Black Dog Short Stories (5 page)

     Grayson was not, of course, sitting on the floor with the girls. The Master of Dimilioc was far too dignified to sit on the floor. He was sitting in a chair outside the cage, a big, fancy chair someone had brought down from the house above. His broad hands gripped the arms of the chair, not hard, but with a power that implied he could crush the heavy wood like balsa. He probably could, if he got annoyed. Not that he would do anything of the kind, because he was also far too dignified to get in a temper and wreck the furniture.

     A fancy table that matched the chair stood between it and the silver-wrapped bars of the cage; the fat volume of Gibbon Cassie had brought downstairs lay on the table. A human hand could reach between the bars and pick up that book, but as long as Cassie got it back on the table before she shifted, her other form wouldn’t be able to touch it. Especially with the silver on the bars. Miguel wondered if the silver would burn her in her human form, now that her shadow had been contaminated. It had never occurred to him to wonder about that before. Civilized black dogs killed
cambiadors
when they caught them, so what did it matter what shifters could and couldn’t do?

     Natividad hadn’t looked around when Miguel came down the stairs, but Cassie glanced up sharply and looked first surprised and then annoyed. Grayson glanced at him and the tray of sandwiches and lifted heavy eyebrows. Miguel hoped he wasn’t flushing. The Master didn’t miss much, but hey, it really was lunchtime. Miguel held up the tray illustratively and said easily, “Always harder to fight evil on an empty stomach, right?”  He was satisfied with his own easy tone. Growing up around black dogs would teach anybody to sound casual, relaxed, friendly, cheerful. It was all part of learning how to slide right on by a black dog’s uncertain temper.

     Grayson started to say something, probably something terse, but before he could, Natividad glanced up and said, “Oh, food, great! Thanks! Is there one with turkey and lettuce and mayonnaise and not those awful tomatoes?”
     “Just for you,” Miguel told her, turning the tray and indicating the sandwich he’d made for his twin. “And cream cakes for Cassie, so don’t eat them all.”  He put the tray down on the table, glancing sidelong at the Master. “This one’s for you, sir.”

     “How very thoughtful of you, Miguel,” Grayson said. His heavy, gritty voice wasn’t the only thing that made him sound suspicious, Miguel was fairly certain. The Master was no fool.

     “Cream cakes, huh?” said Cassie. The corners of her mouth had tucked upward and she was looking at Miguel now with some interest and, he hoped, appreciation.

     “You’re on your own as far as the raw steak goes, though.”

     “Huh. I guess that’s all right, as long as you’ve got the cakes. Pass ’em here, then.”  She started to get up.

     “Don’t reach through the circle! Just let me finish this first,” Natividad ordered, and added to Miguel, “It’s kind of a variant on the
Aplacando
, see, only if I did it right it’ll tighten as the moon waxes and ease off again as it wanes. Only I’m not sure if it’ll work. It’s kind of a new thing.”  She looked doubtfully at the invisible magic in the air or set into the cement or whatever.

     “You should sound more confident,” Cassie told her. “You should say, ‘This’ll definitely do the job. Yeah, once I’ve got this done, you won’t have any trouble with your shadow.’ Like the placebo effect, right?”

     Natividad murmured wordlessly, plainly not paying attention. She was doing something with her hands, as though she was braiding invisible threads or light or something.

     Cassie shrugged and said to Miguel instead, “Planning to leave the rest of the dusting till tomorrow, are you?”

     “I thought maybe I’d take a break to read the first volume of Gibbon,” Miguel explained. “Maybe I should learn Latin first, though.”  She’d offered him a pretty good straight line in more than one way, though, so he also added, watching Grayson covertly from the corner of his eye, “Though Étienne might be pissed off if I don’t get more done today, I guess.”  To his surprise and pleasure, Cassie picked this up.

     It wasn’t anything obvious, just a slight widening of her eyes. But she said smoothly, “Oh, yeah, we wouldn’t want Étienne to get pissed off,” with only the slightest emphasis on the name and without looking at Grayson at all.

