by Karen Ranney
I remembered the lectures I’d received before getting my first transfusion. What I could expect. Super speed, super strength, super abilities, none of which could help smooth out the hills and valleys of my life right at the moment.
What, then, did I want? I wanted a companion who didn’t disappear at the drop of a hat. Mark, I’m talking to you.
I wanted to feel valued in my work, to be able to assist people with their pets, to be able to help animals. Since the Alamo Veterinary Clinic was out of the question now, it was up to me to set up my own practice.
I didn't want the furniture to move at Graystone. I might be out of luck there, especially if Sonny was haunting the ottoman.
Nor did I want to be in danger from my own brother.
I didn't want to be worried about vampires. You would think that because I had some vampire blood they would leave me alone. But of course, they didn't know that. Couldn't they sense it like I could tell, immediately, if someone was a Furry?
And I didn't want to have to worry about my parents’ marriage. I had, after a fashion, accepted that my father was a scumbag and had concubines, even though my mother was one of the sweetest, kindest women in the world. Plus, she was attractive and always looked beautiful.
Okay, that was enough of a list to get me started.
I drove down to the exit of the parking garage and was waved through by the attendant. Of course. No doubt he had a picture of me or my car or both.
What I did next wasn't altogether commonsensical, but it made me feel better. I drove to the nearest Ford dealership and turned in my tiny car for something mid-sized with all the bells and whistles in a bright orange. If my father had a GPS planted on the other vehicle, too bad.
It only took an hour for the car to go through make ready. Instead of going home I headed for North Star Mall. As a rule, I don't go shopping, which meant I was the antithesis of my mother and Sandy.
I was looking for one particular store that billed itself as a place where you could buy devices like GPS trackers and tiny recorders. I figured that if they sold that kind of equipment, they would also have something that allowed you to find trackers and recorders. After making my way to the Spy Store, I explained to the store manager what I wanted.
“Oh, yes, we've got those. We call them sniffers," he said.
I opted for a top of the line super sniffer. After he demonstrated how to use it and made sure I was semi-proficient, I also selected a bunch of outside cameras.
"We could come out and give you an estimate on installing motion detectors around your house. We've done that for a lot of people. It gives them peace of mind.”
I paid for my purchases, took his card, and told him that I’d give it some thought before making my way back to my shiny new orange Ford.
Once in the car I pulled up the app on my phone. I already had one camera on the back porch, on the Brood side. I didn’t even know if it was still working. It was. Pepper was on the couch, with Dalton and Cherry Pip sprawled on the floor on the oval rug. Cherry Pip was on her back, legs splayed, letting it all hang out. She had no modesty whatsoever. I smiled and put the phone up.
When I got home, neither Wilson nor Simon were in evidence, so I didn't get a chance to talk to either man. That could wait. Besides, I had all day. No one was expecting me anywhere.
I couldn't help but wonder what all my clients were being told, people who’d made appointments weeks ago for annual checkups or follow-up visits. According to the terms of my contract, I couldn't steal any of them, or even communicate with them. No parting email that would say, so sorry, no longer there.
What the clinic didn't know was a great many of my clients were Furries. They would naturally gravitate to me, once the word went out about my new clinic. The more I thought about it, the more excited I was about the idea. Maybe I was, at heart, an entrepreneur. I evidently didn't deal well with authority.
I remember reading somewhere that you have to learn to take orders before you can give them. For years I had taken orders, some of which were absolutely ridiculous. Like, in my previous practice, allowing children to be present when a pet was euthanized, simply because their parents wanted them to experience the “circle of life”.
I hated that. I hated everything about it.
Maybe it was time I started giving orders and taking responsibility for the whole of the practice. I was more than willing to do that.
My mother always said that things happened for a reason. Maybe that was the way to look at this situation.
There were things I should do, immediate things to get my life back on track. I wanted to go to the castle’s library and research Were-cats. I wasn’t sure that Alice posed a danger to me, but it was something I should check out.
I had to figure out why Sonny had chosen now to come back to Graystone. What danger was I in?
Wilson and Simon needed to be brought up to date on my plans since they both figured prominently in them.
I had to decide what to do about Mark. Things couldn’t continue as they’d been for the past week, with him disappearing without a word. He hadn’t given me an idea when he was coming back. Or even if he was coming back.
Right at the moment, however, I needed to use my handy dandy sniffer device and see if anyone was playing voyeur at Graystone.
Chapter Thirteen
Well, that was ridiculous
"Ready guys?" I asked.
Pepper barked. Dalton whined a little, and Cherry Pip, in that ladylike way of hers, only inclined her head as if questioning my sanity.
We began at the front door, traveled down the main corridor to the Silver Parlor, the library, and the room I had always called the Cotillion Room because it was furnished with dozens of fans Sonny had collected over the years. Each of the fans was mounted in a shadow box with a brass plate indicating where she’d found it, its provenance and history.
Nothing showed up on the meter.
I did the second floor next, deliberately avoiding the right side of the house on the ground floor for now. I didn't have any idea how this meter would react to my grandmother, the ottoman.
