A week later Rainy handed her padded envelope through the small post office wicket. Nan the postmistress beadily eyed the package front and back. Everything would be fine as long as she didn’t steam it open to check its contents.
‘‘Another story for Worlds of Fantasy already?’’
‘‘Mm.’’ Her package also contained a stamped self-addressed return envelope and three hundred and forty eagerly obedient microthorn demons with orders to rewrite the byline on her last story ‘‘Escape Claws’’ in every single copy of issue 46. Another three hundred and sixty-two microdemons were on their way to St. Pelag’s to seal the leaky gutters—what Father Ainslie didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, and over the years the church had certainly made worse deals—and two hundred were still scrubbing scorch marks off her doorstep and patching her walls.
‘‘Heard from Ros Bailey lately?’’ Nan asked too innocently.
‘‘In psychological assessment, poor lady. Apparently she still sees insects everywhere.’’ Another week till her lawyer checked out the will, and then Rainy would call her three hundred microdemons back from the psych ward.
Rainy turned for the door, anxious to get back to her new demon and cat story. Thornyspine had bent over backward—literally—to charm Tar with treats and games, and it had paid off with a whole new series, almost enough for a story collection.
‘‘Just one more question,’’ Nan probed.
‘‘Red alert, boss,’’ said a tiny raucous voice, but Rainy tapped her oversize shoulder bag to hush Thornyspine.
Nan leaned conspiratorially. ‘‘How ever did you crochet all those marvelous tiny doll clothes for the thrift store bazaar?’’
Narrator: Misspell or miracle? Is the publishing world ready for an author with thousands of demon minions? Or is it already too late to ask . . .
S. W. MAYSE is a Vancouver Island writer who has lived in the Gulf Islands and other parts of British Columbia, the Yukon, the North Western Territory, Alberta, and Wales. Her books include the historical novel Awen, the political thriller Merlin’s Web, and the biography Ginger: The Life and Death of Albert Goodwin. Her short fiction has appeared in Space Illustrated and On Spec. Her crosscut shredder recently exploded, but that had absolutely nothing to do with cats or demons.
Bitch Bewitched
Doranna Durgin
Narrator: Nature in all its glory. The joy of creation. Little feet and big appetites. What could possibly go wrong with love’s enduring expression?
Puppies.
Blind, squirmy, deaf, legs too feeble to walk, pale purplish skin beneath the blue ticking yet to come, blunt, flattened noses perfect for nursing, little pink tongues curling with surprising strength around the nipple.
Puppies.
They were Shiba’s, and she thought them perfect in every way.
She could almost ignore the human discussion in the background—Tallon’s admiration, Taliya’s cooing. Once Tallon had been Shiba’s lineman; once Taliya had handled Shiba’s mate Sabre. But when they all moved into the same cabin, those particular lines had become blurred, and now they all belonged and worked with each other, human and blue-tick hound.
Shiba nudged a still-damp pup—the only girl of the three, mostly black with white markings only on her lower legs, chest, and undercarriage. A white blaze, tiny tan dots at her eyebrows.
Perfect.
And Taliya said, ‘‘You don’t suppose there’ll be trouble, do you? Given where they were conceived?’’
Babies.
Loud, pink, endlessly eating and gooing and gurgling, reaching out from that small, barred environs to grab an unwary tail.
Just one baby human, but it was enough. It was getting older now, and louder, and it woke Shiba from exhausted sleep in her special cabin bedding. Taliya had borne that baby human months ago, and it hadn’t even tried to walk yet. Shiba thought it unnatural. The puppies had their eyes open, and their ticking had started to fill in. In less time than the baby human had already lived, the puppies would take their first training walks.
Taliya swooped the baby human up, and the wailing ceased; Shiba closed her eyes, and only in the absence of the noise did she realize Tallon and Taliya had company on the porch—the Line Mate, Eldon, who oversaw the patrol duty for this entire section of the heavily forested border between Ours and Theirs. He’d assigned Tallon to Shiba when her first lineman had died on the job; he’d put Taliya in the next line cabin over, slyly matchmaking. Sabre did his happy dog dance when Eldon came to visit, and even in her dozing state Shiba’s tail wagged.
But it stopped when she heard the tense undertone in Tallon’s voice. ‘‘You’re sure? Magic? You really think this is wise?’’
