A Feral Darkness

by Doranna Durgin

  Her mother knew, if only she had been willing to see. And if her father had realized, he'd have done something, she was sure—but she couldn't bring herself to see it hurt him. So that was when she'd started reading up on breeds, a subject which hadn't truly mattered to someone who rescued dogs in whatever size, shape, and color they came to her. And that was when she stopped truly trusting her brother, who never understood her ire. "I never did anything wrong," he had told her. "I just sold him the dog. Not my business what he did with it."

  No wonder she spent more time here than with her brother's family in town, and knew Emily's girls better than Russell's two boys.

  The girls came clattering down the stairs and into the kitchen, Druid at their heels and looking attentive and interested in all the little girl things he'd been exposed to. Fashion dolls and stuffed animals...his fascinated expression led Brenna to decide on the spot that he hadn't been in a family with children, at least not girl children.

  Nine year-old Jill, perpetually chubby, freckled, and heading toward braces, held a brush in one hand and a comb in the other; Marilee—equally freckled but beginning to trade her baby fat for height—carried a surfeit of hair goodies—combs and elastics and a few things that Brenna couldn't even identify.

  "Time for the ritual torture," Emily said. "It's what you deserve for coming over here and flaunting that hair in front of two little girls with short hair imposed upon them by their wicked mother."

  "It's on my head, is all," Brenna said, but smiled. Emily's girls had no monopoly on their attentiveness; little girls too young to have been fully socialized often reached out to touch her hair in the store, usually with soft exclamations of delight.

  "Hide it under a hat the next time," Emily responded, unruffled. "Go get her, my little hair stylists."

  Already they were behind her, releasing her hair from its braid and finger combing it, as gentle as always.

  "I just learned a new way to braid," Marilee said with enthusiasm. "It'll look so cool with hair this long. It's called a fishtail braid."

  "Now that sounds attractive," Brenna said, but she slid down in the chair so she could relax, the groomer being groomed. If only half her own canine clients could learn to enjoy the tug and massage of the process.

  Of course, she wasn't sure she'd enjoy it nearly as much if she, too, had mats. But without them she enjoyed it well enough to drift away in thought, Druid dozing by her feet. At least, until the voices started up.

  They came to her in a murmur, as though she were stuck in a verbal collage. Male and female, none of them familiar, expressing themselves in incomplete sentences as though they came from a low-volume television with someone hopping through channels. Druid twitched against her feet, dreaming, but her awareness of it didn't distract her from the voices. Authorities have labeled it shedding rabies, said a male voice, and another man found dead in the city said a woman. Vaccine and too late and then an official-sounding voice that said take your dog out and back again, please. A few jumbled commands—things like stay, Druid, it's only for a little while and Druid, no! And oddly, in a voice that seemed familiar, ...local groomer Brenna Lynn Fallon succumbed today—

  Brenna jerked alert, barely aware of the girls' exclamations that they hadn't thought they'd pulled her hair. What the hell was—

  And Druid jerked awake, looking dazed and disoriented. And then he looked at Brenna, and he screamed—a human sound no dog should ever voice. He flung himself backward, and even as Brenna would have grabbed for him, a dizzying vertigo clutched her; in the instant it took for solid ground to return, he was gone, and all three of the Brecken women, youngest to oldest, were staring wide-eyed at his wake.

  "Oh-kaay," Emily said, turning both her gaze and her expertly raised eyebrow on Brenna.

  "What the hell—" Brenna said, out loud this time, and then realized she was in the presence of young ears. "You guys didn't hear that." She grabbed an elastic from the table and brought her hair around. The fishtail braid was indeed cool, but apparently tedious in execution, for it was only a third of the way down her back. She overrode the girl's protests and fastened it where they had stopped.

  "Do me a favor," she told them, talking over them, and her words hushed them fast enough. "Help me find him. He's probably hiding behind or under something. Don't try to get close to him. He's too afraid right now, and it wouldn't be kind to him."

  Young women on a mission, they rushed from the kitchen.

  Emily caught Brenna's eye and shook her head. "You told me he was strange, but...Brenna, just what is it you think you can do with that dog?"

