Doranna Durgin - A Feral Darkness

A Feral Darkness

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Doranna's Backstory

A Feral Darkness

Doranna Durgin

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

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Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-31994-9

Cover art by Larry Elmore

First printing, June 2001

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Brilliant Press

Printed in the United States of America

This is Jag's book

DARK WIND RISING

Brenna glanced again at the sky—could she get home before dark?—and at Parker, trying to gauge him.

What he might do if she simply got to her feet and left him there.

What could he do? He was stuck on the other side of the creek.

And that's when Druid whined. His fearful whine, the warning whine. Reminding her that while she was

out of Parker's reach, the darkness—the rising power—had no such boundaries. "Shhh," she said, even

as she dreaded what might happen next. Whatdid happen next.

That trickle of breath-sucking fear she'd finally come to recognize. The hair standing up on the back of

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her neck, goosebumping down her arms. The breeze rising, lifting the strands of her long thick hair, then

roaring across the bottom of the pasture like a tornado.

Heading straight for her. . . .

BAEN BOOKS

by Doranna Durgin

Dun Lady's Jess

Changespell

Barrenlands

Touched By Magic

Wolf Justice

Wolverine's Daugbhter

Seer's Blood

A Feral Darkness

Other Books

Star Trek: The Next Generation—Tooth and Claw

Earth: Final Conflict—Heritage

Runes, like our own words, can differ in interpretation depending on context.

With thanks to:

John Forth-Finegan of Canine Specialties, Peter Braggins of the Greece Animal Control, Martyn Miller

DVM, Gretchen Wood of the Greece Humane Society, the Anti-Animal Fighting Task Force of Monroe

County, Tom Haverly at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, Reverend Marie Sheldon, Donna & Tara

Defendorf (who might well recognize the barn), Morgan Ryan, Anne Bishop, my family, Jennifer who put

up with my fits of creative angst, and (deep breath) Judith!

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Chapter 1

THURISAZ

A Gateway

Always

Forgotten gods fill the layers of heaven. Quiescent, subordinate, long ago superceded. Waiting. And

every so often, reminded of their own existence.

* * *

Nineteen Years Before Now

She is nine years old, with tears streaming down her face and the intermittent hiccough of a sob jerking

her chest. Dressed in the ragged cut-offs and worn T-shirt that have been the choice of a generation of

children, she does not wait to hear the rest of her mother's words. She races out of the house, the screen

door banging hollowly in her wake, and runs across the soft spring grass of the yard to duck between the

first and second strands of the electric fence, feeling the swift zing of electricity run above and below her.

The old hound follows at his leisure, but follow he does, as stubborn in this as ever in following a

trail—even though it takes him a moment to rise and his movement is stiff when he does. His tail waves in

gentle arcs as he detours to slip between gate and post rather than duck the fence wire. The day is barely

warm enough for the shorts that hang on the girl's lanky frame, but he is already panting.

She stops to wait for him. Of course. And one hand slips inside her back pocket to feel the stiff, folded

square of paper only recently purloined from her father's magazine. On it is a photo of a sculpture, a

simplistically elegant hound—not a treeing hound like her lifelong companion, but a gaze hound,

couchant, with a long neck and pointed nose, and a gaze hound's insignificant ears.

He catches up with her, pleased with himself, and lifts his head to look up at her with a hound smile

through his panting. Unlike the statue, his ears are long and heavy and the softest things she ever has or

ever will feel. But she doesn't care about the differences between her companion and the Lydney Hound.

She's not particularly concerned about all the details in the accompanying article that are beyond her

ability to digest—cold anthropological facts that even her father doesn't read. She's seen him turning the

pages with dirt-encrusted fingers, skipping from one bright glossy photo to another and getting glimpses

of places that don't yet pull her own attention away from this small farm. That's all he wants, the glimpses,

and when he's had enough he puts the magazine beside his lounge chair and ambles off to see if he can fix

whatever mechanical thing has gone wrong now.

