A Feral Darkness (7 page)

      
Brenna did an automatic glance-about before saying darkly, "Don't worry. Roger will schedule you something."

      
"No way." Elizabeth popped a thin mint into her mouth from her perpetual stash behind the counter—like Brenna, she rarely had time to eat a full lunch. "I've got two minutes to do paperwork while my first finishes drying, and then I'm clipping for the rest of the afternoon."

      
"Take a look at the schedule," Brenna said, nodding at the desk. "See that dog he tried to sneak in yesterday? It was a matted Wheaten."

      
Elizabeth made a face. She was a tall young woman, very blonde, with generous features that seemed a little too big for her face; when she twisted them up, she got impressive results. Brenna grinned at her and headed for the tub room.

      
The Cardigan followed her like a gentleman, tired but amenable. He stood quietly in the tub—three shampooings it took before the mud didn't run off him anymore—he let her blow the water from his coat with the high-velocity dryer, and he went quietly from her arms into a second-tier crate to sit under the stand dryers while she scrubbed his collar and tags and cleaned up the tub area.

      
Finally, she turned to the collar, blotting it dry and taking her first good look at the tags. Rabies tag, though it didn't look quite right to her eye and she couldn't say why; it had the vet clinic—
her
vet clinic—stamped on the tag, along with Rabies I/II and the serial number. But here was something useful—a round ID tag, phone number and all. She took the collar out to the grooming room and dangled it up before Elizabeth, who was trying to get a smooth clipping line on a perpetual motion Springer. Not her strength—Brenna was the one who specialized in the exacting breed clips. But Elizabeth could take any odd hairy breed and turn it cute or handsome, so she didn't begrudge Brenna her breed certifications.

      
Brenna grinned at her from behind the collar. "Score!"

      
"What's the deal with him, anyway? That's not a breed you see very often."

      
"Showed up on my porch last night," Brenna said. "But he ought to be home tonight." She caught up the receiver from the wall phone, stabbed an unlit outgoing line button, and dialed the number, twirling the collar around her finger as the line rang.

      
"I'm sorry, but that number is not in this service area. Please check the number you are dialing and try again."

      
"Huh," Brenna frowned at the phone, hanging it up with much less flare. She looked at the tag again. "Number doesn't exist, according to them. But who'd keep a tag with the wrong number on it?"

      
"What's the address?"

      
Brenna shook her head, running her thumb over the engraving. "There isn't one. Just the phone. Dumb."

      
"Well, it'd be fine if the phone
worked
." Elizabeth's voice came out muffled; her head was in the vicinity of the dog's flank as she fought for control over its foot. Giving up, she straightened and glared into the Springer's eye long enough to bellow in a startling loud voice, "
Straighten up!
"

      
Astonished, the dog stood stock still, watching Elizabeth with wide eyes as she quickly went back to work. "Sometimes it gets 'em, sometimes it doesn't," she said. "I give it three feet's worth of time."

      
"Mmmm," Brenna said in agreement, staring at the other side of the ID tag. "Champion Nuadha's Silver Druid."

      
Elizabeth snorted. "Yeah, there's a name for you. It'd make more sense if he was blue merle. What was that,
New-AHD-ja
?"

      
"
NWUH-dja
," she said absently, looking at the name and thinking Elizabeth was right. Silver could describe merle, but not a black, white and brown tri-color. Elizabeth grabbed the collar to look with vast uncertainty at the tag.

      
"Noowahja?" she said, coming close. "Do you think?"

      
Counter-intuitive as the pronunciation was, Brenna didn't doubt it—although as she retrieved the collar, she gave it her own thoughtful look. She
ought
to doubt it.

      
But she didn't.

      
So she tucked the question away to think about later, and stuck her head in the tub room to offer an experimental, "Hey, Druid!"

      
From behind the wind of the dryers, he got to his feet, cocking his head at her. No mistaking that. "Never mind," she told him, and retreated to the grooming room. "Druid for a call name, that's not too bad. But you'd think anyone with a champion would make it easier to return him!"

      
"No kidding. All right, Springer, you've had your last chance," Elizabeth said with some exasperation, as her fourth attempt to trim under the dog's tail was met with a spinning tactic. "At least I got all the feet done," she said, shortening the noose and using a second noose to secure the dog to the front of the grooming elbow. "If these people would just
handle
their dogs—"

      
"Yeah, yeah, you're preaching to the choir here." But Brenna slid Druid's collar down her arm and let it dangle at her elbow while she went to the Springer's head and distracted her with kissy-kissy noises. Fortunately, the dog was fundamentally sweet if uncivilized, and she was glad enough to squint her eyes with happiness at Brenna's attentions—although the tail-wagging didn't necessarily make things much easier for Elizabeth.

      
Elizabeth moved on to the dog's head and ears, and Brenna went back to check the Cardigan, flipping off the dryers and rolling them out of the way. She laughed, then, at the somewhat stunned look on his face; with all the dryers on him, his coat was as fly-away as it could get. Except for his haunches, which of course he'd been sitting on.

