Pure Magic (Black Dog Book 3) (35 page)

Keziah caught up something from the ground in her jaws, a swift, almost delicate motion, and tore her claws across the zombie black dog’s side, and thrust the thing she had snatched up against her enemy’s wound. The undead black dog reared back, screaming, and Justin stared in disbelief, but at that moment he also realized exactly what she’d done: she’d grabbed one of the silver crosses that anchored the outer mandala and she’d slammed it not just against, but actually into, her enemy’s body. No wonder, no wonder it staggered away, but the mandala, what would something like that do to the mandala?

Keziah had swept Ezekiel up in the crook of a forelimb and whirled and leaped back toward the house in one motion. The vampire was shrieking, a horrible sound that shouldn’t have been possible with a human throat. Another of its undead zombie black dogs leaped after Keziah and Ezekiel and then flung itself away, roaring. It took half a heartbeat for Justin to remember that of course there had always been two mandalas, and even if Keziah had ruined Natividad’s, his was still there, untouched. But it was only his, the very first big mandala he’d ever made and he was horrified to think they now depended on it for safety.

Keziah had leaped cleanly over his mandala, careful not to touch its line, and now she dropped Ezekiel and backed away from him, snarling over her shoulder at the vampire and its undead black dogs and its blood kin.

Ezekiel got to his feet, stumbling, his arms crossed protectively over his chest. Justin couldn’t see if he was actually wounded, but the shreds of his shadow trailed in the air like blood in water. The vampire shrieked again and cut against the mandala’s ward with its claws, and Justin thought he could
feel
its blow, as though the mandala rang like a soundless bell. Ezekiel flinched.

Keziah flattened her ears, reared up, and dwindled rapidly toward her human form. She didn’t wait for Ezekiel after she’d shifted, and certainly didn’t wait to see if he needed help. She only turned her back and strode away, back toward the house.

Ezekiel straightened, slowly, not looking after her. But he took a step and then another, and he didn’t look like he was going to collapse. Behind him, the vampire hit the mandala’s ward again, shrieking with fury. This time, Ezekiel did not flinch. He straightened his shoulders instead, and followed Keziah with a firm step.

Justin took a deep breath and turned to see if any of this had affected Natividad at all.

So far as he could see, she hadn’t even noticed. She still knelt by the coffee table, frowning intently at the knife. Now only one hand hovered over the knife; the other rested, closed into a loose fist, on her thigh. She was humming under her breath, a little melody he hadn’t heard until now, that wound up and down in a strange, unfamiliar, oddly compelling rhythm.

“Unbelievable,” Keziah snapped from the doorway. “She is not finished even yet?” She took a step toward the coffee table. Justin put himself in between before he ever knew he’d decided to move.

“She must finish!” Keziah hissed. “She must make her weapon, her weapon that can destroy that cursed
Ghūl
! You know that single mandala will not hold long, you know it was not as strong as the other! What is she
doing
?”

She moved to get around Justin, who stepped sideways to stay between the two girls and said urgently, “Interrupting her won’t help!” He met Keziah’s eyes, half surprised she didn’t knock him out of the way, but she didn’t touch him. She stopped and glared at him.

“You were brilliant,” Justin told her. “But now be patient. Wait. Just wait.”

Ezekiel came in, moving stiffly, pale as death, one arm pressed against his middle, though Justin couldn’t see any actual wounds. But up close, the damage to his shadow was obvious. It trembled behind him in shreds, ragged and diffuse. “Like blood in the water,” Justin said, only realizing that he’d said it out loud at Ezekiel’s flashing look of irony and irritation.

“Don’t have to worry about drawing sharks,” Ezekiel said, his tone not as biting as Justin thought he probably deserved. His voice was tight with pain, or with something like pain. He said, “All the sharks are already here. Unfortunately.”

“What did it do?” demanded Keziah, glowering at him in furious disapproval. “Can it do it again? Could it do that to me?
Can
you shift?”

“What the hell does it look like?” Ezekiel snapped. “It tore off part of my shadow. And I don’t damn well know. Yes, I think so, sort of, but not like I should. Not like I need to.” He eased himself down into a chair, slowly, moving like an old man, looked away from her, and said, his tone flat, “Thank you for getting me out of there.”

Keziah hissed something in Arabic under her breath and turned her back on him, going to the window, crossing her arms over her breasts and canting one hip in an echo of her usual provocative attitude. At the moment . . . it lacked a certain something. Not that Justin would have dared tell her so.

Natividad looked up at Ezekiel, blinked, and said, “Oh,” in a surprised tone. “Like
that
. I
see
.
Not
very nice.” She turned her palms upward and closed her fingers around something Justin barely saw, something that seemed like a kind of darkness braided with light. Then she reached down and set her hands firmly on the blade of the silver knife. It smoked, and then the smoke
condensed,
and drew back into the blade. Justin blinked, watching silver light burn, shadow braiding around it, and then first light and then shadow sink down into the knife. The light was . . . inside it, but somehow still visible. Then the shadow lay in a thin layer between the light and the horrible vampire magic, which clung to the shadow and wrapped around it. Then there was another thin layer of shadow, and only then, outside everything else, the solid surface of what had once been a knife. Now it was . . . sort of a rod, narrower and longer than the knife had been. A slender stick, maybe two feet long, maybe a little longer.

Oh. It was a stake. A stake, of course. He wanted to laugh, but he also wanted to throw up. The wooden stakes they used in stupid movies were nothing like this filigreed rod of light and shadow and caged corruption. This thing was just . . . really disturbing.

“There,” said Natividad, sitting back on her heels. “That should work.” Then she looked up at Ezekiel again and her eyes widened. “
Madre de dios!
What
happened
?”

“What do you think?” snapped Ezekiel, his voice tight and exhausted. “It got a piece of my shadow.”