This is how she finds the Lydney Hound, and—later, sneaking the magazine into her bedroom—reads

about the oddly named god called Mars Nodens who favors hounds, who likes dogs of all sorts. Who

has an ancient shrine from olden days so olden she can't even begin to imagine the scope of it and again .

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. . doesn't care.

What she cares about is that his shrine was a healing shrine. That he favors dogs, that the shrine, even

after all this time, is littered with representations of them. And that the right-side pasture has some of the

other things she's been able to make sense of in that article—the wide, cold creek that runs deep in all

but the driest months, a hill rising on one side of it to hold not only the area's biggest oak, but a tiny spring

as well. The tiniest of springs, really, a damp spot that the ground downhill reabsorbs practically before

the water has a chance to join the creek, but a spring nonetheless.

She wonders briefly if her own God, her assigned God, will thunderously disapprove of her intent.

But then, He's had His chance, hasn't He? Hasn't she said her prayers to Him, over and over? And did it

stop her mother from sayingthose words about her cherished old hound, only moments ago? Or her

brother from making fun of the dog's aged movement?

She smears the drying tears from her cheeks and runs her hand down the dog's soft ear. Maybe Mars

Nodens will listen. He is not likely to have heard a more heartfelt prayer—nowor then.

* * *

Four Years Before Now

They come in the middle of the night, breaking fences in a final night of tearing up pastures with the

knobby tires on their growling ATVs. Drunk, getting drunker, they spin doughnuts in the wet spring turf,

spitting out chunks of sod in their wake. Picking pastures without stock because they somehow have

sense enough to know that damaging or losing stock will take them over the line from wild young men to

criminals.

But they are mighty wild.

They pick a spot up against a creek too deep to cross, heeding a darkened house in the distance. A

young woman lives there, they know, but has been gone this summer, working several jobs as if the extra

income will somehow be enough to keep her father alive. She is an odd girl with amazingly long hair, the

one who has an uncanny way with dogs and an unsettling way of looking through a man as though he's

not even there and it wouldn't matter if he were. But she is not home, and her pastures belong to them.

They settle in for a time to swallow the beer they've brought, shaking the cans, popping the tops to soak

themselves and the hillside beneath the spreading oak. They don't notice that they trample the grave

markings of the old hound who lived longer than anyone had ever thought possible. They don't notice the

sudden stillness of the night around them, or that even as they drink, they often glance over their

shoulders, looking for that which they feel but cannot see.

Not a benign feeling, for in this place of power they have not thought to call upon things benign. Instead

they call upon aggression, building the strength and ego of the one who will shortly present himself for

army basic training. They call upon braggadocio, chest-thumping stories of prowess, and dark promises

of manly revenge for those who have recently wronged them. They spill beer from can and bladder, and

when they find the struggling remains of a rabbit they roared over in their ATV frenzy, they spill blood.

And then they go home, leaving the debris of the night behind them and never suspecting what they have

awakened.

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At least, not right away.

* * *

Now

It begins.

Chapter 2

KANO

An Opening

"Don't eventhink about it."

The tiny Poodle looked back at Brenna with defiant eyes; it gave another jerk of the paw she had

trapped between gentle fingers and added a calculated curl of its lip, revealing age-darkened but still

needle-sharp teeth.

What was left of them, anyway.

"Quit," Brenna murmured, deftly clipping between the lilliputian toes. On second thought she briefly

rested the flat of the blade against her own cheek. No more than warm. Nothing to complain about. A

quick adjustment to the flat nylon grooming noose restricted the Poodle's head movement, and Brenna

went back to work. "You're supposed to be one of mygood customers," she muttered, shifting the animal

so she could handle its hind paws.

Not today.None of them were good today. The tub room behind her reeked—she couldn't name a

single dog who hadn't messed in its crate today—and still bore the effects of the escapee Collie who had

torn around the room like someone's little brother, tipping over shampoo, spreading wet towels, and

knocking over the tall, standing dryers. The tub walls were covered with shed dog hair—literally blown

from the backs of several double-coated dogs whose owners hadn't taken a brush to them for at least a

season.

