~~~
Brenna left Pets! feeling more upbeat than seemed reasonable after the way the day had started. But Elizabeth had come in early, and they had taken a moment to present a united front to Roger, armed with enough commonsense arguments to earn themselves a permanent bather for the season. No more grabbing whoever was convenient, no more wasting time training a new temp bather every week.
Assuming that DaNise, the cheerful young woman who'd enthusiastically agreed to work with the dogs, didn't quit before the summer was over. Brenna suspected that DaNise had no idea just how much crate cleaning the grooming work entailed. But she seemed sensible enough, and sturdy enough to deal with the physical part of the work. Most importantly, her nails were already neatly trimmed and she wouldn't spend half of her time trying to protect them.
But when Brenna stepped into the parking lot with Druid on a pleasant heel beside her, her arms full of her coat and her purchases for the day—more bones to keep Sunny happy in the crate and please, God, let the danger from the dog pack pass soon—that upbeat mood blew away with the strong spring breeze at the sight of Masera, almost around the corner of the building with his SUV, tailgate open and down, handing off a wad of money and taking two young pit bulls in exchange. Stout and already muscular despite their early age, probably actually some mix of American Pit Bull and American Staffordshire Terrier; people called both breed "pit bull" and most didn't distinguish between them.
In between dogs, was he? Looking at a Cardi for his next, was he? That would have made sense, too—Cardigans were a herding breed, highly suited to obedience and agility competition, and a good showcase for his training business. But pit bulls? And was that Mickey from the stock room standing with his back to her, looking sullen even from that perspective?
He'd lied to her.
He'd come in and made nice and lied to her.
And damn, it bothered her.
She wasn't sure she liked him, but she'd respected him for coming to the grooming room, for offering to bathe the Westie—and for doing it her way. But he'd lied, and now he had his hands on a pair of pit bulls in a back-lot transaction that didn't make her think of anything good.
"Maybe he's rescuing them," she told Druid, watching Masera hoist the dogs into the SUV and crate them. But she didn't convince even herself with that one.
So go ask him.
She'd have to run for it, Druid and packages and all, bellowing his name across the parking lot, and he was already climbing into the driver's seat. And in the time it took for that thought, she missed her chance; he was pulling away from the building. Damn. Druid whined, looking up at her, and she shifted her grip on the slipping coat and packages, heading for her pickup. "As if I care."
She didn't convince herself with that, either.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
CHAPTER 8
NAUTHAZ
Restriction & Pain
A quick stop at the video store netted Brenna a light romantic film she had missed in the theaters, and she splurged on a big bag of malted milk balls from the bulk section in the supermarket when she ran through to scoop up groceries for the week. She grabbed some seedling flats while she was at it; tomorrow was supposed to be fine and sunny, she had the day off, and she looked forward to a day of puttering. Put the little tomatoes in big pots so she could bring them in if they got a late frost, clear out the leaf mulch she'd had protecting her chrysanthemums, do a little target shooting and give the rifle a good cleaning, let Sunny have a good run...
Puttering. And tonight, malted milk balls, a sentimental happy-ending movie, and maybe if she got her second wind she'd even clean the bathroom. Alone again, of course. Too fixed on her own course, too strong in who she was—for good or bad—to suit anyone else for long.
Besides, she liked movie rental nights and puttering days.
By the time she got home it was twilight—even her early hours couldn't make up for a slow grocery cash-out line—so she put Sunny out on the cable run she'd constructed several days earlier and threw a pot on the stove for pasta. They all ate together—even Sunny, who had graduated to strictly supervised moments in the kitchen—and Brenna tossed Sunny back into the crate with a new bone. "Poor hound," she said fondly at Sunny's forlorn look. Sunny was a creature of sinew and long legs and the need to romp, and the crating routine had gone on for far too long—especially considering that there had been no sightings of the pack. Brenna would give her a few extra moments on the run later on. For now, she was ready to settle in to the old couch in the den, a comforter on her shoulders and a Cardi in her lap. By the time she finished the video she'd be lucky to make it from the couch to the bed, despite the early hour—but that was the norm for her lark's schedule.
