A Feral Darkness Part 2

"Not only were most of the workers we found less qualified than claimed, but our hidden cameras revealed unsanitary work habitsa""

Back to the cruise ship. No, that wasn't right, they'd been talking about rabies, she was sure of it. A new kind of rabies. . . .

Yeah, right. Or maybe it was just her imagination, fueled by a pack of loose dogs and one spooky moment in the dog room. Brenna drew the afghan closer, curling into a tighter ball on the couch, letting her hair become a shroud in which she could hide while she thought.

And abruptly decided that she didn't want to think. She had things to do, and then she wanted to go to bed. Let Emily tease her about hitting the sack earlier than Emily's two kids; the kids didn't get up as early as she. Holding the afghan around her shoulders, she got a garbage bag and went from room to room, gathering the week's garbage in semidarkness out of sheer laziness when it came to turning on the lightsa"only to realize, as she reached the kitchen on her way out, that there was no way she was going to put out garbage with the feral dogs running crazed. She left the sack in the corner behind the kitchen door and went through her mail, pulling out the bills and dumping the rest, and then relinquished the afghan long enough to clean up the kitchen sink and table.

She ought to pay some of those bills while the table was clear enough to do ita"she had a desk in one of the second-floor rooms, but its main purpose seemed to have evolved into providing a delicate balance of shifting and layered papersa"old records, grooming newsletters, and a growing stack of clipped articles on introducing yourself to the computer age, keeping business records, and thrifty advertising methods. She ought to pay some of those bills . . . but not tonight.

Tonight she would beat Em's kids to bed; tomorrow she'd deal with the bills and other such things that hadn't been done over the course of this week. Spring grooming season getting into gear . . . it was always like this.

Sunny waited for her, back to snorting at the doorjamb. Brenna couldn't blame her; the dog wasn't used to being confined during the evening. "Let me find you that longe line," she said, and started poking around on the metal shelves. Theoretically this was all dog stuff and not horse stuffa"the barn held the old horse geara"but maybe if she was lucky . . . she hadn't sorted the shelves in some time, and that gave her some hope.

"Whoouh," Sunny said to hera"said to the door, actually, and Brenna jerked to look at her with no little dreada"but the dog's hackles were right where they belonged, smooth and slick all the way down her backbone. And her tail swung in an even, happy arc, steady at hip level.

Of course Brenna had to look, even as her hand closed over a tangled skein of flat cotton line. Absently shaking the line out so she could re-loop it around her hand and elbow, she went to the back door. Not so long ago she'd stood here shaking; now there was no menacea"only her back door with a light she ought to have turned off burning outside in the cold night.

And there, standing at the top step, was the mud-dipped Cardigan Welsh Corgi. Stone-still, as if he had been that way for hours and would stay that way for hours yet. As she appeared in the doorway, Brenna thought she saw the slight tilt of one of those big ears, but she couldn't be sure; it didn't happen again. Finally she nudged Sunny into her crate and put her hand on the doork.n.o.b, slowly turning it.

He heard it, all right. You couldn't get any more alert than that pair of ears, radar-scoped at the door. But his expression was entirely different from the first time she'd seen him. Then he had been terrified beyond rational thought; now he stood at attention, his posture suddenly full of antic.i.p.ation despite the fact that he hadn't truly moved.

Slowly, she pulled the door open. Slowly, she pushed the creaky screen door out.

They stared at one another.

Finally she said, "Would you like to come in?"

He trotted in as if she had been a doorman holding the door to his personal doghouse.

Her eyes widened; that was all. Until she had the door closed behind him, it was the only reaction she could afford. But she needn't have worried. He went to the center of the shallow room and plunked his bottom down, his eyes never leaving her facea"and her eyes never leaving hisa"as she closed and latched the doors. From her crate, Sunny made a noise of protesta"she still wanted outa"but Brenna shook her head. "In a minute," she said, never moving her gaze from the mud-coated Cardigan. She crouched down and patted the floor. "C'mere," she said, an offhand tone.

He came.

He not only came, he rested his muddy face against her leg and gave a sigh of contentment that verged on being an outright groan. Surprised, she hesitated, her hand hovering over his filthy coata"and in the end rested her hand on his shoulder, so d.a.m.n happy to have him there that she couldn't quite believe herself. Didn't believe herself. This was the happiness of a dog long-lost, regaineda"not the simple relief that she'd pulled a stray in out of reach of trouble. It made no more sense than his flip-flop in behavior.

