Blessed (13 page)

She let her eyes slide over to the dog again and noticed that he was still staring at her with that smile and that knowing look in his eyes. He broke eye contact with her to put his head down and lick her hand.

“Thanks buddy. I feel a whole lot lighter getting that off my chest. I haven’t even told Piper about it. For a while I thought I was nuts, so I spent a lot of time putting it out of my head. It still keeps coming back and pestering me every now and then.”

She scratched his ears again and he lie down in the seat.

“Hey! Buddy! That’s a good name right?”

The dog let out a huff of breath.

“Ok, I’ll take that as a no. What about Marcus?”

Another huff accompanied by a violent shake of his head for emphasis expressed his dislike for the name.

“What about Kaiser?”

He lifted his head at that one and thumped his tail against the door.

“You like that one huh?”     

She parked fairly close to the front door of the pet store and went around to the passenger side of the car to let him out. She opened the door and grabbed the leash as he launched himself through the open door in his excitement.

Ardra and Kaiser walked into the store and were greeted by the sounds of birds, fish tank pumps, other dogs and cats in cages along one wall. She was in awe. She had never been shopping in a pet store before. Honestly, she hadn’t expected to ever find herself doing so. Yet, there she was. About to buy dog food.

Kaiser, on the other hand, seemed to be absolutely unimpressed with the place. He lead her through the store to an aisle in the back on the right hand side. He walked up one side and down the other, sniffing each bag and considering each for a moment before moving on.

After sniffing fifty or more bags of food, he walked halfway back up the aisle and nudged one with his nose. It was a big purple bag and looked heavy. She looked around for an employee to help her with the heavy load and sighed when there wasn’t one in sight.

“You’re lucky I’m in shape.” She grumbled to the dog as she hefted the bag off the bottom shelf. After about five steps with the fifty pound bag of food, a guy came around the corner pushing a big, empty, flat cart.

“You want this?” he asked, patting the cart handle with his gloved hand.

“Sure.” She huffed as she dropped the food down on the cart.

“All yours.” He turned to walk away, “Oh! Just tell them to page Jake when you check out. I’ll help you get it into your car too.” And he disappeared around the corner.

She looked to the dog and shrugged her shoulders.

“Thank you, Jake.” She said to the empty aisle.

She wheeled the cart back towards the front of the store with Kiser in the lead.

“Oh hey! Look at this!”

She had made the mistake of walking down the toy aisle. She knew better than to do that in any human store she went to, but apparently her toy-dar didn’t work in pet stores. The dog sniffed at the disk in her hand and she could have sworn that she saw him roll his eyes. She didn’t care what he thought. Images of playing risbee with the dog were playing through her head and it seemed like fun. She tossed the disc on the cart.

They repeated the same procedure with a rope, a tennis ball, and a tiny rubber tire. She got all of them. She even got him a thick blue collar.

When she got to the checkout, she saw that there was a machine that engraved dog tags sitting in the front of the store and informed the cashier that she wanted one of those too.

“Sure. What shape do you want?”

She considered getting him one of the big pink hearts but quickly discarded the idea after thinking about what his reaction might be to it.

“We’ll go with the big blue bone.”

After paying the cashier and creating the tag, she had the cashier page Jake to help her get the stuff loaded into her trunk. He came jogging to the front of the store a few seconds later and pushed her cart toward the doors for her.

She pointed him in the direction of her car and popped the trunk using the button on her remote. She watched him load the heavy bag into the trunk with minimal effort and placed the bags of toys on top of it herself. As he started to wheel the cart away, he turned and handed her a piece of paper folded in half and smiled before walking away.

She unfolded the paper and saw a phone number written under his name. She smiled and decided that she might actually call him if her week kept going as well as it had been so far.

She grabbed the collar out of one of the bags before closing the trunk and walking over to the passenger side of the car to open the door so the dog climb into his seat.

She sat in her seat behind the wheel and put the little tag on the ring that was attached to the thick blue collar. She tightened it around his neck and admired her work. After deciding that he looked quite dashing, she flipped down the visor so that he could take a look for himself.

“What do you think, buddy?”

The dog turned his head from side to side and studied the collar. He shook his head like he was trying to dry off and glanced in the mirror again before looking over at her and thumping his tail against the door.

She smiled and flipped up the visor.

“I thought you’d like it. Now, we just have to get you to give those toys a chance.”

He huffed and curled up on the passenger seat.

“You’ll like them if you give them a chance.” She pushed.

More huffing.

She decided to let sleeping dogs lie, so to speak, and dropped the subject.

She hit the power button on the stereo and before long, she was jamming out to the song that came blaring from the speakers.

After letting Kaiser out of the car, she heaved the macho man bag of dog food into the kitchen and grabbed a bowl from under the island. After she had filled it with kibble she mentally reprimanded herself for forgetting to grab a dog dish. That meant another trip to the pet store. Not that she minded it so much. She had had fun, and decided she would leave Kaiser home the next time she went. It might be easier to have a shopping spree without him there turning up his nose at everything.

She filled another bowl with water and placed it next to his head, already buried in the bowl full of food.

Leaving him to gorge himself on the brown kibble, she went down into the den to watch some TV and get her homework done. After hefting her backpack over to the table from its place next to the door to the garage, she sank into her usual spot on the sofa.

