Black Dog

by Rachel Neumeier

  Rachel Neumeier

  BLACK DOG

  1

  With one fingertip, Natividad drew a pentagram on the window of the bus. It glimmered faintly, nearly invisible, light against light: protection against danger and the dark and all shadowed things.

  Well, almost all. Some, anyway.

  The glass of the window was cold enough to numb the tip of her finger. The cold was always a shock; she somehow never expected it, even after all these days of travel. It was cold inside the bus, but she knew it was much colder outside. Of course winter temperatures here fell way below zero, but she hadn’t guessed what that would be like. She hadn’t known that air could be so cold it actually hurt to breathe. She knew it now.

  The countryside framed by her pentagram’s pale glimmer was as foreign and comfortless as the cold. The mountains themselves were almost familiar, but Natividad recognized nothing else in this high northern country to which she and her brothers had come. Driven by enemies behind and hope ahead… though now that they were here, this didn’t look much like a country of hope. But they had had nowhere else to go. No other choices.

  Natividad glanced surreptitiously sideways, reassuring herself that, even in this cold and unfamiliar country, her brothers hadn’t changed.

  Her twin, Miguel, in the seat next to her, was reading a newspaper he’d scrounged somewhere. That was certainly ordinary. He turned the pages carefully in a vain attempt to avoid irritating Alejandro. Across the aisle, Alejandro was staring out the opposite window, pretending not to be annoyed by the rustling pages. Natividad saw the tension in his shoulders and back and knew how hard his dark shadow pressed him. Despite everything she could do to help her older brother, his temper, always close to the surface, had been strained hard – not only by the terror and rage and grief so recently past, but by the unavoidable awareness that they were running into danger almost greater than they’d escaped.

  All the strangers on the bus didn’t help, either. All along, wanting no one behind them, Alejandro had insisted that they sit together in the rear of the bus. Though it was nice to sit in the front so you could get off faster when the bus stopped, sitting in the back was alright if it helped Alejandro keep his shadow under tight control. Even if it was harder to get a good view of the road. Natividad looked out her window again. She could still see the pentagram she’d drawn, though by now it would be completely invisible to ordinary human sight.

  Out there in the cold, mountains rose against the sky, white and gray and black: snow and naked trees and granite and the sky above all… The sky itself was different here, crystalline and transparent, seeming farther away than any Mexican sky. The sun seemed smaller here, too, than the one that burned across the dry mountains of Nuevo León: this sun poured out not heat, but a cold brilliant luminescence that the endless snow reflected back into the sky, until the whole world seemed made of light.

  Beside Natividad, Miguel leaned sideways to look past her, curious to see what had caught her attention.

  “Nothing,” Natividad said in English. She had insisted on speaking nothing but English since they had crossed the Rio Bravo. Miguel and even Alejandro had looked back across the river, toward the home they were leaving behind. She had not. She wanted to leave everything behind: all the grief and the terrible memories – let the dead past drown in that river; she would walk into another country and another life and never look back.

  “It’s not nothing,” her twin answered. “It’s the Northeast Kingdom. It’s Dimilioc.” His wave took in all the land east and north of the highway.

  “Just like all the other mountains,” said Natividad, deliberately flippant. But Miguel was right, and she knew it mattered. Since St Johnsbury, all the land to the east was Dimilioc territory. She said, “I bet the road out of Newport is paved with yellow bricks.”

  Miguel grinned. “Except the road is lined with wolves instead of lions and tigers and bears, Dorothy.”

  Natividad gave him a raised-eyebrow look. “‘Dorothy?’ Are you kidding? I’m the witch.”

  “The good witch or–” Miguel stopped, though, as Alejandro gave them both a look. Alejandro did not like jokes about Dimilioc or about the part of Vermont that Americans called the Northeast Kingdom – almost a quarter of the state. Natividad knew why. Americans might be joking when they called this part of Vermont a “kingdom”, but she knew that there was too much truth to that joke for it to be funny. Dimilioc really was a kind of independent kingdom, with Grayson Lanning its king – and everyone knew he did not like stray black dogs. They were all nervous, but Alejandro had more reason to be afraid than Miguel and far more reason than Natividad. Fear always strained his control. Natividad ducked her head apologetically.

