A Feral Darkness

by Doranna Durgin

  She laughed. "You think it's that easy, do you, you with your hair that can be measured in inches?"

  He raised an eyebrow, acceptance of a challenge. "My mother had long hair."

  She really didn't want to cut it.

  She went to the bathroom and returned with two combs and a bottle of horse finishing spray.

  "This is for horses," he said, taking it from her. "Just how hard did that dog hit you?"

  She gave him a warning look, one brow quirked up. "It'll make the hair slick. I use it all the time." She took the bottle back and went to the den, where she plunked herself in the couch, draping the snarls around to lie across her thighs. Druid put himself at her feet. "Come on, then."

  He came in with a glass of water for each of them, anticipating what she'd forgotten to ask. Sitting on the floor beside her, he picked up a section of hair, mulling the extent of the tangles, running his fingers over it as though it were a strange Braille that only he could read.

  "Here," she said, handing him the finishing spray. "What happened was, I was at the spring, giving Mars Nodens a candy bar. And then I fell asleep, and Parker came, and we had an argument."

  "Giving Mars Nodens a candy bar," Masera repeated, looking up at her with disbelief.

  He sounded as bemused as she'd probably feel if she stopped to think about all the things that had happened since she woke from her nap, and having him sitting beside her working gently at her hair was hardly the least of it. So she somehow didn't snap at him in the sudden embarrassment of the absurdity of her own words. "I didn't want to go empty-handed. And you know what, I think he liked it."

  Masera looked down at his work, frowning over a particularly tight witch's knot. "You might be right about this."

  "Giving up so easily?"

  That got his attention all right. He gazed at her with those blue eyes hooded, long enough to see if she'd back down or ease up—very much the look he'd given her in the break room that first day—and said, "You should know better than that."

  She just smiled. Then she told him the rest of what had happened at the spring, and by the time she was done he had come up on his knees to take her into his arms again, holding her tightly—only this time she felt it was for him more than for her, a fierce reaction to the thought of the things that might have happened but hadn't. And it was she who stroked his ruffled hair back and rubbed her thumb along the evening stubble on his cheek and gave him the moment he needed.

  But not much more.

  "Now," she said. "You tell me."

  "Tell you—?"

  "We have things to talk about," she said, repeating his words from the night before. Only the night before. She moved aside a small section of hair they'd actually managed to untangle; it was soaked with the coat finisher but drying fast, as sleek and shiny as ever. Not normal hair, she thought, not for the first time in her life...only now she knew why. "I could have called animal control a long time ago. I didn't do it...because you didn't want me to, even if you never said so in so many words. Now...I want to know."

  He grew distant, then, without ever moving a muscle that she could see. A distinct vibration in the air around him, complete with little no trespassing signs. Brenna ceased working on her hair, let her hands rest in her lap, and looked at him. Whether he knew it or not, he hovered at a point of no return.

  He must have known it.

  He still hadn't moved, he still watched her with as much tight concentration as ever, but something inside had relaxed, and she knew it without having to know how she knew it. She went back to work on her hair.

  "We were trying to build a connection to Parker's cocaine source," he said, apparently starting right in the middle of the story.

  "We, who?"

  He looked up, mildly startled. "Me, animal control, the cops...who else?"

  Brenna shrugged.

  "No," he said, and then laughed, short but truly amused. "You didn't think—"

  "You tried hard to make sure I didn't know what to think, didn't you? Me or Eztebe. Do you know how worried he is? And since when do the cops go to civilians to solve their problems?"

  Masera sobered. He ran his fingers through the hair he'd freed up, letting it slide through his fingers like heavy silk. "I was walking a line, Brenna. I didn't intend to get involved at all. Before I even started working at the store, Mickey spotted me there and asked me about the best food for performance dogs."

  "The same brand he ended up stealing, I suppose."

