Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel)

by Melissa F. Olson

  “And say what?” Jesse said disbelievingly. “That thing only knows French commands.”

  “Well, try one. Tell it to sit.”

  Jesse shook his head at me, but said, “Uh—asseyez-vous.” He looked at me. “I don’t know the command tense.”

  I pushed gently past his arm and approached the kennel. When I took a few steps into the room, though, the bargest hit my radius, and suddenly it’s growling stopped and it whined uncertainly. It shook itself. Jesse began to say something, and the bargest snarled again, the tufts of fur on its back rising with tension.

  With some effort, I lowered myself to the floor a few feet in front of the kennel, stretching out my bad knee and pulling my opposite foot in to touch my thigh. “Jesse,” I said softly, not meeting the bargest’s eyes, “I saw a wad of paper in the purse. Would you see if any of it is for the dog? Vet papers or whatever?”

  I wasn’t looking at him, but I could practically feel a suspicious look coming from Jesse. “First promise me you won’t go any closer,” he commanded.

  “I won’t go any closer.”

  I heard soft footfalls on the carpet, and the bargest looked at me, slightly calmer. It tilted its head, puzzled. Maybe having multiple people in one room had been a little overwhelming

  “Hi, puppy,” I said soothingly, keeping my eyes on the floor. “I’m Scarlett. What’s your name?”

  I glanced up to see the bargest yawning, displaying enormous jaws that could possibly be described as “slavering.” “Hoo boy,” I breathed. Despite the shadows in the crate, I thought I saw it wag its tail once, tentatively. Encouraged, I crooned some more nonsense at it.

  Jesse chose that moment to reenter the room. The bargest went on alert again, feet planted, tufts of hair standing on end. Jesse didn’t notice; he was focused on the unfolded wad of papers. “You were right, they had to register it with the airline. Paid a fortune to fly it too.”

  “Jesse,” I murmured, “you’re too big. Be smaller.”

  “Oh. Right.” He sat down on the carpeted floor, and the bargest stopped growling and shifted its feet nervously, totally confused by the situation.

  “What’s her name?” I asked softly.

  “Her?” He looked at the crate again, but the dog was black and there were shadows. It was impossible to see between its legs.

  “Call it a hunch,” I said.

  Jesse flipped a page while the bargest eyed both of us. “You’re right, it’s a female,” he noted, scanning the paper. “They claim she’s a Peruvian Hairless mix, which strikes me as total bullshit. Her name is . . . heh. Belle.”

  “As in Beauty?” I said incredulously. I don’t know much French, but my childhood had been infiltrated by Disney, just like everybody else’s.

  “Yep. The Luparii might be a bunch of assholes, but at least one of them has a sense of humor.”

  “Guess so.”

  Jesse looked at his watch. “We need to move. We’ve already been here too long. If any of the neighbors saw us . . .” The bargest, hearing our friendly voices, began to tentatively wag her tail again. “Well, look at that,” Jesse said softly.

  I nodded. “I don’t think she’s actually that aggressive. I think she’s scared and confused.”

  “Scarlett,” Jesse said patiently, like he was talking to some bleeding-heart moron. “She’s evil.”

  “Hush. She’s no such thing, are you girl?” Hearing the question in my voice, the bargest’s tail started wagging double-time.

  “She slaughtered those two werewolves, Scarlett,” Jesse said gently. “Just because you want something to be true . . .”

  For the bargest’s sake, I kept my voice low and calm, even as I said, “I’m not an idiot, Jesse. Look at her: before it started wagging, that tail was tucked between her legs. She’s not cowering—they probably trained her not to run from scary stuff—but she’s leaning sideways so she’ll be ready to recoil. She doesn’t understand if she’s supposed to listen to us or attack us, and we haven’t given her the right cues for either.”

  There was a long pause behind me, and then Jesse said defensively, “She was snarling.”

  “We scared her, and she’s trapped in a little box. You’d snarl too.”

  “She’s dangerous, Scarlett.”

  I turned my head slightly so I could look back at him. “So is your gun, but I trust you with it. Now trust me.”

  My partner locked eyes with me for a second, and then nodded warily. “Okay. So what do you want to do?”

