A Feral Darkness Part 3

And his eyes. Coming from a clean face, they looked softer, more open. Big love-me eyes that followed her every movement.

He's somebody else's dog.

Brenna gave a sudden sharp shake of her head. "Gotta figure out who owns him."

"Yeah," Elizabeth said, her voice knowing. "Better do it fast, too."

Brenna made a face at her, absently fingering the collar and its tags. No actual license; that didn't surprise her. An ID tag was what got a dog home again, and a license cost money to replace. Sunny didn't carry her license either, just the rabies and ID tags. She looked again at the rabies tag, still not quite sure what wasn't right about it, and the Lakeridge clinic name caught her eye. If the clinic kept track of which dog had what vaccine serial number, then . . .

The Cardigana"Champion Nuadha's Silver Druid with no silvera"decided she wasn't going to fuss with him anymore and eased his bottom down on the table. She kept an eye on him as she called the clinic, picking the number out from the emergency list by the phone. "Hi," she said when Donna, the receptionist, picked up the phone and identified herself. "Listen, I've got a stray here with one of your rabies tags. Can you identify the owner from the number?"

"If the tag isn't outdated. What's the number?"

Brenna gave Elizabeth a thumbs-up as the other groomer looked up from her work to eavesdrop, and held the tag so the engraving showed clearly in the light, reading off a five-digit number and waiting expectantly for the sound of Donna's fingers at the keyboard.

But Donna said, "You're missing one. There should be six numbers."

Brenna frowned. "Only five. They're all very clear; the tag looks practically new." Now that it's been cleaned. "And it's a young dog; he's probably on his first three-year shot." He was, she thought, at least that olda"past the first six months when they didn't give rabies, and then the year after the first rabies, which was only a one-year shot. But she wouldn't put him at much beyond a couple of years. His teeth were still white and strong, and his carriage that of a young dog. All the same, he was a well-developed adult, with masculine features and all his parts intact.

A show dog loaded with identification, and none of it could lead her to his owner.

Donna said, "I suppose you could bring the tag in; maybe one of the vet techs could make some sense of it. Unless you've got six numbers, I can't be of much help."

Brenna sighed. "Maybe I will," she said, but knew she wouldn't. If the tag was defective, there was no point. What was she going to do, ask them to search record by record? Ora" "Can you search your clients by breed?" she asked. "This is a Cardigan Welsh Corgi. You can't have many of those."

"We don't have any," Donna said. "We haven't, for several years. And we haven't done that kind of search before, but it might be possible. Tell you whata"leave your name and number, and let me get back to you. I'm going to have to sneak this into my schedule. And you said it was a young dog?"

"Male, young adult, tricolor," Brenna said, and gave Donna her name and home number. "He's in good shapea"he hasn't been on his own very long. And he's tagged as Champion Nuadha's Silver Druid. Have you ever heard of them?"

"You might search the Web," the woman said. "If you can find the kennel, the breeder should know who owns the dog now."

"Good idea," Brenna said, but upon hanging up she slumped back against the wall and stared at Druid. "You're not making this very easy." Search the Web . . . as if she had a computer, or even knew how to use one!

Emily.

Of course, Emily. Or to be more precise, Emily's daughters, who shared a computer and whose on-line time had been a subject of much discourse in the Brecken household, drawing even Emily's workaholic husband Sam into the fray.

"I can't tell if you're stumped, or if you've got bad answers," Elizabeth said.

"Stumped," Brenna said. "I'm going to make a few more calls from here, then go on back home. No point in spending my whole day on this." She'd call PePP, the local rescue group that showcased their adoptions at Pets! during the weekend, and the local animal controla"that way if anyone started calling around looking for the dog, they'd be directed to Brenna. And she would hope that Roger didn't come in and catch her making personal phone calls from the store phone.

Druid watcheda"he had settled into a couchant posture, with his short legs curled in front of his chest like a cat's, curved wrists gracefully meeting in the middlea"as the rescue group representative offered to take him in. "Oh, no," she told them in an off-hand and casual tone. "He's fine at my place, and he's been through enough change already." The animal control officer was out, as usuala"he must be especially busy with the dog pack situationa"but she left a message. And when she hung up the phone the final time she looked at Druid and said, "I hope you appreciate this."

