Black Dog

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 wordless 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.