  I told Jesse to go move the scout into the bathroom so she wouldn’t distract the bargest. I also gave him his jeans and T-shirt out of the backpack so he could change. When Jesse closed the door to the bedroom we were in, I approached the bargest’s crate by crawling in a curve toward it, never facing her head-on or making eye contact. I crawled on my hands and good knee until I was at the side of her kennel that had the latches. Making sure I wasn’t blocking her escape route from the crate, I took a deep breath and undid them. The door sprang open.

  The bargest exploded out of the crate, suddenly seeming to fill the room with her presence. It was overwhelming, terrifying, but I forced myself not to cower. She could probably smell my fear, but there wasn’t much I could do about that, so I just sat there as calmly as possible while she raced around the room—which had seemed fairly big only a moment ago—in tight controlled circles. Now that I could see all of her . . . well, she was just as ugly as before, with a strange club-like tail that just naturally looked like someone had docked it at ten inches. But there was something else going on with her too: a graceful power and intelligence that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with how she was built. I could see why the Luparii had chosen this particular puppy for the bargest spell.

  After a few minutes, when I didn’t seem to be going anywhere, she calmed down and came over to sniff me. I held very still. After she’d snuffled her muzzle around my hair and clothes, I very slowly lifted my hand from the floor, my fingers curled in a loose fist, and held it out to her. She sniffed it for a long moment, and then gave me a single approving lick. Her club tail wagged again.

  “I’m not sure that Belle suits you,” I said, lowering my forehead to touch hers. “It seems a little pretentious and cruel.” She was wearing a collar, a formidable spiked leather thing. I scratched her neck under the collar, and she panted appreciatively.

  I pulled the new canvas collar out of my backpack and let her sniff it. When she didn’t object, I fastened it around her neck and then undid the buckle on the leather collar, letting it fall on the floor. The bargest was a huge investment of time, money, and magic, and if I were the Luparii, I wouldn’t have been above putting some kind of GPS chip in the collar to protect my investment.

  She sniffed the discarded collar once, and looked back up at me. She had a quizzical expression that said, What now? “We got this,” I told her. I repeated the procedure with the new leash, letting her sniff it before fastening it. She gazed at me evenly, her tail still wagging rather hesitantly.

  Even though I trusted her in that moment, alone together in a room with no stimuli, it was better safe than sorry. I took the soft canvas muzzle out of the bag and let her smell that too. “Okay?” I said. She gave me a resigned look. “You’ve done this before, I take it.” At my voice, her tail wagged once.

  I fastened the muzzle behind her head and let out a breath I’d been holding.

  We left the Luparii scout tied up in the bathroom. I was tempted to hand her over to Dashiell, to be killed or used as leverage. But, aside from the fact that I didn’t know how Jesse would react to that idea, we weren’t up for getting her into the van in broad daylight, especially with my injury.

  The bargest seemed to accept Jesse more now that she wasn’t stuck in a little box while he loomed over her, so I gave him the leash to hold on the way to my van. I was a little nervous that the bargest might take off as soon as she hit fresh air—which prompted a funny mental image of her racing flat-out down th
e center of the street, with Jesse dragging behind her like a prisoner in a Western—but I needn’t have worried. The bargest heeled perfectly, staying exactly in step with Jesse’s left foot as we walked.

  “All that work, and you didn’t get to use your big wagon,” I said sadly, as Jesse stowed it sideways in the back of the van to make room for the bargest. He patted the bottom of the van and the bargest hopped up effortlessly. Despite the graceful movement, the whole van shuddered as she climbed aboard.

  “The night is young,” Jesse said, his voice still a little tight. He was doing a good job of appearing calm, but I knew that committing daylight crimes was bothering him. Or maybe he was just a little nervous about the bargest. “We may get a chance yet.”

  We climbed in the van, both of us craning our heads around to check the back. The bargest had curled into a tight knot on the floor, laying with her head facing forward so she could keep an eye on us. “I’ve never seen a dog do that in a car,” Jesse said, amazed.

  “She’s a lady,” I intoned.

