A Feral Darkness Part 14

The young woman breezed in along with a waft of expensive perfume, resting long, blunt-cut and manicured nails on the counter. "I'm a little latea"is Brenna Fallon still here? I'd like to have her cut my cat's nails, please."

Behind her, Brenna widened her eyes at Elizabeth, pleading. No! And since her name badge was on the rolled up smock, she might as well not be. DeNise, still sipping her soda, pressed her lips firmly together over the straw, trying not to smile. Without skipping a beat, Elizabeth said, "She's not on right now, but I'm Elizabeth and I'd be glad to take care of you. How does your cat feel about nail clipping? And are you up-to-date on rabies?"

"Her tag is on her collar," the woman said. "She's always been just fine about clipping, I just can't bring myself to do it. I can't stand the thought of cutting too close and making her bleed. I heard the other woman was good with cats."

Hmmm. No more or less than any other groomer, not when it came to cats. Brenna gave Elizabeth a silent who knows? shrug. But someone, at some time, must have left the store happy enough to spread the word.

"She is good, though we're all experienced," Elizabeth said, though as she came around the counter, clippers in hand, she took advantage of the woman's attentiveness to her cat to make a face at Brenna.

Brenna returned it in full. She waited just long enough for Elizabeth to draw the cat out of the carrier and to see that the animal was docile enough; then she escaped through the door, heading down the main aisle past the bays of dog, cat, fish, and small animal supplies, once more thankful that the grooming room wasn't wired to the constant broadcast of tropical jungle noises that filled the rest of the store.

Halfway to the break rooma"and the time clocka"a familiar wash of cold fear struck her, so fleetingly quick she wondered if she'd imagined it. But she hesitated, and something made her look back toward the grooming room. Something made her turn around and take a few steps back the way she'd come, almost colliding with a customer in the doing of it. Nothing amiss there. Nothing but the woman holding her cat's collar while Elizabeth started on what must have been the last foot, carefully pressing each toe to express the nail, her lips moving in a murmur of private conversation with the creature.

"Excuse me, can you tell me where the collars are?"

Brenna glanced away from the grooming countera"an instant, that's all it was, an instanta"and the screaming started. The screaming and the cold dark fear and the whirl of the world around hera"bright packaging and toys and giant rawhides and screaminga"and the clutch of someone's fingers on her arm, inadvertently bringing her back to reality. The customer, a middle-aged woman, gripping her arm in horror, staring at that of which Brenna was only now making sense.

Elizabeth, screaming at the cat, the two of them locked in a whirlwind of battle, blood spraying across the gla.s.s, the cat screaming back at Elizabeth, both of them moving too fast to see the detail of it, and a voice in Brenna's head chanting the wrongness of it. Wrong, wrong, wrong for a cat to attack and maul so viciously. Wrong for it to have been Elizabetha"

And then it was over, and Elizabeth somehow had a grip on the cat's scruff. The woman who owned it had fled outside and stood pressed against the door, her mouth open in shock; DeNise huddled in the corner behind the counter. Dazed and wounded, Elizabeth looked up and met Brenna's eyes, somehow finding her halfway across the storea"holding the cat in one hand, her other hand up and dripping blood, blood streaming down both arms to collect in the folds of her smock arms and dribble off her elbow, her face crumpling.

Suddenly Brenna could move again. No one else stirred, no one else knew where to start. Brenna, suddenly awake again, ran.

And still she wasn't the first one there.

Masera.

Masera beat her to the door and whipped himself through it, stopping there to speak low words to Elizabeth, and to move slowlya"not upsetting either of them. Brenna hesitated in the open door, unwilling to upset the balance with her entrance. The cat hung quiescent, defeated; it might as well have been dead for the fuss it put up as Masera pried it from Elizabeth's battered fingers and stuffed it back into its carrier, slick with her blood.

As soon as he jammed the carrier door into place, Brenna threw herself into the room. "Call for a manager," she told Masera, squeezing past him to reach Elizabeth. Elizabeth stood with her hands held as though they were foreign objects on the ends of her arms, and even as Brenna reached her, she started to shake. With a hand at her back, Brenna guided her through the grooming room and into the noisy roar of the tub room, muttering soothing nonsense as she grabbed a clean white towel from the laundry service and flung it over her shoulder.