And the noise. Every dog had something to say today. Loudly.

She had put the earplugs in early. And swallowed a couple of aspirins only a few moments ago, washed

down by more caffeine than she normally dared. It made her hands shake, and that wasn't something she

could afford in a business full of sharp blades and shifting clients. No wonder she had lost her childhood

touch with dogs these days.

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Flowers the Poodle, thinking herself sly, jerked her paw from Brenna's grasp and made a break for it,

darting for freedom—only long enough to hit the edge of the table and the end of the noose at the same

time. With an exasperated noise, Brenna scooped her out of midair and plunked her back in place. "Act

your considerable age. You're not making my day any easier," she growled, and there was something to

that growl that finally got through to the tiny dog.

Or else she was simply humbled by her brief midair experience. Brenna sighed. "Count yourself lucky it

wasn't a bungee cord," Brenna said and went back to work, once more thankful that the Pets! grooming

room was tucked away from customer eyes and not behind glass as some of the other major pet store

chains insisted. Between the clamping adjustment on the noose and the dog's inconsequential weight, she

could have hung there for quite some time without dire result, but best if no one saw. Not something a

customer would understand.

Or a manager, for that matter.

Especially not the manager who now stood in the doorway, arms crossed. She found him when she

circled the table to get a better angle on Flowers' back leg, simultaneously changing to a longer blade

without stopping the clippers, a practiced motion of skillful fingers. But when she saw Roger . . .then she

turned off the clippers. She knew that look, and it never boded well.

Roger was boss, and he knew it. And being boss meant telling people to do the impossible and smiling

benignly when they had no choice but to agree. He wasn't a big man, but he had a meaty look to him; he

filled out his shirts with a bulk that at one point had been muscle and now wasn't so sure anymore—just

as his dull brown hair still held the style that had suited it when it was thick. Now Brenna thought a quick

pass or two with her clippers—a nice #4 blade—would be a mercy.

"Busy in here today," he said. "That's the way I like to see it."

"Keeps things interesting." Brenna grabbed the ever-handy broom for a few quick, futile swipes at the

growing tumbles of dog hair around her feet. The small room held three height-adjustable grooming

tables, but the third table no longer adjusted without several people grunting and hauling and twisting it,

so they kept it at the lowest height and used it for the largest dogs. Other than that, it usually held a

fishbowl full of tiny handmade bows, with the bows-in-progress beside it. There was a short set of corner

shelves and two rolling carts crammed with grooming equipment; the tub room held the shop vac and a

plain grooming table where they towel-dried the dogs before popping them into crates to sit before

powerful crate and stand dryers. Three tables but not quite enough space for three active groomers; they

never had more than two on shift at once, with only three on the payroll and Brenna as senior.

"Just signed up another one for you," Roger said, and his voice held that tone, the one he used when he

knew he'd done something to ruin her day but had done it anyway because it would make a happy

customer. Or so he thought, with the giant assumption that things would turn out his way.

They weren't likely to. Not this time. "I can't fit in any more dogs today. I can't do any more dogs than

this in one dayever , unless you get me experienced help."

"I gave you Katy," he protested, throwing his arms out wide.

"For two hours in the morning, and she hates it. She's bad at it, and she doesn't know what she's doing."

"What do you have to know to bathe a dog?"

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"The question," Brenna said, managing to keep her voice light only because she'd had so much practice,

"is what do you have to know to bathe a dogcorrectly ? Or even, say, to get a dog in the tub?"

She shouldn't have said that last; she knew it as soon as the words were out of her mouth. His face

closed down at the reminder of the time Katy had needed his help andneither of them could get the

seventy pounds of quivering German Shepherd into the waist-high tub—not by trying to convince her to

walk up the ramp meant for large dogs, nor by tugging or shoving or lifting. Until Brenna walked in from

lunch, expecting to find the animal bathed and drying, and with no more thought thanI don't have time

for this , slung the dog up into the tub.

