Pure Magic (Black Dog Book 3) (11 page)

“It’s like when you graph a function,” Justin said. “A polynomial of any even degree, say, with a limited domain—” he stopped, probably realizing that he’d left both Natividad and Miguel behind. He ask Natividad, carefully, “You don’t . . . see geometry? Geometric shapes?”

“Um . . .” said Natividad, trying to imagine what this might even mean.

“Squares and circles and things?” said Miguel, sounding intrigued.

Justin shook his head. “Not like that. Not like drawing on paper. Like—” he sketched that swoopy, curvy thing again. “It’s
like
an even-degree polynomial, but . . . bigger, and more diffuse, and . . . kind of wrapped into itself. Silvery, for you.” he said to Natividad. “It’s different for a werewolf. Black dog. All spikes and edges.” He shuddered slightly. “Worse than an odd-degree polynomial, because it goes off in weird directions that look like they ought to cut you up.”

“Magic as math?” Miguel said, sounding fascinated. “Geometry as magic?”

“It’s just—” Justin shrugged. “It’s just something I see. People do see things when they think of numbers, sometimes. Colors or whatever. I’ve heard of people seeing shapes when they taste things. It’s called synesthesia. But it’s not
magic
.” He stared hard at Natividad and said in a lower tone, “I never
thought
it was magic.”

“Maybe it’s not,” said Natividad. “I never heard of anything like that. But if you see curvy silvery things around me, and black spiky things around black dogs, you
are
seeing magic.” She thought about this. “You see things when you do math? I wonder if . . . I wonder if, when you do math, you’re also doing magic? That might . . . explain kind of a lot.” Like how he could be alive even though he didn’t know anything. The spirals and circles and mandalas and things you drew when you were working magic, weren’t those a kind of geometry? She wondered what kind of protective ward a . . . an even-degree polynomial might make. Whatever that was. She said firmly, “I’ll show you some magic, and you can try it, and maybe you’ll see shapes, and maybe you won’t, but it’ll work either way, I’m sure it will! Want to try?

Justin nodded, though he looked as though he might not be quite sure. Then he laid his hand over hers and some of the tension eased out of his face.

“Watch it, Justin,” Miguel said, his tone friendly but serious at the same time. “Ezekiel got there first.”

Natividad reached across and punched her twin on the shoulder. “It’s not like that,” she said, and muttered, “
Tonto
,” not exactly under her breath.

“Ezekiel might think it is,” her brother said, leaning out of range, and added to Justin, “Natividad will be like a sister to you, I expect.”

“Miguel? Ibuprofen?” Natividad said, in her very firmest tone.

“Right,” said Miguel. “Ibuprofen. Sure. Be right back.” He slid off his stool and sauntered away.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” she said to Justin, “He’ll take a moment, finding it. But don’t mind him. I’ll tell him to leave us alone if he bothers you. Ezekiel’s not a problem, I promise.” She hoped this was true. It had better be true. But Ezekiel . . . “It’s complicated, me and Ezekiel,” she said finally. “Look, don’t worry about that, there’s no problem anyway, truly. Let me show you a little bit of Pure magic. Something you can use right away—something you can use any time.” And if he couldn’t learn it, or if his shapes got in the way, they could worry about that
then
.

Justin looked at her, wary of either the suggestion or the change in subject.

“This isn’t scary demonic black dog magic,” Natividad promised. “You’ll like this. It’s even geometry, I guess.” She drew a star on the granite countertop between them. A five-pointed star embedded in a pentagram, the way her own mother had taught her. The star glimmered with light, the tip of her finger leaving a luminescent trail as she traced the star. “Peace,” she said out loud. “
Que haya paz en esta casa.
Let there be peace in this house.” She took her hand away. The star continued to glimmer, faintly visible to a sideways glance.

“You see?” she said to Justin. “It’s not just the shape, though. It’s what you want to do. That’s why you say it out loud, just to make sure you’re clear in your head.”

Justin, staring at the pentagram, didn’t answer.