"It's all right," she said, hearing Masera's voice over the intercom system in the background, knowing it would get someone's attentiona"who was on today, an a.s.sistant manager?a"if they'd somehow managed to miss the excitement on their own. "It's all right," she said again as Elizabeth stifled a sob, thinking to herself how the h.e.l.l can it be all right and wondering if Elizabeth would even have full use of her hands again as she turned the tub faucet to cold and propped the sprayer at an angle to waterfall across the tub. "Here you go," she said, but a glance at Elizabeth's white face told her the woman was in no shape to offer even that much initiative, and Brenna eased her hands under the water.

She didn't know what a doctor would have had her do. All she could think of was dirty cat teetha"dirtier than a dog mouth, inclined to inflict easily infected puncture wounds. And of getting a look at the damage, though as she carefully removed Elizabeth's smock and returned her hands to the tub, she realized she wasn't sure she wanted to know.

Outside the tub room, DeNise's voice rose in shrill anger, mixing with the owner's in argument. Masera came in, the cat carrier in tow; he flipped off all the dryers and came up behind them, his hand landing on Brenna's shoulder. "How's it look?"

"It's hard to tell," Brenna muttered, as though Elizabeth weren't therea"and in truth, Brenna doubted that she actually heard them. "Still bleeding too much."

"Best that it does," Masera said. He glanced out toward the counter. "Gary just came on shift. I don't know where the h.e.l.l he isa"he's got to know what happened by now. Half the store is gawking in through the gla.s.s."

"Probably soothing the customers," Brenna said, anger spurting its way out of her voice as she moved Elizabeth's hands within the shower of cold water, rinsing, rinsing, never seeming to get to the end of it. "Priorities, you know."

"I'll call the police and animal control," Masera said, not responding directly to her comment with anything but an anger that matched hers.

Brenna shook her head. "Gary won't like that."

"Then he should be here to take care of it himself. This cat's not going anywhere but into custody for the next ten days." Masera left, creating a cold place at her back. With the dryers off and the grooming room door open, Brenna could hear the background conversation well enough. The woman, upset and teary, fearful for her cat, demanding its return. DeNise, standing her ground. And Masera, almost offhand, breaking in to say shortly, "The cat is fine. She's in the crate in a quiet room, and that's what's best for her. You won't get her back until she's been through a holding period with animal control. And for your sake, I d.a.m.n well hope you don't have children at home. Not if you plan to take that cat back."

The woman's high-pitched protests were incomprehensible, but there was no mistaking her distress. d.a.m.ned pity she loved the beast.

Maybe it's not a beast. What would that dark, cold fear do to a cat? Maybe it's as much a victim as Elizabeth.

And maybe it was supposed to have been Brenna. The one the woman had asked for in the first place.

"It doesn't hurt," Elizabeth said in a wondering voice. "Shouldn't it hurt?"

It will, Brenna thought, but kept it to herself, feeling the relief of having Masera out there as her voice, saying things she could never say and keep her job. "It's all right," she told Elizabeth. The blood was thinning, and Brenna turned off the water, taking the towel from her shoulder to enfold Elizabeth's hands gently in ita"the only field dressing she could produce on short notice. There were no chairs in the tub room; she led Elizabeth to the useless ramp the store had bought thema"as if the average large dog would get any closer to a strange ramp than it would to a tuba"and sat her on it, steadying her.

"I don't even want to look," Elizabeth whispered, regaining some of herself to look directly at Brenna again.

"It'll be okay," Brenna said firmly, and thought if she never had to say those words again it would be too soon.

Gary stuck his upper body through the door. Younger than Roger, not as authoritative if easier to talk to, he was the first a.s.sistant manager, and he rarely interacted with Brenna on shift. "Everything under control in here?" he asked. "Because I've got a customera""

"No," Brenna interrupted, sharper than she was wise to be. "You know what? The customer's going to have to wait this time. Elizabeth needs to go to emergency; she needs someone to call her boyfriend to meet her there. Don't you dare walk out of here without making sure she's taken care of."

DeNise had been coming for the door behind him; she stopped short, her already spooked eyes widening further; Brenna had never seen her dark lips look so pale, or that pasty color half-mooning under her eyes. Gary, too, jerked to a halt, stopping his planned withdrawal from the room. Instead he straightened, bringing the rest of his body into the doorway. He eyed her a moment, probably wondering whether he should call her on her tone or simply appease her as necessary. Finally he gave the slightest of shrugs and said, "What would you like me to do?"

