A Feral Darkness (8 page)

      
Elizabeth snorted. She had traded the Springer for a Lhasa mix that bore a typically snubbed face and sausage body, and a nasty temper to boot. Elizabeth had the cat muzzle ready and waiting. "Yeah, right," she said. "As if they ever do. All they want is more food and a place under the covers." She gave Brenna a pointed look as she reached for the clippers to rough out the scissors cut. "And you better be careful not to give him any more than the food. I can see that look in your eye already."

      
Too late
, Brenna thought, thinking of the night on the couch, of how contentedly he'd snuggled beside her. Of course, those circumstances had been special. She wasn't quite sure just what those circumstances
were
, other than strange and frightening, but they had certainly been out of the ordinary. The Cardi would sleep in the crate tonight. Or at the least, on the floor by the bed. "This is my
not-enough-sleep
look, nothing else," she said.
Not
a getting-attached-to-someone-else's-dog look. "And have you heard anything more about the feral dogs? Has animal control been able to break up the pack?"

      
Elizabeth shrugged. "I didn't see the news. Customers seem to think the dogs have been pretty active. That guy who's been around talking to Roger—he seemed to know a lot about it, but he's not exactly what I'd call chatty."

      
"Or even friendly," Brenna said. "Although he was nice enough out in the parking lot until he realized I was a groomer."

      
"Can't make sense of
that
."

      
"Maybe it's just his nature," Brenna said. "Whatever. If you can get anything out of him, do it, okay? I'm right smack in the middle of the pack action, and I'd really like to know just how worried I should be." Come to think of it, it might be time to clean up her grandfather's old .22, take a few test shots into the hill that followed the creek.

      
"What makes you think he'll talk to me?"

      
Brenna thought of the exchange in the parking lot and gave Elizabeth a wry smile. "Maybe he won't. But I'm pretty sure he won't be talking to
me
."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CHAPTER 5
LAGUZ
Water, That Which Conducts
Thnnck!

      
The .22 long cartridge buried itself in the damp soil of the hill just to the right of her target, abruptly reminding Brenna that the sights on the old rifle were slightly off and she'd need to adjust them. Which she did, and promptly shattered the bit of a stick she'd jammed into the ground as a target.

      
Not that she was far away from it, certainly not far enough to crow about her marksmanship. But if she ended up firing this thing, it would be at close range. And the real point to the exercise was to trigger the years of target plunking she'd done in her teens, to re-engage her handling and safety practices.

      
Besides, although she counted herself lucky to have avoided Roger during her time at the store bathing Druid, she was happy enough to imagine him here on the hill in a Manager Effigy. She pumped the old shell out of the chamber and the new one in, and settled the rifle to her shoulder.
Thnnck!

      
She found a certain satisfaction in solitary target shooting, especially with the relatively quiet .22. No big kick, no rendingly explosive noise, just sighting, shooting, and working the smooth pump for another round. The creek burbled behind her, glinting in the sun; the hill blocked out the rest of the world before her, and the breeze that played in her bangs could almost—with some imagination—be called warm.

      
But she couldn't stay here forever. Aside from the fact that she had just run out of shells, there was a lost dog waiting to go home, and she didn't imagine he was terribly happy to be crated while she was gone. She needed to get him and walk on over to Emily's—not close but the next house north, a newer home built on the edge of the Calkins' recently sold farmland lots. A quick phone call had put the girls onto the computer search, and with any luck they'd have the information she needed by evening.

      
She double-checked to make sure there were no more shells in the chamber, pointed the gun at the ground, headed for the hill—and stopped short. The old shrine, her hound's gravesite...she hadn't been there since the final snow had melted. So she walked along the hill instead, further out from the house, following the whimsical creek bed until the great oak loomed above her. Her tattered sneakers gave her perfect purchase in the grassy sod; twenty-four hours ago it would have been just the other side of muddy out here, but now she had nothing more than pleasantly soft ground beneath her feet. Up the hill she went, straight to the grave, where she set down the rifle and knelt there, reminded of the first time she'd been allowed to shoot, and how the old hound had hung by her legs, always touching her, bumping her...worried about her, as if the loud noise might harm her.

      
He'd been shot once; X-rays later in life had shown the birdshot still buried in his haunch. So he had had good reason to worry—or so he must have felt.

      
She had loved him for it then. She loved him for it now. She shoved back the long sleeves of her hooded sweatshirt and tenderly straightened the site marker, an arrangement of rocks chosen for their size and shape and which, at the time, she had put a great deal of effort into creating. They were just plain old rocks, nothing more, but it didn't really matter. All that mattered was that seeing them helped her to remember him.

      
Rocks straightened, she let her sleeves slip back down over the heels of her hands—a hand-me-down from Russell, this one was—and placed one palm flat on the earth, remembering those years. And the years after them, when she had seemed practically able to speak to any dog that wandered by, to intuit their needs and the meanings of their slightest body language. Or that's how it had seemed at the time. At almost twenty-nine, she had a more jaded view of the world, and didn't particularly trust that things had been as she remembered them.

