Black Dog Short Stories II

by Rachel Neumeier

  Though for all Justin knew, Grandmama Leushin would recognize a black dog right off. If she did—if Grandmama Leushin knew all about the Pure and about black dogs, then Justin had a whole lot of questions for her, starting with why she’d never told him anything, why his mother had never told him anything.

  Or if Grandmama Leushin didn’t recognize what Keziah was, then Justin had different questions, but he might not get any answers. He almost hoped for that, because he really didn’t want to find out that his grandmother and mother had been deliberately lying to him about everything important all his life. He’d rather get no answers at all than learn that.

  That was probably a big part of why he’d put off this visit so long. Why he’d accepted Grayson’s order to just send his grandmother a postcard every now and then, nothing important, nothing that would show exactly where he was, or with whom. But now here he was at last, hardly any distance from Roswell, far more tense about a visit with his grandmother than about the fact that he had an escort of three werewolves.

  He wished he only had an escort of one. Or he had wished that, until Grandmama Leushin said airily, It turns out this isn’t a good time for a visit, dear. As though he had called her up from across town instead of on the last leg of a two thousand mile drive. Now Justin was glad to have the extra company. He said, “Someone must have been there with her, or she’d have told me what was going on.”

  “You think?” said Nicholas, leaning forward from the back seat. “Did you notice she never said your name? She didn’t want whoever was there to know it was you.”

  Justin was embarrassed to admit he hadn’t noticed this.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Amira told him, reaching forward pat Justin’s arm. “Now I am glad we are here. We will eat the hearts of your grandmother’s enemies.”

  “I hope she turns out not to have actual enemies,” Justin told her. “But hold that thought. It’s surprisingly comforting.”

  Amira laughed, and even Keziah smiled, a slight tug upward of one side of her mouth.

  “I could call her back,” Justin suggested to Keziah.

  “If enemies are there with her, it may be better not to distract her.” Keziah paused. “Unless you wish to distract them. You could demand to speak to whomever is there. You could warn this person that your grandmother has allies and that we will eat the heart of anyone who harms her.”

  It was actually tempting. But Justin reluctantly shook his head. “I guess maybe not, when we don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Perhaps discretion is wiser for the moment,” Keziah conceded.

  Justin had called from Dimilioc before they’d arranged this visit, and then he’d called from the hotel last night, and both times Grandmama Leushin had sounded fine. Bright, cheerful, asking no questions about where he’d been or with whom or why he’d sent nothing but a couple of postcards since last spring, when he’d walked out of the empty house that echoed with loneliness and grief, away from his old life. He’d assumed she hadn’t wanted to yell at him over the phone. Wait till she got him in her kitchen and sat him down with cherry pastries and gingerbread and couldn’t disappear. Then she could yell at him properly, for walking out and worrying everyone.

  That’s what he’d assumed. But now he wasn’t sure. Maybe even then she had been in some kind of trouble. If Grandmama Leushin were Pure after all...he didn’t have a clear idea of how much trouble she might be in, or what kind. But it undoubtedly broadened the possibilities.

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” he said to Keziah. “Surely we can get there before...anything happens.”

  He thought he did a pretty good job of concealing his fear, but Keziah slanted a glance his way and smoothly accelerated. They were already driving well above the speed limit, which was a generous seventy-five out here. Justin didn’t comment. It was fine with him if Keziah wanted to drive fast. She wasn’t likely to get a ticket, no matter how she punched up her speed, because Justin was pretty good with Pure magic these days, at least some kinds of Pure magic, and that meant Keziah’s car was hard for police to notice.

  “As long as truckers don’t fail to see you,” he muttered, but under his breath. Keziah undoubtedly heard him anyway, but she pretended not to.

  “She’d just dodge anyway, if a truck started to cut us off,” Nicholas said, leaning forward to look at the speedometer. “She’s not even going really fast yet. I’d go faster.”

  “You may practice with one of Grayson’s vehicles, if he is foolish enough to lend it to you,” Keziah told him, not turning her head. “Not mine.”