Laptop whirring and clicking at her fingertips, Married With Children playing on the TV and Piper causing her cell phone to vibrate across the table, she blew through her homework. Multitasking was kind of her thing. If she wasn’t watching TV and answering texts, she had a hard time focusing on her anything. Especially homework. The little breaks that the distractions provided kept her from getting bored and she was done with all of her homework, which wasn’t due until Monday at nine o’clock in the morning.

As she shut down the computer and nudged the dog awake with her foot, she tried to remember the last time that she had finished all of her homework before Sunday night. Her best guess placed it sometime before high school.

She was also mostly positive that she had copied Piper’s work.

She let Kaiser out and groaned when she realized that the moment had finally come. She grabbed the bag off the handle to the door and grudgingly cleaned up his mess with minimal dry heaving. She quickly tossed the dog doo in the garbage bin outside the back door and let him lead the way back into the house. He bolted for the stairs while she locked up and shut the lights off.

By the time she got up to her room, he was laying in the spot he had claimed for himself on her bed.

She realized at that moment how glad she was that he was there. She was starting to see how dogs could be called man’s best friend. Already, she was having a hard time seeing herself without him around.

With him sprawled across her bed, she hung her outfit for church the next day over the back of her chair. After telling Kaiser about her last run in with her birthday present, she hadn’t been able to get it out of her head. She dropped down in front of her dresser and pulled out the bottom drawer.

She reached in and removed the box from the back of the drawer where it had been left. Her shaking hand slowly lifted the lid and pulled out the lock of almost-downy blond hair. It was still as soft as it had been the first day that it had come into her possession. She placed it off to the side and felt her blood start to hum as she contemplated grabbing the necklace.

The memory of the last time made her hesitate. What if that guy was still there? What if he tried to grab her again?  She knew she could always simply wake herself up, but she had been so shaken last time. She really didn’t want to go through that again.

She shut her inner voice out and grabbed the necklace. Being afraid of it was more mental than believing it could force her spirit out of her body.

“It’s just a piece of metal.”

She sighed as the coolness of the gold met with the warmth of her fingers. The now-familiar warmth that had nearly faded over the last several days returned almost the moment the disk settled on her chest. The tingle began where the heavy metal came in contact with her flesh. It spread quickly throughout her body and she was vibrating in a matter of seconds. She consciously fought to keep it together and not let it over run her. She seemed to be doing pretty well.

She didn’t dare press her luck by trying to stand up just yet.

The vibration calmed from jack hammer to cell phone status and her teeth stopped chattering. Her body cooled down to slightly above its normal temperature and she took a deep breath, smiling at her small triumph.

Her trembling legs made her proud as they lifted her from the floor. She held on to the top of the dresser to steady herself for a moment before she walked over to the bed, more confident after a few deep breaths. Wanting to prove that she was in control, she needed to keep it on as long as possible.

Kaiser shifted his weight as she lie down on the bed and climbed under the blankets. Her body was calming down and her temperature was back to normal. She rolled over and got comfortable, facing away from Kaizer and his light snore.

A moment before she felt herself be pulled under the welcome blanket of sleep, Kaiser stretched and put a paw in her back.

Her temperature spiked and she felt that terrifying pinch in her sternum right before she was sucked into a dark vacuum.

Her last thought was,
Not again.

He was almost halfway to Nauvoo and the second piece of the puzzle when he felt the familiar tug at his naval. It never failed to cause even the Chaos inside of him to calm in reverence and fear. It was like having the ice in his veins turn to glaciers in an instant.

He willed himself to completely drop his physical form and allowed the tug to pull him through the veil to the other side. The darkness inside of him was completely at home in this environment. It sprawled out and anchored itself to the dark stones that were strewn about.

As the power started to pour into him, he settled in and focused his mind. He kept telling himself that he couldn’t be there for a bad reason. He hadn’t been out there long enough to get into enough trouble to warrant a summons. His master very rarely had anything to say to anyone, or any
thing
for that matter.

For the life of him he could not think of anything he had done to make the boss angry enough to warrant a lashing.

Stop your worrying you sniveling little worm.

The voice inside his mind was like ants inside of his head.

You’re not here for punishment yet. You can rest easy. I just want an update on your progress.

“Of course. I have retrieved the first of the Bloodline. You received the information that was contained within it I imagine, so there is no need to relay it. The power inside of me was leading me to the next orb when you called me. I answered your summons immediately.”

Wise choice. Return to your mission.

He withdrew the tentacles from their anchor points and prepared to continue his journey on the other side. As he was crossing over, his master tacked on a final statement to the command, adding an extra sense of urgency to his already urgent task.

Chaos, you’re doing well, but pick up the pace. I have a deadline.

Chaos completed the shift back to the physical realm. Instead of joining part of himself to the plane, he stayed entirely ethereal and willed himself along the highway. Staying in his natural form on the physical plane was a huge tax on his energy, but it allowed him to travel more quickly.

The landscape blurred past him so fast that his constantly searching tentacles didn’t even have time to pick up the usual snippets of energy. He flew past cities with barely even a whisper of thought from the residents nestled inside the buildings.

It was an odd sensation to be flying deaf and blind.

Letting his blood take complete control, the landscape quickly blurred as he rushed by and then finally vanished all together. The blurred lights were swallowed by the darkness that he was moving through as fast as his thoughts would allow.