"You're our manager," she said, still pushing it and having been pushed too hard herself to care. "Get someone on the phone to cancel the appointments for the rest of the day, for starters."

"Why can't you doa""

But he stopped short, for she'd turned on him the way she'd take on a snarling dog, and he'd never seen it in her before. The moment hung between them like something waiting to explode, and then Brenna said, very clearly, very carefully, "This would not have happened if you and Roger and Celine didn't ignore every plea we ever made for safety and scheduling limits. Now that it has, you'll have to deal with it. I'm supposed to be off shift. Please sign me out as of right now. I'll take Elizabeth to the hospital. Before I go, I'll mark which dogs from the next few days of scheduling need to be canceled. You'll have to find someone to call them, to clean up the grooming areas, and to clean up Elizabeth's blood."

"We don't have anyone to spare," Gary protested.

"You know what? I don't care." And she didn't. "If I come in here tomorrow and have to deal with any of it, I'm gone."

"Don't say things you don't mean," he said. "Watch yourself, Brenna."

"That's exactly what I'm finally doing." Brenna felt Elizabeth tremble beside her and said, "Are you even listening to yourself? How long has this woman worked for you? How many times has she stayed over hours, or skipped lunch, or faced dogs you wouldn't even get near? Have you even asked how she is?"

No, of course he hadn't. But Gary wasn't Roger; Roger would have bluffed it out. Gary simply hadn't thought it through past the inconvenience to the store. Once her words. .h.i.t him, once he looked, truly looked, at Elizabeth hunched over her wrapped hands, his face changed. "Okay," he said, quietly enough so she could barely hear him. "I'll clock you out. Mark the schedule for me and we'll call the customers."

Brenna nodded and looked to DeNise behind him; she still hadn't moveda"afraid of attracting notice, no doubt, whether she stayed or fled. "DeNise," she said, blowing the young woman's cover as Gary glanced behind himself, "would you come sit with Elizabeth a moment?"

DeNise looked at Gary and seemed to gather herself. "Got to wait for the police to get here anyway," she said. "They want to talk to anyone, they'll want me."

True enough. Brenna exchanged a wan smile with her and put a hand on Elizabeth's shoulder. "I'll be right back," she said, letting her fingers trail down her friend's arm as she made way for DeNise. She would have slipped past Gary but he turned and led the way.

"If the cops are on their way, I've got my own calls to make," he said as the seriousness of the situation seemed to settle on him.

Finally.

Cat attacks were nasty, nastier than most people ever suspected or even wanted to believe. And this cat . . . this cat had been astonishingly vicious. At the best, Elizabeth had weeks of recovery before her. At the worst, she'd lose enough dexterity to affect her life and career. We are not interchangeable and replaceable commodities, Brenna thought at his back. We're not.

Which made her wonder why she had to convince even herself.

Gary left the grooming room for the back office, and Brenna slid in behind the counter where Masera was still on the phonea"animal control, maybe. Someone he knew, but he was using a reasonably formal voice, short and to the point as ever.

The counter itself was a mess, both levels of it covered with the remains of DeNise's soda and plenty of blood. They'd need a new schedule book, that was for sure, and replacements for the day's customer cards. Brenna made a quick a.s.sessment of the next several days of bookings, marked them, and scrawled a note instructing the caller to tell today's half-finished customers that a rescheduled grooming would be on the house. She pulled her wallet from her pursea"a minimalist affair she could easily shove in her sweatshirt pocketa"and stuffed the purse itself in behind her locked toolbox in the grooming room.

When she returned to the counter to hunt up Elizabeth's bulky monster of a pursea"one of those cargo carry-everything bagsa"she found not only the cat's owner, but Mickey from the stockroom, standing behind her and looking oddly protective. Masera, still on the phone, gave Brenna a wary look, a strange kind of warning look, as Brenna shrugged her sweatshirt on and bent to yank Elizabeth's things from the lower shelf.

"I want to use the phone," the woman said. "I want to call my boyfriend. You can't take that cat from me. I've got rights."

