Sheriff Pearson lifted a hand to reclaim all their attention, then turned to take a map from one of the young men. He flattened this out to show Natividad. The deputy had drawn a neat circle across the map in red ink, centered on the church and cutting ruthlessly through all other property. Natividad wished she’d thought to say not to use red. But the map was good. And red ink could stand for cheerful things just as easily as it could stand for blood, if she was careful how she thought about it. The map would do. She nodded.
Lewis was tiny. But when you had to go from one house or shop to another and draw pentagrams on all the windows; when you had to brush snow out of the way on all the streets between and draw lines along them; when you had to climb over fences and pick your way across a stubbled, snowy field and then across a frozen creek, it all made the town seem much larger. She already knew she wouldn’t have time to make little aparatos for people to wear. Just laying the mandala and setting up the big crosses would take all the time there was.
Especially with the snow coming down so hard you could hardly see one building from the next. Natividad hadn’t ever imagined snow could fall like this, in whirling curtains, so thick you could hardly see through it, driven by an icy wind that cut like a silver knife. Anything could be hidden behind that blowing snow. The three deputies might have shotguns, but they only had regular ammunition. Silver was expensive, Denoux said, and they’d used a lot during the vampire war, and if they wanted more, they had to buy it themselves. She bet now they wished they had.
But there was only a little way to go to find the place they would set up the first cross. This proved to be a nice warm home with a woman and a lot of children. Natividad liked them all immediately. She accepted a wedge of ginger cake the woman pressed on her – it had a wonderful cinnamon cream with it, dolloped on with a generous hand.
She let the children watch as she set up the first cross, off-center in a fancy, formal room right at the front of the house. It was a good cross, almost as tall as Natividad herself, made of some soft gray wood. It might have been plain except for the care with which it had been made. Its maker had wound a thin silver chain in a spiral around the horizontal crosspiece and painted, in silver paint, “I will fear no evil, for God is with me,” in elegant calligraphy down the front. A stand for the cross had also been supplied, but of course Natividad did not need to use the stand – she set the cross where it needed to go and drew the beginnings of her protective circle out to either side of it, and it stood firmly when she took her hands away.
“Leave somebody to watch to make sure nobody moves it before I’ve finished,” Natividad told Sheriff Pearson, while the magic she’d begun buzzed in her ears and sparkled along her nerves. “It’ll stand forever then. Nobody will be able to knock it down while the circle holds.”
“And a fine conversation piece it’ll be,” commented the woman who owned the house. “But don’t be telling the brats it can’t be knocked down; they’ll take it as a challenge, won’t they?” She wasn’t exactly smiling, but Natividad thought she liked the cross. “Don’t you fret, young lady: no one will overset your cross. Is that done, now?”
“Almost,” Natividad murmured. She drew pentagrams on all the windows of the house, filling the signs with moonlight as she went, and then for fun demonstrated to the children how they could now throw a ball or toy against a window and it would only bounce off, the glass ringing like a bell.
“Hah!” one of the boys said triumphantly. “We can so play baseball in the house! Can you do Mrs Wilson’s windows, too?”
“Edith Wilson’s next on our list,” Denoux said, amused and indulgent, while the children’s mother pretended to be horrified.
“Use your back door now, not your front door,” Natividad told the woman before they left. “Every place behind you is safer now – not all the way safe, but better – but don’t go out the front, OK?”
The woman promised that everyone would remember, scowled fiercely at her children until they promised, too, and made a show of locking her front door after Natividad when she and her deputies left.
After Mrs Wilson’s house there was another house, and another after that, and then a shop, and a long curving driveway, and then more houses, and finally another cross to set, directly in front of somebody’s kitchen sink, which might be inconvenient for them but that’s where it needed to go. Then there were more houses and shops; and annoying fences; and a brush-tangled gulley to climb down into, which was hard, and then up out of, which was even harder; and then more houses and shops. And more after that.
“How much farther?” she asked, foggy with weariness and magic. She felt like she must have laid signs of protection and goodwill on every house in Lewis, not just the ones set in the planned mandala. Only after she’d spoken, with the sound of her words echoing in the air and Sheriff Pearson looking at her blankly, did she realize her words had been in Spanish. This must be like Alejandro, when his shadow closed around him: this struggle with language and memory and thought… The sheriff pointed, saying something she didn’t understand, and she walked that way, blindly, trusting it was the right way to go.
But alarm broke into her weariness when she saw one of the deputies – Harris – pick up the last of the crosses as though it weighed nothing. The young man started ahead, and she realized the cross needed to go right out in the middle of a field.
The cross was a good one, Natividad’s favorite of the four that the townspeople had provided. Taller than she was, this one had been made of some smooth polished wood riveted together with silver fittings. She’d thought at first they must really be steel, but no: they had the clean, bright feel of silver. Across the crossbar, letters spelled out “Christ Our Light,” and down the front, “Thanks Be To God.” The letters had not merely been painted on the cross, but carved into the wood before being highlighted with silver paint that had real silver in it.
So, the cross was fine. It wasn’t the cross that was the problem; it was the field: a measureless blind white space with snow underfoot and snow blowing in whirling curtains through the air.
