Pure Magic (Black Dog Book 3) (4 page)

Alejandro grinned. “We will do that,” he said. “But I think you are not used to working with a Pure girl.” He glanced over at Natividad. “You tell us,” he said. “What can you make, that will blunt the teeth in this trap?”

Natividad nodded quickly, knowing they were committed. “Even if we don’t know exactly what the trap is, I think I can make something. I’ll use my
maraña mágica
as a base and make something that will fold over and around you, something to confuse the eyes of our enemies. But I don’t know if I can make it big enough to work for Keziah and Amira as well as you—”

“That does not matter,” Keziah said smoothly. “We shall slip the eyes of our enemies without your little magic tricks, Pure girl.” She gave Alejandro a mocking look. “You should go out before us, as I said. Your little sister, she can give you this magic thing. Then you can go out to puzzle our enemies. When all eyes look toward you, Amira and I will come out and kill them all.”

“That isn’t exactly what I had in mind!” Natividad protested, but Alejandro was smiling a dark, fierce black dog smile. He liked the idea, she could see.

“Make your
mágica,”
Alejandro told her. “We do not have so much time before dawn, not so much we can think of many different ideas. But this is clever. This will work.”

Natividad threw up her hands. “Black dogs!” she said, like a swear word. She pulled her
maraña mágica
out of her pocket and shook it out, stalking away toward the front of the van to get her little silver knife.

A
maraña mágica
was a tangled net of light, looking more than anything like a spiderweb of luminescent silk. It had neither mass nor shape, but, flung across the path of an enemy, it was very effective in confusing his steps. Natividad held her
maraña mágica
up and studied it.

Pure magic was defensive. She knew that. Everyone knew that. But, her mother had taught her, some kinds of defense could be
aggressively
defensive.

She knew what she wanted. That was important. She didn’t have her mother’s little flute, nor any
aparatos,
the tools used by the Pure to capture and weave light. But she had her silver knife and she had this
maraña
, and she knew what she wanted. Biting her lip in concentration, she began to cut one strand here and another there, freeing just a little bit of moonlight, tying the strands back into a different shape. Some of the light would be lost. She couldn’t help that. It was good that the
maraña
need protect only Alejandro; she didn’t think she could weave its new shape wide enough to cover two black dogs, certainly not three . . . her eyes burned. She hadn’t blinked in some time, she realized. A child’s mistake. She should know better. She blinked hard and rubbed her face, tangles of luminous spidersilk wavering in her mind’s eye.

“Well?” Keziah said behind her. “The night is passing. How much longer will your magic take, girl?”

Natividad glanced up, embarrassed, but Alejandro, scowling, was already shouldering Keziah back out of the way. Keziah was showing her white teeth in a smile that had a lot more temper in it than humor. So was her brother.

“Anyway, it’s done!” Natividad said hastily. She didn’t
think
they would fight, not now, not with real enemies out there, but sometimes black dog tempers were unpredictable. She held out the insubstantial web. It clung to her fingers, rippling gently in an unfelt breeze. “It’s a turn-the-eye spell,” she explained. “If I did it right, it is! It’s to confuse anybody looking at you. It won’t last long, your shadow will tear it up, but . . .” she hesitated, then went on more softly, “Maybe it might help that you have that tiny bit of my magic wrapped up in your shadow.”

Because that was the other lingering effect of what she had done, of what they had both done: she might have the thinnest possible thread of her brother’s shadow braided into her magic, but Alejandro also had a just a trace of her moonlit magic clinging to the edges of his shadow. That shouldn’t have been possible, either, but it seemed permanent. At first Natividad had been afraid her magic might hurt him, like the touch of silver. But he did not complain, and eventually he had told her he liked knowing where she was all the time, so she had stopped worrying.

He nodded now, not seeming surprised or offended, and she went on, “Even after you change, even if they look right at you, they’ll see
something
, but I think they won’t see you clearly. I think they will have difficulty seeing exactly what or where you are.”

“
Very
good,” Alejandro told her. “Very clever.” He brushed the back of his hand lightly across Natividad’s cheek, smiling at her with human warmth only a little harshened by black dog ferocity. “You will see,” he said. “I will use your
magica
and confound all our enemies. And then Keziah and Amira will kill them all, except for those I kill. And we will take your little
paloma
and go. She will be safe at Dimilioc.”

“Mostly safe,” said Keziah, smiling.

But Amira said seriously,
“I’ll
keep her safe.”

There was a little pause. Keziah quit smiling. “Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, of course you will,
habibti
.”

Natividad was not supposed to risk herself. Grayson had been very stern about that. But of course she couldn’t just hide in the van, because then what if the others needed help?

She had her
trouvez
, which probably wouldn’t be much protection, but she also had her cross tucked down under her shirt, a cross made of copper and zinc with a single thin silver wire wound around it. It wasn’t the silver that really mattered. What mattered was that the cross was hers. She’d made it herself, infusing it with light and a bright-burning clarity of intention, but along with the silver, she’d also wound a thin tracery of dense shadow around and through it.

Pure magic wasn’t supposed to be contaminated with black dog magic. By any reasonable understanding of Pure magic, that sliver of darkness ought to ruin any working she did. But she’d done it anyway, drawing on the fragment of Alejandro’s shadow that clung to her now, and on intuition and the half-remembered teaching from when she’d been very little. If it worked the way she’d meant it to, that cross would keep black dogs from realizing she was here, or at least from being able to tell exactly where she was. Black dogs hated the Pure and tracked them whenever they could. Well, not Dimilioc black dogs who’d had the
Aplacando
worked on them, but ordinary strays. But they shouldn’t be able to track her, not now, now so long as she wore this cross. She thought it would work.