      
She considered the temperature—nice for early March, mid-fifties—and decided against taking him out in it without some spot-drying. A few moments on one of the tables was all it took, and then she stepped back to consider her new charge.

      
"He's got a lot more white on him than I thought," Elizabeth admitted, pausing in her own work.

      
Or than Brenna had thought. No way, under the mud, to see how broad his blaze was, how symmetrically it encompassed his muzzle, narrowed just enough to miss his eyes, and broadened again at his forehead. Or to see the dark freckles on the bridge of his nose, or how richly his brown cheek patches stood out against the black on the rest of his head. He had a white bib and undercarriage, and except for brown points, a white tail tip, and a jagged white collar, the rest of him was sleek black. Black, aside from his ears. The interior of one was stark white; the other light brown. But it was the backs of those huge ears that were so beguiling, mostly white with thick brown freckles. Utterly unexpected, utterly charming.

      
And his eyes. Coming from a clean face, they looked softer, more open. Big
love-me
eyes that followed her every movement.

      
He's somebody else's dog
.

      
Brenna gave a sudden sharp shake of her head. "Gotta figure out who owns him."

      
"Yeah," Elizabeth said, her voice knowing. "Better do it fast, too."

      
Brenna made a face at her, absently fingering the collar and its tags. No actual license; that didn't surprise her. An ID tag was what got a dog home again, and a license cost money to replace. Sunny didn't carry her license either, just the rabies and ID tags. She looked again at the rabies tag, still not quite sure what wasn't right about it, and the Lakeridge clinic name caught her eye. If the clinic kept track of which dog had what vaccine serial number, then...

      
The Cardigan—Ch. Nuadha's Silver Druid with no silver—decided she wasn't going to fuss with him anymore and eased his bottom down on the table. She kept an eye on him as she called the clinic, picking the number out from the emergency list by the phone. "Hi," she said when Donna the receptionist picked up the phone and identified herself. "Listen, I've got a stray here with one of your rabies tags. Can you identify the owner from the number?"

      
"If the tag isn't outdated. What's the number?"

      
Brenna gave Elizabeth a thumbs-up as the other groomer looked up from her work to eavesdrop, and held the tag so the engraving showed clearly in the light, reading off a five-digit number and waiting expectantly for the sound of Donna's fingers at the keyboard.

      
But Donna said, "You're missing one. There should be six numbers."

      
Brenna frowned. "Only five. They're all very clear; the tag looks practically new."
Now that it's been cleaned.
"And it's a young dog; he's probably on his first three-year shot." He was, she thought, at least that old—past the first six months when they didn't give rabies, and then the year after the first rabies, which was only a one-year shot. But she wouldn't put him at much beyond a couple of years. His teeth were still white and strong, and his carriage that of a young dog. All the same, he was a well-developed adult, with masculine features and all his parts intact.

      
A show dog loaded with identification, and none of it could lead her to his owner.

      
Donna said, "I suppose you could bring the tag in; maybe one of the vet techs could make some sense of it. Unless you've got six numbers, I can't be of much help."

      
Brenna sighed. "Maybe I will," she said, but knew she wouldn't. If the tag was defective, there was no point. What was she going to do, ask them to search record by record? Or—"Can you search your clients by breed?" she asked. "This is a Cardigan Welsh Corgi. You can't have many of those."

      
"We don't have any," Donna said. "We haven't, for several years. And we haven't done that kind of search before, but it might be possible. Tell you what—leave your name and number, and let me get back to you. I'm going to have to sneak this into my schedule. And you said it was a young dog?"

      
"Male, young adult, tri-color," Brenna said, and gave Donna her name and home number. "He's in good shape—he hasn't been on his own very long. And he's tagged as Ch. Nuadha's Silver Druid. Have you ever heard of them?"

      
"You might search the Web," the woman said. "If you can find the kennel, the breeder should know who owns the dog now."

      
"Good idea," Brenna said, but upon hanging up she slumped back against the wall and stared at Druid. "You're not making this very easy." Search the Web...as if she had a computer, or even knew how to use one!

      
Emily.

      
Of course, Emily. Or to be more precise, Emily's daughters, who shared a computer and whose on-line time had been a subject of much discourse in the Brecken household, drawing even Emily's workaholic husband Sam into the fray.

      
"I can't tell if you're stumped, or if you've got bad answers," Elizabeth said.

      
"Stumped," Brenna said. "I'm going to make a few more calls from here, then go on back home. No point in spending my whole day on this." She'd call PePP, the local rescue group that showcased their adoptions at Pets! during the weekend, and the local animal control—that way if anyone started calling around for the dog, they'd be directed to Brenna. And she would hope that Roger didn't come in and catch her making personal phone calls from the store phone.

      
Druid watched—he had settled into a couchant posture, with his short legs curled in front of his chest like a cat's, curved wrists gracefully meeting in the middle—as the rescue group representative offered to take him in. "Oh, no," she told them in an off-hand and casual tone. "He's fine at my place, and he's been through enough change already." The animal control officer was out, as usual—he must be especially busy with the dog pack situation—but she left a message. And when she hung up the phone the final time she looked at Druid and said, "I hope you appreciate this."