A Feral Darkness (4 page)

      
With deliberate effort, she put that part of her day behind her, and redirected her thoughts to more pleasant things. The sub sandwich and a nice cold soda, and then a long soak in the claw-footed tub that hunkered in the corner of the recently remodeled bathroom. She hadn't had any choice about that new work, not when a long-undetected leak sent the toilet through the floor and into the basement, but she was glad for the results—fresh, desert rose tile, the old tub resurfaced, plenty of shelves, and faucets it was actually possible to turn off.

      
Despite the upkeep she was glad her brother Russell hadn't wanted the farm, though he had maintained his perceived first claim as son and oldest child even as he'd airily given it up. She needed it more than he, he'd said—he could make his own way.

      
She'd never been sure why he had thought she couldn't.

      
Sub. Soda. Soak. She mounted the steps to the half-enclosed front porch—vertical slats below the handrail, open above—making the habitual observation that the third one sank a little too easily beneath her weight and ought to be replaced. With the sub, her coat, the cargo bag that served as a purse and carryall, and her mail jammed under one arm, she reached for the porch door.

      
Something whined.

      
Feral dogs
.
Roaming pack at the boiling point
.

      
Something whined
on the porch
.

      
Brenna froze, her hand on the door latch.
Yank it open, bolt inside
—but any sudden movement could trigger an angry dog—or worse, a frightened dog, unwittingly trapped in the corner of her porch.
Open the door
slowly
and slip inside
—but any retreat could trigger excited prey instincts.
Turn and face it
—but that could be seen as a challenge.

      
For pity's sake, just stand here indefinitely, until this sub is so stale you can beat the creature to death with it
.

      
It wasn't a pack of whines, it was a single whine. It wasn't an eager whine, it was a distressed whimper. Intermittent, with no sound of movement, no tick of claw against the hard painted wood.

      
Brenna turned around.

      
At first she saw nothing, until, blinking in the darkness, she became convinced that there was nothing to see. That it hadn't been
on
the porch, but under it, and now had fled. And then it whimpered and stirred, and she saw the faint sheen of an eye reflecting the dim night light from the other side of the door.

      
As eyes went, they weren't terribly far from the ground.

      
"Hey," she said to it, a low-key and non-committal response, just to lob the ball back into its court again. But there was no more sound forthcoming, and she opened the door behind her, snaked her arm around to feel the wall until she hit the light switch, and squinted in anticipation of the bare overhead bulb.

      
The dog had had no such warning; when the light blazed, it started, jumping into a jerky flight—but losing courage and freezing up instead. Brenna had all the time in the world to look it over—and she still wasn't sure what she'd found.

      
Ears, that was for sure. Big ears, upright like a German Shepherd's, and just as large as a Shepherd's even though the dog's head wouldn't reach her knee, not even if it had been standing alertly instead of cowering, its short legs spraddled out and its toenails digging into the porch as though at any moment it might go flying off the face of the earth from centrifugal force. She could almost hear its terror, its indecision, a fast babble of
runrunrun
and
which way should I go, whichwaywhichway
and
don't move, don't move, can't be seen if I don't move
.

      
What it was missing in length of leg it made up in length of body, but other than that the details were completely obscured in the stark chiaroscuro light and shadows of the overhead and the thick, all-encompassing coat of gritty dark mud soaking into the dog's coat.

      
Cardigan Welsh Corgi, she could tell that much. Nothing else had all that ear and so little leg—with the possible exception of a dock-tailed Pembroke Corgi, the queen's choice of breed—but she could quite clearly see a tail, flung out behind like a rudder, the quiver of it the only movement in the dog's body. Male dog, another glimpse told her.

      
Brenna didn't move. The dog didn't move. Sunny barked a query, her voice sweet enough to drive a tree hunter to tears, and the dog whimpered again, a sound that seemed to have been torn right out from the depths of his body.

      
This is starting to get more than silly
. He wasn't going to hurt her; she couldn't stand there all night. Her feet hurt, the tub called, and some ill-advised soul had left a rare-breed dog loose on the turf of a roaming dog pack. "Look," she said to the dog, a matter-of-fact tone on the soothing side, "why don't you just—"

      
And he screamed—he
screamed
—and somehow flipped his long body around and flung himself over the side of the porch. Even having seen it, Brenna had no idea how he'd managed. "Damn," she said into the darkness, straightening and only then realizing she'd been slightly crouched, and that her back hurt along with the rest of her tired parts.

      
She didn't even think about going after him. Chase
that
? No point. She would eat, bathe, and go to bed—and in the morning she'd call animal control and report the sighting, so if they were on the alert for a Cardigan, they'd at least know where he'd been.

      
Sunny greeted her with much happiness and not the least resentment that interesting things had been happening just out of her sight; she cared only for the food that Brenna poured after dumping her own things on the kitchen table beyond the dog room.

