Forces people weren’t going to let her go, and there was Ezekiel, right here, and in the end she caught his hand through the silver netting, cooperating because she just did not know what else to do and Ezekiel was the one who seemed to need her the most.

  -10-

  Once they were outside, in the clean air, heading out and away from all the weird black magic stuff, Miguel finally felt as though he could get a breath. It was about time he pulled himself together and started to figure things out. He had hardly been able to think at all in there. He hadn’t been any help at all. It was embarrassing, now. He’d been too stifled to be embarrassed before. Or, be honest, too frightened.

  It was all definitely interesting, though, at least now that he could think about it without a revolting demon-thing stalking around, ready to pounce in any direction, with who knew what horrible effects on its victims. Stéphanie—that had been bad. And Jim Gotz had been worse. And any demonic creature that could attack both the Pure and black dogs was serious bad news. No one had to explain that to Miguel.

  If everybody else had been out here and safe too, that would’ve been even better. Unless their shadows all broke free. Then it’d be dire. Away seemed like a real good idea, at least until they figured out what else was going to happen to all the black dogs and got some general indication of who was going to win. Or at least who was going to be fighting on which side.

  He truly did not want to think about what would happen if all the Dimilioc black dogs turned into poor little whimpering puppies. Or worse, turned into puppets with the demon pulling intact strings.

  Whatever happened to the black dogs, it didn’t seem likely at this point to still be happening to Ezekiel. That was surely a good sign. Though if you had to wrap a black dog up in a silver net to force his shadow under, that definitely wasn’t ideal. And they still didn’t know what would happen when they let Ezekiel up. If he were still under the control of a black witch, would he try to kill everyone or, not having orders, just freeze up? Would he regain control of his shadow or...yeah, Miguel was back to picturing Ezekiel trying to kill everyone.

  Though he didn’t intend to say so to Natividad, he hoped no one would let Ezekiel loose from that net until they were a little bit better situated to cope with a crazy-killer evil-twin version. Just in case.

  He was going to have to figure out some way to stop witches taking control of black dogs. Or Natividad was going to have to figure it out. Maybe they could get Ezekiel to explain how it had worked from the point of view of someone trapped inside the spell, and figure it out together. Not that Ezekiel was likely to be keen on sharing. If he’d talk about his experiences with anybody, though, Natividad would definitely be the one he’d open up to.

  Were black witches born to magic, like black dogs, or was that stuff something anybody could learn? That seemed like a pretty urgent question considering they really needed to know just how many witches they might be facing, and how fast the numbers of enemies might increase. From the quick-and-dirty research he and Cassie had been doing, she thought witches were probably born instead of made, but Miguel suspected it might be the other way around. That would sure be different: magic ordinary people could understand and use and practice.

  Not a very nice type of magic, true.

  Now that they were out of that place, him and Natividad and the Special Forces guys, and Ezekiel dragged along like a casualty, Miguel felt he could finally start to figure out more about how that kind of magic actually worked. He ought to have seen enough to get some kind of impression of black witchcraft’s rules and limitations.

  That black circle, for example. Natividad had been able to interfere with it. The magic that had made it must be like her magic in some ways, then, but very different in others. He wanted to talk to her about it, but the way she was hovering over the unconscious Ezekiel, he might not have much luck with that for the next few minutes.

  Probably a few more minutes to pull himself together would be better anyway.

  He felt like they had all just come up from the sticky mud at the bottom of a lake. Except mud that had deliberately tried to drag them down and drown them. He felt they’d all barely escaped death—or worse than death. That demonic entity, whatever it had done to its victims, yeah, actually he did not want to know what it had done. At least, he sure didn’t want to learn about that first-hand.

  Though probably he wouldn’t have. Probably none of the humans in that place would have been attacked by the demon. They wouldn’t have survived long enough, because if they’d stuck around, the black dogs would have killed them all first. Or not the black dogs, exactly. Their freed shadows, after the demon pried them loose from their human hosts.

  He went back over those last moments in his mind and came to the same conclusion: that had been exactly what was happening. Whether the demon
had managed it, or was going to manage it, they wouldn’t be able to tell for sure until the Dimilioc wolves came out into the light and were either themselves again or...not.

  What a thing that was: loosen the bond between possessed human and demonic shadow, let the shadow loose to kill. Witchcraft was all about calling up and controlling demonic entities; he and Cassie agreed on that one and Miguel sure hadn’t seen anything to suggest they were wrong. Too bad neither of them had put that idea together with the way they knew a witch could take over and control a black dog. Neither of them had even suspected witchcraft might pull the shadow right out of a black dog. They should have suspected it. He should have, for sure.

  And because he hadn’t guessed what might happen, hadn’t figured out a way to prepare for the sorts of things witches might do, they’d been forced to abandon all the black dogs in their rush to escape. Well, all except Ezekiel. Who looked terrible, not just because he was all wrapped up in those nets. But at least he was out of there. Unlike the others.

  Somehow Miguel always seemed to be doing this—running away and leaving someone else to do the fighting. The dying. First Mamá and Papá. Now Alejandro. He could hardly believe he’d abandoned his older brother. Except there’d been no choice. Sometimes you had to retreat and regroup and figure out what you’d learned and come up with a better plan for next time.

  At least Natividad was safe. Pretty safe. Safe-ish. That was one good thing. These Special Forces guys weren’t a bit likely to let anything happen to her. If they could stop it, which that demon hadn’t seemed just real easy to deal with, unfortunately. Still. A dozen men, fifteen or so in fact. And a couple women. And Colonel Herrod, who was not, Miguel was sure, the sort to spend a lot of time regrouping before he came up with a definite plan. Yeah. Calling Herrod in as backup had definitely been a really good idea.

  Miguel was even more sure of that when the colonel held up a hand, bringing all his people to a halt, including the guys lugging Ezekiel between them. Herrod didn’t look the least bit panicky. He had that turned-inward look of someone thinking hard, but at the same time Miguel had the impression the colonel was keeping close track of everything going on right here and now.