  Nicholas didn’t exactly argue—not many black dogs would argue with Keziah. But he said just as though it were a random comment, “These roads are a lot better than anything in Vermont.”

  Keziah shrugged, not my problem coming off her in waves.

  The roads were a lot better out here, though. Mostly straight and mostly level, visibility outstanding in the clear, dry air. Gritty red soil stretched out in all directions, streaked with snow because they were high enough up for the desert to be pretty chilly in winter. Justin remembered that from childhood visits. Scrubby little trees and tough grasses yellow with winter and the odd jackrabbit out despite the bite in the air. Mountains in front of them, half lost in the distance. The tallest of those would be the Sierra Blanca peak, judging from the navigator’s map. There was snow up there, too, glittering in the sunlight. A string of lakes were up there somewhere in those mountains, water bitter with alkali, but lending life to the desert nevertheless.

  Roswell was only another twenty miles away, according to the navigator. So close. Justin almost felt he ought to be able to see his grandmother’s house right from here: a white southern-style house that might have been picked up in Georgia and set down here in the desert, but with a tamarisk tree in the back yard. He’d spent enough Christmases there as a kid. When his mother had still been alive.

  It was so short a time ago. It seemed like so much longer.

  This country was so empty. He’d almost forgotten what space was like, in Vermont, where people thought a hundred miles was a long way. The horizon was so much wider out here. Irrigated farms stretched out to the southeast of town; west was all cattle ranches. Justin knew that from childhood visits. But the way they came in this time, crossing the narrow Pecos River from the northeast, they mostly saw the rolling arid wilderness of national parks or other wild areas.

  “Not so far now,” Amira volunteered in her shy little voice. “Then we will know. Your grandmother will be well, Justin. We will come there and be certain of it. If anyone has harmed her or offended her, we will tear them to pieces and burn them to ash.”

  Justin’s hand twitched, wanting to reach for his phone, flip it open, call again. He resisted the urge. Keziah was right; if Grandmama Leushin was dealing with some kind of problem, better not to interfere until they knew what it was.

  Besides, maybe nothing was wrong. Maybe she really was just too busy this week for a visit from her grandson. Her grandson who had disappeared eight months ago and only sent her the occasional postcard since. And she’d just forgotten to mention this urgent church business when he’d called her two weeks ago to tell her he’d see her for Christmas. Sure.

  Fifteen miles to Roswell, said a sign they passed. The way Keziah was driving, that wouldn’t take more than another ten minutes.

  Justin couldn’t help but compare the land here to the damp, chilly, greenness they’d left behind. He couldn’t quite remember now when they’d driven out of woodland hills into miles and miles of wheat fields, or when they’d left the wheat fields behind for this dry country. But it looked...sparse. Bitter. Though that might be worry for his grandmother. Or grief for his mother. Or the memory of grief. He’d used to find the desert beautiful, he could remember thinking it was beautiful, but those feelings were hard to touch, now. His mother had been gone...not even a year, yet. Driving through New Mexico was like driving into the past. The months seemed both to stretch out infinitely far beh
ind him, and to somehow compress to nothing.

  As though she’d read his thoughts, Keziah said, “It is too much like home here, and too little. Both at once.”

  Justin couldn’t quite hide a flinch, but almost at once he realized that she wasn’t echoing him after all: she meant it literally. Of course the country around Riyadh must be a lot like this, even if the plants and animals and the architecture of the scattered buildings were not the same. Red soil, red stone, scrubby brush, tough grasses...they probably had jackrabbits in Saudi Arabia, too, for all he knew.

  But Amira said, sounding very certain despite her quiet little voice, “No. It is nothing like home.”

  Keziah glanced over her shoulder, surprised. Then she smiled at her sister, a quick flicker of affection and humor that for just that second altered her expression completely. “No. Perhaps after all it is not so much like home.” Then she glanced ahead, at the outskirts of Roswell, and added in a different tone, “No, not so much.”

  Justin could hardly blame her. Roswell surely couldn’t look like much of a town to a girl from Riyadh. After meeting Keziah, he’d looked at pictures—pictures taken before the Saudi people had learned they were ruled by monsters. Once that had happened, the Saudis had risen up in furious defiance against their black dog masters, and half the city was destroyed practically overnight. But he could picture how, not so long ago, Riyadh had stretched out into the lazy golden distance under the Arabian sun.

