WereHuman - The Witch's Daughter: Consortium Battle book 1 (Wyrdos)

by Gwendolyn Druyor

  “I’ll have Bailey throw some dinner together.”

  Clark turned from dropping the gate. “Uh oh.”

  “We’ll talk when you get home. Bye, Thomas.” Sher took Laylea into the garage. “Bailey, inside.”

  Bailey pulled the carriage door closed and followed her. She set Laylea on the center island. They had taped a pad of paper on the counter and collected pencils from the Putt Putt in Hatch. Laylea picked up one of the pencils in her teeth.

  She wrote pairilus flight and turned her big brown puppy dog eyes up to Sher.

  Sher set the kettle on the stove. “Thank you. Two things to talk about.”

  Bailey shut the door and hustled to the pantry. He took a snake of felt-wrapped rice bags and stuck it in the microwave. Sher planted herself at the end of the island facing Bailey and Laylea.

  “First,” she began, “how was the powwow?”

  Went ice skating! Judah and Flower took me this morning. My fault we’re late.

  “Not the storm?” Bailey transferred his sandwich fixings to the island.

  Sher transferred the fixings back to the fridge. “If you’re hungry, start dinner.”

  Whether wasn’t bad in the air. Everyone worked together to dig out a runway.

  Sher held Laylea’s chin with her hand. “Are you just trying to keep Clark out of trouble?”

  No. He was never worried.

  Bailey stole a spoonful of peanut butter before his mother got to it. “How many times did you throw up?”

  2

  “They hit the storm.” He snagged the bowl of cherries from the fridge along with an armload of veggies.

  Laylea growled at her brother. Maggie is woried about Jay playing “catch and releese.”

  “He’s catching CF and not reconditioning them?”

  Sending them back.

  Sher took the cutting board down. Why would Jay send any of Trask’s victims back to her?

  Maggie said he dosent know she knows. She gave us the idea to go ice skating. She almost fell on her butt. Laylea barked through the pencil. Mom! Put a carpet on your scale!

  Sher looked away from dicing garlic when the scratching stopped.

  “At the clinic? Why?”

  Laylea’s writing degraded with speed. The skale is skary. It’s slippery and cold.

  “A carpet would throw off the weight.”

  Bailey took the garlic. “I can recalibrate it for you.”

  “Really? Doesn’t that take math?” Sher stood. “Laylea, anything else you need to tell us about the trip?

  Tons!

  “Too bad. Let’s talk about you two. Bailey, you’ve already figured out you’re on D I N N E R duty.”

  Woodford barked. He jumped up from his bed, wagging his tail. Sher dropped her head into a hand.

  “When did he learn to spell that?”

  Laylea sang. She wrote, SMRT.

  “And you are not getting any more flying lessons until you can spell every word on this list.” Sher pulled out Laylea’s red-lined spelling test. She took the pencil and added perilous, worried, release, scale, scary, and smart at the bottom. “Every single one of these words came from books you’ve already read.”

  Laylea ducked her head, her ears pasted to her skull.

  “Bailey, you will complete every single one of your math assignments, by yourself, AND pass a retest before Thomas is allowed over again.”

  “Mom. You’re punishing Thomas too.”

  “Poor Thomas. He’s suffering because you let your sister do your homework.” Sher hid her pleasure at watching her little cheater pulling food and pans from the cupboards without looking at a recipe. “You will both be doing your schoolwork in the dining room or in here. And your dad and I will be keeping a closer eye on things.” She sat at the counter. “Laylea, since you find math so easy, you’re going to start studying physics.”

  Bailey groaned and pretended to barf over the sink. Laylea kept her head down but her tail gave away her excitement.

  “While you, my son, will be adding canine anatomy to your official biology homework.”

  The microwave dinged. Laylea and Woodford both automatically looked at it. Bailey detoured to pull the rice snake out and tossed it to his mother. Sher lifted Laylea into her lap. She wrapped the warm cloth around her hips and kissed her head.

  “Please stop helping your brother cheat.”

