Black Dog Short Stories III Page 2

  Max, still in his black dog form, tilted his head to show that he did.

  Ethan didn’t ask him whether he would obey—though he wasn’t completely certain, it would make him look weak to ask. He just turned his back on that situation and studied Andrew. Who was panting with pain and fury and the effort of trying to force the shift. In just about another minute, he’d probably manage it, if Ethan was any judge. That’d clear up the little problem with his knee and set him up for renewed violence. If Ethan let it happen.

  Ethan took out the gun again. He walked over, set the muzzle of his gun against Andrew’s jaw, and, as Andrew tried to jerk back and tried harder to force the change, said mildly, “Cut that out.”

  Andrew gritted his teeth. “If you didn’t have that goddamned gun—”

  “Right,” Ethan interrupted him. “That’s why I have it. Now listen up. In a minute I’ll let you shift. You can heal that knee. Then you can decide if you’re done. Because if you’re not, I have four more bullets in this clip, and the last one is silver. You understand me?”

  “Goddamned son of a—”

  “Seriously, that’s the attitude you want to show me right now?”

  Andrew groaned, half a curse smothered by pain and, just possibly, the earliest traces of better sense. He flattened himself down, slow and reluctant, but not after all quite stupid enough to keep pushing a fight against odds that were really pretty bad. Worse as Don arrived, finally. Trailing the kids—it was tough to leave a kid like Conway behind, and naturally little Paloma came along with Conway; those two were a real package deal these days. Not a pretty sight for a little girl, but she’d seen worse. And would again, probably. The world was a hard place. Ethan set aside the natural urge to protect a little Pure girl. He stood up.

  “Shift,” he ordered. “And then shift back, or Don will pull you back into human form, and I will shoot you in the other knee. Probably with silver, because I am all out of patience with you, Andrew. ”

  Two, three minutes later Andrew was back in human form, sullen but obedient. Ethan held up two more of the heavy wristbands. “Give me any trouble about this and I will beat the living daylights out of you and then put them on you anyway, understand?”

  With Don right there and plainly backing Ethan, Andrew didn’t have much choice. He wouldn’t have had a lot of choice anyway, but Ethan was just as glad Don’s presence made that crystal clear. He clamped the bands onto Andrew’s wrists, one and then the other. Then he stepped back, picked up a mattock, and tossed it to the sullen black dog. Andrew caught it, glowering.

  “You don’t need a break for lunch,” Ethan told him. “You need to get the rest of those holes dug. Say ‘Yes, sir.’”

  “Yes...sir,” Andrew ground out.

  Ethan hit him, a short, fast blow to the gut that doubled him over, then a hard backhand across the face that sent him staggering and left him on one knee. “I’m looking for a whole lot less attitude, Andrew.”

  The other black dog dragged in in a breath. Another. Finally, finally, a definite lowering of head and eyes. Sometimes it just took a really good whack with a clue bat to get the idea across. But Andrew at last tipped his head to the side, offering his throat. “Yes, sir,” he said, in a much more acceptable tone.

  “Better. Dig.” Ethan left him, walked across to check on Pearson.

  The sheriff had put his gun away, good. One of his men hadn’t yet; Ethan gave the man a little nod, retroactive permission to have it in his hand. Pearson had regained his usual studied neutrality despite his scraped and bruised face and the handkerchief he now held to his nose. His men looked anything but neutral; they were mad and scared, for which nobody could blame them. Cassie...Cassie looked absolutely murderous.

  “He’ll be punished,” Ethan promised. “They both will.”

  “They should be shot,” Cassie said. “With silver.” She was shaking, fine tremors that wouldn’t have been visible from a few feet away.

  “If we weren’t so short-handed, I’d consider it,” Ethan told her. He turned to her father. “You’re all right, sheriff?”

  “Yes. Fine.”

  Too furious to trust himself to produce a full sentence, Ethan diagnosed. Or not quite recovered from the shock and fear of the attack, but not planning to let his daughter realize that. Cassie wasn’t the only one shaking. Of course it was very cold out here for humans.