  "He was walking away with merchandise from the start. He only worked there so he'd have access to what he could take, and a discount on what he couldn't. Parker's supply man. Happens I saw him in a dog fight photo my friend in animal control was showing around. By then Mickey knew me...I started asking around and ended up in the middle of it. The cops wanted me out, especially after Parker's boys pulled their little initiation stunt on me. Lots of shouting over that, believe me."

  Brenna thought back to their first real conversation, when he'd barely been able to move and the bruises had obscured the well-defined features with which she'd since become familiar. "That day in the breakroom? The first of many times you pissed me off?"

  Grinning, he glanced up; the light reflected from his eyes in translucent indigo. A rare humor, and she thought it was just as well; it was nigh to irresistible. "The day you got my attention."

  "I was trying to get your goat," she said, and wrinkled her nose at him. "That beating was their little initiation stunt?"

  He snorted; instead of working on her hair he'd transferred his attention to scraping a blob of mud from the fringe of her cut-offs. "As far as I can tell, it was a transparent attempt to gauge my determination. Parker's minions; they came and went, except for Mickey and a few others. Didn't matter. It was Parker I wanted, the son of a bitch." He scowled and reached up, using a knuckle on her chin to tilt her head to the light; she let him. Whatever he saw satisfied him, for he let it go without comment. Her nose, probably. It still throbbed, but with less fervor. "There was no way...not once I knew Parker had blundered through akelarre and had a fast growing power at his back...that he would do anything to gain access to your spring—" He shrugged, and quit trying to put it into words. "It wasn't something I could leave to the cops."

  "What about those dogs you bought?"

  He didn't answer at first. Then he said, "What do you think?"

  What did she think? She knew he'd been working with them; Eztebe had cheerfully told her so. He'd said he didn't intend to fight them. He'd also said he didn't currently consider himself as having his own dog. "I think you're trying to rehab them, find them homes."

  He smiled a private little smile, not looking at her. "You'd be right."

  "Can you?"

  "If they'd ever been fought...not likely. But they were just pups, not even in training. They'll be fine. I've just been waiting till this was over."

  "And is it?" she demanded. "You're not going back to that barn." Worried by her tone, Druid got to his feet and put his front feet against her leg, balancing lightly on his haunches to whine at her. She rubbed the base of his speckled ear and watched Masera.

  He shook his head, frustrated. "We hadn't gotten to the bottom of it."

  "It doesn't sound like it has a bottom, if you ask me."

  "You may be right, given what Parker's got going for him." He shook his head again. "Whatever. It's over. I suppose it was over as soon as you told me about the rabies. I told Rick—my friend in animal control—and they're going to shut it all down; I don't know exactly when. They'll get the training barn you saw, the fight rings, two or three breeding barns—Parker's been pretty methodical about it all. Not a hobbyist, a pro. Breeding carefully, taking good care of the dogs, training them with all the tricks—in it for the long haul, and running a nice little drug distribution scheme alongside it. You saw the cat mill out behind his barn while you were there? That's probably where most of the dead animals came from."

  "I saw it. I didn't understand it."


  "It's like a horse walker," he said, trying to keep his voice even. "Put a dog at the end of one arm of it; put a cat in front of it. The cat runs, the dog chases. After a while, the dog catches. It builds fitness in the dogs, and bloods them at the same time."

  Brenna made a choked noise, opened her mouth to respond, and couldn't find any words strong enough. Not to respond to this new image of the cat mill, with blood in the dried winter grass, the smell she couldn't quite locate or identify, the worn rut of dirt—she grimaced, and took a deep breath, and moved the conversation forward. "The drugs came from his dead pal Gary, I suppose," Brenna said, and then, unable to let go of the cat mill, added, "I hope they turn that thing into scrap metal."

  "It doesn't matter," Masera said darkly. "It doesn't matter, because Parker will get away, and his cocaine source is still unknown. He'll just start it up again somewhere else."

  "No," Brenna said. "He won't. He's got to be near this spring. He might start up with something else, but he won't leave this place."

  "Whatever. Dammit, if I'd just had a few more days—" He got to his feet, unaware of the comb he clenched in his hand, frustrated in every tense muscle.

