Black Dog Short Stories by Rachel Neumeier

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 this 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—
         “Pay attention,” growled Grayson Lanning, the Dimilioc Master, from behind him. “Daydreaming about old times, Williams? You’ve missed the trail.”
         He had. There was nothing he could say. He’d gone right past it, that subtle breath of sulfur and ash and old blood they’d been following: it had faded suddenly as the stray shifted to his human form—that spoke well for his control—and ducked away west down a little alley that ran between the ass-ends of crowded businesses, restaurants and who knew what, right into the heart of