      
And all the same, she wished she could experience life on that level again. Simple. Not fraught with daily struggles just to make sure she could do her job safely and professionally. Being with dogs to
be
with them, and not ending up in adversarial relationships with animals who spent the afternoon with her now and then and didn't want to be there at all.

      
"I love you, old hound," she told the gravesite, and pushed herself to her feet, brushing off her damp knees, thinking of that terrible year when she had found the place desecrated, when her father had died and horror seemed to hang over this area for the rest of the year.

      
The tiny trickle of a spring could use a cleaning now; it generally did. Leaves settled there, and the grasses grew long and bent over into it. Brenna moved over to tend it and stopped short, eyes narrowing.

      
Not a leaf, not a stick, not a single stray stem...she couldn't remember ever having seen it so...tidy. It looked as though someone had put giant lips to the spring from the other side and given a mighty puff, clearing away every stray bit of everything.

      
It made the tracks at the spring stand out rather starkly. Far too starkly for Brenna to miss. And after a youth spent tracking this critter and that on the farm just for the fun of it, far too starkly to mistake for the newly encroaching coyotes or, even less likely, fox.

      
Dog.

      
But not dog running across the area, or dog hanging around for a drink and making a mish-mash of prints. Dog tracks coming from the spring, deep-set and clear in ground that was now dry enough to hold them that way, and heading for the creek. Digging deeply into the ground just at the spring, the way anything does when bolting into instant speed.

      
She followed them to the creek—they weren't as clear where the grass thickened, just a tuft or two of sod out of place along the way—where two deep prints showed how the dog had launched itself into the wide, relatively deep water. Not water over her head, but certainly over the top of any boots she might choose to wear, so she stopped there.

      
Dog on the run. Dog full of fear. Dog with Cardigan-sized prints.

      
Brenna went back to consider the spring.

      
Dog out of nowhere.

~~~

After a time she quit looking for answers where there weren't any, collected the gun, and returned to the house. There she had the middle section of the sub for dinner, fed the dogs, let Sunny hang out at the end of the longe line long enough to finish the dishes for the past few days, and then put Druid on a leash for the walk over to Emily's. The girls, she rightly thought, would love his silly long-bodied shape and his expressive ears, and until she had a better understanding of his puzzling responses, she'd rather have him with her than crated alone in her house.

      
The strong light of the day was finally fading when she presented herself at Emily's door and said, "What computer wonders have you wrought?" as Jill, the youngest, answered the door.

      
In response, Jill said, "Oh, he's so
cuuute
. But what happened to his legs?"

      
"That's how they're supposed to be," Brenna said, but she might as well not have bothered, as Jill leaned back and bellowed, "Marilee! Come and see Brenna's new dog!" Druid quailed at the sound, but then, so did Brenna.

      
"He's not my—" she started, and gave up, because Marilee had arrived and both girls were on their knees, petting and kissing and making gooey admiring noises. "Here," she said, and handed them the leash. "Don't frighten him, d'you hear? He's been through a lot in the past few days."

      
Whatever it might have been.

      
Emily, a sheaf of papers in hand, leaned against the kitchen archway and nodded at her daughters. "They're okay with him?"

      
"Even if he has one of his...
moments
, he's not going to do anything to hurt them," Brenna said, repeating the reassurance she'd given Emily on the phone. "If he was going to bite, he'd have nailed me by now." Given what she'd put him through, and how frightened he'd been at moments. Definitely not a fear-biter. Fear-freaker, now...
that
label, she'd paste on him. "I'd be more concerned about what two little girls could do to
him
—if they weren't yours."

      
"Okay, you get points for that last bit," Emily said. "Come sit down. Want some soda?"

      
"Anything decaf," Brenna said. It was, after all, her day off. She took a seat at the table, in a kitchen that was the antithesis of her own—too new to carry the hint of generations past, bright and open and airy. And peach-colored. Every time she came here, Brenna left with an impulse to paint her own kitchen, but when she got home she would realize again just how many other things needed attention, too—a new sink would have been outstanding—and so never got around to any of it. "What'd you find out?"

      
"A whole lot of nothing, I'm afraid," Emily said, pulling a one-liter bottle of Sprite out of the refrigerator and hunting through the freezer for ice cube trays that actually held ice. "The girls were delighted to play detective for you, but they couldn't find any kennel with the name of Nuadha, no matter what the breed. They did find the Web site for the national Cardigan club, and emailed the contact person. You gotta love email—they got an answer just a few moments ago." She set a glass in front of Brenna, but her expression didn't hold any triumph. She sat across from Brenna and pulled the coated elastic band from her ponytail, only to re-gather her shoulder-length hair and confine it again.