Black Dog Short Stories Read online

“Right,” muttered Miguel. “Yes, sir.”

  “Cassandra Pearson likes to read, I know. I think she will be joining you in this little task.”

  Miguel was surprised again, this time in a good way.

  “You may wish to work in silence, however. If you distract each other, then you will find yourselves working in the library on alternate days. If that occurs, I imagine the job will take twice as long to complete.”

  Ah. That wasn’t so good. Miguel took a deep breath. “Yes, sir.”

  “Then we will not need to impose on Ezekiel’s time.”

  Miguel glanced that way again, involuntarily. Ezekiel was still smiling. “No,” Miguel said. “Sir.”

  “Good.” Grayson paused. Then he said, even more quietly, “Next time you have a concern, Miguel, perhaps you will discuss it with me openly.”

  Miguel swallowed, nodded, and retreated from the field, not in very good order. In fact, routed comprehensively was about right. Who would ever have expected a black dog, even Grayson, to notice every little thing?

  But it wasn’t all bad. Cassie Pearson turned out to know sign language. Miguel figured that in a month, he would know it pretty well, too.

  3 -- A Learning Experience

  Thaddeus knew exactly why the Master of Dimilioc had picked him, just him and no one else, to help clean the worst of the cur black dogs out of Chicago. It sure wasn’t because Thaddeus knew the city. At the moment, they were hunting just east of Chinatown, an area he didn’t even know well. He had lived most of his life down near Joliet, and exploring other black dogs’ territories definitely hadn’t been a thing. Besides, before the war, all of downtown had belonged to the vampires and their blood kin and no black dog would dare venture anywhere near vampire territory.

  Then Dimilioc had started the war, and finished it, too, if just barely. Now here Thaddeus was, back in Illinois, with the Dimilioc Master at his back, and everything was different.

  Dimilioc had rules. Thaddeus was still figuring them out. He had grown up with rules, sure, but those rules had been simple. Easy to understand. Keep to yourself; defend your territory; don’t kill too many people; most important of all, don’t let vicious young black dog curs draw Dimilioc attention. Those had been the rules Thaddeus had learned from his father. Those had been the rules for any black dog born outside Dimilioc who wanted to live to get old.

  Now Thaddeus was part of Dimilioc himself, and all the rules were different.

  Not the first time he’d had the rules change on him, though. Except before, it hadn’t been Dimilioc who set all his rules tumbling. The first time, it had been DeAnn.

  Thaddeus first met DeAnn when he was twelve and she was nine. His dad had taken him hunting way outside their normal territory, tracking down a pair of black dogs who were just too noisy and too brutal to leave alone. Usually Dan Williams didn’t take his son hunting above Bolingbrook, that was pretty close to the northern edge of their territory, but this was a bad situation, black dogs in no-man’s-land drawing way too much notice.

  Regular people weren’t the problem. Normal people didn’t know, couldn’t know, regular people didn’t see bad stuff right out plain. The news was all about dog packs and pit bulls on the one hand and an especially violent serial rapist on the other. But all of it was really these black dogs, and Thaddeus’s father said if they let it go on, eventually someone from Dimilioc, maybe the Dimilioc executioner his own damn self, would come down from the east and take care of the problem personally. And if that happened, most likely he would take his time about it, track down and kill every single black dog in Chicago and for fifty miles around. They could do that, the black wolves of Dimilioc. They would do it, if the curs got too noisy. It was impossible to hide from them because they had ways of tracking you down, even if you were very quiet.

  So Dan Williams took his son hunting.

  Downtown was vampire territory, had always been vampire territory. The blood kin would get any black dog who ventured there. North, past Waukegan and all the way up to Milwaukee, was the territory of a black dog, a man named Conrad, who, along with a handful of curs he held tight under his thumb, kept down the noise in that region. Way out west toward DeKalb, a black dog woman named Schoen—no one ever called her anything else and Thaddeus didn’t know her first name—held a small territory all by herself and killed anyone who tried her borders.

