Free Black Dog Short Stories by Rachel Neumeier Page B

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