Reign of Terrier

by Lori R. Taylor

  No one had seen the start of their fight, but the fact that Princess had more injuries than Sparks did made her think Princess hadn’t actually been the initiator like she had in the dog park.

  Maybe, just maybe, something of her soothing Tessa through her fears had given Princess the confidence to work through hers.

  Maybe they were truly better together.

  Tessa shook her head, knocking the thought free. She’d done the best thing for them both, surely. She would’ve never done it otherwise. She had to love Princess enough to let her go, to let her find a home better than the one she could provide.

  She pulled off the lead and stepped back from the kennel door. Leslie shut it quietly and led Tessa back out to the lobby.

  Tessa pretended she couldn’t hear the way Princess whined after her, she couldn’t feel the way her own heart whined back.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The ring tone of her phone woke Tessa an hour before her usual alarm. She groaned and rolled over, blinked at the screen as it lit up, for a moment not quite understanding what was happening to it.

  Then the words of caller ID swam into full focus.

  Pretty Paws.

  She sat up sharply, grabbing the phone so fast and hard that she accidentally yanked it free of its charger. Her sleepy fingers fumbled for the motion to answer the call, and after a moment too long, they succeeded.

  “Tessa?” said a male voice at the other end of the line.

  “Yeah.” She hoped she didn’t sound too sleepy.

  “It’s Dr. Dale. From Pretty Paws.”

  She blinked a couple of times, clearing her vision, and hopefully with it her head. “Oh. Yeah. Morning.”

  “I’m sorry, did I wake you?” Concern creaked under his voice.

  “Just a little. It’s fine.” The last thing Tessa wanted was for him to think she was upset by his call.

  Her heart hammered against her ribs. There was one of two ways this could go: either he would offer her an externship, or he would tell her he chose Eliza.

  A future she never really dared to imagine suddenly dangled before her. Lonelier than she would’ve wanted, but there just the same.

  She didn’t dare to even breathe, lest she get swallowed up by her own panic.

  “I need help down here. Is there any chance at all you could come?”

  Well.

  That wasn’t either of the options for what Dr. Dale could be calling about.

  She blinked, trying to chase away the dual visions of the future: the one where she got the externship, graduated from the vet tech program, earned some fancy letters after her name; and the one where he chose Eliza, Tessa failed out of Harper Jones, and had to go back into data analysis for the rest of her days.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I think so?” She rumbled away the lump in her throat. “Is something wrong?”

  “Maybe. Half the kennel is sick this morning, and I can’t handle them all by myself.”

  “Oh. Oh, yeah. Um … I can be there in half an hour.”

  “Thank God. Thank you.”

  He hung up, and she stared down at her phone until the screen went dark. Then, shaking herself, she rolled out of bed and hurried to dress and brush her hair.

  The front door was locked when Tessa got to Pretty Paws half an hour later, but Leslie sat at the front desk and opened the door when she knocked. She was frowning, and her expression was distant so that she barely even nodded as Tessa came in.

  “Dr. Dale said he needed help?” She didn’t mean to make the words into a question, but they came out that way under Leslie’s obvious uncertainty.

  “Yes. Thank you. You know the way back to the lab?”

  “I remember.”

  She waved Tessa on without another word, so she went, the worry that had taken root in her stomach growing branches and leaves at that.

  She didn’t know Leslie, not really, not such that she’d feel comfortable making any real judgments about the state of things based on her expressions.

  But she hadn’t smiled, had barely even met Tessa’s eyes, not even once, which, from her previous encounters with Leslie, was very odd. She had always seemed to be the stable, reliable sort, one who kept her thoughts and feelings firmly locked away behind a friendly smile and knowing gaze.

  To see her so obviously worried was … disconcerting, and it made Tessa’s own worry flare like fire under a squirt of gasoline.

  The lab was worse; though the room was empty when Tessa first stepped into it, she could sense the nervous energy buzzing through the air. Yesterday, it had been quiet, calm. This morning, though it looked no different at first glance, it was clearly busy.

  Dr. Dale came into the room just behind, leading a dog on each side. Tessa recognized Sparks, though her eyes were dull and her head and tail hung low and unhappy. The other, a tiny Yorkie-ish dog, was in no better a state.

  He looked at Tessa and smiled with just the corners of his lips. The rings under his eyes were so dark they were barely obscured by his glasses, speaking to a long and sleepless night. “Morning, Tessa.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Dunno. Night walk called near midnight because nearly a dozen dogs were sick in their kennels, and the number has been going up since.”

  Eliza came through the door, too, leading two more dull-eyed dogs.

  “Here.” Dr. Dale handed Tessa a small plastic cup half full of a disturbingly runny stool sample. “Do you know how to run a snap test?”

  She’d heard of them, seen diagrams, and she was pretty sure snap tests came with instructions on how to run and read them, so, while she’d never done one herself, she was sure she could. “I’ll figure it out.”

  “I need parvo and giardia.”

  “Top right cabinet, above the computer,” Eliza offered before Tessa had to ask.

  She hurried to find the tests.