Elizabeth snorted. She had traded the Springer for a Lhasa mix that bore a typically snubbed face and sausage body, and a nasty temper to boot. Elizabeth had the cat muzzle ready and waiting. "Yeah, right," she said. "As if they ever do. All they want is more food and a place under the covers." She gave Brenna a pointed look as she reached for the clippers to rough out the scissors cut. "And you better be careful not to give him any more than the food. I can see that look in your eye already."

Too late, Brenna thought, thinking of the night on the couch, of how contentedly he'd snuggled beside her. Of course, those circ.u.mstances had been special. She wasn't quite sure just what those circ.u.mstances were, other than strange and frightening, but they had certainly been out of the ordinary. The Cardi would sleep in the crate tonight. Or at the least, on the floor by the bed. "This is my not-enough-sleep look, nothing else," she said. Not a getting-attached-to-someone-else's-dog look. "And have you heard anything more about the feral dogs? Has animal control been able to break up the pack?"

Elizabeth shrugged. "I didn't see the news. Customers seem to think the dogs have been pretty active. That guy who's been around talking to Rogera"he seemed to know a lot about it, but he's not exactly what I'd call chatty."

"Or even friendly," Brenna said. "Although he was nice enough out in the parking lot until he realized I was a groomer."

"Can't make sense of that."

"Maybe it's just his nature," Brenna said. "Whatever. If you can get anything out of him, do it, okay? I'm right smack in the middle of the pack action, and I'd really like to know just how worried I should be." Come to think of it, it might be time to clean up her grandfather's old .22 and take a few test shots into the hill that followed the creek.

"What makes you think he'll talk to me?"

Brenna thought of the exchange in the parking lot and gave Elizabeth a wry smile. "Maybe he won't. But I'm pretty sure he won't be talking to me."

Chapter 5.

LAGUZ.

Water, That Which Conducts

Thnnck!

The .22-long bullet buried itself in the damp soil of the hill just to the right of her target, abruptly reminding Brenna that the sights on the old rifle were slightly off and she'd need to adjust for them. Which she did, and promptly shattered the bit of a stick she'd jammed into the ground as a target.

Not that she was far away from it, certainly not far enough to crow about her marksmans.h.i.+p. But if she ended up firing this thing, it would be at close range. And the real point to the exercise was to trigger the years of target plunking she'd done in her teens, to reengage her handling and safety practices.

Besides, although she counted herself lucky to have avoided Roger during her time at the store bathing Druid, she was happy enough to imagine him here on the hill in a Manager Effigy. She pumped the old sh.e.l.l out of the chamber and the new one in, and settled the rifle to her shoulder. Thnnck!

She found a certain satisfaction in solitary target shooting, especially with the relatively quiet .22. No big kick, no rendingly explosive noise, just sighting, shooting, and working the smooth pump for another round. The creek burbled behind her, glinting in the sun; the hill blocked out the rest of the world before her, and the breeze that played in her bangs could almosta"with some imaginationa"be called warm.

But she couldn't stay here forever. Aside from the fact that she had just run out of sh.e.l.ls, there was a lost dog waiting to go home, and she didn't imagine he was terribly happy to be crated while she was gone. She needed to get him and walk on over to Emily'sa"not close but the next house north, a newer home built on the edge of the Calkins' recently sold farmland lots. A quick phone call had put the girls onto the computer search, and with any luck they'd have the information she needed by evening.

She double-checked to make sure there was no sh.e.l.l in the chamber, pointed the gun at the ground, headed for the hilla"and stopped short. The old shrine, her hound's gravesite . . . she hadn't been there since the final snow had melted. So she walked along the hill instead, further out from the house, following the whimsical creek bed until the great oak loomed above her. Her tattered sneakers gave her perfect purchase in the gra.s.sy sod; twenty-four hours ago it would have been just the other side of muddy out here, but now she had nothing more than pleasantly soft ground beneath her feet. Up the hill she went, straight to the grave, where she set down the rifle and knelt, reminded of the first time she'd been allowed to shoot, and how the old hound had hung by her legs, always touching her, b.u.mping her . . . worried about her, as if the loud noise might harm her.