      
Sunny wasn't Brenna's dog, not really—never had been. She had arrived a reject, undernourished and severely lacking in intelligence, trail sense, and the potential ever to find another home. She adored Brenna—when she happened to notice her—and spent most of her time sitting in the yard watching the world happen around her, perfectly content that way. For visitors she'd bark a couple of times with a slightly puzzled expression, as if she were trying to remember if barking was what she was supposed to do, and then she'd give up and offer slobbery kisses instead.

      
Brenna thought it was more like having a pet rock than a dog, but in a strange way Sunny suited her current life perfectly. She didn't miss Brenna, she didn't get into trouble, and she wasn't wasted potential in any category—hunting, tracking, obedience, or agility work. She filled her role in life perfectly by being the sort of dog at which cat owners could point and feel superior.

      
Brenna gave Sunny's floppy gold-red ears a rub and placed the bowl in front of her big wire crate. This room was large for the mud and laundry room it had once been, and just a tad small for the dog room and laundry room it now was. Aside from the old washer and dryer, it held several folded wire crates of various sizes, several nested rubber garbage cans for dog food which she un-nested at need, narrow metal shelves with grooming and medical supplies spilling over the edges, and a discreet stack of clean dishes. Not to mention Sunny's water dish, around which the dog had spilled enough water to support the Loch Ness monster. Or the laundry, on which she'd been sleeping instead of the perfectly good dog bed; if it had been dirty before, now it qualified for the heavy-duty cycle.

      
Dropping her boots by the door, Brenna closed off the mostly unheated dog room and padded into the living room to kick the heat up from its frigid daytime setting. March first it might be, and sometimes warm enough for a vest over a sweatshirt, but on a day with lake-borne clouds the house held a chill with vengeance.

      
Pulling her hair from its doubled braid helped; she scrubbed her fingers through it, massaging her scalp, and let it fall to warm her neck and shoulders and the sides of her face. Then she found her slippers, hopping to put them on as she made her way to the first floor bedroom, where she pulled them right back off so she could shed her work pants.

      
Tired, all right
. If she'd tried to stay and work that Wheaten, she'd have been too tired to stop for the sub and too tired to eat it, anyway. She'd pay for the discounted rescheduling—Roger would give her a passive-aggressive cold shoulder for a week—but it had been the right thing to do. Someday Roger would realize that the groomer injuries happened when the groomers were exhausted—not quick enough to avoid the unexpected snap of a jaw, not alert enough to see it coming.

      
She and her hair were tangled in her Pets! store shirt, struggling with her bra hook, when Sunny sounded off. "Nice timing," she grumbled at the dog—but rushed to disentangle herself all the same. It was the
stranger
bark, one Sunny seldom used; all the world was a friend by her definition. Brenna jammed a nightshirt over her head and a sweatshirt over that, and stumbled into a pair of excessively well-worn jeans—one of these days she would put her foot right through the seat of them—and hopped back down the hall slippering her feet.

      
Sunny stood with her nose shoved up against the back door jamb, snuffling noisily enough to inhale all of outdoors through the narrow crack. The hackles of her short, slick coat raised a dark line at her shoulders and down her spine; she didn't even look up as Brenna entered the cold room, hugging herself and wishing she'd at least taken the time to grab up her vest. She pulled the sweatshirt sleeves over her knuckles and peered out onto the porch.

      
She had forgotten to turn the light off, so all she saw was the glare of the bare bulb against the shiny enamel paint and pitch darkness beyond. But Sunny growled, a low monotone warning that Brenna couldn't recall ever having heard before. "Shhhh," she said absently, not particularly expecting a response, but Sunny shushed all right.

      
"Gone?" Brenna looked down to ask her.

      
But Sunny cowered at her feet. She whined, and her eyes showed white, and then she bolted away from the door and ran circles around the room, her claws scrabbling in her usual graceless galumphing stride and her tail tucked so tightly to her belly that she didn't even appear to have a tail at all.

      
"Sunny!" Glancing from the bewildering dog to the starkly empty porch and back again, Brenna would have reached for her, tried to calm her—

      
But then she felt it herself.

      
A whisper of dire gibberish in her ear, a cold brush of fear down her neck...

      
She slapped a hand to it, but this was no bug to brush away—it tickled down her spine and curled her toes and made her recently freed breasts feel tight and naked and exposed against the cold T-shirt. Behind her, Sunny crashed into her own crate and dove blindly inside, heading for the corner where she hid her face and whined.

      
Brenna clenched her jaw to keep from doing the same, clenched it till it ached, and still there was nothing on the porch but a pair of old mud boots and the wispy remains of last summer's potted impatiens. She made her arms into an X in front of her chest, and her fingers peeked out of the sweatshirt sleeves to grasp the material at her collarbones, kneading it without thought, her own hands mindlessly seeking to comfort herself.
Whispers and tickles and fear and a blind, groping invasion of
—