A Feral Darkness (35 page)

      
"The pit bulls," Brenna said. "Fighting dogs."

      
"Yes," Eztebe said. "Not that I know things so well over here, but I see them on the T.V."

      
"He said he wasn't going to fight the dogs." Brenna shifted the pack again, debated whether to shed it altogether.

      
"There, I was right. You
do
know things."

      
"No, I knew
a
thing. That was it. What on earth makes you think he talks to me?"

      
Eztebe shrugged again, a smaller response that revealed something of his despair over it all. "The truth is...I do not know that he does. If I were less worried, I would never bother you. But my brother is in trouble, I think, so I do everything I can think of. He has spent time with you. He points you out at the store. He mentions your name at home. So, I think of you."

      
"Is he in trouble so often?" Her shoulders won; Brenna slipped the pack to the ground and rested it against her leg.

      
Eztebe gave her a wry smile. "He is in trouble never. That is why it worries me so much to think that now, he is." He hesitated, and drummed his fingers on the top of the car. Finally he said, "And also, he tells me you have a place of power on your land." He glanced at her, a wary look, as though he thought Masera had betrayed a confidence to tell him and now he was betraying Masera to reveal that he knew.

      
And Brenna thought that Masera had, and that Eztebe was.

      
She took a deep breath, and forced the sudden tension from her body, right out her fingers and toes. It didn't work. With much effort, she unclenched her hands. Masera, she would yell at. She would let
him
take Eztebe to task, if he chose.

      
"I thought that might be part of it," Eztebe said, growing bold in her silence.

      
"I don't think so." Brenna couldn't help an involuntary glance at the pasture, the front part of which ran along the road, although the spring was not visible from here. "There
is
something going on. Frankly, Eztebe, there's a hell of a lot going on, and I'm not sure I can put any of it together. But I can tell you that he keeps things from me, too. Whatever he's up to, it's something else besides what he's found in my pasture and how he's helped me with my dog."

      
"Funny-looking dog," he said, and grinned at her, a woefully transparent—if earnest—attempt to earn back her good will. "But in a strange way, very handsome."

      
"He's a wonderful dog," Brenna said, having grown used to Druid's short legs and long body and hardly even registering Eztebe's initial, poking-fun comment. A Corgi
was
an odd sight to those who'd never seen one before. Eztebe, she assumed, had seen Druid at the store. "But even the way he came to me is part of the strangeness." She shook her head. "Look, I'd tell you what I knew if I
knew
anything. But you know, Masera—"

      
"Iban," said Eztebe, eyebrows raised. "If he calls you Brenna, in this country, surely you are right to call him Iban."

      
"Only if I want to," Brenna said, pointedly enough to evince a flinch from Eztebe. "What I was saying was, he doesn't owe me anything. He has less reason to tell me any of his secrets than he has to tell his own brother. And he hasn't."

      
He raised an eyebrow at her. "You might think less of yourself than you should. Or maybe you think more of me. Iban and I have not been close. We care, but our lives have been spent apart since he left Euskal Herria. It is a funny thing, too. He had more time with our mother when she allowed herself to work; he had the time to learn of what she knew. He has the more feel for it. But it is he who went away, and I who stayed."

      
"Your mother doesn't...work...anymore?"

      
Eztebe glanced away. He was going to say something he was afraid she'd find offensive, then; she'd already learned that of him. Just the opposite of Masera, who deliberately looked you right in the eye.
Watching to see if you had the nerve to bite back at him
, she realized, and recalling that the first time, she'd all but chased him out of the room. For some reason it made her want to smile—but Eztebe wouldn't have understood, so she didn't. She listened to him instead. "My father wished not. She has her land, he says, but he is the one to work in the family. She only ever wanted to help people, but...it is not always a safe thing, to be sorgin, and she agreed to his wishes. I was half-grown, then."

      
Brenna could feel nothing but the sadness of that, although Eztebe seemed oblivious enough, in his strange mix of Old World upbringing and New World awareness. "Maybe that's why Masera left," she said. "So he wouldn't have to watch her not do what sounds so important to her."

      
He jerked his gaze back to her, startled. "Maybe that is so."

      
"And what about you?" she said, turning the tables on him. He'd thought to get information from her; let him provide the same for her. She looked over to her pasture. "What do you think about the place of power by my spring? What do
you
think of whatever I connected with? Is it God? Is it
a
god? Is it blasphemy?"

      
At first it looked like he wasn't going to answer, that he'd just shrug her off. Then he said, "It bothers you."

      
Brenna said dryly, "Only intensely."

      
"Different people think different things," he said, still sounding reluctant—as though it were private. Or maybe that he didn't really expect her to truly understand, no matter what he said. "There are churches thinking Yainko commands smaller powers with personalities. That they act out His will on Earth. Angels, they say."