He'd been shot once; X-rays later in life had shown the birdshot still buried in his haunch. So he had had good reason to worrya"or so he must have felt.

She had loved him for it then. She loved him for it now. She shoved back the long sleeves of her hooded sweats.h.i.+rt and tenderly straightened the site marker, an arrangement of rocks chosen for their size and shape and which, at the time, she had put a great deal of effort into creating. They were just plain old rocks, nothing more, but it didn't really matter. All that mattered was that seeing them helped her to remember him.

Rocks straightened, she let her sleeves slip back down over the heels of her handsa"a hand-me-down from Russell, this one wasa"and placed one palm flat on the earth, remembering those years. And the years after them, when she had seemed practically able to speak to any dog that wandered by, to intuit their needs and the meanings of their slightest body language. Or that's how it had seemed at the time. At almost twenty-nine, she had a more jaded view of the world, and didn't particularly trust that things had been as she remembered them.

And all the same, she wished she could experience life on that level again. Simple. Not fraught with daily struggles just to make sure she could do her job safely and professionally. Being with dogs to be with them, and not ending up in adversarial relations.h.i.+ps with animals who spent the afternoon with her now and then and didn't want to be there at all.

"I love you, old hound," she told the gravesite, and pushed herself to her feet, brus.h.i.+ng off her damp knees, thinking of that terrible year when she had found the place desecrated, when her father had died and horror seemed to hang over this area for the rest of the year. Which didn't mean that the tiny trickle of a spring couldn't use a cleaning; it generally did. Leaves settled there, and the gra.s.ses grew long and bent over into it. Brenna moved over to tend it and stopped short, eyes narrowing.

Not a leaf, not a stick, not a single stray stem . . . she couldn't remember ever having seen it so . . . tidy. It looked as though someone had put giant lips to the spring from the other side and given a mighty puff, clearing away every stray bit of everything.

It made the tracks at the spring stand out rather starkly. Far too starkly for Brenna to miss. And after a youth spent tracking this critter and that on the farm just for the fun of it, far too starkly to mistake for the newly encroaching coyotes or, even less likely, fox.

Dog.

But not dog running across the area, or dog hanging around for a drink and making a mishmash of prints. Dog tracks coming from the spring, deep-set and clear in ground that was now dry enough to hold them that way, and heading for the creek. Digging deeply into the ground just at the spring, the way anything does when it's bolting into instant speed.

She followed them to the creeka"they weren't as clear where the gra.s.s thickened, just a tuft or two of sod out of place along the waya"where two deep prints showed how the dog had launched itself into the wide, relatively deep water. Not water over her head, but certainly over the top of any boots she might choose to wear, so she stopped there.

Dog on the run. Dog full of fear. Dog with Cardigan-sized prints.

Brenna went back to consider the spring.

Dog out of nowhere.

After a time she quit looking for answers where there weren't any, collected the gun, and returned to the house. There she had the middle section of the sub for dinner, fed the dogs, let Sunny hang out at the end of the longe line long enough to finish the dishes of the past few days, and then put Druid on a leash for the walk over to Emily's. The girls, she rightly thought, would love his silly long-bodied shape and his expressive ears, and until she had a better understanding of his puzzling responses, she'd rather have him with her than crated alone in her house.

The strong light of the day was finally fading when she presented herself at Emily's door and said, "What computer wonders have you wrought?" as Jill, the youngest, answered the door.

In response, Jill said, "Oh, he's so cuuute. But what happened to his legs?"

"That's how they're supposed to be," Brenna said, but she might as well not have bothered, as Jill leaned back and bellowed, "Marilee! Come and see Brenna's new dog!" Druid quailed at the sound, but then, so did Brenna.

"He's not mya"" she started, and gave up, because Marilee had arrived and both girls were on their knees, petting and kissing and making gooey admiring noises. "Here," she said, and handed them the leash. "Don't frighten him, d'you hear? He's been through a lot in the past few days."

Whatever it might have been.