"Only a little while ago," she murmured, searching for her equilibrium, "you were so terrified of me that you practically did a backflip over the porch rail. Now you think I'm mama?"

Unless he had never been terrified of her at all.

Unless that which had come so soon afterward, that which had so frightened both Brenna and Sunny, had not been their combined imagination at all, and this dog had felt it too.

Something else that made no sense. Brenna shied away from thinking about it.

Sunny's antics in the crate acquired a certain fevered intensity, and Brenna retrieved the longe line, snapped it to Sunny's collar, and tied the end around a porch pillar, all while keeping half an eye on their guest. He sat waiting with all the patience in the world, and when she stuffed her hair down the back of her sweatshirt, grabbed a handful of towels from the top of Sunny's crate, and crouched by him again, he stoically allowed her to sop up what mud she could. That gritty, black mud, as if something had driven him through one of the many local mini-swamps at top speed.

Though she didn't know what it could have been, that wouldn't have caught him. Nimble and speedy as the Corgis werea"and well they should be, having been bred to herd cattlea"those short legs wouldn't outrun anything big enough to be a threat, not in the long haul.

Then again, she hadn't actually seen anything out there tonight, and he had performed Corgi gymnastics to run from that.

Quit trying to make it make sense. Sometimes things just didn't. What she knew for sure was that she had a Cardigan Welsh Corgi in her dog room, and that even the generous pile of towels accruing beside her wouldn't do anything but soak up dirty water, leaving the grit in his coat and a bath the only recourse. She couldn't be surea"not in this light, not without someone holding him so she could step back and take a looka"but she had the feeling he was a fine dog, lots of good bone and without the exaggeratedly twisted ankles so many of them had. Someone would be missing him. She ran her hands around his neck and finally came up with a narrow nylon stripa"not a collar, no more than a tag holder. And the tags, too, clinking dully in their wet and mud-coated state.

She tried to make them out, turning them to catch the light, but the engraving would take a good scrubbing before it became legible. The dog c.o.c.ked his head at her, a quizzical expression, and it was then that she realized how she'd squinted her face up in her attempts to read the unreadable. Alert, then, and plenty responsive. She could stick pencils up her nose and waggle her fingers in her ears without getting anything but a bland stare from Sunny.

Not that she ever had. Ever.

In any case, she'd take him into work tomorrowa"stealing a few moments with the tub and dryers was a job benefit for any groomera"scrub him up, clean up the tags, and see what she had to work with. Along with a few phone calls to animal control and the local volunteer adoption group, it would probably be enough to have this fellow home by tomorrow night.

She left the wet collar around his wet neck and pulled out one of the smaller wire crates; a touch too small for him, but for one night he could deal with it. The sharp noise of the shuffled crates put him on edge; his huge ears went from alert to wary as he moved to the far wall, his body hunched and poised for escapea"even if there was nowhere to escape to, not this time. Still, no point in making it hard for him; she took the crate into the kitchen and a.s.sembled it there, flipping the sides into place with practiced ease and snicking the fasteners into place. She had planned to keep him in the kitchen, anywaya"he was too wet to stay out in the cold dog room.

Unlike Sunny, who had been outside quite long enough to take care of her needs. Sunny whined and moaned and threw herself at the door if Brenna tried to keep her inside on a cold night; the most she could enforce was the compromise of the dog room.

Brenna tossed a few towels into the bottom of the new crate and went out to reel Sunny in and crate her with an outlandish bone. She'd been intending to use a slip-lead on the Cardi, but when he got a glimpse of the crate, he pushed his way through the partially open door and installed himself in his new quarters.

Brenna put a hand on her hip and made a face at him. "So you're crate-trained. Show-off." She freed her hair from her sweatshirt and debated whether or not to feed hima"he'd need it, but she didn't want to dump food down him when he'd been stresseda"and ended up giving him a scant handful of kibble. "Make yourself at home," she told him, deciding she wasn't going to be spooked away from her tub. "I've been waiting for my own bath all day, and I'm about to have it."

He met her gaze for a few moments, and then deliberately turned to the kibble, nuzzling it first and finally settling in to eat with a catlike finickiness.

"I guess I know when I'm dismissed," she said, but couldn't help but linger to watch him, so at home in her own kitchen, the very picture of a content dog. It was almost enough to make her forget the strange circ.u.mstances of his arrival.