      
"Angels..." Brenna said. Angels. She'd never gone for the whole angel craze herself, not the cutesie ones or the New Age ones or the sappy ones on TV. But
angel
was just a term; the various modern perceptions sprang from the culture dealing with them. Angels were messengers and conduits...and if they'd been present in a culture not yet exposed to a One God, then what would keep people from considering the messengers to be gods themselves? To name them and discover their likes and their affinities...to touch them, and give them an easy way to touch back.

      
Mars Nodens, in her pasture
.

      
Part of her wanted to weep with relief.

      
Eztebe looked like his brother then, watching her with tight scrutiny, his eyes even taking on the hooded gaze Masera took on when something struck him as significant—or when he was about to offer some subtle dare or challenge. Eztebe, she thought, was daring her to say something to belittle his comments, his people...his mother.

      
"Thank you," she said, her voice low and edged with the emotion he'd brought her. Given her, really, like a gift.

      
He looked away, once again non-confrontational—and from his smile, gratified. "You should meet my ama—my mother—maybe."

      
Brenna grinned. "She should see my pasture, maybe."

      
"Maybe." He slid back inside the car, so she had to bend to the open passenger window to hear him. "I hope you'll tell me if you learn anything. Maybe with the two of us, we can stop Iban from his trouble."

      
"I don't think he'll ever tell me anything he doesn't specifically choose to tell me," Brenna said. "But I'll let you know. It'll be worth it, don't you think, to see the look on his face if I call and ask to speak to you?"

      
"I promise to describe it to you."

      
Brenna stepped away from the car and watched it pull away, waiting until it was out of sight before reaching for her backpack. Eztebe had eased her mind on some counts...and roiled it on others.

      
Then again, where Masera was involved, there was nothing new about that.

~~~

Life got quiet.

      
Almost too quiet, with such an absence of the strange events that had so bombarded her life that she began to doubt herself—what she'd experienced, the conclusions she'd been struggling toward. If it had all been real and true, would it suddenly have
stopped
?

      
On the other hand, with the grooming schedule she was holding down, having quiet in the rest of her life was undeniably a mercy. She arrived from home work each day exhausted in body, mind, and soul, and with nothing left over for inexplicable crises, though she rescheduled her dinner date with her mother, enjoyed her Aunt Ada's recent adventures in flirtation on a short bus tour of the Finger Lakes country, planted tomatoes in indoor flats, and put peas into the ground. Sunny's death receded to a poignant ache and Druid became her shadow. More importantly, he stopped having fits. He whined as he chewed his bones, he stood in the middle of the den and whined when there was nothing to whine about, but he didn't have fits.

      
At least, not when she didn't push him into it at the spring. Even then...he started to listen to her through his fear; the flinging and screaming and cursing shortened in duration each time. Then she'd put him downhill with the latest greasy basted shank bone she'd bought for just this purpose, and she'd sit by the spring and hope to touch something of that which she'd felt here before. It didn't happen, but the meditative time soothed her.

      
She never saw Parker. She didn't know if he'd taken her seriously or if he just came to the spring when he'd discovered she didn't. As Masera had pointed out, her work schedule was easy enough to divine, especially with Mickey in the loop.

      
And now that she'd come to recognize the darkness, it all but disappeared. Sometimes she thought she felt its brief touch...and sometimes she thought she'd been standing in a draft. Perhaps Emily felt her lack of urgency, for she apologetically mentioned that the girls were deeply buried in a 4-H project, and that unless Brenna was frantic for the information, it'd be a few more days before they could wield their Internet know-how on Brenna's request for information on Mars Nodens.

      
Brenna had to admit that she wasn't frantic for anything but more Pets! groomers.

      
Elizabeth visited the store a couple of times, and after a week and half talked about returning to man the counter. Brenna narrowed the groomer applicants down and scheduled interviews, and the Pets! management, although typically failing to address the issue directly with her, kept their hands off the schedule book. She saw Masera at the store, and sometimes he stopped by the grooming room just in time to help her with an especially unruly creature. He didn't question her methods any longer—and that, she thought, spoke more to her about him than almost anything else he'd done. The fact of it dwelt inside her like something small and warm and waiting to hatch.

      
She kept his card in her wallet.

      
The thing that worried her most, that stuck in her mind as she carried the grooming workload and immersed herself in spring clean-up around the farm, finalizing another year of leasing the ten back acres for corn, marking the barn leaks and sags and walking the fence line to fix what she could and make note of the rest, was the look that often settled on Sammi's face, whether she was in the store for supplies or to oversee an adoption day. She was no longer talking about the man's death, was no longer talking about rabies at all. Brenna had the distinct feeling that she'd been warned to silence by authorities who didn't want a panic, although the incident had been announced on the news, along with the fact that the dog had been put down and its brain tested—positive, no surprise to anyone. It answered the question about where Janean had gotten the rabies, and with the dog dead, also officially ended the threat.