Natural Evil (2 page)

Jackson opened his hands to show her what he held, turning the vials so she could read the labels. He said, “Your new dog needs to be anesthetized so I can work on him. I’m going to sedate him with a combination of Valium and ketamine so that I can insert an endotracheal tube and administer Isoflurane, which is a gas anesthetic. Then I’m going to try to save his life. That okay by you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then get the hell out of my way,” he said.

She stepped back, watching closely as he administered the injections. Maybe it was her imagination, but it seemed the dog eased and began breathing easier almost immediately. The vet gave her a scowling look. “Get the hell out of my kitchen too.”

“I want to help,” she said.

Jackson moved quickly to insert a tube down the dog’s throat. “You a vet tech?”

“Nope,” she said.

“An EMT? Human nurse? Any goddamn thing that might be useful?”

“My unit got shot up a couple times in Afghanistan,” she said. “Once we had to deal with the aftermath of a roadside bomb. I’ve triaged more than my share of wounds and sometimes they were ugly. I didn’t bandage animals, and I wasn’t a medic. But if you need an extra pair of steady hands from someone who won’t faint at the sight of blood, I can provide it.”

Jackson snorted without looking up from his work, but after a moment he said, “Grab a pair of gloves. Top drawer on your left.”

She opened the drawer, pulled out a pair of latex gloves and yanked them on.

Rodriguez folded his arms as he watched the exchange. His original friendly expression had morphed into a scowl. He said, “Isn’t that against the law, Dan? You could lose your license.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said the vet. “I’m not letting her actually do anything surgical on the animal, and you’re not the veterinarian State Board. Like she said, an extra pair of steady hands. Speaking of which, hold this a sec.” He thrust an implement at her.

She looked at it with interest. It was kind of like a scalpel, nice and sharp on one end. It would make a good hand-to-hand weapon.

“I have questions I want to ask you,” Rodriguez said to her.

“So ask,” she said. She stood balanced on the balls of her feet and kept her eyes on the vet as she held the implement in one hand and flipped it, then flipped it again.

As she twirled the implement between her fingers, Jackson glanced sidelong at her. He said irritably, “Stop that.”

She stopped and stood quietly as she watched him inspect the dog. He probed the dog’s swollen neck, and his face tightened. He held out his hand and she handed the implement back to him. “Still has rope tied around his neck,” he said. “Get your fingers over here. Keep his skin pulled back so I can cut the rope off.”

“Shit.” She bent over and pulled the swollen, abraded flesh apart as best she could.

“Can you take me back to where you found the dog?” Rodriguez asked.

“Nope,” she said.

“That’s a pretty glib response,” said the sheriff. “You actually give your answer any thought?”

“I’m from New York,” she said tersely, sparing the sheriff a single sharp look. “I’m not familiar with this area. The desert all looks the same to me, and I wasn’t paying attention to where I was when I decided to stop to investigate the lump beside the road.”

“First you say you found the dog,” Rodriguez said. “Now you say he’s yours. Animal torture is against the law.”

“For God’s sake, John!” Jackson snapped.

“Something doesn’t add up about her story,” Rodriguez said, his voice hard. “There’s no damn way she could get an animal of his size and weight into her car all by herself.”

She angled her jaw out. Should she tell the sheriff about her telekinesis? She thought over recent events and stuck by her original instinct, remaining silent.

The vet said, “This dog was dragged behind a vehicle before the rope broke. Go check her goddamn bumper. If you find something, arrest her. If not, go away. We’ve got a lot to do here and it’s going to take a while.” He lifted one shoulder in a fatalistic shrug. “Unless, of course, the dog dies.”

“I’ve said that a lot in the last forty-five minutes,” she said. That dog had one of the strongest wills to live she’d ever seen. She had a feeling he wasn’t going to die on Jackson’s table. She added to Rodriguez, “If you’re going to ticket me, set it on the counter along with my license and registration. I’ll pay it before I leave town.”

