Black Dog Short Stories (6 page)

     Miguel held up the book he held. “I thought about reading you some of the Gibbon, only I don’t read Latin, so I wasn’t sure that would work. So I brought this. It’s not Gibbon, but I thought maybe you’d like it. It’s
The Hunting of the Snark
. Completely frivolous and silly, so you probably won’t like it, but you can’t read things like Gibbon all the time, your brain would melt and dribble out your ears, very messy—”

     Cassie—or the shadow that had taken her for the duration of the full moon—snarled. It was a slow, rising sound, barely audible but filled with knife-sharp fury and hatred.

     “Yeah,” said Miguel. “But I figure you might be awake in there, though. I don’t think anybody ever told me if you shifters stay awake and, well. Anyway. I figure it’s not much to just read for you for a little while. If you don’t remember anything about it afterward, hey, next month I’ll know better, right?”

     Cassie snarled again.

     “Right, then,” said Miguel. He pulled the chair around so he wouldn’t quite be facing the cage and opened the book.

    
The Hunting of the Snark
might be completely frivolous and silly, but it was fun to read. Miguel had to pay just enough attention to it that he didn’t have to pay attention to Cassie, who gave up snarling and lay still instead, staring intently at Miguel. Though he tried not to look at her, he couldn’t help but glance over now and then, and after a while, he had the impression she wasn’t even blinking. Maybe she didn’t have to. Maybe black dogs didn’t need to blink either, and he’d just never noticed because no back dog had ever stared at him with such intensity and hatred. He could have done without Cassie staring at him like that now. Not that the monster was really Cassie. That was the whole point.

     Miguel read the whole poem. He didn’t let himself read too fast. Just the right pace for the poem. It was a fun poem, complete nonsense with its Barrister and Baker and Beaver, and its five signs of a Snark, and seeking it with thimbles and forks and soap and everything. And finding out it was a Boojum, of course, at the end.  But every line flowed right off the tongue. He’d always liked it, but he thought he might never be able to read it again without thinking of this surreal scene: himself sitting outside a cage with bars wrapped in silver wire, with an unblinking monster on the other side waiting for its chance to kill him.

     It was a weird afternoon.

     “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said at the end. “Maybe you’ll be able to shift back tomorrow, huh? What should I bring to read? Probably not
Alice in Wonderland
.”  He paused.

     Cassie didn’t answer, of course. She just stared, her fiery gaze so filled with animosity Miguel was  little surprised it didn’t blister his skin. He pretended not to notice. “Well, I’ll think of something. Something not too long. One of Shakespeare’s histories, maybe. All those power politics and things, it’s just like reading black dog history, you probably love the histories, huh? Or, hey, I could read you
The Taming of the Shrew
.”

     Cassie snarled, a slow, rising sound.

     “Just kidding.
Richard III
, then. At least Act I.”  Miguel sauntered out. He didn’t let himself sag and shudder until he was up the stairs with the door shut firmly behind him.

     It had been worse than he’d expected, seeing her like that. Being hated like that. He had kind of expected to see something of Cassie in that monster, at least glimpses, at least now and then. But he had seen nothing.

     Probably the real girl had not even known he was there.

     But he knew he would go back anyway, the next afternoon.

              He rearranged some of the piles of books in the morning, though, before he went back downstairs.  But though he finished dusting, he didn’t actually put all the books back on the shelves. Sometimes books were more useful in stacks. Disorderly stacks that didn’t quite keep to alphabetical order.

     He also found himself thinking, as he stacked up books, about what Cassie might like. Short stories by O. Henry? “The Ransom of Red Chief” was funny. “A Retrieved Reformation” had a nice ending. Maybe she would like short stories better than Shakespeare.

     Maybe he should ask her what she liked before the next full moon.

     He took both O. Henry and Shakespeare with him when he went downstairs. But as it turned out, he didn’t need to choose which to read to her. Cassie was already back in human form, a full night and half a day before he might have expected her to manage it.

