A Feral Darkness (25 page)

      
Brenna turned on Sammi with vehemence. "
What did you say
?"

      
Startled, Sammi couldn't answer, clearly at a loss to know which of her words would provoke such a reaction. She sat on the chair with her mouth half-open, looking for a response.

      
"The shedding," Brenna said. "What did you say about the shedding?"

      
"Why, that's what they call it, I guess. When the dog has the virus in its saliva, and can pass it on. They say the virus is in its 'shedding' phase."

      
"So it does shed? The rabies we know about sheds?" Barely paying attention to the dog, Brenna eased it down from the table, having given up on the bow.

      
"There's only one rabies, the one we know about," Sammi said, looking completely baffled. "Brenna, are
you
all right?"

      
Brenna realized that Elizabeth, too, was staring at her, and that the Shepherd mix was squirming to get away from the tight grip she had on the noose leash. She felt her face flush, and she said, "I'm okay. Just...just upset, is all. Thinking about how often we get careless about checking for rabies tags when we're just clipping nails on a walk-in, you know?" Not the truth, but
a
truth. And pertinent enough.

      
Elizabeth slid her hand under the Lhasa and stood it on all four legs, pulling its hind legs out behind it slightly when it instantly tipped its rear to sit again. "You're right," she said. "We do. We'd better be more careful. Do all the right things. Even if we both
are
inoculated." One thing Pets! did right.