  Brenna had no doubt that if Druid had been on a leash, they would all have been treated to another incident of flailing and foaming and shrieking, and she sighed, meeting Emily's gaze long enough for an honest shrug. "I don't know. But you saw him...when he's normal, he's a charismatic and well-behaved dog. If I can only figure out what's causing the behavior—"

  "The behavior," Emily said, and laughed without humor. "The behavior! Brenna, the dog is hallucinating! He's the doggy equivalent of a homeless man who's not sane and won't take his drugs!"

  Brenna could only stare off in the direction of Druid's flight, bemused. Local groomer Brenna Lynn Fallon succumbed today...

  Just how crazy did that make her?

  ~~~

  Crazy enough to go back to work. On Saturday, no less, a day Brenna was used to working but one that always lasted several hours longer than she was actually scheduled, even double-teaming with Elizabeth and with someone pulled off the floor to wash the dogs.

  Not someone who actually knew what they were doing, of course. One of the guys from the back of the store, whom Roger must have figured was large enough to handle the big ones. And who obviously loved dogs.

  If only he'd ever washed one before.

  Brenna, swooping in to get her next clip job and crossing mental fingers that the dog was actually dry, found Deryl towel-drying a Collie-mutt and spotted the tell-tale slick of fur at a glance.

  "He's still got soap in his hair," she told him, shouting out of necessity; all the dryers were going, all the crates full.

  He gave a look of disbelief, clearly not able to comprehend that he'd missed some soapy spots or, more likely, that he'd missed them and she'd been able to see them. "But I've already got him half-dry."

  As if that was relevant. "Doesn't matter," she said, gesturing at the tub with her chin, her arms already full of West Highland Terrier. "Put him back in and rinse him again. If you don't get the soap out, he'll itch and we'll rightly get blamed for it." She freed an arm from the Westie, balancing the dog in her grip just long enough to point. "There. And there. Get those spots rinsed enough to make your fingers squeak."

  And still the doubt.

  "Just do it!" she said in exasperation. "You're getting paid by the hour, not by the dog!"

  He frowned, hesitated, and thought better of it. When she left the room he was reinserting the unhappy dog into the tub.

  Elizabeth was hard at work on a Samoyed who apparently hadn't been brushed all winter. "It's no wonder they hate us," she muttered to Brenna as she used the razor sharp blades of a mat comb on the dog's haunches; it tried to whirl and snap, but she had it well-secured.

  Brenna didn't even bother to respond; it was a rhetorical grumble they perfected each spring. Instead she cranked the table up, deposited the Westie, and got to work. "And how are you today, Miss Daisy?" she said, and presented her face for licking.

  "No fair," Elizabeth said, still grumbling. "You got to do Daisy last time she was in."

  "Gotta be quick!" Brenna told her, grinning. Daisy came on a regular schedule, had a lovely coat, a sweet temperament, and solid conformation...good breeding, shining through. Grooming her always made Brenna remember what had attracted her to the job in the first place. Not just working with the dogs, but working with them in a way that they both enjoyed. Not just cleaning them up and putting them through a clipper assembly line, but turning it into an
art of sorts, taking handsome little dogs like Daisy and putting a smart breed clip on them so they'd want to strut out of the shop.

  And the hardest thing about Daisy was that although she knew to stand, she kept trying to give kisses. With a comb attachment, a little stripping work and thinning sheers, Brenna had Daisy spiffed up with a perky Westie breed cut and a tiny pink bow at the base of each ear. "You're too cute!" she told the dog, and escorted her to one of the front crates. Just in time; her owner would be along in fifteen minutes for pick-up.

  By which time Brenna would be snacking on carrots and granola bars. "Everything else is still drying," she told Elizabeth, pulling off her grooming smock. "I'm going for lunch, and maybe even that break I worked through this morning."

  "Fine by me," Elizabeth said, discarding a slicker brush's worth of hair on the floor. "I'll no doubt still be working on this dog when you get back. I hope you warned the owners that there would be matting charges."

  "Oh, yes," Brenna said. "We had the my dog's not matted conversation. I provided visual aids and won the day." What she had done was to stick several wide-toothed combs into the dog's hair—where they stayed upright, quite securely anchored by the mats.

  They kept combs on the front counter expressly for that purpose.