Emily, a sheaf of papers in hand, leaned against the kitchen archway and nodded at her daughters. "They're okay with him?"

"Even if he has one of his . . . moments, he's not going to do anything to hurt them," Brenna said, repeating the rea.s.surance she'd given Emily on the phone. "If he was going to bite, he'd have nailed me by now." Given what she'd put him through, and how frightened he'd been at moments. Definitely not a fear-biter. Fear-freaker, now . . . that label, she'd paste on him. "I'd be more concerned about what two little girls could do to hima"if they weren't yours."

"Okay, you get points for that last bit," Emily said. "Come sit down. Want some soda?"

"Anything decaf," Brenna said. It was, after all, her day off. She took a seat at the table, in a kitchen that was the ant.i.thesis of her owna"too new to carry the hint of generations past, bright and open and airy. And peach-colored. Every time she came here, Brenna left with an impulse to paint her own kitchen, but when she got home she would realize again just how many other things needed attention, tooa"a new sink would have been outstandinga"and so never got around to any of it. "What'd you find out?"

"A whole lot of nothing, I'm afraid," Emily said, pulling a one-liter bottle of Sprite out of the refrigerator and hunting through the freezer for ice cube trays that actually held ice. "The girls were delighted to play detective for you, but they couldn't find any kennel with the name of Nuadha, no matter what the breed. They did find the Web site for the national Cardigan club, and emailed the contact person. You gotta love emaila"they got an answer just a few moments ago." She set a gla.s.s in front of Brenna, but her expression didn't hold any triumph. She sat across from Brenna and pulled the coated elastic band from her ponytail, only to regather her shoulder-length hair and confine it again.

"Don't tell me," Brenna said, and felt all of her hopes for an easy resolution to Druid's fate fade to nothingness. "They haven't heard of any such kennel, either."

"They suggested that it was a fanciful call name as opposed to the dog's actual kennel name."

"With champion at the front of it?"

Emily shrugged. "Don't ask me. I don't know anything about this sort of thing. Now, if you want to talk cross-st.i.tcha""

Brenna waved her to silence and Emily smirked. Any time Brenna became too full of jargon in her talk of dogs, Emilya"who cross-st.i.tched like a fiend and regularly sold patterns to st.i.tchwork magazinesa"interrupted with chatter of her own specialty. "Well, the point is that we aren't going to locate the owner through them. Or even through the Web, it seems."

"You really ought to get yourself a computer," Emily said. "You could keep business records on ita""

"What business records?" Brenna snorted.

"a"if you had your own business, and you'd be surprised what kind of resource the Web can be. You know the girls would be glad to show you how to use it, or you could go to the librarya"they run little cla.s.ses on using the Internet all the time."

"Yeah, yeah," Brenna said, by way of saying, you're right but we both know I'm not going to rush out and do anything about it. "Let me get this dog squared away first."

"Looks like that could be a while." Emily sipped her own soda, and raised an eyebrow at Brenna.

"Don't remind me. I'm going to be in trouble with this one, Em."

Emily shook her head. "I don't know why you keep breaking your heart, taking these dogs in. If you're going to do it, hand them straight over to animal control, why don't you? Quit pouring yourself into them and fixing all their woes only to have to give them up."

"If I didn't fix their woes, half of them wouldn't be able to find new homes. And the other half would be dead through animal control if I didn't hang on to them as long as I do, waiting for their owners."

"So you always say. But we both know animal control does a pretty good job, if the owners care enough to check around. I think you just like the excuse."

Brenna, at a loss for any cogent argument, stuck out her tongue. Things hadn't changed much, it seemed; that had always been her answer to Russell, also. Russell, older and teasing her about her useless mutts, about how he did things that mattereda"at the time, earning a letter on the school math team, already heading for his part-time job at the carpet store he had eventually bought out and expanded.

Not so many years between them, but a seemingly unbridgeable gap that had widened beyond repair the day he had found her with a new dog, a large, starving adolescent with a short, ruddy coat, handsome head, and what she'd immediately thought of as a permanent bad hair day because of the roughened hair on its back. He'd been more thoughtful, then, hadn't ribbed her or made fun of the animal, ugly in its emaciation despite its solid build and the injuries it had sustained. Injuries from human hands, which made her decide against looking for its former owners. In fact, after she had the dog fed up and responding happily to humankind again, he had casually mentioned he knew of a good home. She'd talked with the man, concurred, and placed the dog.