  But these damned stupid black dogs, by luck or some kind of basic cunning, kept to a region bounded on the east by La Grange, in the north by Arlington Heights, in the south by Bolingbrook, and in the west by Aurora, so that they weren’t properly anybody’s problem. But they made trouble, and made trouble, until it was plain someone had to take care of them. And Dan had Thaddeus, who was already, at twelve, big and tough and good in a fight. So his father told Thaddeus they’d do it and get it done, and waited for a good waxing moon that would probably bring out the strays, but that wouldn’t draw the Beasts too hard for Thaddeus to handle his.

  Dan Williams had known just where to hunt, too. “See there, them morons, they let theirselves get predictable,” he told his son. “Never get predictable, kid. Anybody who wants to can track you down, see?”

  Thaddeus had nodded. The two cur black dogs were skulking down Bailey toward a big forest preserve. Probably they wanted to find someone they could chase into the woods and hunt there. Thaddeus would’ve liked to do that himself. Maybe those two curs would get that far and they could have a real hunt. His Beast pressed forward, wanting that. He wanted to let it up and roar forward, but his dad laid a restraining hand on his arm to keep him still.

  “Wait for it,” Dan Williams said. “Wait for it, kid. Let them get past us and focus on that dim old cow over on at the corner of Modaff—see, there?”

  Thaddeus had seen exactly how his dad had used that careless woman as bait for their enemies. That was smart. He told himself he would remember. Let your enemies get past you, let them get distracted by something else. Then they’d be stupid and you could hit them from behind. That was best, hitting your enemies from behind so they couldn’t fight back. He hadn’t had to be taught that part. It was obvious. Maybe they could get just one on their first rush and take their time with the other . . .

  The simple plan worked, too, at first. Thaddeus and his father hit one of the black dogs from either side and tore him up and left him in pieces, but the other one fled, not west into the woods like he was supposed to, but north. Plus he was fast, that bastard, and it took almost two miles to catch him, and they only got him in the end because he suddenly broke stride and twisted around to the west, across the dark suburban yards, and then they could cut across the angle of his flight, and they caught him all right, and that was that.

  Except that there was something else just a little farther away to the west. Thaddeus realized that the minute he and his dad had made their kill. Something close, very close, way more dangerous than any stupid back dog cur. Not blood kin—Dan Williams and Conrad and that Schoen woman, they all hunted blood kin when they found them out of their own territory, so vampire influence was mostly limited to downtown. Anyway, he knew what blood kin smelled like, felt like. This wasn’t like that. This was something else. Something that just needed to be killed, destroyed, wiped right out of the world, crushed so hard no one would ever find even a smear of its blood.

  No wonder their quarry had turned like that, once he caught this scent. Thaddeus dropped the cur’s head, human now the cur was dead, and turned straight west, toward this new thing. It was something terrible. Something very dangerous to black dogs, to him personally, he knew it, he could feel it. And he hated it. Hated, hated, hated . . .

  His father’s hand closed on the back of his neck, hard, claws out just enough to prick through the shaggy pelt. Thaddeus flinched, startled and angry: he hadn’t even noticed his dad had shifted back to human form. He was big even in that form, not nearly as heavy as Thaddeus’s Beast, but taller, with the black dog’s fire lingering in his eyes. He shook Thaddeus li
ghtly, warning and threat, a reminder of his own strength and authority. “Shift,” he ordered. “Now.”

  Thaddeus swung his head to stare west, then glared at his father. Couldn’t he tell about the monster?

  “Shift, Thad. Now.”

  It took several tries and some minutes. Thaddeus wouldn’t have managed it without that grip on the back of his neck, without his father’s insistence and that naked threat. Getting a leash on his Beast wasn’t usually so hard, but the Beast longed to run west and kill whatever that was. It fought him, worse than it had in years. But he managed the change at last, and knelt panting on the hard pavement, surrounded by the torn pieces of their enemy, with the smell of ash and blood thick in the air and his dad still looming over him. Everyone said Thaddeus would probably be even bigger than his father one day, but right now Dan Williams could still do a pretty good job looming. Thaddeus kept his eyes down and his human hands flat on the hot pavement and tried to steady his breathing, expecting any minute for his father to hit him, to yell at him, Don’t I teach you better than that? Fuck, kid, you some stupid lazy cur? Might as well be an animal if you can’t get your Beast chained up!

