Brenna gave herself up to the movie, forgiving all of its weak parts so she could enjoy the clever bits. She smiled with the characters, got drawn up enough in the story to sniffle in all the right places, and noted that the hero character didn't lie to the heroine character.
If he didn't somehow matter, you wouldn't be so mad.
Never mind that. Watch the movie.
The first time Druid shifted uneasily in her lap, she thought he'd just become uncomfortable. The second time, he also whined softly, and she put a hand on the dome of his head. "Shhh."
The third time, she turned off the movie and muted the television volume. They sat in the dimly lit room together, the dog tense in her arms and Brenna puzzling at the night, not hearing anything but the rhythmic grate of Sunny's teeth against bone.
Until it struck, an astonishing intensity of dark spirit clenching down on them all, driving the air from Brenna's lungs like a bad fall.
Brenna barely had time to gasp before Druid sprang from her lap, digging his nails into her thigh and arm and leaping away. But her reflexes were well-trained; some thinking part of her brain realized he was headed not for the floor but up the back of the couch and aiming for the shelves behind it, the very shelves full of breakable mementoes. She snatched Druid out of mid-air despite his sturdy heft.
Panicked, he turned on her, snapping and screaming. She felt his teeth sink into her hand and reacted instantly, grabbing his scruff and yanking him away, letting gravity do the rest; he fell to the floor, still in her grip.
The darkness let go of her but Druid was lost to it, flipping and struggling in her grip. And while a little voice in her head said
let go, you idiot
, she didn't; the last thing she wanted to do was to offer him success—his freedom—in return for this behavior. Even dazed and bitten and scraped raw by emotional darkness, her long-ingrained instincts held true. On her knees on the floor, her worn jeans torn and her hand throbbing, she eventually got the right angle on the scruff-hold to push his face to the floor and hold him there...and by then, he was coming out of it, distressed and exhausted.
And appalled, for even in his wild flight, some part of him knew what he had done.
Bitten her.
When she released him to cradle her hand—and it didn't look so bad, not as bad as it could have been, just throbbing from the force of his jaws but barely bleeding although the swelling was coming up fast—he crawled to her with his ears flat and his tail tucked. Beyond woeful. Looking for a way to apologize for the unforgivable.
"Don't even try," Brenna said, and burst into tears, hot but short-lived. Grouchy, ill-mannered grooming customers were one thing, but
her
dogs? Her dogs didn't bite her. Not since she was young and proved herself to have a special way with them, the girl who could take in any dog and turn it sweet and happy, the girl who could handle the worst of them simply because they gave their hearts to her so quickly.
When had she lost that?
And then she heard her own thoughts.
Her
dog. Somewhere along the way she'd made that decision, letting herself believe that Druid's owner would never appear—and admitting how quickly he'd made himself part of her.
Not a biter
.
For the first time in memory, she was in over her head. Not objective enough to form a strategy for dealing with Druid, and not ever faced with a puzzle on this level before. So much of her response to dogs was instinct, and not knowledge.
She needed knowledge.
She cleared her throat, smeared her face dry, and disentangled her hair from where it was trapped between her thigh and calf. When she went to the kitchen to run cold water over the heel of her hand and the base of her thumb, her gaze fell on the business card she had eventually taken from the break room table and then dropped on the counter when she'd cleaned out her pockets the same evening.
Gil Masera, Dog Obedience and Behavior Specialist
.
She immediately rejected the impulse to call him. She didn't trust him. He'd lied. And the circumstances under which he'd taken those pit bulls...
But she didn't have to like him to learn from him.
And she didn't know any of the other local trainers, hadn't spoken to them. Couldn't call them cold at half past eight in the evening.
She kept her hand under the faucet and reached for the card—turning it in her fingers, nibbling the edge of it in indecision, glancing at the clock. In the background, Sunny had gone back to chewing her bone, her jaws tireless. Druid clung to the wall between the kitchen and den, drawn to her and yet too mortified to slink the rest of the way to her feet. A spot of blood marred the pristine whiteness of his muzzle.
Her blood.
Brenna felt the decision click into place. She snapped the business card to the table like a crisp poker card and turned off the water, gingerly dabbing the hand dry. Darned good thing she had the following day off—she'd never be able to work with
this
hand. And maybe not the day after, either; she'd call Roger tomorrow and give him a heads-up.
She looked at Druid, meeting his gaze directly this time. He sank a little lower to the ground. She sighed. "C'mere, then." Slink-walking, he approached her. She gave him a sad pat, which brought his ears up a little, and directed him toward the crate. "Kennel up, then."
Oh, unhappy dog. The picture of dejection, he entered the crate, turning as she closed the door but making no attempt to push his way out.