The sheriff was silent for a moment. Then he growled, “Fine.”

Rodriguez slammed out the front door. In ten minutes he was back. He slapped papers on the corner of the counter. He said to the vet, “Call me.”

Jackson nodded without a break in his work. The sheriff left without another word.

Claudia’s stomach was in a knot by the time Jackson finally got the rope cut away from the dog’s neck. They washed him next, cleaning him of sand and grit. There were raw wounds all over his body. Jackson’s aged face was set, his pale blue eyes burning. She had a feeling she looked the same way. He took X-rays, diagnosed broken ribs and wrapped them, and he had to cut out two bullets. They worked for a long time in a silence that was broken only by Jackson’s brusque commands. She did everything he told her to do, and she did it quickly.

Jackson’s medicine was mundane, which was to say, he did not use spells in any of his procedures. She didn’t sense any sparks of Power on him or anywhere in his house, but then her magic sense was almost nil. Most creatures, items and places felt mundane to her. She’d never bothered to try discovering if her spark of Power was enough to cross over to an Other land because, in part, she couldn’t sense the land magic of the crossover passages.

Finally Jackson finished working on the dog. When he removed the endotracheal tube, straightened and stripped off his gloves, she stretched her aching back and shoulders and stripped off hers as well, tossing them into the hazardous-waste bin by the back door.

Jackson opened his battered fridge and pulled out two Heinekens. He popped the tops off the green bottles and handed one to her. Claudia accepted it and took a swallow. She watched him dig into his shirt pocket to pull out a cigarette lighter and a pack of Camels. He offered a cigarette to her. She shook her head. He tapped one out of the box, stuck it between his lips and kicked open the back screen door to step outside. When he held the door open for her, she glanced at the bandaged, unconscious dog.

“He won’t be waking up for a few hours,” said Jackson. His pale blue eyes were keen.

She took a deep breath and stepped outside after him. She drank her Heineken and looked around the scene as Jackson smoked. She could see the back end of the modest row houses that lined the sandy two-lane street. To the north, rising foothills provided an elevated horizon. The brown land was sprinkled with dots of sagebrush, cacti and yucca trees. A few of the houses had small landscaped areas of improbable green.

Jackson’s backyard didn’t. It was the same brown as the rest of the desert. A small, battered trailer that rested on concrete blocks instead of tires took up most of the space in his yard. Bare concrete steps led up to the trailer’s door. The window coverings were raised. The trailer looked uninhabited, the parking space beside it empty.

A large part of the evening sky had darkened. She nodded toward it. “Weird.”

Jackson glanced in that direction. “Sandstorm’s blowing in. It’ll probably hit in another hour. Looks like we’ll lose cable again.”

She raised her eyebrows. “That happen often?”

“A fair amount. Cell phone reception is spotty here anyway, and it goes out completely in one of these storms. Sometimes we lose the phone lines too. If the phone lines go, it’ll take at least a day before we get them back.”

“Damn.”

“The storm might blow over in a couple of hours, or it might go all night. I knew one once that lasted a couple days, although that’s unusual. People watch DVDs, hang out in the bars, and there’s always a poker game somewhere.” He shrugged. “You get used to it.”

The storm didn’t look that far off. She guessed it would be blowing in very soon, but for the moment, the heat of the early evening pressed against her skin. Spring hadn’t officially arrived yet; the vernal equinox was in just a few days. She liked the summer and winter solstices, and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. They added a cadence to the year and made it feel balanced.

The heat would go out of the day quickly, especially now that the sun had begun to descend. She imagined the spring nights would get quite cold, but for now she was still comfortable with bare arms.

Jackson finished his cigarette, stubbed it out and tossed the brown butt into a coffee can by his back door. “I’d say you don’t talk much for a girl,” he said. “Except you don’t talk much, period. Those five words were the most you’ve said in a couple hours.”

She took a pull from her beer. “Ran out of things to say a few years back.”