  Part of the sense of chaos, not immediately visible upon first coming into the room but adding to the feeling nonetheless, was the scattering of cups and Q-tips, slides and bits of wrapping, across the countertops, as if stool samples had been run through several different tests at multiple times, and there just wasn’t the time or energy to fully clean up. Tessa found the boxes labeled for parvovirus and giardia snap tests, pulled out one of each, and set to work reading through the instructions.

  They took ten minutes — ten minutes of anxious waiting, watching the clock, helping to cycle through the four dogs Dr. Dale and Eliza had brought back for fluids, and the tension could’ve been cut with a knife and eaten for breakfast.

  At about minute eight, too worried to hold it in anymore, she asked the question that was burning the most. “What happens if it’s parvo?”

  Dr. Dale was giving fluids to the Yorkie while Eliza was returning Sparks and another of the dogs to their kennels and fetching the next two. Tessa tried not to think of Princess.

  He looked at her for a long, long moment after she asked the question, his mouth drawn, eyes weary. “I’m not sure,” he said at last. “We might have to put down a lot of dogs.”

  She pulled in a breath and wasn’t entirely sure how to let it out again.

  “We wouldn’t have a choice. We don’t have the resources to nurse sixty dogs through parvo. And then the contamination…” He shuddered involuntarily. “We’d be done. We’d have to close, probably forever.”

  Tessa bit her lip and glanced at the clock. One minute — one very worried, silent minute — to go.

  The relief at the negative parvo test was audible, a breath breathed out not just by Tessa and Dr. Dale and Eliza, but the dogs and the room and maybe even the entire shelter. Tessa couldn’t but imagine Leslie still at the front desk letting out an equal sigh at the same moment.

  “Right.” Dr. Dale straightened, and a little bit of energy reinvigorated his voice. “That’s a load off. But it leaves us back where we started, with no ideas for what’s actually wrong.”

  She frowned and tried to remember what could cause vomiting
and diarrhea in dogs, and on such a scale. “Did something change? The food or cleaner or something?”

  “No,” Eliza answered immediately, firmly. “I fed and cleaned last night — everything was completely fine.”

  “What about … laundry detergent? Dish soap brand?”

  She was stretching, but that was all she could think to do.

  Eliza shook her head. “All the same as it has been for weeks.”

  “Well, obviously something’s different!”

  “That’s the problem: nothing is!”

  Her voice, echoing Tessa’s, rose in both pitch and volume, and the dog Tessa was holding winced. She swallowed hard and forced her own back down. None of them needed the unskilled volunteers to be at each other’s throats right now. “It’s okay. We’ll … we’ll figure it out.”

  How had it happened that Tessa was the one with the confidence?

  It was going to be a very strange day.

  The lab door opened again, and this time it was Leslie carrying a dog, and the dog was Princess.

  For a moment that somehow felt like an eternity, Tessa could only stare, her heart pounding at her chest like it was determined to kick right through it, and in that moment, all she could think about was what Dr. Dale had said in answer to her question about this being parvo.

  We might have to put down a lot of dogs. We’d have no choice.

  The test was negative, but snap tests weren’t 100% accurate. They could give false negatives.

  What if this one had? What if Pretty Paws had come down with a case of parvovirus and they didn’t even know it? What if this box of tests was defective? What if she’d done it wrong?

  If Princess had parvo, if she had to be put down because Tessa had messed up, she would never forgive herself.

  “Tessa,” Dr. Dale said, softly, urging her attention back to the dog between them.

  She went back to stroking the dog’s long, houndy ears, distracting them from the sting of antiemetic Dr. Dale gave them, but half her attention stayed on Princess.

  She was restless, nudging, and whining at Leslie where the older woman held her, her eyes flickering between Tessa and a different corner of the room. She wondered what Princess might say if she had words because Tessa was almost certain that she wanted them.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Sometimes it was frustrating to be a dog.

  Princess didn’t often have moments to dwell on that — she was a dog, and that would never change, so why spend time and energy worrying about what she could and could not do?

  But then came the moments, the thoughts, the knowledge, that humans would be able to communicate with their voices and words that tail wagging and whines just could not convey.

  She knew Tessa was watching her; though her hands and face stayed turned toward the floppy brown dog in front of her, her eyes kept glancing over her shoulder toward Princess’ face. Her mouth and eyebrows were pulled down into a frown, and Princess knew she was doing her best to understand what she was trying to tell her.

  But she was a dog, and she didn’t have words to just say what Tessa needed to hear.

  The dog under her hands was finished, and Dr. Dale nodded once at her, and as quick as a blink, she was at Leslie’s side, hands reaching for Princess.

  Princess squirmed against Leslie’s grip. She knew she shouldn’t, that whatever Leslie was doing, it was meant to help, but she suddenly didn’t want Leslie doing it at all. Whatever needed to be done, she wanted Tessa to do it.

  Leslie didn’t fight, and then Tessa’s fingers were in her fur, stroking lightly down her sides near where the needle had gone in under her skin.

  “Hey, puppy,” she murmured.

  Princess flicked her tongue at her fingers in an answering greeting.

