The Wild Rites Saga Omnibus 01 to 04

by Anna McIlwraith

  Sweet Jesus. If Pam had explained just how big the dog was, maybe Emma mightn’t have shoved her out the door so fast. Looked like a cross between an Irish Wolfhound and a Rottweiler. Some idiot probably thought they were breeding the best guard dog ever — and abandoned it when it got too big and hard to control.

  And the poor baby stank to high heaven.

  Those long ears flicked forward once, then straight back. One lip curled in a silent snarl. The tangled tail hung low and stiff. Emma cursed herself for not putting the pole down when she’d had the chance, and then let out a long breath, relaxed her face, and fixed the dog with a hooded stare. Holding his gaze, she crouched, slow, so damn slow, and let the pole rest on the floor. Then she stayed where she was. Eye level with the dog.

  His forelegs stiffened. A line of hackles sprang up along his ridged back with one smooth motion, even as he curled his tail tight around one leg. Emma didn’t let her breathing change; this one wasn’t going to be easy, but panicking would make it even harder.

  It wasn’t magic, what she did. But to most people, it came close.

  “How about it, mister?” She kept her voice low, measured, husky. “Wanna talk this through? I got all the time in the world.” The words weren’t important; the sound of her voice was. The connection.

  The dog’s ears flicked forward again, back. One hind leg wobbled.

  Emma kept her eyes hooded and a small part of her willed her own stomach not to growl. One bite of a hotdog was not dinner. “I bet you’re hungry too,” she said to the dog, a little more conversational this time. “We get this done, I’ll find us both something to eat. Well, that’s a lie,” she added with a smile. “I’ll find you something to eat. Plenty of food for dogs here. Not so much the human variety.” Although Pam might have a pack of crackers stashed in a desk drawer.

  She lowered herself to the floor, sat half lotus style, and sighed.

  The dog whined, showing the whites of those brown/blue eyes as it dropped its head and looked up at her.

  That’s it, sweetheart. Come on.

  Slow, she opened her palms in her lap. “Wanna come to me?”

  She didn’t think he would. Then, ears still flat, he limped a few steps towards her. Hesitated. Emma sighed, hummed a long tuneless note out beneath her breath. And he limped the rest of the way.

  The smell hit her, and she ignored it. For a moment he stood taller than her; then he ducked his head, lay his belly along the floor, and with a rattling breath, put his face in her hands.

  She’d persuaded the dog to follow her out back to one of the consulting rooms and eat something when she heard a knock at the front of the clinic. The dog lifted his shaggy head from the feed bowl and growled, ears cocked forward, tail held stiff and almost horizontal. Odd eyes wide and intense.

  Huh , Emma thought. Not submissive. So the dog might have some emotional scarring, that was obvious, but he wasn’t broken — broken animals didn’t go on the active defensive. Awesome. It meant he was likely to respond well to pre-adoption behavioral rehab. Now who was at the door?

  Pam, she thought to herself as she hushed the dog and got up, heels clacking on the tiled hallway until she passed into the linoleum floored reception area — and froze. Claws clicked behind her. The dog growled again, low and wet, and for a second she couldn’t think straight to calm him.

  Alan stood framed in the glass partition window of the front door to the clinic. It was dark out, but the porch light had automatically come on, bathing him in a pool of sickly yellow light that did nothing to diminish his appearance. Dark blond hair, aristocratic good looks, pale brown eyes a shade lighter than polished teak — an immaculate white shirt she knew would be silk. He tilted his chin, raised a hand in a small wave through the glass. Dinner jacket folded over one arm. He didn’t smile.

  Shit. What the hell was he doing there? Emma crossed the waiting area, flipped the overhead lights on, and flashed him what she knew was a nervous smile. Then she opened the door.

  The dog barked, loud and deep and rough, and lunged, still barking, lips peeled back and ears forward and hackles jacked up porcupine high. For a second Emma thought he was going for her, then Alan stepped through the door and the dog’s bark turned into a harsh, snarling roar.

  Emma’s pulse rocketed into her throat. Her voice broke as she shouted, “NO!”