  Thaddeus knew he would deserve it. He was having trouble just holding his human shape even now that he’d got it back. His Beast pushed and snarled right below the surface of his skin, wanting out, wanting to kill . . . he bit his lip and clenched his hands into fists and pushed it back as hard as he could.

  “Come on,” his dad said abruptly, and hauled him up by the back of the neck and shoved him forward. West, after all. Thaddeus hadn’t expected that, and stumbled, and his dad pulled him up again and said harshly, “Shift back and I’ll beat you bloody, you hear me, Thad? You stay human and you keep your Beast way the fuck underneath. We’re gonna find this woman and you’re not going to kill her, you’re not even gonna to try, you hear me? You keep human and you keep close to me or I’ll chain you up and beat you senseless every day for a week, you hear me?”

  Only that continual mutter of low-voiced threats let Thaddeus keep his Beast under while they closed the distance between themselves and this new thing, this monster-woman that his father obviously knew about even though Thaddeus had never scented anything like her. He knew his father meant every word. His Beast knew it, too, and was just wary enough of the threatened punishment that Thaddeus could manage to keep it back and under. He tried to concentrate on the unfamiliar streets, on the suburbs that stretched out all around them, but it was impossible. Mostly he was just aware of the woman they were tracking.

  She was in the street, out in the moonlight. She looked like an ordinary woman, but Thaddeus could tell she wasn’t. She wasn’t a black dog either. She was something else, some other kind of person. He hated her, but he wasn’t sure why—he could tell by now that it was mostly his Beast that hated her, but he couldn’t tell if it was just his Beast or if part of it was also him. He blinked, and blinked again, trying to look at her better, without the Beast looking through his eyes.

  She looked so ordinary. She was black, though not as dark as Thaddeus or his father. Old, at least thirty. Not pretty, or he thought she wasn’t pretty, it was hard to tell with his Beast hating her and hating her and hating her. He was scared of her—or his Beast was, he couldn’t really tell which. The Beast wanted to roar up and lunge across the little remaining distance and tear her in half. But his father still held him; that dangerous, threatening grip on the back of his neck, so Thaddeus was able to keep it under.

  The woman was doing something, walking in a slow circle around her house and its small yard and part of her neighbor’s yard. It was slow, because she was stooping as she went, dragging a knife across the lawn and the sidewalk and the pavement. She bent and cut the line with her knife and edged forward again, moving wearily as though every step took an effort.

  A little kid, a girl with skin half a shade lighter than her mother’s and her hair in tight braids against her head, stood on the porch, watching. The girl’s hands were filled with a tangle of light. Thaddeus hated her, too. He wanted to rush at her and tear her apart, except that his father still held him and anyway he kept losing sight of the girl when he blinked. Something about the light she had in her hands confused his eye and made it hard to keep track of her even though she was standing still.

  “Two of ’em. New here,” grunted Thaddeus’s father. “Yeah. No wonder they’re so damned loud. Anybody can find ’em till she gets that circle laid down. Fucking lucky there ain’t no blood kin way out here. ’Cept she could probably tell, I guess, so it’s not all luck. Us putting that damn cur dog down before it could get her, that was luck.”

  Thaddeus barely heard his dad and didn’t understand what he meant. His blood was full of the Beast’s fire. The fire thundered in his veins, wanting out, wanting the hunt and the kill. Nearly all his concentration had to go to keeping his Beast inside, not letting it out.

  “Come on,” said Dan Williams. “Don’t you dare shift.” He pulled his son his forward.

  The woman saw them. She flinched hard and started to step back, then looked quickly along the circle she’d been drawing, and then glanced at the girl on the porch and the open door behind the kid, and then flung another desperate look at Thaddeus’s dad. It was plain even to Thaddeus that she was thinking maybe she had time to finish her circle but that she knew really she didn’t, that she knew how fast a black dog could move and that it was too late for her to do anything, she knew she couldn’t finish her circle or reach her kid or do anything—but she didn’t scream or run, she straightened her back and held out her hands, looking straight at Thaddeus’s dad. Moonlight pooled in her hands, so maybe she wasn’t completely harmless, but Thaddeus couldn’t imagine what she meant to do.