  Laylea barked once. Curled up with her muzzle on the mom’s hand, watching her big brother cook, she wondered if any of her litter brothers had gotten as lucky as she had.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Trask came into the office, turning completely to close the door behind her and take a moment to regain her calm. She ran both hands over her scars, fixed her hair, her skirt, and turned to push brusquely past the privacy curtain, only to stop short. She froze facing the angry muzzle of a ten pound chocolate colored mutt. It wore a harness connected to a leg of the desk by what appeared to be the chain of a ship’s anchor. It stood with front legs spread, back legs crouched as it decided whether or not to pounce from the top of the desk.

  Everything that should have been on the desk was now on the floor except for a classified folder with its contents spread across the desk, Walter’s blotter, and her gifted legal pad flipped open to a page covered in penciled redactions. Her monitor had hit her chair leaving glass shards on the seat before falling to swing from its cord just over the floor. Trask looked for the hated buffalo and was momentarily cheered to see it had flown all the way to the window and was tangled in the bird curtains’ draw chain. Then she looked back at the tiny bared teeth in front of her and the smile faded.

  The click of a code being entered on the other side of the door was followed by Walter striding past the curtain with a long pole in his hand.

  “You’ve met Bayard. And how are you getting on?”

  The dog finally decided to risk it and pounce. He leaped from the desk at Trask. Even as the chain stopped him short, Walter caught him and slipped the loop of the dogcatcher’s pole over his neck. Before Bayard could get his teeth into Walter’s hand, the man threw himself backwards and held Bayard at the length of the pole.

  “Bayard is one of my missing subjects. The runt, I’m praying.”

  “Do they get nicer when they’re bigger?”

  “Smarter, I hope.”

  Trask smoothed her skirt modestly as best she could on the floor where she’d fallen. “It’s trying to kill you at the moment. It can’t be that dumb.”

  The dog stopped snapping at Walter for a moment and turned to glance at Trask at this remark. Walter took the moment to roll onto his knees and Bayard turned his growl back at the Therian researcher.

  “I’m trying to give you a better life, Bayard. They were putting you in danger. Just look at you. You’re covered in scars.” Walter spoke in a sweet voice as he duck-walked over to the foot of the desk.

  “Where did you find him?” Trask resigned herself to having a conversation while sitting on the floor.

  Walter kept Bayard at a distance, pushing him back with the pole as he moved forward. Trask saw this and scootched back from where she had fallen. She reached the door before she stopped, the privacy curtain bunched on her head. She shoved it aside and halfheartedly tried to fix her destroyed coiffure as Walter unhooked the chain from the desk leg and gently dragged the dog, speaking lovingly to it, over to where he attached the chain to the lowest handle of the farthest file cabinet. Trask smirked. Even the tiny dog could easily rip the handle from the wood of that cabinet.

  Walter took a moment to breathe once he had the chain moved. “We found him in a town not far from Hatch.”

  “Hatch, that’s where you found the bicycle shop Rhea was hiding them in before she got the drop on you again.”

  “Yes.” Walter held the little dog still with the pole as he edged along the file cabinets and back toward the door. He handed the long handle of the dog pole to Trask. “Twist it as you hold it to keep the loop closed. But pull him fo
rward a bit like this so that he’s at the end of the chain.”

  Trask slipped off her shoes. She rolled to her knees and took the pole in both hands. Walter kept a hand on it while he used the other to fish in the pocket of his vest. He took out a syringe, uncapping it with his teeth as he left Trask.

  “She’d dumped him at the fire station. They have a sign on the front door that says Don’t abandon your baby. Safe Surrender. That’s where Rhea left him.” Walter laughed a moment.

  The dog lunged at him but Trask pulled on the pole and Walter safely circled around Bayard. The dog could only stare at him from the corner of his eye as Trask held him tightly at the length of the chain. Walter got next to the dog, trusting Trask to keep his head controlled. “The firefighters kept him as their mascot. He didn’t even have a home, sleeping at the firehouse and going on calls with them. That’s what all the scars are from, aren’t they, my precious? Those men did not take good care of my little boy.” He stuck the syringe in Bayard’s haunches and emptied it. The dog fell into a forced sleep, his lips snarling to the very end.