  But she didn't have to think of that now. She could grab her lunch, her current paperback thriller, and let the rest of her brain take a deep, restful breath in the employee break room, where the biggest challenge was resisting the beguiling whisper of the snack pastries in the vending machine.

  Which was where she was when Roger's new buddy sauntered in and poured himself a cup of coffee, a sheaf of photocopies tucked under his arm. She didn't look up from her book; peripheral vision identified him easily enough, although he wasn't moving with the same facility she had already associated with him. And he took no special note of her, not until he carefully eased into one of the folding metal chairs across the table from her and came out of his preoccupation long enough to recognize her. "How's that dog?" he asked, but his voice didn't sound especially solicitous. Making conversation.

  She hesitated, tempted to pretend she was so absorbed by her reading that she didn't hear him and trying to pin down the faint accent in his words—not English, but too elusive to identify. He wasn't dissuaded; she felt his gaze through the book between them and finally she lowered the book to the table, careful to miss the remains of her lunch. "He's strange," she said noncommitally. "He's about the strangest dog I've ever dealt with, if you want to know. But I suppose somehow I'll manage."

  "If you decide you want help, give me a call." He took a card from his shirt pocket and shoved it across the table at her.

  "You know," Brenna said, feeling her mouth take over and knowing that she would probably regret it later, "if I was going to ask someone for help, it sure wouldn't be someone who makes that...face at me."

  "Which face would that be?" he said, and she could swear she heard amusement. Not outright humor, just...

  She couldn't tell, and it frustrated her. "The one you're probably making right now—" she said, finally and fully looking away from the book, and then cutting herself short. Whatever his expression, this was certainly the first time he'd had a couple of stitches in one eyebrow and dark purple bruising all the way down the side of his face...as if a heavy fist had skidded up from jaw to brow and come to an abrupt stop there. "Well, okay," she said, finding it odd to meet his gaze and those same clear, deep blue eyes as her own—familiar eyes in an unfamiliar framework. "Probably not that exact face. But under all the colors, pretty much identical." She imitated it for him. "Anyway, working with dogs is what I do."

  Undeterred by her response, he nudged the business card toward her. Thanks to the stickiness of the table—there was a definite cabal of employees who thought a magic fairy would descend from the ceiling to clean up their mess once they'd gone—the card didn't go far, but Brenna reached for it anyway. She recognized the logo from his SUV right away, a generic dog silhouette circled by words. Gil Masera, it said. Dog Obedience and Behavior Specialist.

  As she looked up from the card he shrugged and said, "Sometimes it's good to have a backup."

  Obedience trainer? Talking to Roger, hanging around the store? Great—it was a probably a professional thing, then, that look. That judgment. Trainer techniques looking down on groomer techniques. She put the card back down where she'd gotten it, in the middle of the table, struck by a sudden bad feeling. "What is it you're you doing here?"

  "Having coffee. Listening to you get straight to the point."

  "It's better that way—I don't get a very long break." She flashed an annoyed look at him. "Why," she repeated, "are you having coffee here? Why does your presence make Roger deliriously happy? And why do you look at me that way—" for he'd done it in the parking lot, too, more or less, "—and don't deny it."

  He withstood the barrage with no change of expression, aside from one barely discernable wince when the coffee touched his split lip.

  Maybe it would leave a scar, she thought, and gave it some hope.

  He leaned back in the rickety chair, wincing again, but ignoring her blatant scrutiny of his physical woes. "I'm having coffee here because I'm here. I'm here because I'm trying to arrange the necessary layout to hold obedience classes in this store. Roger's happy because he thinks the classes will increase the customer base, and because he didn't think he'd talk me into signing on since I don't need his customer base."

  "Then why did you? Sign on, I mean." Straight to the point, why not. "And don't think I didn't notice you didn't answer my last question."

  "The church I used to work out of not only raised their rates, they kept taking my class space at the last minute." Straight to the point, right back at her. And there was something in his voice that let her know he answered because he chose to, and not necessarily just because she'd asked. "Roger made me a better offer."