"Ready for the movie?" she asked Druid, who cocked his ears to their most alert angle, tipping his head to the side as if at any moment he would burst into spoken commentary—or maybe she'd start talking in dogspeak. Between the ears and the bright white symmetrical blaze, he was probably close to illegally cute. "Never mind," she said, when he couldn't place her words into his vocabulary. "How about this one—want to come up on the couch?"
Fast learner, that dog. He was waiting by the couch by the time she scooped up the video and followed him into the den. He waited just long enough for her to settle into the corner of the couch—a quick procedure, given the extent of the dip that many years of use had formed there—and open her arms to him, and then sprang into her lap to curl into a pleasantly boneless cuddle. His nose twitched at the malted milk balls, but he'd quickly learned there was no point to outright begging. A subtle gleam of drool formed on his lips as he heaved a great sigh and resigned himself to sleep.
Brenna gave herself up to the movie, forgiving all of its weak parts so she could enjoy the clever bits. She smiled with the characters, got drawn up enough in the story to sniffle in all the right places, and noted that the hero character didn't lie to the heroine character.
If he didn't somehow matter, you wouldn't be so mad.
Never mind that. Watch the movie.
The first time Druid shifted uneasily in her lap, she thought he'd just become uncomfortable. The second time, he also whined softly, and she put a hand on the dome of his head. "Shhh."
The third time, she turned off the movie and muted the television volume. They sat in the dimly lit room together, the dog tense in her arms and Brenna puzzling at the night, not hearing anything but the rhythmic grate of Sunny's teeth against bone.
Until it struck, an astonishing intensity of dark spirit clenching down on them all, driving the air from Brenna's lungs like a bad fall.
Brenna barely had time to gasp before Druid sprang from her lap, digging his nails into her thigh and arm and leaping away. But her reflexes were well-trained; some thinking part of her brain realized he was headed not for the floor but up the back of the couch and aiming for the shelves behind it, the very shelves full of breakable mementoes. She snatched Druid out of mid-air despite his sturdy heft.
Panicked, he turned on her, snapping and screaming. She felt his teeth sink into her hand and reacted instantly, grabbing his scruff and yanking him away, letting gravity do the rest; he fell to the floor, still in her grip.
The darkness let go of her but Druid was lost to it, flipping and struggling in her grip. And while a little voice in her head said let go, you idiot, she didn't; the last thing she wanted to do was to offer him success—his freedom—in return for this behavior. Even dazed and bitten and scraped raw by emotional darkness, her long-ingrained instincts held true. On her knees on the floor, her worn jeans torn and her hand throbbing, she eventually got the right angle on the scruff-hold to push his face to the floor and hold him there...and by then, he was coming out of it, distressed and exhausted.
And appalled, for even in his wild flight, some part of him knew what he had done.
Bitten her.
When she released him to cradle her hand—and it didn't look so bad, not as bad as it could have been, just throbbing from the fo
rce of his jaws but barely bleeding although the swelling was coming up fast—he crawled to her with his ears flat and his tail tucked. Beyond woeful. Looking for a way to apologize for the unforgivable.
"Don't even try," Brenna said, and burst into tears, hot but short-lived. Grouchy, ill-mannered grooming customers were one thing, but her dogs? Her dogs didn't bite her. Not since she was young and proved herself to have a special way with them, the girl who could take in any dog and turn it sweet and happy, the girl who could handle the worst of them simply because they gave their hearts to her so quickly.
When had she lost that?
And then she heard her own thoughts. Her dog. Somewhere along the way she'd made that decision, letting herself believe that Druid's owner would never appear—and admitting how quickly he'd made himself part of her.
Not a biter.
For the first time in memory, she was in over her head. Not objective enough to form a strategy for dealing with Druid, and not ever faced with a puzzle on this level before. So much of her response to dogs was instinct, and not knowledge.