  Trask held the dog pole tight until Walter tugged it from her hands.

  “We had a bit of a witness problem when we took Bayard.” He pulled the loop over the dog’s head, unclipped the chain from the harness and scooped Bayard into his arms to lay him on the desk while he straightened the office up. He flinched when he swept the redacted legal pad off his blotter to make room.

  Trask let him clean. “You mean you did some recruiting.”

  “I’ve named him Felix.”

  “I thought its name was Bayard.”

  “What?” Walter looked up from his examination of the buffalo. “Not the dog. The volunteer. Dr. Jones claimed him.”

  Trask slowly stood and straightened herself. “Volunteers in my program do not get names. We’ve discussed this.”

  She looked at the still form on her desk. The dog was more appealing unconscious. For one, his teeth were hidden. He had shaggy brown fur except for his spotted back left paw and a tuft of white on his right ear. The ears were too long for the face, his body a bit too sturdy for his short legs. He had no extra fat on him though he did have quite a few scars. His tail was cut short but not short enough to be fashionable in the AKC crowd.

  “Nicole and I decided to share the volunteer. She thought a two hundred series erasure would be the best base for what we plan.” He lifted her monitor back onto the desk and unplugged it. “Division four is closest to my kennels and she says a level four instinctual conditioning would be appropriate to the basic physical reboot my division will oversee.”

  Once she’d gotten her hair in place, Trask circled the far side of her desk chair and leaned over the monitor to gather the strewn papers on her desk back into the folder labeled Gamma Subject Intake Profile.

  “Congratulations on your recovery.” She glanced over the still body. “I hope he’s everything you’ve hoped for. I’ll go oversee 244’s intake.”

  Walter didn’t stop cleaning. “Felix 244, please.”

  Trask tucked the folder under her arm. “Will you be putting Bayard in the kennels before he wakes?”

  “For bonding, it’s best he stay near me.”

  Trask crossed to the door. “I’ll have a crate delivered. You can keep him in our office only if he’s inside the cage when he’s conscious. Should he undergo a successful personality transplant we can revisit the arrangement. I will see that Felix 244 is being well cared for and then I’ll be debriefing Jones.” She pulled the privacy curtain closed behind her.

  Trask paused by the mirror to check her hair. A strange expression curled up the corners of her mouth. Trask was happy Walter had returned to his unbearable old self.

  The Director flipped to a set of shots showing Walter’s yellow college-ruled legal pad. Walter never stayed within the lines. The pages were covered with doodles wherever notes weren’t scrawled in his prescription-quality handwriting. The Director focused on three blackened pages. Notes from his previous trip with Dr. Jones into the mountain villages. Notes on directions. An address. The name Laylea, repeated multiple times. Sketches of a woman’s face and of a dog. All violently scratched out. When reviewing his notes, Walter had not transcribed these pages. He’d flipped past these three pages as if they didn’t exist. The pad sat on his desk blotter, untouched for over a year. Organized clutter continued to rule the blotter side of the partner desk everywhere around the legal pad. Until the chaos of Bayard, the pad itself rested ignored as if covered by a force field.

  The Director combined the three cleaned images with the redacted originals onto a screen in his peripheral vision and pinned them there for the next hour to let his unconscious mind consider the conundrum yet again. His conscious mind moved on to the more mundane task of reviewing possible scientific renegades spotted through phone call and text data mined from the University of Chicago’s student roster. This job had been made immeasurably tougher by a recent Second City sketch on bioterrorism. A little personal recruiting trip might refresh the bioresearch department’s selections, solve the lack of qualified scientists problem, and satisfy his doctor’s insistent that he get outside more. He opened a link to his assistant, then remembered how cold it was in Chicago, and shut it down again.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Dinner’s ready. Laylea, go get everyone.”

  Laylea lifted her nose. She peeled an eye open. Bailey stood poised with his wooden spoon over the rice pot. Food was ready. He had a working voice box. She barked twice without opening her mouth and tucked her nose back into her belly.

  “Laylea, wake up,” Bailey crooned through her dream. She flicked an ear at him.

