“Which is? What was the setback?”
The men behind him shuffled in their seats. Interesting. I looked down at the dog.
“Diablo is one of our guard dogs. While the Capricorn Institute has altruistic aims, there are those who do not agree with our methods. We had a recent incursion from a radical animal rights group, and ironically, it was Diablo who was the victim of their ham-fisted attempts to free non-native apex predators into the community. He has become skittish when out on patrol, and an unstable guard dog is a dead guard dog.”
Hollingsworth’s dark eyes seemed to spear straight through me. “But this is also a job interview of sorts. People in town talk about your miraculous ability with traumatised animals. Some of our specimens have been recovered from impoverished zoos, where the animals go mad from lack of enrichment or worse, starve. Others have been retrieved from ‘personal collections’ or circuses. Having someone on staff that can work with traumatised animals? Well, that would be priceless.”
Go, go, go, the voice in my head said. Grab your go bag, leave here, and never come back.
Yeah, I said, ready to argue with a dead woman. You gave up on your go bag years ago. You got a house, had a family, tied yourself and us to this place.
“Am I all right to touch him? What’s his tolerance of stranger contact?”
“I would not let a dangerous dog roam freely around the room.”
I shot a look at Stuart. Is this what he wanted me to do? But it was obvious he did. All we knew about him was that he’d been Fergal Wilson’s son, that he was much older than me. That he’d gone away to some fancy school and was headhunted for some animal preservation project. Then his dad had died, and back came Stuart, inheriting a practice, Janey, Nick, and me.
He was trying to keep it under wraps, the hope he felt. I wasn’t as good at reading humans, but his eyes were slightly too wide, his attention solely on me. Things weren’t great at HG Vets, I knew that. Stuart tried to hide it, the hours he spent bent over the books, trying to clear the mess his dad had left, but this… I scanned the men and their uniforms, seeing signs of a big budget in the hardware they’d been outfitted with.
My jaw flexed as I felt it—the age-old admonition to get out and away warring with loyalties. Our kind never stayed in one place for too long in the past, preferring to follow routes handed down from mother to daughter for generations, but then my ancestress had been sent over here on a convict ship, away from all of that history, and we’d settled here in the Grove.
“I’ll just tap into Diablo’s energy and see what I can do,” I said, bending over the dog.
I heard the snorts from the peanut gallery at the back of the room, but I held out my hand nonetheless, back out, an offering to the dog.
Friend, I sent out. Smell, reassure.
Something came rushing at me, the dog’s consciousness slamming into mine like an overexcited puppy, and with it came memories, impressions, feelings.
The room fell away to be replaced by one of those darkly sleek spaces, full of minimalist stainless steel, glass, and concrete, but it was merely the backdrop. My view was jerked forward when Diablo fought against his handler’s lead. Enemy! Intruder! his mind shouted, riding the adrenalin high of leaping into action. He barked furiously, no doubt appearing demonic with his teeth bared, jaws snapping.
I’d expected to see a bunch of soft-eyed PETA clones holding placards, but they weren’t the people beating down the reinforced steel door. The sound the lift door made as it was forced open was cacophonous in the dog’s ears, striking a moment of fear in his heart, but he was strong, he was fierce. He was Diablo, and he would protect his pack to the end. He squared his feet, tensing his powerful muscles as they came through.
My view of the intruders was blurry and imprecise, but what I did catch looked a lot more like trained soldiers than hippies. I frowned, being dragged deeper, despite myself. Not soldiers, I revised my opinion as Diablo pulled harder and harder. He had smelled these before. These were the ones he’d been told to hunt, to bring down. All those millions of circuits of the institute, being led around on a short lead only to find nothing, were for this. His brain jumped instantly to the samples his trainer had given him, rewarding him each time he picked the right one, then showing him how to hunt them, bring them down.
And bring them down he would.
He jerked free of his handler’s grip, his lead whipping behind him as he went barrelling towards the interlopers.
“Stun only!” came Hollingsworth’s command. “Do not shoot any of them!”
But Diablo’s haunches coiled, and he launched himself at the nearest of them.
All I got was a blurry view of a muscular chest, a snarling face before hands snapped out way too quickly to grab us—Diablo around the throat.
“Not this time, little brother,” a voice said, more growl than speech, and for a second, all I saw was a deep golden eye before we were shaken brutally, then sent sailing through the air to smash down on the marble floor.
The air was driven from our lungs, the dog struggling with all he had to get back up and failing miserably.
“Stay down, mutt!” another voice said, and then a god-awful kick to the head stopped the memory in its tracks.
When the room reasserted itself, I felt everyone’s eyes on me, but I kept mine on the dog. Those brown eyes held so much—an endless desire to serve and protect, and a fragile pride in his ability to do so, one that had taken a battering. He shifted restlessly, looking down and whining before meeting my eyes again. This was a dog at war with himself, his need for that occasional pat and praise burning so brightly inside him but… With an animal’s instincts, he saw the threat now to his existence and shied away from possible enemies, feeling a deep need to avoid that boot, that white hot burst of pain as it exploded in his head.
“They’ll make you do things you don’t like, force animals to do things they shouldn't,” Nan had said, reordering her work bench, putting bunches of carefully dried herbs into baskets with a little more oomph than needed. “You’ll have to do it. There’s not many of us, while there’s so many of them, and nothing pricks their pride like being told no. Especially for the sake of a ‘dumb’ animal.”
She collected crystals and tarot cards, her stock in trade when the hippies decided Harvest Grove was the place to be back when I was a kid.
“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’” She snorted. “And who has dominion more than us? But we have the wit to understand, to know what a bloody privilege it is, to know how dependent we are on them. To know we must live beside them, not as overlords.”
She looked down to her ageing beagle, Princess, who thumped her tail in response to the attention.
“Isn’t that right, my love?” she said, patting the dog’s silky head. “But they don’t see it that way, and there’s not enough of us to make a difference. So we keep them happy, as it’s their teeth that’ll be on our necks, not the animals. You’ll be faced with a situation, many times I’m afraid, where you must use your powers for the humans and against the animals.”