  "Iban," she said gently, "Iban, you stopped the rabies. They'll put down every single one of those dogs, knowing there's rabies among them. They'll test them—and I swear CDC already knows this is a new strain." She thought of Sammi's constrained and unnatural silence. "They'll work up a new vaccine in case anything slipped through the cracks. Damn, this is what it's all about, what it's been about."

  "What?" he said, as his eyebrows pinched in on his nose. It made her want to reach up and erase the resultant line with her finger, though she could do it just as well with words.

  "For weeks I've had those weird visions. I can't explain it...I know they're connected to Druid."

  "Visions?" he said.

  "Impressions...memories. Only not my memories. I know it sounds crazy—"

  And it did. Too crazy. She hesitated, would have stopped.

  Masera said, "Tell me."

  Still hesitant, she did. She started at the beginning, at Emily's kitchen table with Druid asleep at her feet and dreaming, and took Masera all the way up to the stark moments she'd envisioned only the night before. "I felt like I was looking at the days of the black death. All caused for—and by—Parker's dark power, and by its new rabies." She stopped to look at him, aware she'd gotten sidetracked. "It would have killed so many people...it would have killed me. It would have changed everything. But it won't, not now. Maybe you didn't get the drug dealer, but you stopped the rabies." Even if Parker didn't know it yet. And if he'd been angry during their recent confrontation, then he'd be utterly beside himself when the raids went down.

  And he'd blame her. He knew enough to do that.

  "We stopped the rabies," he murmured. "One of us had to figure it out, first, and then have the stones to call the other in the middle of a dog fight."

  "Stones?" she said, and grinned, sliding the comb through the last of the tangles and gathering her hair up in one section again, feeling, despite its natural resilience, the loss of some bulk, the broken ends in the affected area. "Is that what I have, Iban?"

  "Say that again," he told her.

  "About the stones, or—"

  "My name," he said.

  "Iban," she said, drawing it out.

  "I'm coming over there," he said. "Now."

  How they ended up on the floor a short time later, she wasn't sure, but Druid wasn't slow to take advantage; he walked right over them and whisker-inspected Brenna's face, then Masera's, then back to Brenna, paying particular attention to the cuts and bumps. And while Brenna was altogether focused on how nice it felt to run her hands over—well, to have him run his hands over—well, maybe she wasn't altogether focused, maybe she was altogether unfocused. But the whisker inspection didn't work for her at all. She relinquished Masera's lower lip and looked over at Druid. "What," she said, breathing unreasonably fast, "What in this picture doesn't belong, Druid?"

  He whined. A reminder whine. A doggy nudge. Brenna let her head rest on the carpet, which gave her an appalling view of the dog hair she needed to vacuum up. "He's right, though," she said. "We've got a lot of other things to—what?"

  For Masera was laughing. He was trying to hide it, lying on his side with his head propped on his arm and one nice strong hand resting on her hip, but she felt it through that connection, the slight jostling it gave her. "He's right?" he said, and let some of the laughter slip out. "The dog's right?"

  Brenna gave him a little shove; he didn't resist so he ended up on his back. Then she conceded, "Maybe I've been living alone too long." But, leaning closely over him and his amusement, she added, "Or maybe he's just right." She climbed to her feet and plunked back down in the couch, but since she hadn't been careful enough, she sat on her hair and had to bounce up to free it. By then he sat opposite her, fiddling with a folded piece of paper and not objecting when she invited herself to put her feet across his thighs. "Seriously," she said. "That cat was meant for me; whether it was Parker's idea or—I mean, how much can he communicate with that...thing, anyway?" It would seem unfair that the darkness would be so willing to communicate with Parker when she was still leaving voice mail with Mars Nodens.

  "At this point, I suspect quite a bit. Parker's the perfect point man for something like that as it gains a foothold in this world. He's a first-come, first-serve kind of guy, even if it means eating off other people's plates, and he's smart enough to carry his end of it without messing up—unlike his two friends before him. That's why it doesn't mean much in the long run, that we've stopped the rabies. He'll start up with something else."