  She said, her voice even and surprisingly deep for a woman, “You haven’t shifted. Who are you?”

  Thaddeus hadn’t exactly realized this, although it was very, very obvious and very, very strange. His father was still in human form, except for claws that pricked the skin of Thaddeus’s neck. If his Beast was pushing him toward killing fury, it didn’t show at all.

  Dan Williams didn’t let Thaddeus go, but he held his other hand out toward the woman, open and empty, human right down to the fingernails. “Yeah,” he said. “No, listen. I’m calm. I’m good. A woman like you, she did it for me a long time ago. I want you to do it for my boy. I want him calm. Lot safer from those Dimilioc bastards that way—safer from vampires, too—safer from his own damn Beast. He’s got a strong one, it’ll get stronger, he’s got to get one hell of a chain on it or pretty soon it’ll eat him.”

  Thaddeus blinked at that, startled even through the hatred and the consuming effort to keep his Beast down. It would get stronger, yeah, they did, yeah it seemed plenty strong now, but his father had never said someday soon it will eat you. That would scare him, he thought, once he got a chance to think about it, but right now he had no room for anything but hating the woman and the girl—yeah, definitely her, too, she was just the same as her mother—

  “You can do that,” Dan Williams said. “That’s what you are, that’s what you do, isn’t that right.” It wasn’t a question.

  The woman didn’t step away from her mostly-completed circle, but she looked carefully across the street at Thaddeus. He shuddered with the need to kill her, but his dad shook him hard and muttered threats, and he didn’t dare fight. He glared at the woman, but he didn’t move.

  “Yeah,” said the woman. “I need to finish my circle first. It’s almost done.”

  “No,” said Thaddeus’s father. “You’ll close me out, us out, no way. First you get my boy Calm.”

  This time Thaddeus heard the capital letter. He almost did try to fight then, because what the fuck was his father planning to let this woman do to him, except it was his dad, who might beat the shit out of him if he didn’t obey, but who also taught him and protected him and made sure he was better than those black dog curs on the street—it was his dad, and though his Beast was sure t
his was a kind of death and they had to fight, had to get away, had to kill the woman, Thaddeus wouldn’t listen, he fought the Beast back and locked his hands—human hands, still, despite his Beast pushing him—into fists and crammed them in his jean pockets and wouldn’t fight. He wouldn’t, he didn’t, he wouldn’t, it was his dad and he didn’t care what his Beast thought about anything.

  “She won’t close you out,” said the girl on the porch. Not pretty, Thaddeus could see that, her face was too broad to be pretty, her mouth too wide, but she stood up straight and looked directly at Thaddeus and his father, steady and confident. Her voice had a burr to it, not exactly an accent, but different somehow. Thaddeus hated her just as much as he hated her mother, but she met his eyes and then said again, to Thaddeus father, “She won’t close you out. She wouldn’t. She won’t. Anyway, if she does, I’ll do the Calming for you.”

  The woman made a wordless sound of surprised protest, and the girl looked at her, and smiled, and shrugged. “You wouldn’t leave them out in the cold,” she said to her mother. And then said again to Thaddeus’s father, “But if she does, I won’t. I promise.”

  “Don’t make promises!” said the woman. “Damn, girl, you know better!”

  “Sometimes you have to,” said the girl. “You taught me that. Sometimes you have to make a promise, even when it’s dangerous.” She ran down the steps, two at a time, ignoring her mother’s shout, and came confidently to stand almost within arm’s length of Thaddeus and his father. “I’ll wait out here with you while my mother finishes her circle,” she said. “That way you can be sure, all right?”

  And that was DeAnn.

  Yeah, meeting DeAnn had changed everything. Thaddeus could even see how meeting DeAnn had brought him, by a very strange route, back here to this city, hunting strays again, full circle. Only this time, with the Dimilioc Master rather than his father—