A Feral Darkness (47 page)

      
"What about those dogs you bought?"

      
He didn't answer at first. Then he said, "What do you think?"

      
What did she think? She knew he'd been working with them; Eztebe had cheerfully told her so. He'd said he didn't intend to fight them. He'd also said he didn't currently consider himself as having his own dog. "I think you're trying to rehab them, find them homes."

      
He smiled a private little smile, not looking at her. "You'd be right."

      
"Can you?"

      
"If they'd ever been fought...not likely. But they were just pups, not even in training. They'll be fine. I've just been waiting till this was over."

      
"And is it?" she demanded. "You're
not
going back to that barn." Worried by her tone, Druid got to his feet and put his front feet against her leg, balancing lightly on his haunches to whine at her. She rubbed the base of his speckled ear and watched Masera.

      
He shook his head, frustrated. "We hadn't gotten to the bottom of it."

      
"It doesn't sound like it
has
a bottom, if you ask me."

      
"You may be right, given what Parker's got going for him." He shook his head again. "Whatever. It's over. I suppose it was over as soon as you told me about the rabies. I told Rick—my friend in animal control—and they're going to shut it all down; I don't know exactly when. They'll get the training barn you saw, the fight rings, two or three breeding barns—Parker's been pretty methodical about it all. Not a hobbyist, a pro. Breeding carefully, taking good care of the dogs, training them with all the tricks—in it for the long haul, and running a nice little drug distribution scheme alongside it. You saw the cat mill out behind his barn while you were there? That's probably where most of the dead animals came from."

      
"I saw it. I didn't understand it."

      
"It's like a horse walker," he said, trying to keep his voice even. "Put a dog at the end of one arm of it; put a cat in front of it. The cat runs, the dog chases. After a while, the dog catches. It builds fitness in the dogs, and bloods them at the same time."

      
Brenna made a choked noise, opened her mouth to respond, and couldn't find any words strong enough. Not to respond to this new image of the cat mill, with blood in the dried winter grass, the smell she couldn't quite locate or identify, the worn rut of dirt—she grimaced, and took a deep breath, and moved the conversation forward. "The drugs came from his dead pal Gary, I suppose," Brenna said, and then, unable to let go of the cat mill, added, "I hope they turn that thing into scrap metal."

      
"It doesn't matter," Masera said darkly. "It doesn't matter, because Parker will get away, and his cocaine source is still unknown. He'll just start it up again somewhere else."

      
"No," Brenna said. "He won't. He's got to be near this spring. He might start up with some
thing
else, but he won't leave this place."

      
"Whatever. Dammit, if I'd just had a few more days—" He got to his feet, unaware of the comb he clenched in his hand, frustrated in every tense muscle.

      
"Iban," she said gently, "Iban, you stopped the rabies. They'll put down every single one of those dogs, knowing there's rabies among them. They'll test them—and I swear CDC already knows this is a new strain." She thought of Sammi's constrained and unnatural silence. "They'll work up a new vaccine in case anything slipped through the cracks. Damn,
this
is what it's all about, what it's
been
about."

      
"What?" he said, as his eyebrows pinched in on his nose. It made her want to reach up and erase the resultant line with her finger, though she could do it just as well with words.

      
"For weeks I've had those weird visions. I can't explain it...I know they're connected to Druid."

      
"Visions?" he said.

      
"Impressions...memories. Only not
my
memories. I know it sounds crazy—"

      
And it did. Too crazy. She hesitated, would have stopped.

      
Masera said, "Tell me."

      
Still hesitant, she did. She started at the beginning, at Emily's kitchen table with Druid asleep at her feet and dreaming, and took Masera all the way up to the stark moments she'd envisioned only the night before. "I felt like I was looking at the days of the black death. All caused for—and
by
—Parker's dark power, and by its new rabies." She stopped to look at him, aware she'd gotten sidetracked. "It would have killed
so many
people...it would have killed
me
. It would have changed
everything
. But it won't, not now. Maybe you didn't get the drug dealer, but you stopped
the rabies
." Even if Parker didn't know it yet. And if he'd been angry during their recent confrontation, then he'd be utterly beside himself when the raids went down.

      
And he'd blame her. He knew enough to do that.

      
"
We
stopped the rabies," he murmured. "One of us had to figure it out, first, and then have the stones to call the other in the middle of a dog fight."

      
"Stones?" she said, and grinned, sliding the comb through the last of the tangles and gathering her hair up in one section again, feeling, despite its natural resilience, the loss of some bulk, the broken ends in the affected area. "Is that what I have, Iban?"