  No doubt. Brenna had gotten one of those herself, luring her away from her last job. And she'd questioned Roger carefully about her professional concerns, all of which he had assured her would never happen—and every one of which now occurred on a daily or weekly basis.

  But let Gil Masera find that out for himself.

  "The faces," Masera said bluntly, "are because I don't like big commercial grooming set-ups. I've seen the way the dogs are handled in those situations. I've even picked up the pieces."

  Brenna's composure slipped. "You've never even seen me work! And you've probably picked up the pieces of what happens when a dog doesn't even see a brush until it's so matted that the owners drop off the mess for someone else to deal with, all while demanding that the dog's coat be saved."

  "I've seen enough," he said, not narrowing his eyes so much as lowering the lids in a way that might have made someone else look sleepy but just made him look like a big cat waiting to pounce.

  "You come work in the tub room for a week, you want to say anything like that about this grooming room," Brenna said, her bangs sliding into her face with her emphatic words. She brushed at them in an automatic gesture and poofed them away for good measure, sitting back in the folding chair. "Are you always this abrasive?"

  "It's a gift," he said, watching her. "Sometimes it suits me."

  She quite definitely didn't know what to make of him. Under Russell's expectant stare she often kept silent, promising herself she'd do things her way as soon as he looked away—which never took long. But now...there was some unspoken challenge in Masera's scrutiny, and she gave him an even look in return. Standing behind what she'd said, the good and the bad of it both.

  Still, it came as a relief when the door swung open, interrupting their temporarily silent exchange. Sammi Grozny of the People Placing Pets rescue group came in, hunting down a soda. PePP held weekly adoption days out of Pets!, during which the volunteers juggled various cats and dogs, made sure unsupervised kids didn't poke Fido's eyes out, diplomatically discouraged the people who wanted simply to walk away wit
h a new pet, and encouraged the owner-prospects to fill out the initial questionnaire in the process of adoption. Saints, in other words, or so Brenna had always thought.

  But not perfect ones. Sammi, who weighed enough that Brenna worried about her health and who never seemed to catch her breath, nonetheless used that breath on endless streams of verbal worrying. "Brenna!" she said, as though Masera weren't even in the room. "I wondered why I didn't see you out front. I wondered if you'd heard about that dog pack—you're right in their territory, aren't you?"

  Before Brenna had a chance to answer, Masera said, "No one's seen a single member of that pack."

  Sammi ignored him, making her soda selection automatically enough that it was obvious she knew this machine well. "I hope you're being careful."

  "Sunny's crated," Brenna said, but she glanced at Masera and realized right away that his own words had been deceptively offhand in delivery; his eyes were watching every nuance of the conversation. "Hold on," she said, balling up the plastic wrap that had held her peanut butter and jelly sandwich and twisting in her chair to toss it out. "I'll walk back up front with you."

  "Finish your lunch," Masera said, nodding at the remaining baggie of carrot sticks as he swallowed the last of his coffee; Brenna winced at the thought of how hot it must have been. "I'm through here."

  It stopped her short, her hand in the act of stuffing the carrots into her Warrior Princess lunch box. He didn't wait for her response, but stood—or tried to. It seemed to take him by surprise, as though his attention had been so diverted that he'd forgotten his battered status. But he pushed himself to his feet, straightened with effort, and tossed his coffee cup at the giant bin in the corner of the room, gathering up his papers.

  "Don't forget to come spend some time in the tub room," she said, and gave him a dare-you smile. People forgot she could do that; she had one of those wholesome faces, the kind that take on cheerful as their default expression. Her eyes even tipped up a tiny bit, as if they were always smiling. Sometimes she stood in front of the mirror and tried for sultry, but couldn't ever pull it off. Not with that chin—strong, in a strong jaw, and with a definite cleft. Or with those lips, which had a little uplift in each corner and, just like her eyes, always seemed to imply a smile even when just in repose. And her nose...just hopeless. Not that it didn't suit her face, but maybe that was the problem. It wasn't quite what you would call perky, not with that subtle bump on the bridge of it, but it was darn close.