  Miraculously the dog stopped, eyes still rooted to Alan’s frozen form. The animal turned — watching Alan over his great shaggy shoulder, muttering a snarl between nervous licks and chomps of his teeth — and then he slunk behind Emma’s legs and wrapped himself around her. One paw on her bare toes where they poked out of the strappy heels.

  Emma’s chest heaved. She met Alan’s eyes, and only their wideness told her he’d even reacted at all; otherwise he looked the same as always, cool and implacable.

  He glanced down and then up, taking in the sight of her. “You look incredible.” His pale brown eyes lit with some emotion Emma couldn’t place.

  She forced a nervous laugh out. “Pam said the exact same thing. Only I think she was just shocked to see me in something other than jeans.” He didn’t look amused — but then he never did. Her hand went to the dog’s matted head, and she scratched behind one ear, feeling the vibration of a silent growl against her leg. “For someone who was almost attacked by a dog just now, you don’t seem too concerned.”

  Alan shrugged, made it look elegant. “You have things under control.” With an unreadable half smile that didn’t touch his eyes, he added, “You usually do.”

  He could be so weird sometimes. But then, he was dating her. “Alan,” she licked her lips. “What are you doing here?”

  He glanced down at the dog and frowned. “I decided I wanted to see you before I left. When I called to tell you, you didn’t pick up. I began to worry.” His eyes came up again, considering. “Besides. You did suggest…”

  Emma groaned inwardly. She hadn’t exactly suggested he come to the clinic. But he was here now. And she knew she should act happy about that — be happy about it — but there was something about him tonight. Maybe it was just that he’d almost been mauled by a dog that stank like an outhouse, but maybe it was something else.

  He stared at her. This wasn’t all that interesting; he stared at her a lot when they were together. She was used to it. But it was the quality of the stare that counted, and this was intense. The kind of intense that made her want to wipe at her face in case she had a spot on it or something, though she knew she didn’t. The kind of intense that made her mouth dry. She wanted to say something, but suddenly the air was too heavy to breathe.

  Alan plucked shining onyx cuff links from his shirtsleeves, popped them in a pocket of his tailored slacks, and began rolling back his sleeves. “You are very special, Emma.”

  Oh, no. He wanted the talk. The where-are-we-going talk. Emma’s heart dropped into her guts. A growl bubbled up from the dog, subsided when she smoothed a firm stroke down his neck. “No,” she said lightly, swallowed with difficulty. “I’m not.”

  Alan almost laughed; his eyes lit with a brief, cold sparkle, crinkling at the edges. “Very well. You are special to me .”

  Emma worked to keep her face neutral. She had serious doubts about Alan’s ability to find anyone very special aside from himself; he was possessed of a singular focus and calm that, to her, ruled out the possibility of being infatuated with anyone. It was one of the attractions — the lack of that obsessive quality which marked her few previous boyfriends.

  Alan’s eyes narrowed and a smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. Laughing at her. Emma felt a traitorous blush of anger creep up her neck and tried in vain to stop it reaching her face. She should be acting cooler than this.

  Alan might be infuriating occasionally, but he wasn’t stupid. His face smoothed, expression gone blank. “I’ve offended you somehow. That was not my intention. That was, in fact, the opposite of my intention.” He sighed. “You’re a difficult woman to romance.”

 
She bit back an apology. Never apologize unless you mean it . Especially not for something like that. “Are you trying to romance me?”

  Instead of answering, he dipped into the inside pocket of the jacket slung over his arm and withdrew a small, black velvet box.

  Emma’s brain locked. She had to do something. Stop this. But she just stared. The dog wedged behind her legs was the only thing keeping her upright.

  Alan cocked his head, studying her, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the box. “I wanted to give you something,” he said.

  Pressure cracked her, released the paralysis. She looked into his eyes. “We haven’t been dating all that long, Alan.”

  His gaze dropped to her mouth. “No.”