      
Sammi heaved herself to her feet, not a sign of her usual humor hidden anywhere on her face as she said, most pointedly, "
Janean
did all the right things."

~~~

The PePP news spread through the store as fast as any news, leaving the employees somber and the early customers baffled by the black bows that spread—thanks to Elizabeth and some black bow ribbon—on the PePP and sales floor associates' collars and buttons. Roger put a moratorium on all talk of rabies on store grounds, and worried to Brenna about a drop in bookings should cautious pet owners keep their animals at home. But a local death caused by rabies was newsworthy enough that by the time grooming work hit a short lull and Elizabeth and José grabbed the chance to eat, the customers came in looking for details.

      
"I don't have any real details," Brenna told the owners of Snifter the Brittany when they dropped him off for his bath and trim—not that a Brittany had a breed cut
per se
, but Snifter was gifted with a wild profusion of wispy hair on his back, head and ears, the sort that was best stripped off instead of clipped. "In fact," she added, "you probably know more. I haven't heard a single news report about it. Just what's hit the grapevine."

      
"They can't figure out how it happened. I have a friend who thinks it started with the dog pack somehow," Snifter's mother said. "But on the radio they say that PePP has logs for all their animals, and that they keep strict track of the shots and quarantines."

      
"That's true," Brenna said, and gave them a pick-up time for the happy but chronically over-energized Snifter. José would be plenty wet by the time he washed the Brittany—and Brenna, with her hand, wasn't even going to try. She took the dog in the tub room and put him in one of the big bottom crates, and then just stood there, staring at him without even seeing the astonishingly hopeful look on his face as he shoved it into the upper corner, somehow expecting that instead of a bath they'd just have a good romp.

      
Of course they couldn't figure out how it had happened.
Because it shouldn't have happened
. It shouldn't have been possible.

      
Just like all the other things currently in her life that shouldn't be possible. Weird black hole moods that bounded in like Tigger from
Winnie the Pooh
, a stray with multiple ID tags—all of which led to non-existent records of one kind or another—startling visions—no, not visions, for she'd only ever
heard
them. Someone else's memories of words about death and shedding rabies.
Why
shedding
rabies, instead of just
rabies
?

      
And Gil Masera mixed up in it all, with his half-truths, his interest in a property newly re-occupied by men who might well be called thugs, his frighteningly complete knowledge of her.
His careful hands checking Druid the night Sunny died. His quiet words on the hill as Brenna sought to deal with Druid's fear.
His recognition of what she'd felt along with Druid in the lane. The demand that had so angered her, when he'd stepped over the line to grab her arm.
What did you
do
?
he'd said.

      
Maybe none of it was related. Maybe she was going crazy, and Masera just happened to stumble into it, to add to it. Brenna found herself at the tub, her forehead resting on her crossed wrists atop the cool porcelain.
God, how am I supposed to sort it all out?

      
And that, she realized suddenly, was more than a frustrated inner cry. It was a prayer, as true a prayer as she'd ever said.

      
Except she had no idea which god she was talking to. The God she'd grown up with, the one she'd been raised to believe in as the only god? Or the ancient, forgotten god who once seemed to have answered a heartfelt child's plea, and whom she thought of as dwelling at the very spring where Druid's weird tracks appeared?

      
She didn't know.
Brenna Lynn, good little Christian girl, and she didn't know.
The wrath of God strike her down or not, she
didn't know
.

      
And if she didn't know
that
, how could she know anything?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CHAPTER 11
SOWELU
Guiding Forces
The busy days usually went quickly, but not this one. This one passed in a strange timelessness, and even when things got hectic—a dog on the table, the phone tucked under her chin, a customer waiting at the counter and Elizabeth gone for the day—Brenna operated in a strangely dissociated way, as though her soul were dazed and nothing else could touch her.

      
She managed time for a phone call to the church she hadn't attended for several years, the small but healthy little congregation in which she'd grown up. The one her mother still made a point to attend on Easter and Christmas, although she spent her other Sunday mornings in the barely denominational services provided by Sunset Village. Yes, the pastor would be there in the late afternoon, keeping office hours before the evening youth group. Yes, he'd see her.

      
"Brenna Fallon," he said, when she walked down the center aisle of the square sanctuary, plain but for one set of astonishing stained glass windows above the pulpit. He wore street casual clothes, a soft grey sweater over slacks, and his hair had completed the journey to silvery white since she'd last seen him. How many years ago? The year she'd graduated from high school and watched most of her friends journey away to one college or another?

      
"Reverend Dayne," she said, and then, because there didn't seem to be any other way to start, added the expected. "It's been a long time."

      
"Too long," he said, as though he were finishing some secret code exchange necessary before they could discuss anything else. He rearranged the candles on the table set before the pulpit, and she realized that it must have been a communion Sunday. That somehow made her long absence worse. And then he smiled, and said, "But I can't imagine you called me after all this time just to make small talk."

      
"No," she said, and jammed her hands into her pockets. "Though I have to admit it makes it easier to sneak up on what I've really got on my mind."

      
His smile this time seemed more genuine; he gestured at the front pew. Square backed, barely padded seats...she'd never understood why they weren't more comfortable. "To keep people awake," Russell had told her once when they were children, and received instant admonishment. Now, with years of perspective behind her, Brenna couldn't help but wonder if he'd been right.

      
She didn't need any help staying awake through this conversation. But she sat anyway.

      
"You look tired," the pastor said, sitting next to her but far enough away that they could turn toward one another, carry on a conversation without bumping knees. "I heard about the young woman who died. You knew her, I imagine. Is that why you're here?"

      
"No," Brenna said, but then stopped. Without Janean's death, would her thoughts have reached this point? "Maybe," she amended. "More like...the last straw." She took a moment to arrange her thoughts, and found she wasn't any more sure of her starting place than before. Slowly, she said, "We both know I haven't been here for years. And I know that a faith is more active when you stay joined with a community, but just because you're not going to church doesn't mean it's not
there
." She hesitated, waiting for some reaction on his part. Any sign of judgment at this early point, and she sure wasn't going any further.

      
But he gave her none of that. Instead he gave her a faint smile, and a nod. "People take their faith to them in different ways," he said. "Some people aren't as comfortable with group worship. I happen to think it offers a necessary support. Now, if I were a Catholic priest, you can imagine that my response would be quite different."

      
"It's a good thing I was brought up Presbyterian, then, isn't it?" Brenna said, acerbically enough to raise his eyebrows. She gave a chagrined shrug and let it go. "The point is...the reason I'm here...is that lately I've been looking at some of the other major religions—non-Christian religions. Non-Yahweh, even. And if you go beyond the god-ness of it, the philosophies seem to have as many good things to say as Jesus in any red-line Bible."

      
"Ah," Reverend Dayne said, sitting to put his arm along the back of the pew, relaxing a little now that he knew the gist of the issue. "I feel obliged to say, Brenna, that this is just the kind of subject we discuss in our women's religious study group."

      
"There's a women's religious study group?" Brenna said, surprised and unable to remember any such thing.

      
Amused, he said, "Things do change. And as we've noted, it
has
—"

      
"—been a long time," Brenna finished. "And that's why I'm here. Now. Asking you." A women's study group might actually hold some interest for her, but it wouldn't help her
now
.