The cold was horrible, much worse than when she and her brothers had walked those last miles through the forest toward Dimilioc. There had been no wind that day. Today the wind bit like a vampire: ferocious and draining. Worse, it was impossible to see through all that white, impossible to see a man who walked ten steps away. Anything could hide in the blinding snow just as easily as in the dark of night, and Natividad found herself certain that something was hiding out there in that field, something – someone – that knew where they were, where she was, by a strange kind of vision that used malice instead of light to find her.
She stopped, trying to look in every direction at once, as frightened of the blind field as she was pressed by the need to finish the magic. Behind her, a line of soft light arced out, visible despite the blowing snow. This should have made her feel better. Safer. But if she could see the light of her protective circle by using senses that didn’t exactly involve sight, didn’t that mean Vonhausel might see her the same way?
Sheriff Pearson touched her arm. His hood was back; snow caught and melted in his hair, on his face. He said something… Natividad stared at him, shook her head, took a step out into the open field. The sheriff said something else, more loudly, not to her, and the deputies all got serious expressions and checked their guns.
Nothing came at them except the wind. Natividad drew her circle across the field with every step, feeling it sink down into the frozen ground beneath the snow. She felt the shape of the mandala humming in the earth, slightly discordant, waiting to be completed with this last little arc and its anchoring cross. There was so little left to do, and still the only enemy they had to face was the savage wind…
They came to the right place. Natividad knew it was right. She was surprised she had to catch Sheriff Pearson’s arm to make him stop: it seemed to her that anybody ought to know that they had come to the exact eastern limit of the protective circle.
<
br /> Deputy Harris brought her the cross. Natividad showed him where it needed to go, and he knelt earnestly to fit it exactly where she showed him. She touched his shoulder in thanks and he looked up and smiled at her, then got to his feet and steadied the cross as she stroked her fingers across the carved letters and smooth wood. She drew a breath and touched the top of it, reaching for the clean gift of magic to seal the cross into her mandala, and Harris suddenly staggered and fell into her. His gun spun away, into the air, lost instantly in the blowing white, which was suddenly spattered with red. Blood was on her hands, on the cross – Natividad could smell it, like meat and hot metal. A dark, hot magic swirled by her, so strong it shoved at her with almost physical weight. Natividad staggered, and the cross toppled over, threads of light from her shredding magic trailing after it.
Natividad tried to catch the cross as it fell, tried to catch the shreds of her light and magic before they could dissolve into the air, but the cross was too heavy or the light too delicate, and she fell instead, floundering in the snow. She was, she found, more outraged than terrified. Her cross, thrown down in the snow! And poor Deputy Harris was dead, there was death and violence all around her – someone was screaming, one of the other deputies, a male voice pitched high as a girl’s, and she couldn’t even get her cross set. She was furious.
Natividad gripped the smooth wood of the cross in both hands, heaved it up and whirled it around with an effort she felt all through her back and stomach and shoulders – it was a lot heavier than she’d guessed – then she staggered and fell to one knee when a shotgun blast crashed next to her. But, once kneeling, she could brace the cross against the ground, haul it upright, embrace it with both arms to hold it steady. She called light into the silver-limned letters carved into the wood, and a net of light spilled down and around the arms of the cross. She expected all the time to feel claws tear into her back, powerful jaws clamp down on the back of her neck. There was another shotgun blast followed by a heavy, coughing roar then a huge dark shape loomed at her out of the snow, and she screamed…
Sheriff Pearson strode out of the blowing snow, leveled a shotgun at the black dog, and pulled the trigger twice in quick succession: pump, boom, pump, boom. The black dog staggered back a step, but his shadow writhed thickly as it carried away injuries that ought to have killed any natural creature, that would have killed even most black dogs. He didn’t even seem to need to shift to human form and back again to shed his wounds, which seemed strange, but Natividad had no attention to spare for that. The light from her cross had tangled with the black dog’s trailing shadow, that was what she was worried about, but she couldn’t see anything she could do about it now. Lunging to her feet, she hauled the cross up as straight as possible, drew a pentagram where the crosspiece met the upright, and cried, “May the strength of God fill this cross! May this cross guard Lewis and all within against any who come with ill intent! And against the fell dark! And against all manner of evil things!”
She did not know whether she was shouting in Spanish or English, did not think the words in whatever language were exactly the ones her mother had taught her, but light followed her hands, running swiftly up and down the length of the cross. The light knotted where the blood spatters contaminated the wood, and everywhere it tangled up with the black dog’s shadow, but it gathered strength despite that and exploded outward. Light, intertwined with blood and shadows, spilled out across the snow, reached left and right along the circle, and speared back along the cross that centered her mandala, rushing away toward the heart of the town. The power of the circle smashed out into the night as it closed, much greater than Natividad had expected; the force of it sent her staggering sideways and then she lost her balance and fell – away from the mandala, exactly the wrong way. Though she tried to scramble back toward safety, the black dog was too close and she ducked the other way even though she knew she shouldn’t. But all her muscles spasmed with magic, and she fell again and then found she could not get back to her feet, couldn’t even scramble away on her hands and knees, though she tried. The mandala was doing something, very strongly, but not the way she’d meant it to – even if she could get to it, it might not work to keep the black dog away, but she couldn’t even move, she was helpless, and the black dog was going to kill her…
The black dog had taken several steps away from the mandala, but he had not fled from it. He was in human form now, laughing and cursing at the same time. The laughter and the curses sounded the same: aggressive and furious and savage, with nothing of humor, not even cruel humor. His human shape was tall, blunt-featured, angry. Natividad cowered down. She was sure he was going to kill her, but Sheriff Pearson stepped in front of her. His hands moved quickly to reload the shotgun.