Miguel, coming back with a bottle of ibuprofen, set it down on the countertop with a little click and went to find a glass and fill it with water. He said over his shoulder, “You see anything weird? I don’t see anything at all. Sometimes I can feel magic, but this whole house is wrapped up in so much Pure magic, some of it hundreds of years old, it would take something a lot bigger than that for me to feel anything different. Here.” He set a glass of water down in front of Justin. “Take three,” he advised. “I know it says two, but three is safe. Unless you have ulcers or something. I looked it up once. You don’t have ulcers, do you?”

“Probably, after tonight,” muttered Justin. But he looked amused. He had relaxed a little now, as Natividad’s star spun peace into the room. After a moment, he shook three ibuprofen out onto the palm of his hand. He took them all at once, then leaned his elbow on the counter and studied Natividad’s pentagram.

“You see it?” Natividad asked, trying not to sound anxious.

“It sort of . . . extends in strange directions, doesn’t it? Like an Escher drawing.” He nudged at it with a finger.

“Escher?” said Natividad. But she didn’t really care. She was just glad he could see the magic, even if he did see it in a weird way.

Justin turned his head to the side, studying the pentagram from the corner of his eye. He said absently, “That’s . . . that’s very . . . um . . .”

“If you can see that, you can draw one of your own,” Natividad said firmly, though she wasn’t quite sure. “You draw them on stone or glass—windows are good.” She tried to sound matter-of-fact, as though she’d never doubted for a minute that he would see her pentagram. As though she didn’t doubt at all that he could draw one of his own. “Hard, cold surfaces hold the magic best.”

Justin traced over her pentagram with the tip of his finger. “I don’t . . . it doesn’t . . . it sort of folds away into the countertop. Huh. Is it going to fade?”

“Sure. Eventually. The ones on stone last better. You just draw them over. Layers of stars, generations of women laying them into the stone of this house . . . You’ll learn to feel them, even when you can’t exactly see them. Or,” she added, “maybe
you’ll
always be able to see them. Want to try making one of your own? It’s fine,” she added. “No one will ever mind if you put a star someplace. I mean, this is Dimilioc, right? Black dogs everywhere, right? You can hardly lay down too much peace!”

Justin traced her pentagram again. “I sort of get the shape, but the rest of it . . . what if I do it wrong?”

“Either it’s right or it’s not there at all. You can’t do it wrong,” Natividad assured him, and then blinked, hearing her own words echo in her memory, a needle of grief and confusion. Her mother had said that to her.
You can’t do it wrong
. Natividad had believed that all her life.
You’ll do it right or it won’t work at all. You can’t do it wrong
. Only . . . only that had been before she had found out there
was
another way to work Pure magic. She hadn’t thought of that before. That what she’d discovered might be a way to work Pure magic, but work it wrong.

This didn’t seem the moment to mention such doubts, though. She said instead, keeping her tone encouraging, “Just trace it out lightly. Don’t think about it, though. Think about being calm, about everyone being calm. No anger, no fear. Peace. Peace in your star. Peace in this house. You weave the peace into your spell, and it spills out, but only very slowly, do you see?”

Justin sat with his hands braced on the countertop, as though he might suddenly shove himself backward, away from the counter. But he looked interested. Miguel, casually uncoiling a cinnamon roll and eating it a bit at a time, utterly ordinary and unconcerned, might have had something to do with the Justin’s willingness to trust Natividad: it was impossible to believe she was asking him to do anything hard or risky or weird when Miguel looked so completely uninterested. Natividad wasn’t sure Miguel was doing that on purpose: her twin brother could be very manipulative, an important skill for an ordinary human living surrounded by black dogs, but this would be subtle even for him.

“Try it,” she encouraged Justin. “Just . . . sort of think of it sideways, and do it.”

Justin looked at her for another minute. Then he tentatively touched the countertop with the tip of one finger, squinted—it wrinkled his forehead up in a very cute way—and quickly traced a star. He did it like a baby, sketching a number “4” and then completing the star with two more lines. All the interior lines interfered with the flow of magic through his star, and he didn’t know he should bound the star with a pentagon or circle, so the magic he called into the star flowed away almost immediately. And he didn’t say anything about peace in the house, didn’t frame what he wanted to do at all. Nevertheless, the lines he traced glimmered briefly to life, and Natividad’s skin prickled with the touch of Pure magic.