Eldon didn’t sound entirely happy, either. ‘‘We’re losing the battle . . . smuggled magic is getting past even our best teams, because the Others are using magic to do it. And they’re using magic against us, which breaks every treaty ever written. There are even rumblings that they might target individual linemen. So . . . we found some free agent magic users, and they’ve made up these potions.’’
Something clinked. Taliya said most definitely, ‘‘I don’t want this stuff near the baby.’’
‘‘She’s not standing yet,’’ Tallon pointed out, but he sounded unhappy . . . as though realizing he’d made an argument for something he didn’t even want.
‘‘It’s harmless,’’ Eldon said. ‘‘It’s got to be used with purpose, and it’s got to be used in the presence of something distinctly magic. Even if the baby got her hands on it, she couldn’t do anything with it. But if you run into trouble out there, this potion will reverse the effects of any magic aimed your way.’’
And Taliya said, ‘‘I don’t like it. There’s going to be trouble.’’
Babies. Babies and puppies.
Squalling, pooping, peeing, vomiting, legs strong enough to get them in trouble, always hungry, sharp little teeth—
‘‘YIPEYIPE!’’
They’d snuck up on her again. Shiba leaped to her feet, scattering puppies across the thin, shady grass. She hastily removed herself from reach, sitting beside Sabre to sulk.
Truth be told, she sat on Sabre. On his head, to be exact. Pretty much the only way to get his attention when he was hound-in-the-shade, don’t-know-anything-about -puppies.
‘‘I don’t blame you, Shiba,’’ Taliya said, wincing as she pulled the baby human from her breast and put it to her shoulder. It hadn’t grown much, unlike the puppies. Still three of them, they more often seemed like six. Or twelve. They’d grown strong enough to pounce, to leap, to fight fiercely over sticks and twigs and summer leaves. There was Bent, who’d broken the tip of his tail on his first day, and Trey, who’d been the third one born. And there was Cutter, the girl they now just called Cuttie.
Taliya loyally insisted they’d chosen the name for the pup’s precocious ability to cut right through to a scent—she was already trailing training bags, and she was hard to fool. Tallon, with much wincing, maintained it was for the pup’s shrill, insistent voice, emitted at every possible opportunity. ‘‘That’s almost too high to hear,’’ he’d say. And he’d always make that face and add, ‘‘I wish it was.’’
But they conspicuously didn’t talk about whether the pups might be in danger from Shiba’s wild romp with Sabre in the borderlands, the forested swath of land that the linemen and linehounds patrolled most assiduously to keep Their smugglers from bringing contraband magic into Ours. Like Sabre, like all the other linehounds up and down the borderlands, Shiba could scent magicsmell from far away, trailing it just as she might track any animal.
But that wild romp was long behind them, and Shiba was more than ready to return to patrol. Sabre was just as ready for her help, worn out from pulling double duty—Tallon had even left him behind on his day-long errand into the nearest town. Shiba thought better of sitting on his head and slid aside so she only sat on half of it, turning to give his exposed muzzle a quick solicitous lick. He twitched but didn’t
open his eyes. Hound-in-the-shade, hot summer day.
‘‘Let’s put them all in their little jails,’’ Taliya muttered, wincing as the baby human emitted a resounding belch, not all of which was air. She always had a cloth to hand these days, and she made short work of clean-up as she rose and took the baby human inside—up the solid porch steps, into the depths of the cabin where the thing called a crib would keep it out of trouble for a while.
Shiba glanced at the pups. They’d fallen asleep in a heap of fat, sleek puppy limbs. The boys were both marked lightly, their thin ticking broken only by modest patches of black. The girl had taken Sabre’s black body and Shiba’s even, silvery ticking, a splot of white at the end of her tail and a blaze running straight and true between her eyes. The pups hardly knew what was coming when Taliya scooped them up and gently deposited them in the wood-and-wire corral on the porch. Their jail, she called it. It held water, it held an old blanket, and it gave Shiba and Taliya time to themselves. For Taliya to sleep, and Shiba to run. Quiet time.
If only Cutter hadn’t startled dramatically awake as Taliya backed away from the jail. ‘‘Yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi!’’
‘‘It’ll be good,’’ Taliya muttered after Cutter finally fell asleep in mid-cry and after Shiba was tacked up and prancing on the edge of the clearing, ‘‘when things get back to normal around here.’’