  “We don’t know each other all that well.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  Emma’s heart beat too hard. She licked her lips, wishing she’d worn her hair down, feeling like her throat was one long, naked line of vulnerable flesh. Like her racing pulse was visible at a hundred paces.

  She swallowed to steady her voice and surprised herself by saying, “Do you even know why you’re dating me?”

  He made a surprised noise, almost a laugh. He took her free hand in his and ignored the dog’s wet snarl. “Here.” He pressed the small box into her hand and feathered a chaste kiss across her cheek. “I have to go. I will call you.”

  Feeling relieved and guilty, Emma watched him back off a few steps. He eyed the dog. “You do have a way with animals, my love,” he said with a wry twist of his lips.

  Emma’s pulse kicked against her sternum. He’d never called her that — my love. She flashed him a sunny smile she didn’t feel. “You have no idea.”

  His pale brown eyes narrowed in a considering look. “Perhaps not,” he said. Then he stepped out into the night, and left.

  By the clinic’s porch lights Emma watched him cross the parking lot, and then twin headlights speared the darkness. He opened the passenger side door and climbed into the waiting silver sedan; his assistant must have chauffeured him. Emma stared after him.

  She’d always known he was strange; she seemed to attract strange people, and she wasn’t exactly apple pie normal herself. But there was strange and then there was different. Was he more than just strange? And should she have noticed before? She looked down at the small, velvet covered box in her hand. Not a ring. Box was the same though.

  The car drove away.

  And she was left with a smelly, overprotective dog, and a jewelry box she didn’t want to open.

  Emma had grown up on a horse farm in Colorado — her parents bred American Quarter Horses — but lost it all in a fire when she was eleven. The blaze took the horses and her parents. She was visiting with her Aunt Chase in Oregon when it happened, and she’d spent the next seven years under Aunt Chase’s care, until Ursula Chase met the woman of her dreams and moved to the United Kingdom to marry her.

  By then Emma was at UCLA for biology, thanks to the modest inheritance from the farm and Aunt Chase’s smart financial management. She’d grown up surrounded by animals on the farm, and helped Aunt Chase with her dog walking business through her teens, which had helped her get the kennel tech job at the clinic back when she was in undergrad. She’d never be able to go back to farm work — too many memories — but she still wanted to work with animals for the rest of her life. Now she was almost a year into her vet medicine degree, which meant her life was pretty much school and studying and working with the dogs at the clinic. But it was good.

  She was better with animals than she was with people — especially after the fire.

  Life before the fire was like this perfect dream, except it was also mundane and dirty and real, and after the fire that perfect dream was locked away and the key melted to slag, a lost door to fairyland. And although she’d been dating Alan for almost three months, she’d never felt comfortable enough to tell him how her parents died.

  She didn’t believe in fairyland, any more than he did. But she still didn’t want to tell him about it.

  An hour and a half after Alan left the clinic, Emma had managed to get the dog to eat some more, and decided not to risk him escaping from his kennel a second time. So she brought him home. A bad idea — he couldn’t stay with her, her apartment was too small for a dog his size — but she couldn’t force herself to leave him.

  The dog was a welcome distraction. Of course, the mutt needed a bath like wow. Several bottles of shampoo later, Emma stripped off her damp underwear — she’d hung up the blue dress when she got home and hadn’t bothered dirtying up a new change of clothes — and traded the sodden undergarments for a pair of plain black boylegs and an oversized Evil Dead: Army of Darkness t-shirt so old the black dye had long ago faded to gray, exactly the way an old t-shirt should.

  She undid her hair at the bathroom mirror, brushed and braided it so the shoulder length mass was out of the way, brushed her teeth, washed her face. She looked tired without the makeup. She wondered for the thousandth time if twenty-four was too young to be dating a guy in his mid thirties. Well, a little older than that. It shouldn’t be, should it? Maybe it was because Alan seemed older than that. But she’d Internet-stalked him when they first started dating — he was definitely thirty-six. And in every other way, Emma didn’t feel twenty-four. More like sixty-four.

  Something about Alan just made her feel vaguely inadequate somehow, and it wasn’t just the money. Although there was the money.