Only in retrospect had she seen the look on Roger's face, now imbedded in her mind's eye.

Embarrassment. Resentment. It had at least, she'd hoped, taught him that he couldn't simply throw just

any of the interchangeable floor associates back to work grooming for a day.

She hadhoped .

"It's just a bath," Roger said. "No clipping. Medium-sized dog, I checked."

Brenna felt something clutch hard in her stomach. She waved toward the tub room. "There's a whole

room full of dogs waiting for me, and every one of them is a problem today. I swear, there's something in

the air today. I can't do it, Roger. I can't even do what I've already got."

"We don't turn away walk-ins, you know that."

Steadily, her voice as flat as it could be when she had to raise it over the dryers and the barking, she

said, "Then get me help."

Agreeably, as if he'd never consider asking the unreasonable of her, he said, "I'll grab someone off the

floor when the dog comes in," and left the room with the air of a man who has just solved a major

problem with much aplomb.

Brenna closed her eyes, momentarily overwhelmed by the impossible.

Then she picked up her clippers and went to work.

* * *

Twenty minutes later she presented Flowers to Ginger Delgaria, a pleasant woman who had come to

Brenna since Flowers' first puppy cut. Flowers, by this time tucked into the nook of Brenna's elbow with

a sulky expression pasted on her face, merely stared at Mrs. Delgaria without bestirring herself to move;

Brenna had to hand her over. The woman gave a rueful shake of her head. "I see her mood hasn't

improved."

"They're all like that today," Brenna said, absently rubbing her forehead between her eyebrows as she

filled out the charge slip for the cashier, already calculating how long it would take to have the Sheltie

done; she'd finished dematting before the bath, but the dog had way too much hair for its owners to

handle, at least not without a judicious amount of trimming and thinning. Like a woman with just the right

makeup . . . no one could see where the work had been done, but people could definitely appreciate the

difference.

The Sheltie would take too long, that was the answer. And there was the Cocker in for a cut-down; she

hadn't done the dog before and wasn't encouraged by her behavior in the tub. And Roger's new

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appointment still hadn't shown—

"—feral dog pack," Mrs. Delgaria was saying.

Brenna looked up at her, unable to reconcile the words with the neatly professional woman before her.

No, don't ask. Give her the charge slip and go get the Sheltie.

She asked. "What did you say?"

"You haven't heard? I'm surprised. It's been in the news since last night." Mrs. Delgaria shifted Flowers

into a more protective hold that Brenna didn't think was coincidental. "And you live out toward the lake,

don't you? That's where they're supposed to be. If you've got animals out there, you'd better make sure

they're put up safely."

Sunny. Numbly, Brenna held out the slip. "I don't listen to the radio much," she said. "Thank you for

mentioning it."Sunny the hound . Poor dumb Redbone reject would stand there with her tongue hanging

out, happily watching the canine visitors approach and never know the mistake until they bowled her over

and chewed her into little pieces. She glanced at the clock. Two hours till her shift ended and not even

then, if this new dog was other than what Roger said it would be.

Get the Sheltie started. She grabbed the stand dryer and wheeled it over to the table, which she swiftly

adjusted to height. Then the tools, ready to hand; she snapped a #7 blade onto the clippers, pulled out

her good thinning shears from the locking toolbox where she kept her personal gear, and hunted out the

wide-toothed comb and a couple of different brushes. In moments the dog was on the table, losing the

last of his matted hair and voicing his displeasure in high-pitched complaints from behind a nylon muzzle.

He wasn't nearly as tough as he thought he was, but she was in no mood for the toothy pinches he

commonly dealt out.

Definitely one of those days. The if-I-had-my-own-shop days. She wouldn't book this many dogs at

once, not without the right kind of help.And no one allowed to book dogs against my say-so , she

thought grimly, back-brushing the generous tufts of hair between the dog's toes and scissoring them to

neat round paws.