  “Newport,” Alejandro said, his tone curt.

  It was. Natividad had not even noticed the exit signs, but the bus was slowing for the turn off the highway. Newport: the town where all the bus routes finally ran out. Just visible past Alejandro’s shoulder, Lake Memphremagog glittered in late afternoon light. Natividad liked the lake – at least, she liked its name. It had pizzazz. She stretched to catch another glimpse of it, but then the bus turned away from the lake and rolled into the station and she lost sight of the bright water.

  Newport was the town closest to Dimilioc that did not actually fall within the borders of the Northeast Kingdom. It was smaller than Natividad had expected. Clean, neat, pretty – all the towns this far north seemed to be clean and neat and pretty. Maybe that was the snow lying over everything, hiding all evidence of clutter and untidiness until the spring thaw should uncover it. If there was a thaw. Or a spring. It was hard to believe any spring could thaw this frozen country. As she got off the bus, Natividad pulled the hood of her coat up around her face and tried to pretend she was warm.

  “You must get out of the cold,” Alejandro said abruptly. He closed one long hand around Natividad’s arm, collected Miguel with a glance, and led them across the street toward the hotel on the opposite corner. He scanned the streets warily as they moved, scenting the cold air for possible enemies.

  Natividad made no effort to calm her brother. She hoped and believed they’d left all their enemies behind them – even Vonhausel would not dare intrude on Dimilioc territory – but they were intruding here, so how could Alejandro be calm? She didn’t argue about the hotel, either. It looked alright. It looked like it might be expensive. But everything in Newport was probably expensive, and her brother needed to feel like he was in control, and they would only be there one night, after all.

  Miguel heaved their pack up over his shoulder and hurried to catch up. “We need to find a car–” he began.

  “Not today,” snapped Alejandro. “It gets dark too early here. You can’t go alone to look at cars, and Natividad is tired and cold and needs to rest.”

  Miguel, catching Alejandro’s tone and not needing Natividad’s warning glance, said meekly, “Maybe tonight I can find a newspaper with ads. Then I can figure out which cars we should look at tomorrow.” Alejandro nodded curtly, not much interested.

  The hotel was expensive, but they only needed one room. They got a room with two beds, but Alejandro wouldn’t sleep, of course – certainly not after dark. He stretched out on his stomach on the bed nearer the door, on top of the bedspread, his chin propped up on his hands, his eyes open and watchful.

  “One night,” Natividad said, counting the money they had left. “I think we can afford one night – if we don’t have to pay too much for a car. We won’t need–” she stopped herself, barely, from saying that after tomorrow, one way or another, they probably wouldn’t have to worry about money. She said instead, “Try to find a car for less than two thousand dollars, Miguel, but we can pay more if we really need to.”

  Miguel muttered a wordles
s acknowledgement, not looking up. There had been newspapers in the hotel’s lobby, and he had collected them all. Natividad read the stories while her twin looked at the ads for cars. Big headlines shouted about recent werewolf violence. The part about the weather included warnings about the dates of the approaching full moon as well as about expected snow. All the way north, in one hotel and bus station after another, the headlines had been like that.

  Certainly the newspaper people were right about the great increase in “werewolf” violence, though the writers did not yet know enough to distinguish between true black dogs and mere cambiadors, the little moon-bound shifters. What ordinary people thought they knew about “werewolves” was still mostly wrong, even now, when the vampire magic that had fogged human perception for so long had thinned almost to nothing. The vampires had not been gone long enough, yet, for people to figure out the real shape of the world. Miguel said that human ignorance about the sobrenatural could not last very much longer. Natividad wasn’t sure. She thought people wouldn’t want to think about or believe in scary monsters that hunted in the dark.