  There was nothing more she could do to delay the inevitable. With the dog resting in the bathroom doorway, head on his paws, smelling of coconut scented shampoo and talc, she dared to take the necklace out of its little velvet box.

  The mounting was simple, the chain slim, and for a second she almost mistook the white gold for silver. But she didn’t recognize the black stone. Crystal? She tilted it again, bemused; she didn’t know anything about jewelry.

  But she did know something about Alan. She looked harder at the mounting and the chain. She looked harder at the stone.

  Alan had money. A lot of money.

  Emma fired up the laptop in the living room. Google confirmed her worst suspicions.

  Back in the bathroom, she put the necklace on.

  The smoky black diamond sat just below the hollow where her collarbones met, nestled there, glinting. It did not, as some warped part of her had expected, feel heavy, clammy, hot, or alive in any way.

  She put her hand over it. In fact, it almost felt good to wear.

  Not that she had anything to wear it with, anyplace to wear it, or any desire to flash thousands of dollars worth of jewelry around. But that wasn’t the problem, was it?

  She liked Alan. He was smart, and interesting, and reserved, quietly passionate about art and philosophy and good pizza. She could relate to the pizza thing, at least. He seemed not to mind that she was usually dirty and never wore anything but jeans and t-shirts. He was an extraordinary kisser, and it had been difficult not to jump into bed with him already, despite her new thirteen week rule. But something about him…

  Something about him was scary, wasn’t it?

  She unclasped the necklace and carefully put it back in the little box. Left the box on the bathroom vanity. Killed the lights in the bathroom and padded through the dim, lamplit apartment to the sofa, and grabbed her phone as she sank into it.

  Thumbing open a text message to her roommate, she started typing. Canceled date, brought dog home from the clinic instead. Prob’ly going 2 break up with A. Try not 2 make 2 much noise when u come in. Xoxo

  She put the phone aside. Too wired to go to bed, too tired to study, and the retribution would be swift if she watched the next episode of Vikings on her own.

  She grabbed her book off the coffee table and opened it, eyes skimming the pages, but her mind was noisy with garbled replays of the last couple of hours. It shouldn’t have been so damn unsettling seeing Alan this evening. Was she really going to break up with him?

  The big dog slunk up beside
the couch and lay alongside it, rolling those mismatched eyes up at her when she leaned over and stroked the top of his lean head. Fingers still trailing through his coarse fur, she fell asleep without even realizing it. And dreamed of animals with pale brown eyes, and immaculate golden fur.

  2

  Emma woke up to the dog barking and someone knocking on the door, soft but insistent. She groped for the dog before she realized her right arm was numb, accidentally punched the edge of the coffee table and groaned. Just as well that arm was dead from the elbow down. Her fumbling hand swept a collection of books and grocery receipts onto the floor before she found the dog’s ruff, but she managed to get a good grip on him before she swung her legs off the couch, murmuring soothing nothings.

  The dog quieted, muttering low in his throat. Emma let him go and swayed to her feet, still half asleep, stumbling over a shoe on the way to the door. “Shit. Hello?”

  Muffled male voice from the other side, faint Hispanic accent familiar. “Em, it’s me. I lost my keys.”

  Emma swung the door open, still trying to get her eyes to function. “And your phone? You could’ve just — oh my God.” She stepped back as her roommate staggered into the apartment, caught himself on the back of the threadbare armchair, and stood there for a moment with his head hanging and his chest heaving and the left leg of his work slacks in bloodied tatters.

  The dog whined, but miraculously stayed sitting calm by the sofa.

  “Ricky, you’re bleeding. ”

  He laughed shakily. “Yup.”

  “Is it bad?”

  His breath hitched. “Yup.”

  Emma crossed to him and crouched, touching his hip lightly. She noticed a graze on his elbow. It was nothing compared to what had happened to his leg. “What did you do, take a shortcut home through razorwire fencing?” She gently lifted the torn, bloodied fabric away from his leg, wincing. She frowned. “This is really bad. Ricky, seriously.” She sat back and looked up at him. “What happened?”