     The Master, who had gathered up his sandwich neatly in a napkin, paused, regarding Miguel with narrow curiosity. “Dusting?”

     “I’m sure someone has to dust,” Miguel said easily. “I guess Étienne was used to having things polished up all neat and clean when he was Master of Lumondiere.”

     Grayson’s gaze became more intent. “Étienne was never Master of Lumondiere. His cousin was Master. Before that, his uncle.”

     “Oh, really?” said Miguel, as though slightly surprised but not very interested. “I figured he’d been Master. You ready for a sandwich,
gemela
?”

     His twin had sighed and sat back on her heels, rubbing her face with both hands. She looked up, though, smiling, when he offered her the platter.
“Sí.
Yes. Thank you. It’s fine, you can move now,” she added to Cassie. “I don’t know—” then she stopped and said instead, firmly, “This will help you very much. It will make it much easier for you to reach past your shadow even when the moon is all the way full.”

     “That’s the way,” Cassie said approvingly. She added casually, “I thought he’d been Master, too. He sure thinks he’s his own gift to the world.”

     “He knows his own strength,” Grayson said, his voice lowering toward a growl. “He is an asset to Dimilioc.”

     That could be a warning to a mere human not to criticize a strong black dog—or more likely a warning to a human kid not to criticize someone so much older, or so much more senior in Dimilioc. But Miguel hoped that tone also implied dislike of Étienne Lumondiere. Who, yes, was undeniably an asset to Dimilioc. It was just that he was also a pain in the ass.

     “Sure,” Miguel said easily. “It’s just a pity he can’t be an asset to Dimilioc from somewhere else. France would be perfect.”

     “I doubt the French would have him back,” said Cassie. “Not that there was ever anything wrong with Lumondiere. But, well, France, right?”

     “France?” Natividad said, innocently providing another straight line.

     Miguel was all set to take that opening, but before he could, Cassie answered, “Sure. That business with the forêt des Landes? That’s the biggest forest in France, you know, and almost all of it deliberately planted by a house called Èvanouir so their black dogs would have a proper forest to hunt people in.”

     Natividad paused. “Oh, no. Seriously?”

     “They sold it as a way to deswampify this huge region, but yeah, Èvanouir was really into it as a hunting preserve.”

     Natividad was looking more and more upset. Miguel wouldn’t have raked up all that old history, if he’d been the one to explain. He said quickly, “Lumondiere put a stop to that, though! They were already getting strong by then. They tore up Èvanouir and took over France almost before the trees had all been planted.”

     “Sure,” agreed Cassie. “But not before Landes had already become a hunting ground. Finding out about Landes gave pretty much all of France a permanent hate-on for all black dogs. Èvanouir or Lumondiere, the French mostly don’t care, and I don’t blame ’em.”

     Natividad shook her head, wordlessly.

     Unable to help himself, Miguel demanded, “How do
you
know all that?”

     Cassie gave him an amused little tip of her head. “I paid attention in school.”

     “Oh.”  That . . . actually made a lot of sense. Miguel should have been able to figure that out without asking. The whole town of Lewis was almost part of Dimilioc, after all. Lots of human kin must have settled there, over the years. It made sense the people in the town would know a lot about black dog history. Plus, Cassie’s
papá
was just the sort of guy who would want to know
all
about black dogs, and she’d probably picked it up from him. Yeah, that was obvious, now that he’d let himself look like an idiot in front of her. But who’d have guessed she would have cared about learning all that stuff?

     “It seems unlikely there are enough black wolves of the Lumondiere bloodlines left to re-establish their house in any case,” Grayson said. If he was annoyed by this little tour down memory lane, or for that matter entertained by Cassie showing up Miguel, he didn’t show it.