If she’d made it right.

Even with her special cross, even though she knew Alejandro was a good fighter and Keziah was deadly and even little Amira was very dangerous, Natividad was scared. They knew this was a trap, they expected an ambush, they were ready for it, so it shouldn’t be very dangerous really, but she was scared anyway. It was a good thing she didn’t believe in premonitions.

But it was an ugly house. It felt wrong. Too big, too square, dull yellow brick instead of the red more common here in the northeastern part of the United States, and a steeply-sloped gray shingle roof that looked dingy above the white-painted trim. The yard, guarded by a wrought-iron fence about as tall as Natividad, was also square. Although the yard was big enough, it looked small because of the bulk of the house and the single huge beech tree that loomed in one corner. A beech was not a bad tree, though not as good for magic as oak or pine. But this one felt wrong somehow, as though it cast too heavy a shade from its leafless branches.

The black dog lounged beneath the beech, seeming sated with his night’s hunt, with blood and death. He was massive, even for a black dog. He looked very dangerous, but Natividad wasn’t worried about the enemies she could
see
.

Natividad could glimpse the body of the Pure woman sprawled beneath the tree near the black dog, but from her place, hidden well back away from the house, she couldn’t see the body in any detail. She was grateful for that.

Far more visible was the interior of the house, that one room on the lower floor glowing with light and a false promise of warmth and safety. Even from where she crouched, Natividad could see a high-ceilinged room of generous proportions, pale yellow paint on the walls, decorative white trim like sugar icing along the ceiling and along the top of the wide fireplace. A wide open doorway led away to the interior of the house.

The room was filled with furniture, but it all looked uncomfortable: upright, rigid couches and matching chairs, all upholstered with cream or tan or cream-and-tan stripes, with narrow arms and legs. But in the chair farthest from the window crouched a little girl, and even from way across the yard and on the other side of a brick wall, Natividad could tell she was Pure.

She looked back at the black dog, but she couldn’t tell whether he expected attack, whether he guessed it was coming right now, whether he was part of the trap or just part of the bait.

Then his head lifted suddenly, and she held her breath.

At first even Natividad wasn’t sure the movement she was seeing was Alejandro. Her brother was still in his human form when he came through the gate, but the
maraña mágica
she had remade draped across him and above him, half floating in the slight breeze, its indistinct edges confusing his outline so that he looked both dim and strangely outsize. As though his shadow had pulled mostly free from his body and rode above and around him. As though, Natividad realized, the threads of her
maraña
had tangled up with the edges of his shadow and pulled it loose. She bit her lip, leaning forward. She hadn’t intended to do anything like that, but things got strange when you used slivers of black dog magic mixed in with ordinary Pure magic. It wasn’t like following a technique you’d learned from your mamá, and she from hers, all the way back for hundreds of years. Though if her magic was hurting her brother, it apparently wasn’t enough to stop him.

At least the enemy black dog seemed confused by Alejandro’s indistinct shape, too. He was on his feet now, his head low, black fangs showing as he snarled, wisps of smoke curling upward from his jaws. But he hesitated, and then Alejandro leaped forward. The shadow that surrounded him seemed to sink down into his body as he moved, and at the same time spread outward, a very strange thing to watch. Half disguised by the strange rippling magic of her
maraña
, his bones contorted and his back broadened and bowed. She could see that the hand that struck the cold earth was blunter and larger than a human hand, bear-sized, clawed. Where that hand struck the ground, the earth smoked. Tiny flames whispered up from the dead grasses, dying in the damp breeze. The smoke rippled, caught up in the shreds of her
maraña,
pulled into a swirling veil that streamed sideways in a wind that wasn’t anything physical; a wind, Natividad thought, that blew from one world into another, or from life into death. It looked like that: unearthly and scary.

Alejandro snarled, a savage ripping sound. He looked so
strange
. The shifting insubstantial veil of her
maraña
blew around him and above him, shredding into darkness and starlight, pulling the edges of his shadow in strange directions.

The other black dog didn’t seem anxious to close with him. He reared up, threatening Alejandro with long black claws and powerful jaws. Alejandro swung wide to the left, trailing tatters of light and shadow, and a long slender arrow flashed past him, drawing a line of silver fire through the air. The arrow punched right through Alejandro’s indistinct looming shape, flew ten more feet, and buried itself in the wide trunk of the beech tree. The fine silver line it had drawn through the dark followed it down like the tail of a falling kite, rippling into graceful curves along the ground, and Natividad saw it was actually a silver chain, leading back into the dark where she, with her ordinary eyes, couldn’t see. She pressed her hand over her mouth to stifle a sound of dismay. It was far too easy to see how a weapon like that, a harpoon or something, might be used against a black dog.

Alejandro roared, but he didn’t sound hurt. He sounded furious. His shadow rushed up and out, filling a huge space around him, and Natividad realized that her
maraña
must have done exactly what it was supposed to, fooled the eye of his enemies, thrown off their aim so they had missed. At least, with their first harpoon. She was sure they must have others. No one would prepare a weapon like that and only have one harpoon—

Natividad’s
maraña
, stretched far past its limits, shredded at last into a memory of misty light and dissolved into the air. Alejandro’s shadow poured down and into him, condensing all at once as though sucked inward by a powerful vacuum, and her brother bowed under the pressure of it, collapsing involuntarily back into human form. A second harpoon flashed directly over his back as he crumpled to the ground, and Natividad couldn’t suppress a short, terrified cry because if a weapon like that hit him now, in human form, it could
kill
him.