Their enemy shifted again to his black dog shape. He showed no sign of any wounds, no fear of the sheriff’s gun. He was enormous, the largest black dog Natividad had ever seen, with heavy shoulders and a thick neck and powerful jaws. His eyes were crimson, his breath black smoke that wreathed around his huge head; the snow melted away from his tracks. The cold air smelled of sulfur and blood.
Sheriff Pearson’s movements were economical and quick – he had a shell in the chamber, he was lifting the gun – but even so it was perfectly clear to Natividad that the black dog would tear him apart before he could shoot again. She knew the moment the sheriff was out of the way, the black dog would tear her apart, too, but she still couldn’t move.
Another black dog flung himself out of the blinding snow, trailing smoke and a hot gust of sulfurous air. He slammed into the first with such force that both were hurled backward and disappeared. A shattering roar tore through the blind snow-filled light. Natividad put her hands over her ears and tucked herself down as small as she could, like a little mouse trying to hide from a very big cat. But nothing lunged out of the snow to grab her, and after a moment she couldn’t help but open her eyes and straighten cautiously, trying to see. She could still smell blood – she was sure she could still smell the blood, mixed with smoke and sulfur. But there was no sound, no movement except the blowing snow.
The sheriff stood over her, his gun ready but no enemy now to shoot at. He asked her, sharp and tense, “Can you get up?”
Natividad thought she could stand, maybe, now. She tried, cautiously, and found the power of her mandala had… not faded, exactly, but it had become less… less immediate. Less intense. Less something. If she couldn’t get up, she could now at least crawl. The dubious protection of the mandala, whatever the contamination of the black dog’s shadow had done to it, would almost certainly be a lot better than staying where she was.
The sheriff was not exactly illuminated by the light that radiated from the cross and the mandala, because that kind of light didn’t exactly illuminate anything, but Natividad could see that raking claws had shredded his coat, that bruises were darkening on his face. But he seemed to be alright, mostly. He turned his head slowly back and forth, listening as he waited for her to do her part, to at least try to save herself. Nothing could be heard, now, but the wind.
Natividad staggered to her feet. She could get to her feet, now, barely, and looked for her mandala. She moved stiffly in that direction. Sheriff Pearson backed up beside her, watching not her, but everything else. The cross stood straight and firm, only a little way away. Natividad limped toward it. Neither her light, nor the black dog shadow tangled with it, were visible, now. Not exactly visible but she knew that both were still there.
Natividad didn’t understand what she had made. Black dog magic and Pure magic shouldn’t mix, though it was a little like blooding silver for a black dog. Well, not really. Had Mamá ever said anything about contaminating Pure magic with black dog magic? She couldn’t remember anything like that, but everything near the end had happened so fast and she had been so scared and her memories of those last days were all in bits and pieces. She wanted to study what she’d done; she wanted to figure it out; she wanted to be able to tell the townspeople what kind
of circle she’d put around them. But she was sure that she wouldn’t get the chance to figure out anything – any moment, that huge black dog would lunge out of the blind white snow surrounding them and kill first Sheriff Pearson and then her.
Deputy Denoux lay, crumpled and still, just near enough to be visible. The dark heap of his eviscerated body was already disappearing under the snow, which seemed a mercy, like throwing a blanket over the dead. All the blood, too, was already chilling and being covered over by the snow. She could see part of another leg that probably belonged to Belliveau. Natividad shivered, and then couldn’t stop. They were all dead, those three deputies who had come to protect her: bad-tempered suspicious Belliveau and polite Denoux and young Harris. All three of them had protected her, with their lives. Would they feel like that was fair? She didn’t. She put a hand out. The cross was only a step away, now, and she could feel the magic in it like a physical pressure against her skin: not exactly Pure, but she couldn’t decide whether the difference felt bad or actually sort of OK. She knew it felt strange. It felt powerful, though.
The snow parted like a veil, revealing a black dog who loped toward them, fluid as a lion and a lot more dangerous. The black dog moved very fast, out of the blowing snow and past the dead man. He straightened toward human form as he moved forward, and he hardly seemed less massive in his human form than as a black dog. It wasn’t the same one as before. Sheriff Pearson aimed his shotgun at the newcomer’s chest, but didn’t fire, and at first Natividad didn’t understand why, but then she saw that the black dog had caught the barrel. He twisted the gun out of the sheriff’s grip, and closed his other hand, nearly human now, around Pearson’s throat.
It was Harrison Lanning. There was no sign of the other black dog.
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