Normal. Normal was running through the thick woods in search of magicsmell. Normal was drinking in the rich scents of the ground cover, the trail spoor of the animals who lived there, the spongy ground playing past beneath her feet. Normal wasn’t—
‘‘Ahyi-yi!’’ Taliya’s voice hit full shriek. Shiba abandoned her gentle homeward trot for a full-on gallop, reaching the yard at such speed that she ran smack into Sabre as he bolted to his feet in high alarm. They untangled—Shiba clothed in a belly-protecting canvas brush guard, Sabre still blinking sleep from his eyes— as the cry came again from inside the cabin. ‘‘Ahyiyi! Those . . . those . . . those!’’
Both of them could hear the unspoken word.
Puppies.
Sabre eyed the dark, cool space under the porch. Not a complex thinker, her Sabre, but he had an instinct for safety and a speed Shiba could never match on trail. He displayed some of his speed right then, diving for the cool darkness. For a moment his tail lay exposed, but in afterthought he withdrew it neatly into the shadow.
Shiba ran for the puppy jail. Empty. Completely and totally empty, its panels crooked and fallen. And then she ran into the cabin, where she was assaulted by a plethora of odors and visual chaos. Puppy chaos. The diaper box, overturned in the middle of the floor with the used contents spread and torn and decorating the furniture. The baby, squalling at Taliya’s shouts of anger and dismay. Furniture overturned, cushions scattered and leaking filling, not an single spot in the cabin’s little shared living space that hadn’t been touched by—
Puppies.
Shiba felt an absurd swell of pride that the puppies had so ably climbed atop table and chair—and then a surge of alarm.
For there were no puppies left here.
She ran into the back rooms, into the cooking room, into the pantry, her nose to the floor and so full of puppysmell and puppypoosmell and puppypeesmell that she blundered blindly into the main room again with tickles wrinkling up her muzzle. She stopped short of Taliya in time to sneeze violently in her face.
Taliya, crouched to pick up a broken bowl, wasted neither words nor time. ‘‘Out,’’ she said. ‘‘Outside right now!’’
Shiba bounded outside and down off the cabin porch without bothering to use the stairs. Out in the yard that was really a beaten down clearing, she began quartering for scent.
Taliya followed right behind her, except she had the baby human and she used the stairs. She had a blanket with only one hole, and she hastily spread it over the ground, plunking the baby human in the middle. She glanced at Shiba’s frantic quartering with a mother’s knowing eye and then snapped, ‘‘Sabre! Watch the baby!’’
Sabre’s tail reappeared from the shadows long enough to thump a few quick times against the ground; he swapped ends so that his nose peeked out, and Taliya returned inside, trusting him to watch. As well she herself could watch, with Sabre linehound bred and trained and carrying the heritage of magic-enhanced dogs from over the border with Theirs.
And Shiba trusted him, too, so she put her nose to the ground and found the scent of her gamboling, frisky, bold, and yet completely naive puppies. Puppies who had no knowledge of the wolves, the eagles, the big cats or the bears surrounding this area. Puppysmell , more puppysmell, filling her nose so thickly that she almost didn’t notice the . . .
Magicsmell.
Magicsmell, mingling here with her puppies.
Shiba gave voice, bawling her urgency to the trees.
Shiba followed the meandering scent in a wavering loop through the trees—until she realized the puppies had merely circled hugely back around to the yard. She loped home at full speed, stopping short at the sight of her youngsters gamboling toward the baby human.
Found, found, found! Safe and back in the yard! Shiba plunked down into a sit, relief making her breathless in the best of ways. The puppies tumbled forward, their movement revolving around a strange object; they took turns dragging it, mouthing it, bumping it along . . . Trey fell over the baby human’s chubby leg and it chortled with glee.
Magicsmell.
Sabre crawled out from beneath the porch, his nose lifted to scent the air. ‘‘Wuhf,’’ he said softly.
And Taliya poked her head out the door to check on the baby human and relief crossed her sharp features. ‘‘Puppies!’’ she said. ‘‘Where have you—’’ Her eyes narrowed, the relief fled. ‘‘What have you got? Don’t eat that!’’
Even as Shiba eased in closer, Cuttie clamped her teeth into the end of the object they all coveted—and no wonder, for were they not bred to trail magicsmell?— and tugged. And Shiba realized it was a cork, and Sabre realized it was a cork, and Taliya shouted, ‘‘Cutter, no!’’ and with a clink and a pop, Cuttie plopped back on her bottom, her long ears flopping and her face the very study of surprise.