     “Yeah, too bad,” Miguel said, absently, as though he wasn’t that interested. He wasn’t sure the hook was set. But slow and subtle was good. Plausible deniability and never, ever making any kind of real suggestion about anything. You had to lead black dogs very, very gently. Especially Grayson Lanning.

     And on that thought, Miguel began gathering up the debris from lunch. No good overstaying his welcome, especially since he hadn’t actually been invited to this party. “Well, good luck, then,” he said vaguely. “I’ll come back down when the moon’s started to wane and see if you’re ready for the third volume, okay?” 

     But Miguel actually came back down the second full-moon day. Three full-moon nights, that was the rule, and two days—but you had to be careful because some of the moon-bound shifters would change for as much as five nights and four days, not three and two. That was what Grayson and Natividad were helping Cassie with, of course: learning to control her shadow well enough to minimize the time of its rising. Intellectually, that was an interesting question: whether someone who’d become moon-bound could learn things like that, or whether it all depended on the strength of their corrupted shadows and not at all on their own will and determination.

     It was the sort of question Miguel preferred to keep at an intellectual level. It was pretty awful to let himself imagine what it would be like, if will and determination turned out to count for nothing, if everything instead turned out to depend on luck—the strength of the black dog that bit you, the invasiveness of the demonic influence, the length of time you’d been moon-bound, whatever. Things you couldn’t control.

     He really didn’t want to believe that could be true. He supposed he was going to find out if it was, though. They were all going to find out. Because of Cassie. Who read Gibbon with the footnotes in Latin—unless she’d made that up to impress him—and who knew a lot about the history of black dogs in Europe. She couldn’t have made
that
up. Probably she really did read Latin.

     So he went downstairs on the second full-moon day, just to look in on her and see how she was doing. Whether her shadow still held control. It would, of course. It was too early for her to fight it back, no matter what magic Natividad had worked on her. But he went downstairs anyway.

     He’d almost finished the dusting by then, though not quite; he’d left some of the highest shelves for later. He’d also left some artistic piles of books on the floor to make it clear that he’d been terribly busy, just in case Étienne came to see how he was getting on. He seriously did not want the Lumondiere black dog pissed off at him. At least, not yet.

     Cassie was indeed still in her shifted form. Of course. Shifters were called moon-bound for a reason, and they just could not learn control the way a true black dog could.

     Though Miguel wondered now whether that necessarily had to be the case. A black dog, at least a Dimilioc black dog, worked on control almost from birth, and since the shadow was weak at first, that gave a black dog
niño
a chance to learn how to control it before it got strong. A
cambiador
, a shifter . . . the shadow was strong right from the beginning, and the person had no practice dealing with demonic corruption. But maybe . . . maybe time and practice could do the same job, if a shifter could only depend on other people to help keep her from killing everyone she loved while she learned.

     That Cassie in her shifted form would have been delighted to kill Miguel was extremely plain, not that he hadn’t known that already. Moon-bound
cambiadors
were like that. Their shadows wanted to kill, but wanted even more to cause pain: left free during the full moon, a shifter always went first for family and friends. Then, driven back and down by the moon’s waning, the shadow would subside until the next full moon—leaving its horrified, grieving host to bear the guilt.

     Miguel had never really wanted to know how much a shifter remembered of what its shadow had done, after the moon finally let him go. Or her.

     He said to Cassie, “Hey, you in there?

     She stared back at him, her fiery eyes burning with contempt and hatred. Though he tried, Miguel could see nothing human in those eyes.

     She was a lot smaller than a real black dog. A whole lot less massive. She was built for speed, not for crushing her enemies with her sheer bulk. Her head was not as broad, her shoulders not as a powerful as those of a black dog. She might be bigger than a wolf, but she probably didn’t weigh as much as, say, a mastiff. The overall impression was quite different. A shifter really did look more like a wolf than the bear-dog-monster that was a black dog. Her eyes were not like a wolf’s eyes, though. They were fiery yellow, though as far as Miguel knew, a shifter couldn’t call up
actual
fire the way some black dogs could.