It wasn’t that I actually believed my father capable of bugging Graystone. He was known to be ruthless on occasion, but Hamish Boyd also had a strong core of values and I doubted that they would extend to infringing on my privacy.
However — and this was a big, honkin’ however — a little skepticism was a good thing from time to time. Like now. I was going to sweep the entire house and if I found something… Well, I would just have to figure that situation out when I came to it.
I opened my grandmother's bedroom door which was normally kept closed, expecting a flurry of memories to assault me. Nothing did. Only the faint scent of dust that reminded me that I needed to be a little more diligent in my housekeeping efforts. For example, I could spend the rest of the day dusting which would probably be a good use of my time. I rolled my eyes at the idea and banished the faint hint of my mother's voice from my conscience.
My grandmother had loved red and it showed in the furnishings of her suite. The couch and the two wing chairs in front of the fireplace in the sitting room were both upholstered in a deep crimson velvet. The carpet was a pattern of crimson, white, and black roses intertwined on a black trellis around the edges. The curtains were crimson, too, and closed against the sunlight.
I’d put Sonny’s furniture in storage when I’d rented out Graystone. The renters had used this room as their master suite. Nothing remained of them, either. It was as if the room was a blank canvas on which any work of art could be painted. Even my life, if I wanted to move in.
I walked to the bedroom door and stood in the doorway. I glanced down at the sniffer, but nothing registered here, either.
The fourposter bed had been built to my great-grandfather’s specifications by a furniture company in Dallas. My grandmother had imparted that information to me when I was just a child.
“When you buy something, dear Tor, you must ensure that
it is the best quality you can afford at the time. Only the best will last you for the rest of your life and the lives of your descendants.”
I hadn’t been all that interested in my progeny at the time. Only recently had I been giving thought to children and that was because Mark was in my life. Sort of.
Turning, I left the suite, only then realizing that the Brood hadn't followed me inside the room. Instead, they sat patiently in the hallway waiting for me.
Their docility and manners, if you could call it that, wasn't due solely to the fact that I was Keeper of the Kibble. In a great many ways we were a homogenous unit. They followed me. They obeyed my hand signals and sometimes didn’t even need those. All three of them seem to complement each other and mesh well as a group and together they had accepted me as their alpha.
I wondered if my father's assumption of command had been as easy as mine. Had all the Furries in the clan simply lined up behind him with no overt disruption? The only time I could remember anyone giving him grief was Craig Palmer, and my father had dealt with Craig by banishing him to Saskatchewan.
Poor Craig. He really didn't like the cold.
We did the third floor and there was nothing there, either. I was beginning to think that I’d allowed my imagination to work overtime. However, I hadn't finished the first floor completely yet.
I made myself descend the stairs. I hesitated at the bottom and then turned left, heading for the formal dining room.
This room wasn’t used much — at least since I had moved back to Graystone. I think the last time the room was used was when the renters lived here. They were all for giving these fancy dinners and claiming that they were negotiating to buy Graystone. I'd heard that rumor more than once when I lived in Austin.
The dining room was a rectangular chamber fitted with a table that could easily sit twenty. The chairs were upholstered in needlepoint that had come from France fifty years ago. The walls were adorned with tapestries featuring Scottish scenes. I made a mental note to check out the tapestries later. Maybe instead of arcane Boyd Scottish lore, they told the story of the Stone of Scone.
The needle on the sniffer moved slightly, startling me.
I took a few steps into the room, the Brood preceding me this time. Pepper, stalwart defender, forged ahead, starting to bark.
He ran toward the corner and sat there. The barking stopped, thankfully, but he remained in position, staring at nothing.
“I thought I told you to stop doing that,” I said. "Seriously, it gives me the creeps, not to mention goosebumps." It was also doing a number on my spine.
This wasn't the first time Pepper had barked at something that wasn't there. Or at least something I couldn't see. But I hadn't been as spooked as I was now. I began to walk toward him, and then glanced down at the sniffer in my hand. I pointed the remote-control sized device toward Pepper.
It went crazy.
Well, that was ridiculous. My dog was not emitting a signal. Nor was Pepper a listening device.
I moved the sniffer from about five feet to the left of Pepper to five feet to the right and the edge of one of the windows.
The meter registered higher closer to the window. I moved it up to the ceiling, then down to the floor before returning to the window.
I walked over and pushed the curtains back, anticipating that I’d find something. A small box, perhaps. Or a discreet button like I saw on television. Part of me questioned the placement of a listening device here in the dining room. First of all, I was never here. Secondly, in order to hear anything in the rest of the house it would have to be incredibly powerful.
It didn’t matter what I thought. There was nothing there. I even studied the drapery rods, but I couldn’t see anything.
I spent a good half hour checking things out, cranking open the window and shutting it again. I couldn't find anything that looked remotely like one of the devices at the spy store. Maybe I needed an expert. Should I hire a private investigator? Were there any Furry investigators? Maybe I should check that out.