  “Your maraña mágica,” Alejandro said abruptly.

  Natividad looked up in surprise. “You think it’s important? Here?” Even if Vonhausel had managed to track them all the way north – which was impossible – but anyway, even Vonhausel would hardly attack them here in this nice hotel so close to Dimilioc.

  “It’s always important,” Alejandro snapped. “All the time.”

  Natividad said, “Alright,” in her very meekest tone and slid off the bed. Before she got out her maraña, she drew a pentagram on the glass of the window, for safety and peace, to help calm her brother. But she drew a mandala on the floor, too: a simple crossed circle, just in case Alejandro was right and somebody was looking for them. Unwanted attention just sort of slid off a circle. Mamá had taught her–

  Natividad stopped for a second, breathing deliberately. For just a heartbeat, she could almost have believed she really was back with Mamá, out behind the main house, where the great oak reached its heavy branches out over the ring of young limber pines, twenty-seven of them, each with its trunk only a little thicker than her own wrist. She could almost believe she stood amid rich light slanting through the oak leaves, dust motes sparkling in the sunlight pouring down around her.

  Mamá had planted those pines when she and Papá had first built their house in Potosi, because there was strength in bending as well as in standing firm. She said Papá and Alejandro could have the rest of the mountain, but the circle was her workshop and she wanted no shadows to fall uninvited beneath the oak or between the pines–

  Natividad flinched from that memory. She would not remember the other shadows that had come there, at the end – she refused to remember that. She wanted to remember Mamá the way she had been before, long before, when the pines had been hardly taller than a little girl of five or six or seven. Mamá smiling and happy, teaching Natividad to draw circles in the gritty soil. Circles, and spirals, and mandalas strengthened with their interior crosses. She had said, “Spirals draw attention in, but circles close it out, Natividad. Attention slides off a circle. Remember that, if you ever have to hide. But then, of course you will remember, my beautiful child. You remember everything.” And she had reached out and touched Natividad’s cheek gently with the tips of her fingers. She had been smiling, but she had been sad.

  “Hide from what?” Natividad had asked. The sadness worried her. She had not understood it. She remembered that now: the naivety of the child she had been, who understood already that the Pure always had to hide but thought that was just the way the world was and did not understand why that truth should make Mamá sad. Who did not understand yet how carefully Mamá had worked to hide them, their whole family. Or from what.

  Or what would happen when they were found.

  She would not allow herself to remember. She breathed deeply. Only after she had again locked the past in the past did she go on to borrow Alejandro’s knife, prick her finger, and anchor the mandala with a drop of her blood at each compass point. She did not remember Mamá showing her how to do that – she would not remember, and did not, focusing fiercely on the immediate present. As she closed the circle with the last drop of blood, she murmured aloud, “May this cross guard this room and all within, against the dark and the dead and any who come with ill intent.” And then she added, “And this night let it guard us, too, against ill memory and dark dreams.” Her brothers both looked at her sharply, but Natividad pretended not to notice. The mandala closed with a sharp little shock of magic. She nodded firmly to show them that everything was fine.

  “The maraña,” Alejandro reminded her, not commenting on her addition. He watched her, worried. He thought she couldn’t tell when he worried about her, but she always could.

  “I know,” said Natividad. She slipped her maraña mágica out of her back pocket and held it up. Folded, it was about the size of a credit card. She snapped it open and spun it across the door from top to bottom. It clung there, a tangled net of light and shadows, trembling like a dew-spangled spider web, insubstantial as a handful of light but ready to confuse the steps of any enemy who tried to cross it. Natividad didn’t dare remind Alejandro about anything in case he thought she was nagging, but she remarked to the air, “If we call out for pizza, we’d better remember to take that down again, or we’ll be waiting a long time.”

  Miguel looked up, suddenly alert. “Pizza?”

  Natividad made a scornful sound, pretending to be offended. “You and pizza! Anybody would think you’d grown up Gringo.”