Brenna couldn't decide if they were an unrelated string of statements or were somehow supposed to fit together. She reminded herself again that the cat was a beloved pet, taking a deep breath as she straightened with the cargo bag. "I'm sorry for your inconvenience. We all wish this hadn't happened. But it did, and now we have to deal with it. You'll have to wait for the police and animal control. Meanwhile, I'm sure Mickey can take you to a phone."

"You're Brenna Fallon," she said accusingly, while Brenna looked at Mickey. Mickey. He who argued with Masera, who sold him dogs. The woman was oblivious. "You were right there. Why didn't you clip her nails? This wouldn't have happened."

"I expect it would have," Brenna said, and suddenly she knew it. "It just would have happened to me."

"You were right there," the woman repeated, not willing to let it go, not even though Brenna was already turning away.

"You," Brenna said, pinning a swift glare on her, "let go of the cat." And she headed for the back with the woman's gasp following her, knowing she'd been cruel and not caring. Not with the mental image of Elizabeth's blood on the walls.

By the time she reached the tub room, she'd decided to take Elizabeth's sedana"her own truck didn't have a back seat or an easy ridea"and found the keys to it clipped inside a small front pocket of the cargo bag. DeNise slid away from the table to meet her and say in a low voice, "Did you see? It looks bad, girl," and shudder.

Brenna didn't respond directly, but she kept her voice just as low. "Don't let Gary talk you into making the phone calls unless you really want to. You've put in your hours for the day." She waited for DeNise to nod and, a little louder, she said, "I'll be back for my truck as soon as I can break away. DeNise, I've got Emily Brecken down on my contact sheet. Would you give her a call and ask her to let Druid out for me? And my moma"tell her I won't make dinner tonight." Then she slung the bag over her shoulder and went to Elizabeth. Elizabeth, taller than Brenna and a st.u.r.dily built woman, seemed oddly small inside the curve of Brenna's arm. But she wasn't as shaky as she'd been, and her face was no longer ghastly pale. "Ready to go?"

"Now it hurts," Elizabeth said. "I don't even want to look."

"Then don't," Brenna said, matter-of-factly. But for all of that, she needed a moment, herself. Just to close her eyes and sit against the wet towels on the grooming table and take a deep breath. Remind herself which of the city's hospitals was closest, and how to get there. Try to rid her ears of the sound of screaming, and the way her very soul had felt the fear of that bounding dark.

At that moment she felt an arm around her own shoulders, and the squeeze of a man's hand on the side of her neck, a touch against her templea"the side of his face.

And then it was gone, and she opened her eyes and took Elizabeth out to her car.

Brenna stayed at the hospital long enough to make sure Elizabeth's boyfriend was on the way, and then until they took her into the back room. She'd seen Elizabeth's hands by then, and wished she hadn't. The cat had bitten her again and again, puncturing her nails, leaving her fingers grotesquely swollen and badly mauled. All Brenna could think of was the wrongness of ita"that it had happened to Elizabeth, that it had happened at all. She drove the unfamiliar car back along darkening streets, glad for the abundance of lights in the Pets! parking lot, and for the fact that although there were few cars in evidence, the store wasn't yet closed.

She pulled the sedan into the parking s.p.a.ce next to her truck and sat there with her head resting on the wheel, debating whether to go inside and see if they'd cleaned up, to get her purse. To face the people there, and answer all their questions about Elizabeth.

But the walk suddenly seemed too long. And if anyone wanted to steal a purse with an old brush and a for-emergency-use tampon, they could have it. She climbed out of the car and hesitated over the unfamiliar electronic locks, finally settling for shoving down the physical locks and leaving it at that. Then she turned to her truck.

That was when she saw the tires were slashed.

She stared for a stupefied moment, taking in all the implications of it. Not just flat, slashed. Not just one tire, which she could change and be on her way, but two.

She'd have to go into the store after all. Call Triple A, hang around the parking lot for an hour or so until they showed up.

Masera's shadow preceded him, driven by the lights inside the store. "Well, h.e.l.l," he said, when he realized what she was looking at.

"Are you everywhere?" she asked wearily. At her house after Sunny disappeared. At the store when the cat attacked. Sitting on her porch in the dark. His arma"it had been his arma"around her in the grooming room.

"I try to be," he said, humor in his voice, in the easy stance of his shadow next to hers.