      
"Say that again," he told her.

      
"About the stones, or—"

      
"My name," he said.

      
"Iban," she said, drawing it out.

      
"I'm coming over there," he said. "Now."

      
How they ended up on the floor a short time later, she wasn't sure, but Druid wasn't slow to take advantage; he walked right over them and whisker-inspected Brenna's face, then Masera's, then back to Brenna, paying particular attention to the cuts and bumps. And while Brenna was altogether focused on how nice it felt to run her hands over—well, to have him run his hands over—well, maybe she wasn't altogether focused, maybe she was altogether
un
focused. But the whisker inspection didn't work for her at all. She relinquished Masera's lower lip and looked over at Druid. "What," she said, breathing unreasonably fast, "What in this picture doesn't belong, Druid?"

      
He whined. A reminder whine. A doggy nudge. Brenna let her head rest on the carpet, which gave her an appalling view of the dog hair she needed to vacuum up. "He's right, though," she said. "We've got a lot of other things to—what?"

      
For Masera was laughing. He was trying to hide it, lying on his side with his head propped on his arm and one nice strong hand resting on her hip, but she felt it through that connection, the slight jostling it gave her. "He's
right
?" he said, and let some of the laughter slip out. "The
dog's right
?"

      
Brenna gave him a little shove; he didn't resist so he ended up on his back. Then she conceded, "Maybe I've been living alone too long." But, leaning closely over him and his amusement, she added, "Or maybe he's just
right
." She climbed to her feet and plunked back down in the couch, but since she hadn't been careful enough, she sat on her hair and had to bounce up to free it. By then he sat opposite her, fiddling with a folded piece of paper and not objecting when she invited herself to put her feet across his thighs. "Seriously," she said. "That cat was meant for me; whether it was Parker's idea or—I mean, how much can he communicate with that...thing, anyway?" It would seem unfair that the darkness would be so willing to communicate with Parker when she was still leaving voice mail with Mars Nodens.

      
"At this point, I suspect quite a bit. Parker's the perfect point man for something like that as it gains a foothold in this world. He's a first-come, first-serve kind of guy, even if it means eating off other people's plates, and he's smart enough to carry his end of it without messing up—unlike his two friends before him. That's why it doesn't mean much in the long run, that we've stopped the rabies. He'll start up with something else."

      
"No," Brenna said, still stuck on that point. "Parker's come at me a couple of different ways already. He won't give up yet. He—
they
—need this place, the access to the spring. We've got to do something to protect it. That's where you come in."

      
"Me," he said blankly.

      
"You know about this stuff! You and Eztebe, but he says you more than he."

      
Masera shook his head. "Nothing like this. I know runes you can use. I know this is a bad phase of the moon to brace darkness—Medusa Moon, like when you lost Sunny. I know we're better off for having made it past the vernal equinox before reaching this point. But how to go up against this darkness? This is way outta my league, Brenna. Way out."

      
"Then call your mother. Ask
her
."

      
He seemed to think about it. In the end, he didn't outright reject it. He just said, "It would take time to reach her."

      
"Fine," she said. "Then we try. And until then, we've got to do something. Masera—
Iban
—he's going to come for me. As soon as he figures out you were in on the dog fighting, he's going to come for you, too, but right now he wants that spring. And I pretty much figure if he gets it—if he changes it so his darkness can use it again—we don't have a chance. Am I right about that?" And Druid, sitting beside her again, gave Masera his most earnest look and whined.

      
Masera said most dryly, "One of you is."

      
"Take it from him, then. And what's that paper?"

      
He shrugged, unfolding it. "It's your paper—
papers
—from your couch."

      
Emily's print-out
. "The Mars Nodens research!" Brenna said. "Anything interesting?"

      
He smoothed the papers out against his leg and pulled the top one off, handing it to her. "Rabies information," he said, and she scanned it while he read the other page.

      
They reacted at virtually the same moment, as he stiffened, muttering, "I'll be a son-of-a-bitch!" and she waved her paper at him and said, "I get it, I get it!"

      
They looked at each other for a heartbeat and he lifted his chin, a gesture of interest, as though he could read her rabies information from there. She said "Okay, listen to this," and looked back at the paper, where all the strange bits and pieces she'd been hearing—from Sammi, from her Druid-memories—coalesced to make sense. "Rabies incubates in the animal before it becomes active, right? Incubation periods vary, but the animal's not contagious until the virus kicks in. That's when it sheds virus in its saliva."