     She had plainly just changed. She was curled into a ball on the cement floor, her arms drawn in and her face tucked down. She obviously hadn’t been wearing her winter-fairy dress when she’d shifted, and the reason was obvious, because she looked cold even in the ragged jeans and oversized white sweater she was wearing. She looked terrible, washed out and pale, and even thinner, as though weight had burned off her just over the three nights of the full moon. But she looked completely human. There was no trace of the monster left, to Miguel’s eyes, though no doubt a black dog would have still recognized her as a shifter.

     At first Miguel thought she didn’t even know he was there. Then she said, still not looking up, “Go away.”

     “Right,” he said. He was obscurely embarrassed, as though he’d walked in on a girl in the shower or something. He said, rattled enough fall back into his mother’s Spanish—he, who’d been reading and speaking colloquial English since he could remember—
“Lo siento.”
  Then he said, “Sorry,” and started to back away again, up the stairs, clumsy because he was backing up—but that wasn’t why he
felt
clumsy.

     “Wait!” Cassie said, and uncurled suddenly.

     She looked even thinner and more desperate once she sat up. The wild look in her eyes might have belonged to a creature of frost and winter, a fairy, a woodland elf—but it was her, and not her shadow. Miguel wanted to say something, but what could he say?
He
wasn’t moon-bound. She wasn’t going to want sympathy from
him
.

     “I heard you,” she said. Her tone was fierce and angry. “I was there.”

     She didn’t say she was glad he’d come down to read to her. From her fury, she might hate him for it. Miguel nodded, awkwardly. “Right . . .”

     “You want to get rid of Étienne Lumondiere.” 

     Miguel hadn’t expected that at all, and stared at her, speechless.

     Cassie told him, “We need black dogs right now. We need numbers. But Étienne isn’t the kind we need. He’s trouble. No human is going to want to be here as long as he is. He’s not worth that kind of problem.”

     “That’s what I thought,” admitted Miguel. “But I’m pretty sure Grayson isn’t going to see it that way.”

     “Yeah, not unless you plant the idea in his mind. You’ve already started, I know, but you could do better—and he mustn’t catch you at it.”

     “Yeah, working that out is the hard part—”

     “I know how. But not now. Come back in an hour.”

     It was easy, actually, in principle. Tricky in practice, though.

     It was all about getting Grayson to see Étienne Lumondiere as a threat to Dimilioc, as well as an asset. The Master had to decide he was an asset better used elsewhere, not kept close to Dimilioc’s central territory. And the Master had to be annoyed enough to get rid of him, but not so much so as to kill him—a fine line with a black dog. Plus Miguel and Cassie had to arrange everything without letting anyone, not Grayson nor Étienne nor anyone else, see they were doing anything at all on purpose.

     Yeah, in practice it was tricky. Without Cassie’s help, Miguel wasn’t sure how he would have arranged to get Grayson in the right spot at just the right moment. That had always been the key. Setting the hook was one thing, but landing the fish was the thing. It was more like hooking a shark. A shark was not what you wanted to catch unless you had very strong fishing line. And preferably a harpoon. Miguel had only words. And Cassie Pearson’s help, now. Miguel didn’t know exactly how she got Grayson to the library at just the right moment: she sure hadn’t asked the Master of Dimilioc for his personal help in finding just the right book. Or maybe she had; maybe she could actually pull off something like that.

     Miguel had been the one to get Étienne Lumondiere to the library on schedule, though. That part had been simple. He had just announced he was finished dusting, and of course Étienne had said,
Are you?
in that sarcastic, superior way of his and had come to check. No actual white gloves, but all the attitude. And of course Miguel had made sure to be pretty casual about alphabetizing the whole last section when he put the books back on the shelves, and of course Étienne was just the perfectionist to notice.

     “Careless,” he said severely to Miguel, who made sure to duck his head, all properly meek and apologetic. “Slovenly. What is this, all these books out of order?”

