A Feral Darkness (5 page)

      
Of nothing.

      
It left as abruptly as it had come.

      
Brenna gave a little laugh, sharp and bitter. "This job is getting to me," she told Sunny, ignoring for the moment that Sunny had no reason to let "this job" drive
her
into a crate and turn her into a whimpering ball of Redbone Hound. "I need more food and less caffeine. Definitely less caffeine." And she went in to cut up the sub and pop tonight's portion into the microwave after slathering on more of her favorite specialty mustard than she probably should have. By the time the microwave dinged at her, she had a Sprite ready to go and had stuffed a few carrots in her mouth to assuage the inner voice that kept wanting to clamor about vegetables. Heck, there were tomatoes on the sub, weren't there? And onions—those should count for something.

      
A glance in the dog room showed her that Sunny had not moved, and she squelched the strong impulse to coax the dog out of the crate and soothe her. Sunny wouldn't come out until she was good and ready, and dragging her out would hardly create a soothing effect.

      
Brenna took her meal into the den—dark paneling left over from the seventies, a sagging couch she'd known all her life, her father's recliner, bought specially for him the year before he died. Her mother hadn't been able to bear taking it along to Sunset Village, the retirement community where she had been invited to stay with her younger sister Ada...it was a room Breanna loved, but not one in which anyone else spent much time. The little television was here, the one that got only two channels no matter how you twiddled the antennae. She flipped it on, found a news magazine show, and turned most of her attention to the sub.

      
Too much mustard, all right.

      
She ate it anyway, with as much—or as little—decorum as Sunny had used to devour her kibble. Then she went and washed the grime of the day from her face. She'd given up on the bath while gathering her wits in the kitchen, not about to sit naked in a tub after feeling so exposed and frightened right out there in the dog room, and dusted the insides of her elbows with corn starch powder to get rid of the dog hair that often worked into the skin there. She checked on Sunny—who seemed to have forgotten the entire strange incident and was hard at work on a bone—and plopped back down in front of the news show. Normally she just opened the back door and gave Sunny the boot until bedtime, but not tonight. Tonight she'd have to rig up something to keep Sunny under control when she went outside. An old longe line from Brenna's childhood horse, maybe, if she could find it.

      
But for now she settled in for a few moments of important enlightenment. This particular news show segment seemed to have something to do with cruise ships and their chefs.
"...and you'll be as surprised as we were to learn who
really
handles the food behind the scenes
," as they cut to commercial.

      
"Bet I'm not," Brenna muttered at the television, pulling an old knit afghan off the back of the couch and wrapping it around herself as the commercials droned on. She closed her eyes; at some point the news show returned, diving into its intense scrutiny of shipboard cuisine with a grand display of moral outrage. Brenna drifted away, envisioning those same cameras behind the scenes at Pets!, focusing in tightly on Roger while in the background—

      
"—regret to report that there were no survivors found on the farm, another entire family lost to this new rabies.
Shedding Rabies
is the common term being used for the mutated virus—"

      
Brenna jolted awake, squinting at the screen, frantically trying to refocus her thoughts and her eyes on the information they were presenting.
Rabies? What?
She hadn't heard—

      
"Not only were most of the workers we found less qualified than claimed, but our hidden cameras revealed unsanitary work habits—"

      
Back to the cruise ship. No, that wasn't
right
, they'd been talking about rabies, she was sure of it. A new kind of rabies...

      
Yeah, right. Or maybe it was just her imagination, fueled by a pack of loose dogs and one spooky moment in the dog room. Brenna drew the afghan closer, curling into a tighter ball on the couch, letting her hair become a shroud in which she could hide while she thought.

      
Abruptly, she decided that she didn't
want
to think. She had things to do, and then she wanted to go to bed. Let Emily tease her about hitting the sack earlier than Emily's two kids; the kids didn't get up as early as she. Holding the afghan around her shoulders, she got a garbage bag and went from room to room, gathering the week's garbage in semi-darkness out of sheer laziness when it came to turning on the lights—only to realize, as she reached the kitchen on her way out, that there was no way she was going to put out garbage with the feral dogs running crazed. She left the sack in the corner behind the kitchen door and went through her mail, pulling out the bills and dumping the rest, and then relinquished the afghan long enough to clean up the kitchen sink and table.

      
She ought to pay some of those bills while the table was clear enough to do it—she had a desk in one of the second-floor rooms, but its main purpose seemed to have evolved into providing a delicate balance of shifting and layered papers. And she
ought
to pay some of those bills...but not tonight.

      
Tonight she would beat Em's kids to bed; tomorrow she'd deal with the bills and other such things that hadn't been done over the course of this week. Spring grooming season, getting into gear...it was always like this.