  Roswell wasn’t like that at all. In fact, Roswell was hardly a quarter the size of Los Alamos, where Justin had lived with his mother. If fifty thousand people lived in this town, he’d be surprised. It had never had anything to match the top-flight engineering and rocket science labs of Los Alamos. Small and plain, haunted by an indefinable air of age and poverty, Roswell’s downtown area wasn’t much to look at. A drugstore, a movie theater, both looking pretty much deserted; a mom-n-pop café-type of restaurant with a sadly faded red awning, a couple gas stations...nothing that seemed worth a second glance.

  “I wonder where Area Fifty-One is?” Nicholas said. And, when Justin looked at him in bafflement, added, “You know! Area Fifty-One? Where the government is supposed to be hiding the alien ship that crashed in 1947. There was a show about it when I was a kid—dissected aliens on ice, but they weren’t all dead. Some of them had crazy psychic powers. They kidnapped people and brainwashed them and made them into slaves.” He sketched something with his hands, a bit like an upside-down pear. Possibly it was supposed to be an alien.

  Amira looked interested in these putative aliens, but Keziah said scornfully, “Aliens!” and her sister ducked her head and didn’t ask Nicholas about them.

  Before Nicholas could snap back at Keziah, Justin said diplomatically, “I expect, if there ever was an alien ship, the government probably didn’t have much time for it once they found out about vampires and werewolves.”

  Nicholas was glowering, but he nodded reluctantly at this. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “The house of your grandmother?” asked Keziah. “Where should I turn?”

  “Uh, yeah, get off at the next exit.” Justin had nearly forgotten she wouldn’t know. He tried to remember landmarks from his childhood visits. “You’ll want to turn right. It’s a few minutes yet. She lives off West Mescalero, just west of an Eastern Orthodox church and a little park.”

  “Mescalero,” Keziah repeated, and smoothly passed a truck, cut back in front of it, and tucked her little silver car neatly into the exit lane.

  Grandmama Leushin lived in a big, square white house, wide porch set off by pillars and a steep roof in a northwest part of town. All the houses on her cul-de-sac had that generous southern look, though a couple were brick and one was painted pale yellow instead of white. Yards were big, lawns irrigated in summer but hidden under a couple inches of snow right at the moment. No kids’ toys out on driveways or lawns, which was no doubt the season but was probably also because this was a neighborhood for older people. Grandmama Leushin had been a teacher, like Justin’s mother, but for high school instead of college. But even though she wasn’t so very old, she’d retired years and years ago. When teaching became all about meeting stupid bureaucratic benchmarks and hiding grade inflation, she’d said. Whenever they got together, she and Justin’s mother had always tried to top each other’s stories about that kind of thing.

  The car he remembered from childhood visits was this big old station wagon kind of thing, a tan-colored whale of a car. Maybe Grandmama Leushin had traded it at last for the sporty red number presently occupying the driveway. It seemed possible; he could remember her declaring she was going to go wild and get a fancy car someday. Hey, I skipped my mid-life crisis, guess I’m due a snazzy little car before I’m too old and decrepit to enjoy it. Besides the red convertible in the driveway, there was a heavy black car parked on the side of the street just a bit up from the house, some kind of big, old-fashioned thing that almost looked like a hearse. It didn’t really look like the kind of car Grandmama Leushin would have wanted, and Justin couldn’t think of any reason why she would have parked in the street. But it could be hers.

  Definitely more puzzling than the unfamiliar vehicles was the dim silvery glow around the house. That might belong to Grandmama Leushin, too. It was a sort of rolling, sinuous glimmer, a bit like the light Justin had gotten used to seeing around Natividad and DeAnn, but muffled somehow, or...not quite finished. Or something. It looked almost like Pure magic, but different. Sort of like a function that was only half defined and might yet turn out to be something simple and pretty like a parabola, but might just as well turn out to be something complicated with a lot more back-and-forth movement in it. Justin frowned at the glow, uncomfortable with it, with his own ignorance. He wished Natividad were here. She knew a hell of a lot more about magic than he did.