  Ethan nodded as though he hadn’t noticed anyone trembling, with cold or otherwise. “They can finish the digging. Russell too as soon as he’s back out here. Max can keep an eye on them, but with those silver bands on, they shouldn’t be able to make trouble. I’ll give them time to settle down and start thinking. I figure in about an hour they’ll realize how much trouble they’re in.” He glanced around, including all the humans as he went on. “I don’t expect any further problems, but if there are any, for God’s sake keep out of reach. Shoot if you have to. Grayson will blame me for it, not you. On the other hand I don’t have any special desire to take the blame for getting one of his wolves shot, so I would be personally grateful if you would try not to put yourselves in that position, okay?”

  The sheriff met Ethan’s eyes. “I don’t want my people anywhere near that son of a bitch.”

  Ethan put down a surge of temper at this. It wasn’t defiance, just disagreement. Probably justified disagreement. He nodded. “All right. That’s probably best for now. Take a break, go inside, get warmed up. Andrew and Russell can get as many holes dug as possible while you’re inside. Thaddeus should be back soon. He can help finish up. That work for you?”

  Grayson probably wouldn’t have asked. For that matter, Sheriff Pearson probably wouldn’t have looked the Master directly in the face while he drew a line in the sand. Ethan didn’t let himself hold the sheriff’s manner against him. He wasn’t about to try pushing Sheriff Pearson, not right now, not over something trivial. He had a pretty good idea the sheriff wasn’t going to push.

  Pearson glanced around, assessing his people and collecting a tiny nod from Cassie. Then he nodded. “That works.” A tiny pause. Then, “Thanks.”

  That was better. It took the edge off Ethan’s temper. He acknowledged this with a short nod and said briefly, “Get inside and get warm.” He walked away without waiting for a response because ending the moment with an order further assuaged his temper. He did not plan to let himself resent Pearson’s attitude, but that was easier if he made sure he didn’t have too much to resent.

  Andrew was digging a hole, chopping through the frozen, rock-hard soil with fierce blows of his mattock. It was definitely work for a black dog, not a human, and even a black dog had to be grateful the hole didn’t need to be deep. On the other hand, they needed a lot of holes. Maybe Andrew would learn something digging out holes for an hour or two. Probably not. Russell might, but Andrew?

  Well, Ethan could hope.

  Thaddeus walked into the Master’s office an hour after noon. He knocked once on the doorframe, came in, and sat down rather carefully in the nearest chair. The chair creaked, not really meant to hold someone his size. Thaddeus cautiously stretched out his legs and gave the chair a second to collapse. When it didn’t, he finally relaxed. He looked at Ethan, not smiling, but with amusement in the tilt of his head. “The Meade brothers, huh?”

  “Saw them on the way in, did you? How’s it looking out there?”

  Thaddeus scowled. “Too obvious, despite DeAnn’s look-aways. We need it to snow.”

  “Better than seventy percent chance tonight. If it doesn’t, we’ll try something else. Haul in a lot of snow maybe. Have a big snowball fight out there, trample the whole area up good so no one can tell we’ve been digging.”

  “Too cold for a snowball fight.”

  It was a point. It was a lot too cold for humans to go out there just for fun. They’d been rotating in and out by pairs every fifteen minutes all morning, or they’d be dealing with frostbite at the very least. Black dogs didn’t worry about the cold, but black dogs wouldn’t have
a snowball fight. “Snow probably wouldn’t pack anyway,” Ethan conceded. “We’ll think of something if we need to. Maybe a real fight. You against everybody else. That might be fun. How’d Andrew look?”

  Now Thaddeus grinned, a flash of white teeth in his very dark face. “Not real happy. But at least he wasn’t showing burns. You got to test out the powder on Russell, I guess.”

  “To be fair, Andrew thought he and Russell had it in the bag. DeAnn did a great job on that silver. I’d like her to do some more tonight. I figure I’ll give some to Pearson to share around. Might have to make him promise not to use it on Andrew.”

  Another flash of teeth in a predatory grin. “Oh yeah? What’d Andrew do?”

  Ethan told him.

  “Uh huh.” Thaddeus ticked off the points on his powerful fingers. “Usurping the Master’s authority, conspiring to do the same, assaulting an ally, assaulting a human under Dimilioc’s protection, insubordination, defiance. That right? Am I missing anything?”

  “Not sure it matters. That’s plenty right there.”

  “Yeah. Pearson okay?”