She needed knowledge.
She cleared her throat, smeared her face dry, and disentangled her hair from where it was trapped between her thigh and calf. When she went to the kitchen to run cold water over the heel of her hand and the base of her thumb, her gaze fell on the business card she had eventually taken from the break room table and then dropped on the counter when she'd cleaned out her pockets the same evening.
Gil Masera, Dog Obedience and Behavior Specialist.
She immediately rejected the impulse to call him. She didn't trust him. He'd lied. And the circumstances under which he'd taken those pit bulls...
But she didn't have to like him to learn from him.
And she didn't know any of the other local trainers, hadn't spoken to them. Couldn't call them cold at half past eight in the evening.
She kept her hand under the faucet and reached for the card—turning it in her fingers, nibbling the edge of it in indecision, glancing at the clock. In the background, Sunny had gone back to chewing her bone, her jaws tireless. Druid clung to the wall between the kitchen and den, drawn to her and yet too mortified to slink the rest of the way to her feet. A spot of blood marred the pristine whiteness of his muzzle.
Her blood.
Brenna felt the decision click into place. She snapped the business card to the table like a crisp poker card and turned off the water, gingerly dabbing the hand dry. Darned good thing she had the following day off—she'd never be able to work with this hand. And maybe not the day after, either; she'd call Roger tomorrow and give him a heads-up.
She looked at Druid, meeting his gaze directly this time. He sank a little lower to the ground. She sighed. "C'mere, then." Slink-walking, he approached her. She gave him a sad pat, which brought his ears up a little, and directed him toward the crate. "Kennel up, then."
Oh, unhappy dog. The picture of dejection, he entered the crate, turning as she closed the door but making no attempt to push his way out.
Sunny was harder to handle; exuberant as always, more than ready for some time outside, once released from the crate she bounded around the small enclosed porch room, whacking Brenna with her tail and singing Redbone joy to anyone who could hear her half-barked, half-howled excitement. Finally Brenna snagged her collar and, with a clumsy, fumbling hand, snapped the run cable in place. Only then did she open the door that had been closed on it, releasing Sunny into the yard.
Then she returned to the kitchen to reassure herself that Masera could let his machine pick up if he didn't want to answer the business line at this time of night, and nabbed the portable phone from its cradle. She dialed quickly, before she could think too hard about it or change her mind.
And he answered quickly, too. Whatever he was doing this evening, the phone was close by. "Gil Masera."
She hesitated, suddenly not sure how to start or even what she wanted to call him. Enough of a hesitation so he said, "Hello?"
"Yes," she said quickly, so he wouldn't hang up. "It's...this is Brenna Fallon—"
It was his turn to be silent a moment. "Sorry," he said. "I wasn't expecting to hear from you."
"I wasn't expecting to call," she said, putting the conversation back on more familiar footing with that edge of antagonism. "I hope it's not too late."
"I wouldn't have answered the phone if it were too late." But he didn't make it easy for her, didn't ask what he could do for her or why she was calling or if everything was all right.
Brenna had the sudden impulse to hang up, to go back to her movie and her malted milk balls and pretend her hand didn't hurt. Or her heart, which Druid had bitten just as hard as her hand. But she closed her eyes and tightened her grip on the phone, and didn't. Instead she managed to say, "You said to call, if I...if things got hard with the Cardi. And I could use an objective opinion. On what to do next, I mean."
"What happened?" he asked, as if he knew she would never call him unless something had.
She hesitated, uncertain how to say it. "He had another one of those...fear fits. And," her throat suddenly constricted, as if she were about to say something that should never be said—and in truth, she supposed it was. She shoved the words out. "He bit me."
"Ah," he said, but it was an understanding sound. As if he knew she wouldn't be upset about a snap-bite, a bite that was more a comment than an offensive, and the likes of which she fended off every day. That if she said he'd bitten her, it was more than broken skin and insult, it was jaws and teeth and power.