But not quite.

Chapter 4.

PERTH.

An Initiation

Early afternoon in the Pets! parking lot, a shared lot in a strip mall that no longer held the sparkle of fresh construction but hadn't quite descended into rattiness. Bills paid, laundry done, and she'd even found some old boards in the barn to lay over the mud hole between the house and the car shed. The Cardigan had jumped readily into her pickup and sat quietly on the towel she'd laid over the seat, happy enough to be in the car, happy enough to keep her company. Happy enough to hop out again, onto the warm asphalt of a spring day that had actually chosen to be sunny.

Which left Brenna entirely unprepared when he took one look at the Pets! storefront and screamed like a panicked child.

He tried to bolt, couldn't, and flopped at the end of the leash like an enraged fish out of water, issuing bloodcurdling screams, foaming at the moutha"and whew, there he wenta"blowing his a.n.a.l glands on top of it all. Of course, he could hardly pitch a protest of these proportions and not release his a.n.a.l glands.

In a way, Brenna supposed she was lucky. They were lucky. He was in an empty parking s.p.a.ce, and not in the path of careless parking lot traffic. And unlike the average dog owner, she'd seen this kind of thing before. She'd had dogs squirt out of the tub, screaming in outrage; she'd had cats ping-pong across the wall like something out of The Exorcist. She'd dealt with pets in all stages of temper tantrum and protest. So now she held the end of the leash and rolled her eyes and tried to figure out what had set him off while she waited for it to end.

Not that he hadn't been through enough. The night hadn't been easy on either of them. She had emerged from the tub to find him sleepy and satisfied, and he'd even, after some hesitation, accepted the longe line rigging for his outs before bed. Buta"dry now, if still muddya"he hadn't been so happy about returning to the crate. Once inside, he had given her a look, a this isn't the way it's supposed to be look, and she'd almost let him out.

Almost. But a second look at his dry but no less grimy state brought her up short, and she murmured an apology and took herself to beda"not quite as soon as Emily's children despite her intentions, and exhausted to the bone. Maybe she'd even sleep in, despite her body's natural greet-the-dawn inclinations; she'd certainly sleep hard.

Or maybe not. Maybe it was the dog's fussing that woke her; maybe it was something else. But this time, when she went to the kitchen to check him, she couldn't harden herself to the plea in his eyes. She let him out and grabbed one of the towels; he seemed glad to follow her to the den, and just as glad to settle on the towel she spread before the coucha"although he didn't truly relax until she plopped herself down in the worn cushions and drew the afghan over herself. Eventually, she let one hand fall to rest on his shoulders, and they dozed that way.

But not for long.

She didn't know what brought her to alert, just that the dog had sensed it, too. He was a tight bundle of muscles anch.o.r.ed to her touch, and she felt his fear creep right up her arm and curl around her heart. It was the only thing she could hear, her hearta"the rest of the house was utter silence, and yet there was a pressure in her ears as if a giant black fist squeezed the house and everything in it. And the moments pounded on and she thought surely the fear would ease, her heart would slow, but it never did.

It stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and only then did she start shaking. Only then did the Cardigan let a whine slip out. She reacted automatically, and for both of them. She forgot about his grubby state and she lifted the afghan in silent invitation. He jumped up without hesitation and snuggled in next to her, water-bottle warm and smelling just like the swampy mud he'd run through. She turned to her side, giving him more room, and then lay awake feeling the rise and fall of his ribs against hers and the puff of his breath on her forearm. Somebody's pet, all right.

Why did he seem to think he was hers?

And why, she wondered grimly in the Pets! parking lot the next day, couldn't he just remember how he had trusted her the night before? And just how d.a.m.n long could he keep this up, anyway?

A woman with a Shih Tzu waddling along beside her hesitated for a horrified look at the Cardigan's antics; Brenna gave her a forbearing smile and a little shrug. A few moments after that, the dog eased off into wary cease-fire, panting, attractive little bubbles of spit on his lips.

"Are we done?" Brenna asked him, as sardonically as she could muster. And with much relief, because someone else was approaching from behind, and she didn't think she could pull off another forbearing smile. "Look, dog, I'm already giving up my day off for youa""

"Trouble?"