  “Laylea, you caught the rabbit and we made sausage,” he tried again. Laylea rubbed at her nose with a paw. She smelled meaty goodness.

  Her eyes popped open. Bailey held a hunk of sausage and three triangles of zucchini in front of her. Laylea snatched them. And burnt her mouth. She sat up and let the food dribble out to the red vinyl seat of her kitchen stool.

  “Hot?” Bailey grinned.

  Laylea barked. She looked around the kitchen. The mom had been cooking when she went to sleep. Her apron was still missing from its hook. Davis’ letter was also still sitting on the island, unopened. Laylea stood up and tapped it with a paw.

  “He’s loving Northwestern. Parker’s asked his girlfriend to marry him. She’s asked him to quit football. There’s nothing in the letter I can’t guess.”

  Laylea barked twice and pushed the letter at him.

  Bailey slapped a hand down to keep the white envelope from sliding off the countertop. “The letter ends thank you for saving my life and includes a picture of his newest leg.” Bailey kept his eyes down, on the return address. “Your sausage is getting cold.” He stuck the letter in his apron pocket and turned back to the stove.

  Laylea ate the food and licked her stool clean. She hopped down the three steps and ran off to find the parents.

  Clark and Woodford dashed into the kitchen. Woodford padded over to Bailey while Clark hid beside the door. He jumped out when Sher came in carrying Laylea and dipped them. Sher and Laylea both protested and kissed him.

  “Easy there, Captain. Lee’s having a rough day.” Sher guarded Laylea’s hip with an arm as Clark spun them up out of the kiss.

  “The cold weather makes her limp.”

  “The cold contracts the muscles and that aggravates her damaged nerves.” Sher massaged the joint. “If only you were human, Lee. I could make you heal yourself.” Sher sunk into her thoughts. She stood by the pantry, massaging Laylea, and looking a million miles away.

  “Mom?” Bailey offered her the spoon.

  “I got this, kid.” Clark kissed Laylea’s head and took her from his wife. “Sustenance makes brain work better, woman.”

  Sher blinked. She didn’t laugh but she managed to help Bailey serve up the human’s sausage and vegetables over rice while the dad set Laylea on the food mat beside Woodford. He dished up
kibble for both of them and took their bowls to the stove. Bailey added a spoonful of juice and a piece of sausage to each.

  The humans settled around the island counter. Throughout dinner, Clark accidentally dropped pieces of squash into Laylea’s bowl. Woodford considered vegetables on par with poison. Normally Sher would have objected to feeding Laylea from the table, but she didn’t say a word. Clark stole a piece of zucchini from her plate to confirm her absence.

  “Well, Mom’s on a different planet.”

  Bailey didn’t miss a beat. “Mom’s from a different planet.”

  “Be nice now. We’re all weirdos sometimes.”

  Bailey shoveled food into his mouth before returning, “Or all the time.”

  Clark was finding the teenage years to be just as difficult as advertised. Ever the Pollyanna, he trudged onward.

  “We’re thinking of going to the cabin for a weekend to do some repairs. What do you say we start training? See what you can do.”

  “I’ve got marching band every weekend.”

  Clark choked back his laugh. “Every weekend?”

  “Yeah, it’s competition season. Not like Foothills High has a backup tuba.”

  “I get that.” He wiped his mouth. “I get that. Not many kids can carry a tuba and march at the same time.”

  “Yeah, anyone can. Just no one else plays tuba at my school.”

  The three ate in silence. Bailey took a couple pieces of the squash Clark had pushed to the side of his plate. Sher ate but with her eyes focused on a space deep inside her own mind.

  “Okay kid.” Clark tossed the last squash slices into Laylea’s bowl and set down his fork. “Do you know what’s going on with Mom?”

  “No.”

  Clark looked down at Laylea. She tilted her head at him.

  Clark took his glass to the sink for more water. On his way back he bent and poured some into the dogs’ bowl. “You don’t know what’s going on with Mom?”

  Laylea licked her muzzle. She trotted over to the Magic Slate they’d taped to the ground. Using a claw she scratched out new tek? Early warning lights?