"The thing is...I think I know how to trigger a fit—there's a place on my property that seems to do it." The spring, of course. She'd bet on it. "I was wondering if I could hire you to come out here and help me get him through it. Help me deal with it."
Another silence, though a short one. "You said he was a stray."
"He can't stay that way forever," Brenna said.
"No." There was a pause, and she heard background noise—the pages of a book being closed, cushions crunching gently as he got up. "Let me check my book."
Outside, Sunny gave an inquisitive hound hello—aowhuff? Druid whined from inside the crate, circling within its confines. She touched the wire with her toe, distracting him; it worked for a moment. Then Masera came back to the phone; she heard him flipping through the pages of his schedule book, a sound long-familiar to her ears. "When's the best time for you?"
"I get off work in late-afternoon," she said. "Or my days off—Fridays and Mondays, so I have tomorrow—"
Druid barked sharply.
"No," Brenna told Druid, barely considering it an interruption in the conversation as she returned to Masera, "though I can't imagine you'd have time on such short notice."
"Not tomorrow," Masera said, hesitating at the noise of Druid moving restlessly in the crate, the wire shifting, his toenails clacking—noises any trainer would know.
And a look on Druid's face Brenna was beginning to recognize. "I hate to say it, but I think—" and she gasped in surprise as the cold dark hit her body again, and Druid erupted into a frenzy, flinging himself against the wire, snapping and tugging and tearing at it with his teeth and nails. Brenna couldn't find the breath to speak, not to Masera on the other end of the phone or to Druid or to—
Sunny!
Outside, Sunny let off a quick volley of barks, sharp and utterly unlike her.
And then she screamed.
Over and over, she screamed.
Brenna finally found her own breath and threw herself free of the clenching hold on her soul and right out the kitchen door, into the dog room and yelling for her copper-red hound, her sweet-natured, joy-hunting Redbone, slamming up against a storm door that somehow wouldn't open. Senseless—foolish—she hurled herself against it, gaining a few inches and so startled by the bone-chilling cold that poured in through that gap that she staggered back when the door slammed closed, given life of its own by a strong wind.
But there was no wind.
&nb
sp; And suddenly there was no sound, nothing but the final scream in her raw throat and her own ragged breathing. Silence from Druid.
Silence from Sunny.
The door swung outward with a familiar creak of hinge, unimpeded.
~~~
After the briefest of hesitations, Brenna stuck her head out. She reached for the porch light, then thought better and grabbed the flashlight sitting on the washing machine. The overhead bulb would only blind her to what lay beyond the porch.
The flashlight beam quivered along with her hand, splashing shadows across the clumpy grass, steadying enough to find the tree at the other end of the run and from there the run cable itself. She took a step out on to the porch. "Sunny?"
There was no sign of her.
Nothing, until the light created unfamiliar shadows in the middle of the yard, and she stopped scanning the grass to settle on it, her heart beating wildly in her chest. A disc, gleaming dully. It didn't belong.
A few more steps—down the porch stairs, onto the stepping-stone sidewalk—and light and shadow resolved into something recognizable. Sunny's collar. A turquoise nylon collar, looking darker than it should. Another few steps from there and she could reach for it, slowly dropping to a crouch to first touch it, then pick it up. Her swollen hand was stiff and fumbly, the fingers not sure of what they felt.
"Sunny?" she said, a tentative call into the darkness as she stood. "Sunny?"
She couldn't not look. She couldn't stop herself from going to the barn, from walking the old rail fences of the barn paddocks, calling Sunny's name in a voice that refused to shout, her fingers clenched around the collar, feeling more and more dazed as the moments went by and she slowly realized how little sense it made. Any of it.
She was crazy. Overworked. Imagining things. Had imagine things.
Like th clenching dark cold that stole the breath from her lungs, the air pressure slamming the door closed on a clear still night. Sunny's cable to the run broken at the collar, the collar abandoned nearby.
A Feral Darkness Page 9