“Can it
do
that?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so. But clearly it did.”

“But,” said Natividad, and stopped. She looked at Ezekiel and then, helplessly, at her knife. At the thing which had been her knife. She said, “I guess I kind of did the same thing. Only I used . . . I think I used Alejandro’s shadow. The part of it . . . the part of it I still held.” She looked back up at Ezekiel, her eyes flinching. “What will that do to him? If I put a little bit of his shadow in that?”

Ezekiel only shook his head.

“Not very nice,” she said in a small voice. “I don’t . . . it won’t hurt him, I don’t think it will, he’s not even
here
, that was just
a little bit
of his shadow and he’s so far away . . .”

“I think
we
are in far more danger than your brother, no matter what is happening there,” Keziah snapped. “Did it work? Because that other mandala, I think it will not hold very much longer. I think it will break very soon.”

Natividad started to reach out toward the thing she had made, but drew her hand back without touching it. She said in the same small voice, “It’s an
aparato para parar las sombra y luz de enlace a través de magica del vampiro.
If I did it right. It’s meant to bind light and shadow. It’s got my magic in it, and Alejandro’s magic, and that awful vampire magic that Ezekiel brought me just now.”

“Does it?” said Ezekiel, his tone very neutral.

Natividad said apologetically, “I mean, I could see what the vampire did to you, sort of, so I kind of did that. Not really the same way.” She shivered. “I wouldn’t want to do it the same way. No wonder, no wonder they call them
vampiros
, only I thought it was just blood and, and the corruption, but I didn’t know it could take part of your, your—” she waved her hand helplessly, unable to put what she meant into words.

“Shadow,” muttered Ezekiel.

Natividad shook her head. “Self,” she said. “Soul. It’s awful, but I kind of see what it did, and if
I
did it right—” she looked at her knife again, though she still didn’t touch it. “It’s meant to, to, I don’t know, pull vampire magic out of the world? Make a hole in the vampire, in what it
is
, so vampire magic will pour away, into the fell dark—sort of. I think!
If
I did it right! But I don’t know what else it might do. To, to any black dogs whose shadow is caught up in it. Or in the vampire.” She looked helplessly at Ezekiel.

He started to lever himself to his feet. “We’ll find out.”

“Do not be so stupid! You cannot even shift!” snapped Keziah. She turned around at last, beautiful and fierce and bitter. She took Justin’s breath away. “
I
will have to take that weapon. Who else? I will take it. I will kill the vampire—if it works as Natividad says.” She glared at Natividad.

Justin thought it was a pity to spike all this heroism, but he half raised a hand and said, interrupting both Natividad’s protest and Ezekiel’s sharp response, “How exactly is
anyone
going to get close to the vampire carrying that thing? Because it seems to me any vampire, especially one that’s into stealing other peoples’ shadows or souls or magic or whatever, has got to be able to tell that that—” he pointed at it— “is serious bad news with an extra helping of bad news on the side, and in case you’ve all forgotten? There’s a
lot
of monsters out there and only a few of us in here. Even if we were all in tip-top shape, these would not look like good odds to your friendly neighborhood bookie.”

There was a pause. Natividad said at last, “It’s not a black dog thing at all, I was going to say so, but maybe I can make—” and then a silent, motionless
boom
shook the world, and she bent forward, her hands over her eyes. Justin staggered and grabbed the back of the couch to keep from falling. He felt exactly like Natividad looked: like someone had driven an intangible but gigantic icepick into his skull. It didn’t hurt—it didn’t exactly
hurt
—but every nerve in his body seemed to try to tighten up into a ball all at the same time.

“Second mandala’s failed,” Ezekiel said. He was on his feet, looking like death served cold. The bones of his face and shoulders and arms distorted and thickened as he reached laboriously for a change that should have been effortless.

Justin dropped to one knee and slapped his palm against the floor, thinking hard about circles that kept out
everything
, but though he felt magic tremble and stretch through him, it shattered before it could settle—shattered and melted, it felt just like that, as though he’d tried to throw a handful of snowflakes through a furnace—

“You have to be on the
ground
,” Natividad said faintly. Her hands were still pressed over her face, her voice stifled. “Mandalas have to be anchored in the
earth
.”

“
Now
you mention this?” snapped Justin, though he knew that was completely unfair.

“
Sí
, yes, sorry,” Natividad muttered. Lowering her hands, she added, a little more strongly, “But there are still the wards on the house. We have a few minutes. A few minutes, at least.”

“Yet it is two hours or more until sunrise,” Keziah said tightly, and reached for the weapon Natividad had made. Ezekiel knocked her hand away from it, and she snarled at him, a thin, savage sound. “Fool!”

“You’re the one fit to fight,” Ezekiel snarled, cold as ice, his words slurred in a mouth no longer quite human. “So stay free to fight.”

“No,” snapped Keziah, and reached for the weapon a second time.

Leaping up, Justin caught her arm. She didn’t hit him—he thought she might, but she didn’t. Nor did she jerk her wrist out of his grip, though he could feel the strength of her arm and knew she could effortlessly break his hold. He met her dark-amber eyes, remembered he wasn’t supposed to do that, and did it anyway. He said, knowing it was true, “I don’t think you’ve understood—
I’m
going to have to do it. No black dog can touch it.”

“You?” said Keziah, and at the same time Natividad said urgently, “
Not
you, Justin!”

Justin let Keziah go as she pulled away, but shook his head. “Natividad, you’re a lot more valuable than I am. You know things; you can
do
things. I—what do I know? I didn’t even know you have to anchor a mandala into the earth! But at least I know that thing you made won’t steal
my
soul if I touch it.” He glanced at it, sidelong, and flinched. “It is pretty awful, though.”