  If this were a kind of Pure magic, though, at least it didn’t appear to be a problem for Keziah or her sister or Nicholas. Keziah drove right into the faint glimmer without hesitation, and no one flinched as she guided her car to the curb in front of the truck. Parking in this spot would give them a few more steps to walk. Justin didn’t ask Keziah about this decision, partly because he was sure she wouldn’t appreciate backseat parking advice, but mostly because he guessed she was thinking about the possibility they might have to peel out quick so she didn’t want anybody blocking their way. Paranoid, sure, but then she was a black dog. He was uneasy himself even without that excuse.

  He didn’t ask if it were okay to get out of the car, though. Black dogs were all either control freaks or wanna-be control freaks, and it was hard enough to know exactly where the lines were, but this was, after all, his grandmother’s house. And that glow didn’t look bad. It didn’t look dangerous or ill-intended. Just...vague and undefined.

  “Besides, I’ve brought the big bad wolf right along with me,” Justin muttered under his breath.

  Nicholas grunted with amusement. Even Amira smiled. Keziah, swinging her long legs out of the car and strolling around to join him, lazy and sleek as a lioness, gave Justin a look but didn’t ask. Maybe she, too, recognized the reference; he couldn’t tell. All she said was, “Someone is in the house. An old woman, I think, but also someone else. A man, I think.”

  “An old woman, though? Good,” said Justin, relieved and impressed by black dog senses. He hadn’t realized they were quite that good. Maybe this was actually some sense peculiar to black dogs.

  Keziah jerked her head impatiently before he could ask. “Yes. She might be Pure.” She frowned, tilting her head. “I am not certain. Maybe she might be Pure. Or human. It is hard to...the feeling here is strange. But I think no black dog is near this place.”

  Other than them, she meant, obviously. Justin nodded. That was good, at least. Probably it was good.

  Keziah touched Justin’s arm, a light brush with the back of her hand, the way a black dog would offer reassurance. From her, it was a rare gesture. “There is no blood smell,” she said.

 
Justin let his breath out and nodded. That was definitely good.

  Amira exchanged a glance with her sister, hopped out of the back seat, and traded a second, longer look with Nicholas. He bailed out, too, and the two of them headed down the street, then trotted across the lawn toward the back of the house. They might have been a couple of kids stretching their legs after a long car ride, except for the more-than-human grace with which they moved and the predatory air with which they circled the house. Justin nodded to himself, because if anybody in there would make trouble for an old woman and then bolt out the back way when her grandson knocked on the front door, he’d deserve to meet those two.

  “You should wait in the car,” Keziah told him, disapproving of the whole situation but perhaps most of all disliking their exposed position.

  “Not likely.” Justin rubbed his fingertips nervously together and then sketched a quick mandala in the air, holding the familiar shape in his mind, defining the equations of its circle and straight lines with heart and mind and will. He said out loud, framing his intention the way Natividad had taught him, “Let those of ill intent depart this house!” Then he brought the mandala to life, not the little sketch he’d traced in the air, but a great burning mandala that swept all the way around Grandmama Leushin’s house, the quartering lines spearing right through the doors and walls before them. It was a thing of fierce, perfect geometry, its clean lines as different from the amorphous glow as an eagle was from a sparrow. Justin nodded again, this time with conscious satisfaction. He’d learned a lot in the past months.

  Pure magic worked best against vampires and blood kin, pretty well against black dogs and moon-bound shifters, and was by far least effective against ordinary people. But least effective didn’t mean useless. Pure magic could draw your friends to you and turn your enemies away, protect your home ground and defend against hostile intent, ease anger and encourage kindness. That kind of thing was what Pure magic was all about. So Justin more than half expected a response of some kind from within, startled or outraged or pained or something. He wouldn’t have been at all surprised if some human or maybe-human person had come running out of the house, someone who expected trouble but maybe not exactly the kind of trouble that was about to fall on him like a ton of werewolves. But there was nothing.