"I can't decide if this makes you good luck or bad," Brenna muttered. And she couldn't. Every time she thought she knew or understood him, he did something that changed her mind. When he acted from his heart, it spoke to her in some way she couldn't understand. And when he shuttered his eyes and put evasions between them, it made her more wary than she'd ever felt about anyone else.

As if everything he said or did mattered more than it ought to, for good or for bada"and that made her wary, too.

"Let me drop you off at home," he said, and nodded at the auto club sticker in her back cab window. "You can call Triple A tomorrow once you get to work."

Brenna didn't respond right away. And when she did, she found herself saying not, Okay, thanks or That makes sense, but, "That wasn't right. Nothing about that was right."

"No," he said.

"A cat wants to get away, it nails you and runs." Brenna hid her hands in her sleeves, and covered her eyes with them. "It might bite, it might claw, but it runs. This cat . . . This cat wanted to maul her."

"I saw," he said, and there was agreement in the way his shadow inclined its head toward her, a gesture she barely caught as she pulled her hands down just enough to look over them. "And," he added more sharply, looking at her, "I felt it."

She sighed, and eventually said, "So did I. But I don't know what it means or what to do about it."

"For starters," Masera said, and his voice had turned grim, "I don't think it's a coincidence that the cat's owner is Rob Parker's girlfriend."

"Oh," Brenna said, and groaned. "Oh, s.h.i.t."

"Looks like you got his attention."

One more thing connecting Parker to the darkness. Not that Brenna had been left with much doubt. Although ordinary human hands wielding an ordinary knife had done the tire-slashing. Mickey, she thought suddenly, and then winced at the a.s.sumption. Just because he'd been standing by the woman, by Parker's girlfriend, like he knew her and felt some need to protect her.

No, not just because. Mickey, who'd argued with Masera and who'd sold him two pit bulls. And now he was connected somehow to Parker, who had a barn with dogs in it, plenty of supplements and medical supplies, a weird contraption out in the backa"

The question popped out of her mouth before she even realized she'd formulated it. "Are you going to fight those pit bulls you bought?"

A blunt question in a quiet moment. He might refuse to answer it, but he couldn't misdirect or evade her.

He didn't do any of those. Without hesitation, he said, "No, I'm not."

She quit watching his parking light shadow and looked directly at him, searching his face to confirm the directness of his response. The realness of it. If he'd tried to convince her, if he'd piled words on top of that simple statement, she'd have lost the wire-thin connection he'd made with his answer.

But he didn't do that, either. He gave her the slightest of shrugs and the suggestion of a smile. An understanding smile, one that said I know you're having a hard time believing in me but leaving her to make up her own mind.

"Parker is, I think," she said. "I ought to call animal control, tip them offa""

"Animal control knows about the situation," he said, cutting her off short and hard, and his easiness from the moment before vanished. Brenna felt that wire of trust break and backlash as he turned to face her with a real anger. "You went there," he said. "After we got chased off by one of Parker's boys, you went back there."

"Didn't you?" she said, lashing back at him and taking a stab at more truth while she was at it.

"That's not thea"" and he stopped short, and Brenna realized with astonishment that they were words he hadn't meant to happen, that he'd slipped and given her a real answer when he'd meant to be evasive.

It was a lot more revealing than he'd ever meant it to be, and he knew it, standing there with his eyebrows crowding the bridge of his nose. That's not the point. He had gone back, that's what it meant. And she'd gotten through to him at last, that's also what it meant. But he had himself back, now, and he said, "Let me drive you home; I'll bring you back in the morning. You don't really want to hang around here waiting for Triple A, not alone. Parker isn't one to take lightly."

Why? she wanted to ask him. What do you know? But she didn't push him any more. Enough for one night, and she was suddenly so tired she could hardly see straight. So she said, "Do you have any idea what time I have to be at work?"

He gave her a c.o.c.ky grin. "I had to sneak to find the file, and I managed that. Your schedule's right there on the wall." Fishing his keys from his pocket, he jiggled them in his hand and nodded toward the SUV. "It doesn't matter. I've cancelled a lot of work in the past few days, and starting the day early will give me a chance to catch up. Eztebe is taking the flack, answering the phone at homea"I think he's about to walk out on me. Which reminds mea"do you still have my business card?"