      
Sunny waited for her, back to snorting at the door jamb. Brenna couldn't blame her; the dog wasn't used to being confined during the evening. "Let me find you that longe line," she said, and started poking around on the metal shelves. Theoretically this was all dog stuff and not horse stuff—the barn held the old horse gear—but maybe if she was lucky...she hadn't sorted the shelves in some time, and that gave her some hope.

      
"
Whoouh
," Sunny said to her—said to the door, actually, and Brenna jerked to look at her with no little dread—but the dog's hackles were right where they belonged, smooth and slick all the way down her backbone. And her tail swung in an even, happy arc, steady at hip level.

      
Of course Brenna had to look, even as her hand closed over a tangled skein of flat cotton line. Absently shaking the line out so she could re-loop it around her hand and elbow, she went to the back door. Not so long ago she'd stood here shaking; now there was no menace—only her back door with a light she ought to have turned off burning outside in the cold night.

      
And there, standing at the top step, was the mud-dipped Cardigan Welsh Corgi. Stone-still, as if he had been that way for hours and would stay that way for hours yet. As she appeared in the doorway, Brenna thought she saw the slight tilt of one of those big ears, but she couldn't be sure; it didn't happen again. Finally she nudged Sunny into her crate and put her hand on the doorknob, slowly turning it.

      
He heard it, all right. You couldn't get any more alert than
those
ears, radar-scoped at the door. But his expression was entirely different from the first time she'd seen him. Then he had been terrified beyond rational thought; now he stood at attention, his posture suddenly full of anticipation despite the fact that he hadn't truly moved.

      
Slowly, she pulled the door open. Slowly, she pushed the creaky screen door out.

      
They stared at one another.

      
Finally she said, "Would you like to come in?"

      
He trotted in as if she had been a doorman holding the door to his personal doghouse.

      
Her eyes widened; that was all. Until she had the door closed behind him, it was the only reaction she could afford. But she needn't have worried. He went to the center of the shallow room and plunked his bottom down, his eyes never leaving her face—and her eyes never leaving his—as she closed and latched the doors. From her crate, Sunny made a noise of protest—she still wanted
out
—but Brenna shook her head. "In a minute," she said, never moving her gaze from the mud-coated Cardigan. She crouched down and patted the floor. "C'mere," she said, an offhand tone.

      
He came.

      
He not only came, he rested his muddy face against her leg and gave a sigh of contentment that verged on being an outright groan. Surprised, she hesitated, her hand hovering over his filthy coat—and in the end rested her hand on his shoulder, so damn happy to have him there that she couldn't quite believe herself.
Didn't
believe herself. This was the happiness of a dog long-lost, regained—not the simple relief that she'd pulled a stray in out of reach of trouble. It made no more sense than his flip-flop in behavior.

      
"Only a little while ago," she murmured, searching for her equilibrium, "you were so terrified of me that you practically did a backflip over the porch rail. Now you think I'm mama?"

      
Unless he had never been terrified of her at all.

      
Unless that which had come so soon afterward, that which had so frightened both Brenna and Sunny, had not been their combined imagination at all, and this dog had felt it too.

      
Something else that made no sense. Brenna shied away from thinking about it.

      
Sunny's antics in the crate acquired a certain fevered intensity, and Brenna retrieved the longe line, snapped it to Sunny's collar, and tied the end around a porch pillar, all while keeping half an eye on their guest. He sat waiting with all the patience in the world, and when she stuffed her hair down the back of her sweatshirt, grabbed a handful of towels from the top of Sunny's crate, and crouched by him again, he stoically allowed her to sop up what mud she could. That gritty, black mud, as if something had driven him through one of the many local mini-swamps at top speed.

      
Though she didn't know what it could have been, that wouldn't have
caught
him. Nimble and speedy as the Corgis were—and well they should be, having been bred to herd cattle—those short legs wouldn't outrun anything big enough to be a threat, not in the long haul.

      
Then again, she hadn't actually seen anything out there tonight, and he had performed Corgi gymnastics to run from
that
.

      
Quit trying to make it make sense
.

      
Sometimes things just didn't.

      
What she knew for sure was that she had a Cardigan Welsh Corgi in her dog room, and that even the generous pile of towels accruing beside her wouldn't do anything but soak up dirty water, leaving the grit in his coat and a bath the only recourse. She couldn't be sure—not in this light, not without someone holding him so she could step back and take a look—but she had the feeling he was a fine dog, lots of good bone and without the crooked front and twisted ankles that cropped up so quickly with bad breeding. Someone would be missing him. She ran her hands around his neck and finally came up with a narrow nylon collar, no more than a tag holder. And the tags, too, clinking dully in their wet and mud-coated state.