She didn't recognize the voice, but a glance showed her trouble, all right. The dog must have thought so, too, for as the glazed look left his eyes and he focused on the new arrival, he went into instant action, shrieking and flopping, thirty-five pounds of idiot at the end of the leash. Brenna felt an odd moment of disorientation, a wrongness, and for a moment her world teetered with him. And then she caught herself. She looked at the mana"Roger's friend from the day before, with a cell phone in one hand, a gym bag in the other, a pager visible on his belt through the gaping front zipper of his leather jacket and a reasonably solicitous look on his face.

"Why, no," she said, with an edge of sarcasm so fine he might or might not perceive it. Trouble? As if it weren't obvious, and as if he'd taken for granted she couldn't handle trouble on her own.

He shifted the gym bag in his grip, easing back on one leg to narrow his eyes at hera"eyes easily as blue as hers, hair easily as dark, glinting with nearly hidden chestnut in the spring sun. And as recognition came into those eyes, the solicitous expression faded. "You're one of the groomers."

"And you're the man who was talking to Roger yesterday." She didn't mention the look he'd given her; he knew he'd done it. And though she was tempted, it would take her just a little closer to b.i.t.c.hy than she liked.

And who wouldn't be, with a manic dog jerking her arm arounda"though he was once again settlinga"spooky things ruining her sleep, a day off slipping away, and Mr. Scruffy adding his presence on top of it all? It was his hair, she decideda"a nice style but ready for a trima"or maybe that he evidently hadn't shaved today.

And he grinned at her words, but it wasn't in apology, it was . . . it was . . .

She didn't know what it was. Acknowledgment of some sort?

"Good luck with the dog," he said, clearly abdicating the unspoken offer of help. He nodded at the dog. "Interesting kind of storm for Winnal's Day, I suppose." And without explaining either comment, he turned on his heel and left, heading for a pale blue SUV with some sort of logo on its side.

She didn't have a chance to note just which logo it was, because the instant he moved, the Cardigan blew his wits again, catching her up in another moment of inexplicable wrongness before she recovered. Poofing her bangs out of her eyes with an exaggerated sigh, she decided she wasn't going to gain anything by waiting for the dog to work through whatever kept triggering him and headed for the store, thankful enough that he was a Cardigan instead of a seventy-pound Lab as he flailed along behind her.

"Oooh, that's special." Elizabeth, the second-shift groomer who caught Brenna's early shift on Brenna's off days, leaned over the counter to admire Brenna's acquisition. "What do you call that breed, the Freaking Mudball?" She looked closer, and reconsidered. "Freaking Mudball with Ears."

But now that they were inside, the dog settled again, clearly exhausted. His tongue hung long from his mouth, and his st.u.r.dy front legs spread wide.

"Doomed Mudball," Brenna p.r.o.nounced; Elizabeth knew a Cardigan when she saw one. "Is the tub free?"

"Only if you clean it when you're through with that," Elizabeth said without hesitation. "I'm done with my baths for the day."

Brenna did an automatic glance-about before saying darkly, "Don't worry. Roger will schedule you something."

"No way." Elizabeth popped a thin mint into her mouth from her perpetual stash behind the countera"like Brenna, she rarely had time to eat a full lunch. "I've got two minutes to do paperwork while my first finishes drying, and then I'm clipping for the rest of the afternoon."

"Take a look at the schedule," Brenna said, nodding at the desk. "See that dog he tried to sneak in yesterday? It was a matted Wheaten."

Elizabeth made a face. She was a tall young woman, very blond, with generous features that seemed a little too big for her face; when she twisted them up, she got impressive results. Brenna grinned at her and headed for the tub room.

The Cardigan followed her like a gentleman, tired but amenable. He stood quietly in the tuba"three shampooings it took before the mud didn't run off him anymorea"he let her blow the water from his coat with the high-velocity dryer, and he went quietly from her arms into a second-tier crate to sit under the stand dryers while she scrubbed his collar and tags and cleaned up the tub area.

Finally, she turned to the collar, blotting it dry and taking her first good look at the tags. Rabies tag, though it didn't look quite right to her eye and she couldn't say why; it had the vet clinica"her vet clinica"stamped on the tag, along with Rabies I/II and the serial number. But here was something usefula"a round ID tag, phone number and all. She took the collar out to the grooming room and dangled it up before Elizabeth, who was trying to get a smooth clipping line on a perpetual-motion Springer. Not her strengtha"Brenna specialized in the exacting breed clips. But Elizabeth could take any odd hairy breed and turn it cute or handsome, so she didn't begrudge Brenna her breed certifications.