  They were quiet for a while, just reveling in the chance to be close, a chance Princess thought she’d never have again.

  But then, with the sting of something sharp going into her skin, the tightness between her shoulders where Leslie had placed the needle and spilled fluids into her body, she was shaken from her reverie.

  And she remembered.

  She had to make the humans understand.

  It had been a miserable night, the worst of perhaps her entire life. Everything inside her hurt, and no matter how she tried to not, each mouthful of water kept coming back up. Her kennel stunk something awful, and all the other kennels around hers did, too, the whimpers of her nearest neighbors telling her that they felt just as terrible as she did.

  She wasn’t sure how many knew, or how many dogs were sick, but it had been enough that Dr. Dale and Leslie had been here since the middle of the night and stayed even until now.

  But Princess couldn’t make them understand.

  And if they didn’t know, they wouldn’t be able to stop it.

  So she was grateful to see Tessa — not just because it meant she was here, she was taking care of me, but because maybe Princess could make her understand, and then she could use her human voice to tell everyone.

  A lot of dogs had been hungry for so long before coming here that they didn’t even notice their food. Princess hadn’t noticed it before she’d scarfed down half of it herself.

  But once she paused, once she tasted it, it became clear: something was wrong with last night’s food. Something about it tasted wrong, off, not right.

  And now, Princess and some large number of the other dogs in the shelter were sick from it.

  She stayed on the table where Leslie had placed her, and what she gave did help. By the time Tessa was taking the needle out from under her skin, Princess already felt less nauseous and a little clearer in the head.

  A relief after a night spent vomiting.

  And maybe the clarity she needed to make sure someone understood her.

  Tessa slid a lead around her neck and put her back down to the floor, and Princess knew her time was quickly disappearing. She pressed close to Tessa’s ankle, ignoring the way she tried to hand her back to Leslie, until Leslie smiled a little at her and said that maybe she should take Princess back and reached for another dog instead.

  They all headed back to the kennels as a group — all four humans and a trail of dogs. Tessa was about to put Princess in her kennel again when she heard the distinctive metallic rattle of the food cart, being pushed along by Phoebe, the woman who’d let everyone out with the group yesterday.

  She opened the door to one of the dog’s kennels who wasn’t yet sick and grabbed a bowl of the tainted food.

  It was now or never.

  Princess yanked away from Tessa’s grip on the end of her lead and ran snarling for the bowl. Phoebe jerked back, but she’d already set the dish into the dog’s kennel, and the dog was diving eagerly for it.

  Princess snapped at him, and he drew back for a moment, startled.

  “Princess? What the…?”

  Tessa was only a few steps behind, and Phoebe hesitated nearby. Either one of them would stop her any second, but Princess couldn’t let this dog get sick, too — he was barely more than a puppy, still gangly and floppy with skin he hadn’t quite finished growing into, and she knew if he ate the food, he would be as sick as she’d been.

  And, more to the point, if the humans kept serving the bad food, all the dogs would be sick again by nightfall.

  The dog whined and made a move again for the food. Princess growled, baring her teeth, trying for threatening now.

  He had at least thirty pounds on her, but he was young, and that helped tip the balance back into her favor. He withdrew again, still whining and gazing at his dish.

  Princess risked a glance back at Tessa, who hesitated now at Phoebe’s side, and willed her to understand.

  “What is she doing?” Phoebe mumbled, more to herself than anyone else.

  Tessa stared, frowning.

  Princess nudged the bowl. It clanked, metal on metal, inside the holder, but she refused to flinch away. The faint whiff of the strange taint in the food filled her nose.r />
  And suddenly, Tessa’s expression cleared, a flash of smile to replace the confused frown.

  “It’s the food. Something’s wrong with the food!”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Oh!”

  Tessa dropped to her knees and reached for the food dish Princess was worrying with. She stepped back, no longer growling and showing teeth as if she understood that Tessa now understood.

  “Tessa?” Dr. Dale was behind her now, watching, a confused frown strong in his voice.

  “It is the food. Something’s wrong with it!”

  Princess whined again and flicked her tail as if in agreement.

  Tessa pulled the bowl out of the little circular holder at the front of the other dog’s kennel and sniffed it. There was a faint soapy smell under the stronger scent of kibble, subtle but there once she looked for it.

  She handed the bowl to Dr. Dale, who took a long whiff of it as well. The tired lines around his eyes and lips deepened as he looked back at her.

  “You’re right. Something’s not right about that.” He passed the bowl back to Leslie. “Take a good look at this, Les. We might have a problem.”

  The woman from yesterday, Phoebe, chewed on her lip. Tessa could almost hear the guilt swirling around in her head — am I to blame? Did I do something wrong, again?

  Tessa smiled at her, just a little. The poor woman had been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time twice in as many days, but surely none of this was her fault.

  If anything, it might be Eliza’s, since she was the one who fed tainted food last night and didn’t even notice it.

  “What is that?” Leslie asked.

  “Dunno,” Dr. Dale said. “Smells a bit like undiluted chlorhexidine.”

  Tessa stood. Eliza had come up to the little knot they’d all made in the aisle between kennels, and their eyes met.