     “Anybody can find Wodehouse, once they get to the W’s,” Miguel pointed out. But meekly and apologetically. “It’s not like those got mixed in with Gibbon or anything. Anyway, they’re dusted—”

     Étienne ran the tip of one finger along the top shelf and looked at Miguel even more severely.

     “Well,
you
could dust,” Miguel suggested. He could hear someone approaching, out in the hallway. Just a few seconds more . . . he straightened his shoulders, met Étienne’s eyes, and said, not meekly at all, “Since you’re taller than me and can see up that high, maybe you should take over
all
the high shelves, if you care about dust so much.”

     Combined with that look, it was enough to make Étienne hit him. Miguel had been almost sure he would. Proud, Étienne Lumondiere. Proud and vain and very sure of his prerogatives. And not so concerned with Dimilioc custom or law, because he was so certain Lumondiere’s ways were superior.

     Étienne did not mean to hit him very hard. He only hit him with the back of his hand, with no claws or anything. It was more difficult than Miguel had expected to step into the blow instead of jumping back—he’d argued with Cassie about that; she’d said anything would do, it wasn’t necessary for Étienne to leave a mark. Miguel had insisted he needed to show at least a bruise. But when it came right to the moment, he tried to flinch in both directions at once and had to grab the back of a chair to stop himself stumbling. Which looked perfect, of course, so that worked out, though he hadn’t done it on purpose.

     He yelled, too, just a little, not enough to be embarrassing, just a small sound of shock, timed to coincide with the arrival of Grayson Lanning in the doorway, Cassie hovering behind him. Cassie looked hugely entertained, which was okay, since no one but him was paying any attention to her. Miguel’s face hurt, his cheek and eye both, but he had to suppress an urge to laugh—that would be insanely stupid, after all this trouble, but Étienne’s expression
was
funny. Grayson didn’t say a word, not then. He just gave Étienne a long, measured stare. Then he nodded to the door.

     Étienne didn’t exactly slink out of the room, but his attitude sure had changed.

     “Are you hurt?” Grayson asked Miguel.

     Miguel touched his cheek, carefully. That whole side of his face ached. He’d cut the inside of his mouth against his teeth. But he said, “No, sir. I don’t think so. I shouldn’t have been rude to him—”

     “True,” Grayson said, and walked out.

     “There you go,” Cassie said, pleased with herself and with him. “That should do it.” She came over to look closely at Miguel’s face. “Ow. You’re going to have a black eye.”

     “Yeah? Good.”  He touched the inside of his cheek gingerly with his tongue. It hurt. “If we need to do this again, maybe he can hit you next time.”

     “Not very chivalrous,” she mocked him. “Black eyes are your business.”  She glanced at the shelves. “Yeah, mixing Wodehouse up with Tennessee Williams, I bet that made Étienne mad.”

     “Seemed to,” agreed Miguel, satisfied.

     Étienne Lumondiere left Dimilioc four days later. In a way. Grayson sent him to Denver along with five other recently recruited black dogs to re-establish Dimilioc’s western sept. Once that whole region had been held by Dimilioc black wolves, mostly of the Hammond and Toland bloodlines, but over the course of the war between black dogs and vampires, the whole western sept had been destroyed. Every black wolf and Pure woman had been killed, their human kin scattered, except for a couple who had pulled back to Dimilioc proper, and even those had died later. But now, with the vampires gone, of course it was important to re-establish Dimilioc’s presence in the west. So in a way, you could consider that Étienne Lumondiere had only been sent to another part of Dimilioc. In a way, it was even a promotion: in Denver, Étienne would be Master because none of the black dogs that went with him approached his combination of strength and control. Miguel was okay with that. A Lumondiere black wolf, even a bastard like Étienne, would know how to run a civilized house, even if he would want to put a Lumondiere stamp on it. Working on that would keep him busy and occupied and out of everyone’s hair. Yeah, really, it was perfect.