A year later, she had seen news of the dog's big win in a regional dog show. A Rhodesian Ridgeback, it was, and apparently quite a handsome one. But Brenna knew it couldn't be the dog the man claimed it to be, with the parentage and breeding behind it that he spoke of so glowingly in the printed interview. And Russell had just laughed. "His own dog got hit by a car," he said. "Yours was a perfect ringer. And where do you think I got the money for the junior prom? If you'd been more careful about reading the local weekly, you'd have known he lost the dog and could have had the money for yourself."

Her mother knew, if only she had been willing to see. And if her father had realized, he'd have done something, she was surea"but she couldn't bring herself to tell him and see it hurt him. So that was when she'd started reading up on breeds, a subject which hadn't truly mattered to someone who rescued dogs in whatever size, shape, and color they came to her. And that was when she stopped truly trusting her brother, who never understood her ire. "I never did anything wrong," he had told her. "I just sold him the dog. Not my business what he did with it."

No wonder she spent more time here than with her brother's family in town, and knew Emily's girls better than Russell's two boys.

The girls came clattering down the stairs and into the kitchen, Druid at their heelsa"leashlessa"and looking attentive and interested in all the little-girl things he'd been exposed to. Fas.h.i.+on dolls and stuffed animals . . . his fascinated expression led Brenna to decide on the spot that he hadn't been in a family with children, at least not girl children.

Nine-year-old Jill, perpetually chubby, freckled, and heading toward braces, held a brush in one hand and a comb in the other; Marileea"equally freckled but beginning to trade her baby fat for heighta"carried a surfeit of hair goodies, combs and elastics and a few things that Brenna couldn't even identify.

"Time for the ritual torture," Emily said. "It's what you deserve for coming over here and flaunting that hair in front of two little girls with short hair imposed upon them by their wicked mother."

"It's on my head, is all," Brenna said, but smiled. Emily's girls had no monopoly on their attentiveness; little girls too young to have been fully socialized often reached out to touch her hair in the store, usually with soft exclamations of delight.

"Hide it under a hat the next time," Emily responded, unruffled. "Go get her, my little hair stylists."

Already they were behind her, releasing her hair from its braid and finger combing it, as gentle as always.

"I just learned a new way to braid," Marilee said with enthusiasm. "It'll look so cool with hair this long. It's called a fishtail braid."

"Now that sounds attractive," Brenna said, but she slid down in the chair so she could relax, the groomer being groomed. If only half her own canine clients could learn to enjoy the tug and ma.s.sage of the process.

Of course, she wasn't sure she'd enjoy it nearly as much if she, too, had mats. But without them she enjoyed it well enough to drift away in thought, Druid dozing by her feet. At least, until the voices started up.

They came to her in a murmur, as though she were stuck in a verbal collage. Male and female, none of them familiar, expressing themselves in incomplete sentences as though they came from a low-volume television with someone hopping through channels. Druid twitched against her feet, dreaming, but her awareness of it didn't distract her from the voices. Authorities have labeled it shedding rabies, said a male voice, and another man found dead in the city said a woman. Vaccine and too late and then an official-sounding voice that said take your dog out and back again, please. A few jumbled commandsa"things like stay, Druid, it's only for a little while and Druid, no! And oddly, in a voice that seemed familiar, . . . local groomer Brenna Lynn Fallon succ.u.mbed todaya"

Brenna jerked alert, barely aware of the girls' exclamations that they hadn't thought they'd pulled her hair. What the h.e.l.l wasa"

And Druid jerked awake, looking dazed and disoriented. And then he looked at Brenna, and he screameda"a human sound no dog should ever voice. He flung himself backward, and even as Brenna would have grabbed for him, a dizzying vertigo clutched her; in the instant it took for solid ground to return, he was gone, and all three of the Brecken women, youngest to oldest, were staring wide-eyed at his wake.