Free Black Dog Short Stories by Rachel Neumeier

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