“Oh, good!” she said, vastly relieved. “I mean, I didn’t explain enough, so it wasn’t the best way to do it, but it was fine, you did it fine, did you feel that? You must have felt it, right?”

Justin didn’t answer. He was rubbing the tips of his fingers together, looking uneasy but pleased. He said, “It didn’t fold up right. I think I get it, though. It’s like a circle.” He drew a quick plus-sign on the countertop, touched his fingertip to the center of the sign, and a circle flickered into place—an instant mandala. Justin lifted his hand away from the table, looking pleased. Then he glanced up, saw Natividad’s astonishment, and his smile faded. “Is that wrong?”

“Wrong?” said Natividad blankly. “It was so fast! How could you draw a circle without actually drawing a circle?”

Justin looked back at his mandala, his forehead creasing. “I—it’s just a circle. Circles are easy. They have very simple equations, you just have to know where you want the center and what you want the radius to be—” he stopped, shrugging. “I mean, circles are easy. I used to—” he stopped. Then he said, in a different tone, “My mother used to do that. Only she put the origin right in the middle of our living room and gave her circle a radius of a thousand feet. I—she said—I don’t remember what she said. I thought she did it for fun, to show me a really big circle—” he stopped again, cutting the last word off short as though he didn’t trust his voice. He was blinking hard, too, and he suddenly looked crushingly tired or as though his headache had become crippling, or both.

Natividad said gently, “I think we know how she was keeping you safe. And I think she was teaching you to keep yourself safe, even if she didn’t explain. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she was like you—good at math even if she didn’t know ordinary Pure magic.” She paused, then added, “You’re really tired, I know, Justin. And you have a lot to think about. You can pick any room you like along this hall and just move in, they’ve all got sheets on the beds and towels and things. I don’t think Ezekiel let you stop for your things, did he? Ezekiel, right?” She rolled her eyes, deliberately lightening the tone, trying not to let him see she was worried about him. She slid off her chair, and held her hand out to Justin.

He moved slowly, getting up. And he didn’t say a word. But he took her hand willingly enough, she thought, and let her lead him out of the kitchen and toward the stairs.

Justin picked the suite directly across from Natividad’s without really seeming to notice anything about it, not much to her surprise. It had a nice big bedroom and a separate office, plenty of space for one person, but that wasn’t why she showed it to him first. More importantly, it had the lightest stamp of character from its lost occupant: it didn’t shout of loss and grief. It might almost have been a suite in a hotel. It was all neutrals, with a taupe bedspread and brown pillows on the bed, and a taupe couch and a couple of matching chairs. The office held just bookshelves and a very simple desk of glossy dark wood.

An interior suite, neither room possessed windows. Natividad thought that might be a plus as well, though she didn’t really think Justin was likely to climb down from a window and dash madly into the countryside. He looked like he was out on his feet, and no wonder. It wasn’t just Dimilioc and everything. She knew very well how grief could rise up and swallow you, even after you thought you had it under control.

“We’ll be just across the hall here,” she assured him, for the second or third time. “Just knock on my door if you need anything. You’re perfectly safe, you know. Just sleep till you wake up, and don’t worry about anything!”

“Yes. Right. Yes,” Justin said vaguely. He had moved across the room to look in the bathroom, opened the closet door to glance in at whatever it contained, and now leaned on one arm of the heavy couch. He rubbed his hands hard across his face, though, and then gave Natividad a sharper look. “I’m a prisoner here, right?”

Natividad didn’t want him to be scared. She began, “No, not at all—” just as Miguel said, “Yes, more or less.” So Natividad glared at her brother and said to Justin, “
Right at the moment
I’m sure Grayson won’t want you leaving the house, but when you know more and learn enough to protect yourself and everything, that’s different, right? You’re not a
prisoner
, anyway. Your door doesn’t lock, you know, except from the inside! You can check it! Anyway, you’ll be fine! Don’t try too hard to think about things tonight, and just knock on my door if you wake up and want anything, or just need to talk!
Bueno
—good night!” She drew Miguel firmly out of Justin’s room with her and shut the door.