I swear, my life was getting more complicated by the day.
Now what did I do?
Well, stay out of the dining room, that was for sure.
I gave up finally, urged Pepper to surrender his pose as defender of Graystone and come with me. I had three more rooms to investigate and those went fast. The only room I hadn’t done was the Sun Parlor.
I reluctantly entered the room. The ottoman was where I had pushed it the previous day. I walked to the chair, the Brood arranging themselves around me (and on me in the case of Pepper). I scanned the room with the sniffer waiting for something to happen. Maybe I should have asked for a ghost detector.
I didn’t need a parabolic instrument since I hadn’t said the hearing spell for the past hour. I was my own listening device. Unfortunately, all I could hear was the wind and the sound of a few branches clicking against the brick on the eastern side of the house. I added pruning the trees to my list of things to be done. I didn't hear any howling or dragging chains or sounds of suffering souls. Occasionally there was a pop and clicking noise, but I thought that was Graystone settling around me.
The house had always had a personality and I felt it now. It was an entity unto itself, a personage. A refined old lady who didn’t take guff from anyone.
The meter didn't register anything, for which I was eternally grateful. Nor did the ottoman move, another reason to be thankful.
The Sun Parlor was like Google, in a way. The clue to a successful Google search was the terminology you used. Maybe the secret to the moving ottoman was knowing which questions to ask.
Sonny had thought I was in danger.
Did it have anything to do with the Stone of Scone? Was it simply a coincidence that my father had spoken about it today? Or had his mother's ghost urged him to do so?
Questions, questions, questions — when would I ever get the answers?
Not by waiting around for someone to give them to me, that was for sure.
I left the Sun Parlor, feeling a little ridiculous for expecting to communicate with the furniture.
Chapter Fourteen
Dumb bunny
The doorbell rang, startling me. All three dogs immediately started barking. I didn't get far before it rang again which made the barking only worse. Before I opened the door, I frowned down at all three dogs, wishing I had the ability to silence them like Mark did.
"Enough!"
That shut Cherry Pip and Dalton up, but had no effect on Pepper. I silenced him by picking him up. For some reason, he rarely barked in my arms. Maybe he didn’t want to lose his preferential spot.
I hesitated before opening one of the doors, wishing I had a peephole. The double doors were antiques and I hadn’t wanted to drill through the wood and metal. I’d installed a camera for the front of Graystone, but the angle was such that I could see anyone on the circular drive, but not someone standing on the steps. I made a mental note to correct that as soon as possible as I reached for the door handle.
It couldn’t be Maddock. It was daylight and he might be a Master Vampire but he hadn’t conquered the sun. Yet.
Did door to door salespeople still exist? Fed Ex and UPS always made deliveries to the rear and either Wilson or Simon brought the boxes to the porch. Besides, there weren’t any trucks in the drive, just a sporty car I didn’t recognize.
I slowly opened the door, hoping I wasn’t making a mistake doing so. My grandmother, the ottoman, had informed me that I was in danger. The message might have been ridiculously delivered, but I was still conscious of the warning.
A stranger stood on the steps.
I didn't know what the woman was selling, but if it made me look anything like her, I might consider buying one of everything. She was the most beautiful redhead I'd ever seen, with bright green eyes and softly flushed cheeks. Her face was perfect, her chin neither too pointed nor round. She had those high cheekbones that most models have, but she wasn't anorexic. Instead, she was what a
male Were might politely call endowed. Even worse, she was a Furry.
I was abruptly grateful that Mark wasn't here.
“May I help you?”
“Are you Torrance Boyd?”
I nodded, somewhat reluctantly, half expecting her to thrust an envelope at me and declare that I’d been served. Not that I knew of a reason I’d be sued. Maybe I’d irritated someone inadvertently. Or it might even be Alice. The woman had become my bugaboo. I saw her around every corner.
“He's in danger because of you, you know. It's all your fault.”
I blinked at her. “I beg your pardon?”
"You should. You really should. And the pardon of every Were for what you’ve done.”
Her eyes were now flashing green fire at me. Any moment now she was going to jump into her wolf.
Pepper was growling at her, a sign of his intelligence.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
"Like hell you don't. That innocent act might fool a lot of people, Mark included, but it doesn't fool me.”
We were getting somewhere but not very far or very fast. Evidently, this woman knew Mark and thought he was in danger.
I wanted to shake her, make her tell me what she was talking about, but I managed to keep my hands to myself and my voice even.
“Why do you think Mark’s in danger?”
That was the most important part of what she’d said. Who she was or why she was here was secondary.
“Did you get bored being the only weirdo? How did you talk him into it?”
“Just a minute,” I began, but that’s about as far as I got.
“He was fine the way he was. He was perfect the way he was. You’ve made him a freak.”
Was she talking about the lottery? And the transfusion that we both received? Mark’s pre-dated mine by a year or more. I hadn’t known him back then, let alone convinced him to become Pranic.
I didn’t really want to talk about the lottery with this woman, however.