Jackson grunted, tapped out another cigarette and lit it. He drew deeply on the cigarette and with evident pleasure. The glowing coal at the end flared bright red. “Why’s that?”

She lifted a shoulder. Too much blood, too much death. Her unit got shot at one too many times, and the last time almost none of them survived to walk away. Sometimes, she thought, things happen that are so bad you go deep inside, down past the point of screaming, into silence.

She finished her Heineken.

Jackson smoked. She liked the smell of the cigarette smoke. It was comforting. It reminded her of people she had cared for more than her own life, people she would never see again this side of death.

He asked, “So what’s the real story? You know that dog?”

“Nope,” she said. “I found him, just like I said.”

He said, “He should’ve died on that table couple times over.”

“I figure,” she said. She stretched her neck again, first one way then the other.

“Thought you might,” said Jackson. “You know, it could just mean he’s one hell of a stubborn dog. I’ve seen animals with a kind of will to live you wouldn’t believe.”

“It could.” She waited. She thought she knew what might come next.

Jackson did not disappoint. “Or it could mean something else,” he said. He pushed his hat back with the tip of his bottle. “Which is why you watched me so damn close the whole time I was working on him, wasn’t it? Why you wanted to help. And why you wanted to make sure about the drugs I was giving him. He could just be a stubborn dog that won’t die. Or he could be Wyr. In which case, what happened to him wasn’t just animal cruelty but attempted murder.”

“I figure,” Claudia said again.

Chapter Two

Hearth

“But the healing capabilities of the Wyr are famous,” she continued. “Wouldn’t we have seen some of his injuries heal by now?”

“Maybe we did, which is why he didn’t die. You don’t have the magic sense to tell whether he’s Wyr or not,” Jackson said. He didn’t phrase it as a question.

She answered him anyway. “Nope.”

“I don’t either. Nor John, or he would have said something.”

“Would he?”

“The hell you mean by that?” He aimed a fierce frown in her direction.

Earlier, the vast space she had been driving through had been so empty there hadn’t even been a bird visible in the sky. Rodriguez had to have been moving fast just to catch sight of her, let alone catch her on his radar. She knew why she’d been speeding, but she didn’t know why he had been. She wondered what had been so urgent it had caused him to drive at such speed. Yet whatever it was, he had abandoned it in order to pull her over.

It could have been coincidence that Rodriguez pulled her over just after she found the dog. The sheriff had only put his hand on his gun, he hadn’t drawn it. The dog was so badly injured that anyone might have suggested putting him out of his misery. She’d thought of it herself.

Rodriguez had brought it up twice.

Coincidence and niggles. They were such small things. They almost certainly meant nothing. She kept her tone mild. “Nothing. I don’t know the sheriff. I don’t know you. That’s all.”

The vet heaved a sigh. It sounded disgusted. “Well, obviously something happened for you to wonder if the dog might be Wyr.”

“Rodriguez brought up a good point,” she said. “It wasn’t easy getting such a large animal into the back of my car.”

“Yeah, but you managed it somehow. So?”

She squinted up at the early evening, storm-swept sky. What was that color? It was not quite orange, not quite red. Maybe that was what brimstone looked like.

“He was awake when I found him,” she said. “He was already hurting bad. I hurt him a lot more when I got him in the car.” She thought of the look the dog had given her, the sense she had gotten of a sharp intelligence behind the suffering, and searched for more words. They came harder when a body had stopped talking for a time. Jackson was staring at her. Finally she said, “He didn’t bite me.”

Jackson sighed again. He opened the back screen door and gestured for her to precede him. She moved to the table and he joined her. They both regarded the unconscious dog. Jackson said, “You know, he’s probably mundane. He’s facing a long, hard recovery, and that’s just the physical component of his injuries. After the kind of abuse he’s suffered, it might take him months before he trusts anyone again. He’s gonna wake up in a few hours. I can keep him medicated for the pain, but I’m still gonna have to crate him.”