Nothing happened. Taliya jumped off the porch, muttering to herself, ‘‘It can’t do anything, Eldon said it can’t do anything—’’ and Shiba loped for the center of the clearing and poofsquallwailyi-yi-yishrieeek! suddenly she couldn’t see the blanket or the baby human or the puppies. Her gaze skittered uncontrollably away from the sight; Taliya made a pained noise and threw her hands in front of her eyes—but neither of them stopped running for the young ones, and in the background Sabre let loose with full bawl at the wash of magicsmell that swamped the air.
Quite suddenly, the air cleared. Quite suddenly, Shiba could see normally again. Taliya lowered her hands . . . and they both stopped short. Shiba’s hackles rose completely beyond her control, all the way from her neck down her spine and even into her tail.
Three young humans, one fuzzy blond puppy of no particular lineage.
The three young humans look stunned—two naked boy children with silvery gray hair and one naked girl child with black hair, all with dark eyes and sharp oval faces and rather large ears and six or seven years’ growth. The blond puppy floundered in a diaper cloth, not nearly as steady on its feet or of an age with the puppies who had been there moments earlier.
Shiba growled, and then she whined, and then she looked to Taliya for guidance—but Taliya’s face couldn’t decide between fear and fury. ‘‘It’s harmless,’’ she said, mimicking Eldon’s voice from not so very long ago. ‘‘Conceived in the borderlands,’’ she said and glared down and Shiba and then back at Sabre, who knew well enough when retreat under the porch was the very best option. Then she tipped her head back and cried in a voice surely loud enough to reach a town miles and miles away, ‘‘TAAL-LONN!!’’
Shiba stalked around the three young humans, bewildered by the mixed puppysmell and humansmell. Taliya—once she finished shouting i
mprecations to the sky and stomped her foot once or twice—had no such hesitation. She snatched up the blond puppy and bundled it into a basket best left for picnic outings. She went into the cabin and at short intervals, pieces of clothing flew out the door. When she was done flinging, she emerged to clothe the young humans.
For their part, the young humans barely interrupted their play. They poked, they prodded, they giggled, they pulled hair, and they experimented with their teeth. Shiba’s teats shrunk up in horror at the sight of those strong human incisors. At least she still had the brush guard on.
Once Taliya had them clothed—tunics made from Tallon’s old shirts, with no attempt at the puzzling underlayers she and Tallon wore, or even at pants at all—she recorked the potion, checked the level of the remaining fluid, and shook her head. ‘‘We’ve got to find the other one,’’ she told Shiba, and crouched to show Shiba the thick glass cordial. ‘‘It’s not inside— they must have lost it somewhere. We’ve got to find it and take it and the children to Eldon. Eldon will know what to do.’’ But Shiba would have taken better heart if Taliya hadn’t then muttered darkly, ‘‘He’d better.’’
She called Sabre out from his sanctuary and held the cordial out to him, too. ‘‘Take scent,’’ she told them both, only a hint of desperation in her voice. ‘‘Find it!’’
Sabre instantly bounded away into the trees, barking in a choppy early-trail voice, already on the scent. But Shiba gave the playful young humans a worried look and went to nudge them, making them squeal at the touch of her cold nose even as they wrestled, emitting odd hybrid puppy-human I-am-fierce noises. And she looked up at Taliya, who stood beside the picnic basket of blond puppy growling just as fiercely at the tail it had just discovered, and she whined.
Taliya’s anger melted away; she went down on one knee and threw her arms around Shiba’s sturdy shoulders. ‘‘We’ll fix it,’’ she said. ‘‘Somehow. We’ll fix it.’’
‘‘Yi-yi-yi-yiii!’’ Cuttie’s voice, unmistakable no matter her form, rose even as her brothers’ faux snarls rose to fever pitch. Shiba didn’t hesitate. She pulled out of Taliya’s grip and she rounded on the squabbling young human puppies, her own no-nonsense snarl garnering instant silence. The three looked as they ever did in such moments—perpetually astonished at the reprimand, all wide-eyed what-did-we-do? But then . . . Then their little faces crumpled. Their eyes squinched shut and their cheeks flushed and their mouths opened to human wails of dismay dampened by human tears.
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