  Ethan nodded, only slightly surprised that Thaddeus would pick out the one thing that mattered most out of that whole list. “Upset. He doesn’t want the Meade brothers near his people. I told him I’d pull those two off the digging once you got back, said you’d help them finish up out there.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Ethan leaned back in his chair, smiling. Naturally Thaddeus would willingly pick up whatever job needed doing and not fuss about it. He said, “I figure I’ll talk to Andrew and Russell at dinner.”

  “You gonna offer them three choices?”

  “Just like we discussed,” Ethan agreed with considerable satisfaction. Everything had gone just right, or nearly. Could have been a total disaster, but so far everything was just fine.

  Dinner was burgers. Max made them, plus potato salad and baked beans. The beans were out of a can, the potato salad too mustardy, the burgers mostly too well done. DeAnn was much better in the kitchen. But DeAnn had been busy. Everyone had been busy. With Max cooking, the whole first floor smelled of charred meat—not actually a distasteful odor, but Ethan liked his burgers medium-rare. He didn’t say so. No one complained.

  Definitely neither Andrew nor Russell said a word. Russell had to eat his burger with knife and fork, unable to open his mouth wide enough to take a bite normally. His face was pretty badly blistered in places, shiny with ointment across the jaw and cheek where the burns were worst, but he was lucky the silver powder had missed his eyes. Ethan had tried to be careful, but a handful of powdered silver was not exactly a precision weapon.

  Both Russell and Andrew ate with their eyes on their plates. They were probably pretty hungry—black dogs needed a lot of food and they’d both missed lunch—but that wasn’t why they kept their heads down. It ought to have been shame. Maybe it was, though Ethan doubted it. Probably it was just fear.

  Fear worked, though. He was willing to take that.

  Ethan had taken the place to the right of the head of the table. He’d thought of taking Grayson’s place, but that felt wrong. He took the place to the right and let everyone else sort themselves out as they chose. You could learn something from the arrangement that shook out after trouble.

  DeAnn sat across from him, then the kids—Conway and Paloma had only recently started eating in the dining room with the adults—and then Thaddeus, between his family and everyone else. That was one bit of fallout from the brief nasty fight, because ordinarily he wouldn’t have bothered. Then there was an empty place, then Max and Don.

  Andrew and Russell had very quietly taken places a couple seats down from Ethan, across from Max and Don. Then there was a pretty big gap, and finally, at the other end of the table, Pearson and his people. They talked quietly among themselves, maybe just to prove they had the nerve. Two of the men, Tom Berg and Doug Lanmere, were deputies; the third just a man with guts enough to volunteer because he was a good shot plus he knew Dimilioc was direly short of manpower. His name was Willes, Nathan Willes. Ethan actually knew him slightly. Willes was older than Sheriff Pearson, older than the other men, probably about fifty, fifty-five, maybe sixty. But strong for a human, and not scared of much. A long time ago he’d had something going with a Dimilioc wolf, who’d died a year or so before the war—a routine mission gone bad, if Ethan remembered right. Likely they’d have broken up anyway. Relationships between Dimilioc wolves and ordinary humans were tough. But Willes was pretty comfortable around black dogs.

  Tonight he was grim. All the humans were grim, except Pearson himself, who was studiedly calm. The scrapes on his face had scabbed over pretty well, but the bruise across that cheekbone was going to be striking. Cass Pearson’s occasional glances Ethan’s way were frankly accusatory. Ethan pretended not to notice. He’d half expected the humans to eat in the kitchen. Actually, he’d thought of ordering Andrew and Russell to eat in the kitchen. But he wasn’t especially inclined to make things easy on the two troublemakers.

  Plus there was plenty they needed to talk about.

  “It’s snowing right now, and likely to pick up,” he told them. “That’s excellent; just what we hoped for. In a few hours it should be impossible to tell anyone was out there chopping holes in the ground. DeAnn, you’ve been working hard today; how’re you holding up?”

  The woman looked up, a swift smile coming and going across her strong-boned face. “No problem. I’m glad it’s done, mostly done, but Paloma was a big help.”