Brenna grinned at her from behind the collar. "Score!"

"What's the deal with him, anyway? That's not a breed you see very often."

"Showed up on my porch last night," Brenna said. "But he ought to be home tonight." She caught up the receiver from the wall phone, stabbed an unlit outgoing line b.u.t.ton, and dialed the number, twirling the collar around her finger as the line rang.

"I'm sorry, but that number is not in this service area. Please check the number you are dialing and try again."

"Huh." Brenna frowned at the phone, hanging it up with much less flare. She looked at the tag again. "Number doesn't exist, according to them. But who'd keep a tag with the wrong number on it?"

"What's the address?"

Brenna shook her head, running her thumb over the engraving. "There isn't one. Just the phone. Dumb."

"Well, it'd be fine if the phone worked." Elizabeth's voice came out m.u.f.fled; her head was in the vicinity of the dog's flank as she fought for control over its foot. Giving up, she straightened and glared into the Springer's eye long enough to bellow in a startlingly loud voice, "Straighten up!"

Astonished, the dog stood stock still, watching Elizabeth with wide eyes as she quickly went back to work. "Sometimes it gets 'em, sometimes it doesn't," she said. "I give it three feet."

"Mmmm," Brenna said in agreement, staring at the other side of the ID tag. "Champion Nuadha's Silver Druid."

Elizabeth snorted. "Yeah, there's a name for you. It'd make more sense if he was blue merle. What was that, New-AHD-ja?"

"NWUH-dja," she said absently, looking at the name and thinking Elizabeth was right. Silver could describe merle, but not a black, white, and brown tricolor. Elizabeth grabbed the collar to look with vast uncertainty at the tag.

"Noowahja?" she said, coming close. "Do you think?"

Counterintuitive as the p.r.o.nunciation was, Brenna didn't doubt ita"although as she retrieved the collar, she gave it her own thoughtful look. She ought to doubt it.

But she didn't.

So she tucked the question away to think about later, and stuck her head in the tub room to offer an experimental, "Hey, Druid!"

From behind the wind of the dryers, he got to his feet, c.o.c.king his head at her. No mistaking that. "Never mind," she told him, and retreated to the grooming room. "Druid for a call name, that's not too bad. But you'd think anyone with a champion would make it easier to return him!"

"No kidding. All right, Springer, you've had your last chance," Elizabeth said with some exasperation, as her fourth attempt to trim under the dog's tail was met with a spinning tactic. "At least I got all the feet done," she said, shortening the noose and using a second noose to secure the dog to the front of the grooming elbow. "If these people would just handle their dogsa""

"Yeah, yeah, you're preaching to the choir here." But Brenna slid Druid's collar down her arm and let it dangle at her elbow while she went to the Springer's head and distracted her with kissy-kissy noises. Fortunately, the dog was fundamentally sweet, if uncivilized, and she was glad enough to squint her eyes with happiness at Brenna's attentionsa"although the tail-wagging didn't necessarily make things much easier for Elizabeth.

Elizabeth moved on to the dog's head and ears, and Brenna went back to check the Cardigan, flipping off the dryers and rolling them out of the way. She laughed, then, at the somewhat stunned look on his face; he'd had all the dryers on him, and his coat was as flyaway as it could get. Except for his haunches, which of course he'd been sitting on.

She considered the temperaturea"nice for early March, mid-fiftiesa"and decided against taking him out in it without some spot-drying. A few moments on one of the tables was all it took, and then she stepped back to consider her new charge.

"He's got a lot more white on him than I thought," Elizabeth admitted, pausing in her own work.

Or than Brenna had thought. No way, under the mud, to see how broad his blaze was, how symmetrically it encompa.s.sed his muzzle, narrowed just enough to miss his eyes, and broadened again at his forehead. Or to see the dark freckles on the bridge of his nose, or how richly his brown cheek patches stood out against the black on the rest of his head. He had a white bib and undercarriage anda"except for brown points, a white tail tip, and a jagged white collara"the rest of him was sleek black. Black, aside from his ears. The interior of one was stark white; the other light brown. But it was the backs of those huge ears that were so beguiling, mostly white with thick brown freckles. Utterly unexpected, utterly charming.