  “It’s probably genetic,” Miguel said, pretending his dignity had been injured. “It’s not my fault I got the pizza gene and you got the tamale gene. Can we order pizza if we put jalapenos on it? Jalapenos and onions and ham and extra cheese.”

  “It’s not very good cheese on those pizzas–”

  “It wouldn’t be very good on anything else, but it’s perfect on those pizzas.”

  “Order whatever you want,” Alejandro said from the other bed. He spoke in Spanish, visibly beginning to relax at last as this casual, ordinary bickering persuaded him that his sister felt safe and cheerful again. “Better than going out.” He rolled over, reached out to snag a pillow, and shut his eyes at last.

  Natividad gave her twin a quick grin and an OK sign. Miguel raised a conspiratorial eyebrow and went back to his ads, careful not to rustle the papers.

  “I like this one,” Miguel announced in the morning, waving a slice of cold pizza illustratively in the air over the newspaper. “See? It’s old, but those Korean cars last a long time, and the ad says it’s got good tires for snow. It’s a little more than you said, but maybe we can bargain the price down. The phone number is the same as the hotel; I mean the first three numbers, so I think the address is maybe not too far away. I bet we could get a map at the desk.”

  Natividad had figured out how to use the coffee pot in the room and now she sat on her bed, drinking coffee and watching Miguel finish the pizza. The pizza looked disgusting, but the coffee was good. She would have liked to add cinnamon, but it was alright the way it was. The shower was running. Either Alejandro was feeling safe enough to leave off guarding the room for two minutes, or else he’d realized it was important to look as civilized as possible when they met the Dimilioc black dogs. Natividad was betting on the latter: she didn’t think Alejandro ever felt safe anymore. She said, “Newport isn’t very big, is it? You think we can walk?”

  “I’ll have to call, find out where this is.” Miguel looked at the phone but didn’t reach for it. Natividad understood perfectly. Black dogs, especially when they were nervous, liked to feel like they made all the important decisions. Her twin would wait until he could ask Alejandro for permission to make that call. He finished the slice of pizza instead. Then he looked wistfully at the last piece in the box, but he didn’t touch it in case Alejandro might want it.

  “Maybe we can stop somewhere for cinnamon rolls o
r something,” Natividad suggested.

  Miguel made a face. “Those cinnamon rolls! Too much sugary goo.”

  “I got the cinnamon roll gene,” Natividad said smugly. “All you got was the gene for pizza. Cold pizza.” She pretended to shudder. Then, since Alejandro had opened the bathroom door in a puff of steam, she went to see what things she might have clean. Things that would make her look civilized and grown up.

  To her, the steam seemed very faintly scented with charcoal and ash. She touched Alejandro’s arm in passing, taking the edge off his tension and anger. Pausing, her brother looked down at her and smiled suddenly, the way he could: a swift hard-edged protective smile that said more clearly than words, I won’t let anything bad happen to you. “I know,” Natividad said. She patted his arm again and went on into the bathroom, closing the door behind her.

  The water was hot and came down hard, stinging. The shampoo smelled of lemons and pine needles. Natividad used the hotel’s blow-dryer – really, American hotels were so thoughtful – and put her hair up, pinning it carefully so it would stay. She chose pink crystal earrings to match her pink blouse. Then she stood and looked at herself in the mirror for a long time, tilting her head one way and another, trying different expressions, trying to see if she looked grown up and confident. She thought she did. She was thinner, now. That made her face look different, more like Mamá’s. Only not really.

  Turning abruptly, she went out into the main hotel room, and said, just a little too sharply, “Are we ready? Can we go now?”

  They bought Miguel’s second-choice car. It was a little more expensive, but the woman who owned it was telling the truth when she said it was in good shape and would handle snow well. The owner of the first car had lied about those things. It was hard to lie to a black dog, and not so easy to lie to Natividad, either. That man hadn’t understood how he’d given himself away, but he’d been too scared of Alejandro to protest when Natividad told him he should be ashamed of himself.