But she never approached the thought too seriously. Years of her brother Russell's dismissive comments,

of her parents' unintentional discouragement—though now only her mother was left to fill that role. "Let

someone else worry about the bills," they'd say, her father with loving protectiveness when he was alive

and her mother—now and then—with the assumption that she couldn't handle the load. "Russell will tell

you." And Russell would. "Can't see you doing the accounting for your own business," he would tell her,

and of course he knew, what with his partnership in the small carpet and flooring store in Brockport.

"You haven't got a single class under your belt outside of high school."

True enough. But not how she'd wanted it, either.

She clipped the Sheltie's nails and pulled the muzzle off; just the thinning and a little trimming to go, and

he'd be fine with that.

Feral dogs. A pack of them. What was that all about? She worked in a suburb north of Monroe City,

but lived fifteen minutes northwest of that, between Lake Ontario and the city. Definitely rural—but

generally tame. A handful of coyotes, not as many stray cats as there used to be, lots of small farms no

longer supporting anything but a handful of cows or horses, plenty of farmland owned in modest lots but

leased to larger operations. Her own place had taken that role over the years, and even now the old

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north pasture was in corn for Bob Haskly—the lease paid her winter's heating bills in the old farmhouse.

But the right-side pasture, hilly and divided by the creek, had only ever been pasture and still was.

Maybe next summer she would get another horse; right now the field was fallow, recovering from some

hard grazing from Emily's last batch of cattle.

Plenty going on in her part of Parma Hill, but never had feral dogs been any part of it. Nothing more than

your basic random stray, half of whom seemed to find their way to Brenna for feeding and grooming

before Brenna passed them along to the local animal advocate group for placement.

"Brenna, you in there?"

Think of Emily, and Emily arrives.

"Be out in a moment," Brenna said, taking one more pass through the Sheltie's thick ruff with the thinning

shears and then shaping the result. She stepped back to give him a critical eye, found a tuft she'd missed,

and tucked him under her arm to step into the tub room and turn off the last dryer. The Cocker behind it

gave her a bright and manic eye. "Best you change your attitude," she told it, and went out to the counter

area to stash the Sheltie in one of the two open-wire crates stacked for finished dogs.

"What's up, Emily?" she asked, reaching for the charge slip and doing a quick calculation of the extra

time she'd spent on the mats.

"In town for project supplies," Emily said. "As usual. Those girls go through crafts like they were born to

sell little-old-lady cutouts for people's front yards. You know, the kind bending over with all their

pantaloons showing."

Brenna stopped writing to look up. Emily, with her honey-blond hair drawn back in a hasty ponytail, not

a trace of makeup on her slightly too-wide, slightly too-large blue eyes, looked back at her quite

seriously, but there was a trace of humor hiding at the corner of her mouth. "Solemnly swear," Brenna

said, "that you will never allow that to happen."

"Sheep, then," Emily said. "Lawn sheep."

Brenna gave a firm shake of her head. "Lawn skunks at the most." She finished the charge slip and stuck

it in the proper cubby slot behind the counter, noted the date and the Sheltie's new wart on his customer

card, and dropped it in with the others to be refiled. "No project supplies in Pets!, unless they're going to

build you a cow out of rawhide bones."

"They wanted to see the big lizards," Emily said, and smiled as she glanced through the glass of the

counter area to the store proper. The grooming room had its own entrance, right next to the main store

entrance; the counter area served as a functional antechamber behind glass. The girls, of course, were out

of sight around the corner, where the reptile area boasted several huge snakes and the biggest monitor

lizards Brenna had ever seen. At nine and eleven years old, Emily's daughters were fearless and outgoing

children, and no one had ever told them that girls don't like that sort of thing. "Say, Bren, have you heard

about the dog pack? I'm trying to figure out a way to put the goats up, but you know they're little escape

artists—say, who's that?"

Brenna had started back for the Cocker; she looked over her shoulder to see Emily focused on the store

entryway, just beyond which stood Roger and a customer, talking.

No, not just a customer. Something more. Roger was nodding with exaggeration and high frequency,

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Doranna Durgin - A Feral Darkness

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