  The little girl smiled too, shyly. She still didn’t talk much, only a word here or there. She never had said what her birth name had been, but she answered to Paloma—Dove, the name Natividad had given her when she’d been rescued from nasty crowd of black dogs who’d killed her mother. DeAnn had taken her in, of course she had; not just for Paloma’s sake but for her own, and for her son’s. It was very good for a black dog boy to have a Pure sister, and those two were close to the same age—at least DeAnn said her best guess was that Paloma was about seven now. She’d given her adopted daughter the same birthday as her son, since no one knew when her birthday actually was.

  If those Meade idiots had had a Pure sister instead of an ordinary human sister, they might not be...no, probably they’d still be idiots.

  Ethan gave Paloma a nod of grave approval. “Good job, kid,” he said to her, exactly as he would have said to any youngster who’d made herself useful when it counted. The little girl smiled again, not quite so shyly.

  Ethan turned to Thaddeus. “They’re all set in town, right? You made sure of that?” He glanced down the table on that question, including Sheriff Pearson.

  Thaddeus nodded. “Hard target, that town. I guarantee, anybody who tries it is going to get bloodied up.”

  The sheriff cleared his throat. “Everyone’s sheltering in place. Anyone who isn’t confident of their own defenses is at the new church. The church kitchen’s fully stocked. They should be all right...if nothing too unexpected happens. As long as this situation doesn’t drag on too long.”

  Ethan nodded. “Sounds solid. Cass?”

  “Grayson and everyone arrived in Denver on schedule,” she told them all. “They talked to Étienne and got things organized and picked up some of Étienne’s wolves and headed out. Natividad still has a good sense of where Ezekiel is—he was still alive last I heard. Miguel thought they were getting close.”

  Ethan nodded. No one could guess what kind of trouble the Master and his team might still find. But it seemed like things could be a lot worse; from everything Cass knew, the Master’s team was making progress. Maybe they’d find Ezekiel and destroy their enemies and be back this time tomorrow. Unfortunately no one knew for sure. Impossible to say how long the Master would be gone, and the best half of Dimilioc’s strength with him. Or how many enemies of Dimilioc might know it, and seize the opportunity the Master’s absence offered.

  Of course, any enemy would first have to get word about the Master’s abs
ence and then set up whatever kind of attack; Grayson’s best estimate for a minimum time to expect attack was no sooner than forty-eight hours from his own departure, probably later. Ethan agreed with that, or basically agreed with it, although obviously any enemy would know they’d better be quick off the mark because they’d have even less idea than Ethan how long Dimilioc’s weakness would last. He personally figured any time from tomorrow afternoon on could very well bring attack if any enemy was going to move at all. That was why he’d driven everyone so hard to get things ready today.

  Still, all too often unexpected crap had a way of turning perfectly good plans to rubble. Ethan just had to hope they’d come up with enough contingency plans this time. And that all Dimilioc’s preparations would turn out to be enough.

  Ethan ate the last of his third burger, chased it down with a final bite of mustardy potato salad, and said to Max, “Good job. Next time, less mustard and more celery in the potato salad. I like the bacon in it, though. And the bacon on the burgers. Bacon’s always a good idea.”

  Max ducked his head. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  DeAnn smiled at Max, a quick relaxed smile. She got along with him pretty well, especially since Max wasn’t strong enough on his best day to remotely threaten Thaddeus on his worst, so Thaddeus had no need to worry about his wife when she was around Max. That kind of power imbalance generally did make black dog relationships easier.

  She said, “I’ll mark up the recipe. I never put in as much mustard as it says, but I didn’t think to change it in the book.”

  “No problem. It was fine like this,” Ethan told her. “Max, is there dessert?”

  “I made gingerbread.” He glanced at DeAnn. “I did it just like the recipe said.”

  “Then it’ll be excellent,” DeAnn promised him. “Can’t go wrong with gingerbread on a snowy evening.” She stood up. “Kids?”

  Conway made a face, but he got up to clear the table as his mother went to help Max cut and plate the gingerbread. Paloma solemnly carried soiled plates into the kitchen one at a time, which was pretty cute. Ethan pushed his chair back from the table, looked around at everyone, and then turned a thoughtful gaze on the Meade brothers. He deliberately tried for Grayson’s exact look: that unimpressed, considering, what-shall-we-do-with-you look that had cut Ethan himself down to size a time or two. He couldn’t tell how close he came, but both Russell and Andrew bowed their heads, so he might have managed a fairly good approximation.