  As he pulled away from the curb, Jesse jerked his head back in the direction of the building we’d just left. “You think she can hex herself out of there?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I’ve never met a witch yet who could do a spell with their thoughts only. And if she could, I’m guessing she would have done it by now. We’re waltzing off with her prize.”

  He nodded, accepting that, but looked a little regretful. “She’ll be fine, Jesse,” I added. “That bitch forces animals to kill people. A day or two locked in a bathroom is the least we can do to her.”

  “That’s true,” he said thoughtfully. Looking a little more cheerful, he headed toward the freeway.

  We rode in companionable silence for a few minutes, and then he glanced over at me. “How did you know?” he asked.

  “Know what?”

  “That she wasn’t going attack us.”

  I considered the question for a moment. “The body language, for one thing. My mom was really interested in dog body language; she talked a lot about their cues.”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t know if it would follow dog rules,” Jesse pointed out.

  “That’s true,” I allowed. “But, look, the Luparii have to use her. That means they have to direct her to specific purposes. The Luparii haven’t lasted this long or prospered this much without being smart. And which is smarter, to have a psychotic cave troll that you can only let loose at your enemies, or to have something so well trained that you can point to five people out of a crowd of a hundred and say ‘kill them’?”

  Jesse adjusted the rearview mirror so he could check on the bargest. “So you’re suggesting she’s more effective as a weapon than as a monster.”

  “Yeah. And the Luparii built her that way.” I shook my head. “The bargest spell is probably the most complex I’ve ever heard of. It makes sense that they’d start with raw material they could control. If it were me, I’d keep a whole bunch of these dog-wolf hybrids trained and ready at all times, and just do the bargest spell when I knew of a werewolf threat somewhere.”

  “That would save on resources.” Jesse thought it over for a few minutes. “So she may not even have had these powers for that long. If they did the spell just a few days ago, she might be as new to killing werewolves as we are to the Luparii.”

  I nodded. Jesse turned his head and smiled at me briefly. “Sorry for doubting you,” he added.

  I sniffed imperiously. “Don’t let it happen again.”

  Chapter 43

  We got away from the Huntington Park area as quickly as we could, pulling over at a fast food restaurant so I could call and update Will while Jesse ran in for caffeine replenishment. With the Luparii scout taken off the board, the whole situation got a lot less complicated, but we still had almost six hours until moonrise. Jesse thought we shouldn’t arrive at Griffith Park too early, for fear of the nova wolf spotting us as he arrived and taking off for another location. That left us with a lot of time to kill—and not a lot of places where we could take a 180-pound dog-monster.

  Molly’s was out, as was Jesse’s tiny apartment. “What about taking her to Will’s house?” Jesse asked, taking a sip from his Diet Coke. “It’s secluded, and there’s parking.”

  I shook my head. “That whole place stinks of werewolf. I don’t know how she’d react to that, especially if she wandered out of my radius.”

  “Good point. Dog park?” Jesse suggested.

  “No way. We have no idea how she’ll react to other dogs. She might eat them.”

  “I guess that rules out taking her to my parents’ place,” Jesse mused. “I don’t want Max to be eaten.”

  I thought it over for a moment. “Actually . . . maybe it’s worth a try? At least then we could see if she can pass for a dog in mixed company.” With her color and intelligence, I couldn’t imagine thinking the bargest was anything but a magical creature, but I was hoping that was only because I knew for a fact that magical creatures existed.

  Jesse shot me a dubious look, but called his parents’ house anyway. They were both out, but his brother Noah was home, and willing to participate in a doggy friendship experiment. Or rather, a dog-bargest friendship experiment. Possibly the first of its kind. Jesse brightened a little. “If we’re stopping at my folks’, I have another idea too.”

  When we pulled into the driveway at Jesse’s parents’ house, there was a man already standing on the front steps with Max on a leash beside him. My eyes bugged out a little at the sight of him. It was like Jesse had taken another Jesse and swallowed him. “Whoa,” I said in awe. “It’s Jesse version 2.0.”

  “Can it, Bernard,” Jesse said good-naturedly. “That’s Noah.”