Sunny was harder to handle; exuberant as always, more than ready for some time outside, once released from the crate she bounded around the small enclosed porch room, whacking Brenna with her tail and singing Redbone joy to anyone who could hear her half-barked, half-howled excitement. Finally Brenna snagged her collar and, with a clumsy, fumbling hand, snapped the run cable in place. Only then did she open the door that had been closed on it, releasing Sunny into the yard.
Then she returned to the kitchen to reassure herself that Masera could let his machine pick up if he didn't want to answer the business line at this time of night, and nabbed the portable phone from its cradle. She dialed quickly, before she could think too hard about it or change her mind.
And he answered quickly, too. Whatever he was doing this evening, the phone was close by. "Gil Masera."
She hesitated, suddenly not sure how to start or even what she wanted to call him. Enough of a hesitation so he said, "Hello?"
"Yes," she said quickly, so he wouldn't hang up. "It's...this is Brenna Fallon—"
It was his turn to be silent a moment. "Sorry," he said. "I wasn't expecting to hear from you."
"I wasn't expecting to call," she said, putting the conversation back on more familiar footing with that edge of antagonism. "I hope it's not too late."
"I wouldn't have answered the phone if it were too late." But he didn't make it easy for her, didn't ask what he could do for her or why she was calling or if everything was all right.
Brenna had the sudden impulse to hang up, to go back to her movie and her malted milk balls and pretend her hand didn't hurt. Or her heart, which Druid had bitten just as hard as her hand. But she closed her eyes and tightened her grip on the phone, and didn't. Instead she managed to say, "You said to call, if I...if things got hard with the Cardi. And I could use an objective opinion. On what to do next, I mean."
"What happened?" he asked, as if he knew she would never call him unless something had.
She hesitated, uncertain how to say it. "He had another one of those...fear fits. And," her throat suddenly constricted, as if she were about to say something that should never be said—and in truth, she supposed it was. She shoved the words out. "He bit me."
"Ah," he said, but it was an understanding sound. As if he knew she wouldn't be upset about a snap-bite, a bite that was more a comment than an offensive, and the likes of which she fended off every day. That if she said he'd bitten her, it was more than broken skin and insult, it was jaws and teeth and power.
"The thing is...I think I know how to trigger a fit—there's a place on my property that seems to do it." The spring, of course. She'd bet on it. "I was wondering if I could hire you to come out here and help me get him through it. Help
me
deal with it."
Another silence, though a short one. "You said he was a stray."
"He can't stay that way forever," Brenna said.
"No." There was a pause, and she heard background noise—the pages of a book being closed, cushions crunching gently as he got up. "Let me check my book."
Outside, Sunny gave an inquisitive hound hello—
aowhuff
? Druid whined from inside the crate, circling within its confines. She touched the wire with her toe, distracting him; it worked for a moment. Then Masera came back to the phone; she heard him flipping through the pages of his schedule book, a sound long-familiar to her ears. "When's the best time for you?"
"I get off work in late-afternoon," she said. "Or my days off—Fridays and Mondays, so I have tomorrow—"
Druid barked sharply.
"No," Brenna told Druid, barely considering it an interruption in the conversation as she returned to Masera, "though I can't imagine you'd have time on such short notice."
"Not tomorrow," Masera said, hesitating at the noise of Druid moving restlessly in the crate, the wire shifting, his toenails clacking—noises any trainer would know.
And a look on Druid's face Brenna was beginning to recognize. "I hate to say it, but I think—" and she gasped in surprise as the cold dark hit her body again, and Druid erupted into a frenzy, flinging himself against the wire, snapping and tugging and tearing at it with his teeth and nails. Brenna couldn't find the breath to speak, not to Masera on the other end of the phone or to Druid or to—
Sunny!
Outside, Sunny let off a quick volley of barks, sharp and utterly unlike her.
And then she screamed.
Over and over, she screamed.
Brenna finally found her own breath and threw herself free of the clenching hold on her soul and right out the kitchen door, into the dog room and yelling for her copper-red hound, her sweet-natured, joy-hunting Redbone, slamming up against a storm door that somehow wouldn't open. Senseless—foolish—she hurled herself against it, gaining a few inches and so startled by the bone-chilling cold that poured in through that gap that she staggered back when the door slammed closed, given life of its own by a strong wind.
But there was no wind.
And suddenly there was no sound, nothing but the final scream in her raw throat and her own ragged breathing. Silence from Druid.
Silence from Sunny.
The door swung outward with a familiar creak of hinge, unimpeded.
~~~
After the briefest of hesitations, Brenna stuck her head out. She reached for the porch light, then thought better and grabbed the flashlight sitting on the washing machine. The overhead bulb would only blind her to what lay beyond the porch.