  "No," Brenna said, still stuck on that point. "Parker's come at me a couple of different ways already. He won't give up yet. He—they—need this place, the access to the spring. We've got to do something to protect it. That's where you come in."

  "Me," he said blankly.

  "You know about this stuff! You and Eztebe, but he says you more than he."

  Masera shook his head. "Nothing like this. I know runes you can use. I know this is a bad phase of the moon to brace darkness—Medusa Moon, like when you lost Sunny. I know we're better off for having made it past the vernal equinox before reaching this point. But how to go up against this darkness? This is way outta my league, Brenna. Way out."

  "Then call your mother. Ask her."

  He seemed to think about it. In the end, he didn't outright reject it. He just said, "It would take time to reach her."

  "Fine," she said. "Then we try. And until then, we've got to do something. Masera—Iban—he's going to come for me. As soon as he figures out you were in on the dog fighting, he's going to come for you, too, but right now he wants that spring. And I pretty much figure if he gets it—if he changes it so his darkness can use it again—we don't have a chance. Am I right about that?" And Druid, sitting beside her again, gave Masera his most earnest look and whined.

  Masera said most dryly, "One of you is."

  "Take it from him, then. And what's that paper?"

  He shrugged, unfolding it. "It's your paper—papers—from your couch."

  Emily's print-out. "The Mars Nodens research!" Brenna said. "Anything interesting?"

  He smoothed the papers out against his leg and pulled the top one off, handing it to her. "Rabies information," he said, and she scanned it while he read the other page.

  They reacted at virtually the same moment, as he stiffened, muttering, "I'll be a son-of-a-bitch!" and she waved her paper at him and said, "I get it, I get it!"

  They looked at each other for a heartbeat and he lifted his chin, a gesture of interest, as though he could read her rabies information from there. She said "Okay, listen to this," and looked back at the paper, where all the strange bits and pieces she'd been hearing—from Sammi, from her Druid-memories—coalesced to make sense. "Rabies incubates in the animal before it becomes active, right? Incubation periods vary, but
the animal's not contagious until the virus kicks in. That's when it sheds virus in its saliva."

  "Not news so far," he said, but his attention remained fixed on her, waiting for the rest of it.

  "The thing is, with regular rabies, once the animal starts shedding the virus, it becomes symptomatic within ten days. So if you're bitten, and the animal makes it through quarantine, then you know it didn't have rabies. Which is what everyone assumed with the cat, and with the stray dog that killed Janean and its new owner." She waved the paper at him again, so caught up in the new concept she had a hard time putting the words together. "In those visions...I kept hearing the term shedding rabies. And I couldn't understand it, because all rabies is shedding rabies. But what if this new rabies allows the animal to shed the virus in its saliva for a long time before it gets sick? It could infect people, go through quarantine, and be released...no one would ever know it was carrying the disease!"

  Masera just stared at her a moment, working it through, until he closed his eyes with the impact of it. "Parker's darkness took away our safety check. Every assumption health care professionals have made about the prevention and treatment of rabies would be invalid."

  "Is invalid," Brenna said. "There's no way to tell how many animals have the new rabies by now, not if Parker's been spreading it with his dogs. And not without new detection tests—all the current ones assume the animal has viral damage to the brain by the time it's shedding the disease."

  "Goddamn," Masera said with enough quiet vehemence to make Brenna wince.

  "I think you should be careful with that one around here," she said, and rolled her eyes toward the pasture. "We don't want to get on anyone's bad side."

  He gave a rueful grin. "Good point. But the ramifications—"

  "Will your friends in animal control listen to you? Or we could go straight to the CDC—" She cut herself off, thought about Sammi and her sudden reticence after the CDC had contacted her. "On the other hand, I think they already know they've got something new on their hands. The question is whether they know just what. We might be able to save them some time..."