  I took a closer look as he put the van in park and we got out. Noah stayed on the steps, standing calmly as Max started jumping straight up and down in the air, thrilled beyond measure by our presence. Noah had lighter skin, for sure, and wasn’t as handsome as Jesse. He had the exact same smile though, which I noticed as we walked toward the house and he stepped down from the steps, holding out his hand. I shook it while Max cheerfully head-butted my legs, delighted to have me within love-attack range. It hurt, and I winced. “Max,” Jesse reproached. Max turned to him with a wounded look and did his best to love my femur by wagging his whip tail against me instead. Not a big improvement. I patted him on the head anyway.

  “It’s nice to finally meet you, Scarlett,” Noah said playfully. “Jesse never, ever talks about you, so we know you must be special.”

  “Noah,” Jesse warned, in the exact same tone he’d used on Max. His brother took him about as seriously as Max had.

  “All right, where’s this monstrous dog?” Noah asked.

  Jesse and I exchanged a look. “In the van,” I said simply. I looked down at my knee. “Jesse, can you . . .”

  “Yep, I’ll get her. Hang on to Max’s leash,” he warned Noah. “She’s . . . big.”

  Jesse went to the back doors of the van and cracked one door open a little. “What’s he got in there, King Kong?” Noah said under his breath. I smiled.

  The bargest stepped daintily down from the van, hardly needing to hop at all with her long legs. Max went stock-still, his hackles rising. “Holy shit,” Noah whispered. I glanced at him. He was staring at the bargest with a mixture of wonder and respect, but no fear. “That,” he said with awe, “is the ugliest fucking dog I have ever seen.”

  I laughed. Definitely Jesse’s brother.

  Jesse took it slow, but she walked toward us with perfect calm, head up, eyes alert. I’d never seen such a self-possessed dog before; she seemed to be controlling herself, not because we’d told her to, but because it was her nature. As someone who has spent a lot of time around dogs, I found it almost spooky. Then she paused and rubbed her face against Jesse’s leg, trying to push the muzzle off, and I had to laugh a little.

  “What kind of dog is she?” Noah asked me quietly.

  “Technically, she’s a lurcher,” I
replied. More or less honestly. Anytime you breed a sighthound, like a deerhound or an Irish wolfhound, with any non-sighthound breed, that’s called a lurcher. Don’t ask me why.

  Max whined as Jesse and the bargest drew closer, shuffling his feet the same way she had in the crate. He didn’t know what to do. Jesse stopped when the bargest was just close enough for the two dogs to smell each other’s heads, and we let them do so. Then Max did something I never dreamed I’d see him do: he plopped on the ground and rolled over, belly in the air.

  And that was that.

  Fifteen minutes later, we were sitting on the kitchen table, watching the dogs chase each other around the house. I could have sold tickets to this view. Max, who was already a fast, intelligent, strong dog, was tearing around the house, playing with a creature that was twice his size, speed, and intelligence. Noah had wisely put all the breakables up high before we arrived, so while they thundered around, the cupboards rattled a little, but nothing actually broke.

  After a few minutes, Noah vanished upstairs to take a phone call. Jesse and I had started out sitting on the couch, but had elected to move to higher ground for our own safety.

  “Let’s change her name,” I said to Jesse, watching the two of them play. Max was panting heavily, but although I’d removed the bargest’s muzzle, she still seemed unfazed. “She’s not responding to how I pronounce Belle, and anyway, she should get to be called something a little less annoyingly ironic.”

  “What are you gonna call her instead?” Jesse asked with a tiny smile. “Frenchie? Blackie? Inky?”

  “Those are terrible bargest names,” I informed him. “Everybody knows that.”

  A grin broke out on his face. “What, then?”

  “Well, it should really be Hunter, but that’s a boy’s name, and I’d like to think she can escape the trappings of her upbringing.” I pursed my lips, watching the bargest lope after Max as he made joyous circles around the house. Where he was lively, excited, and rambunctious, she was more serious, grave. It was like all the natural liveliness of a big high-energy dog had been taken away from her through her training. What was left was restrained grace and dogged pursuit. Max was probably the fastest dog I’d ever seen, but the bargest looked like she could have run right over him whenever she felt like it. But she stayed glued to his heels instead.