Hunter's Trail

“Hi, puppy,” I said soothingly, keeping my eyes on the floor. “I’m Scarlett. What’s your name?”

I glanced up to see the bargest yawning, displaying enormous jaws that could possibly be described as “slavering.” “Hoo boy,” I breathed. Despite the shadows in the crate, I thought I saw it wag its tail once, tentatively. Encouraged, I crooned some more nonsense at it.

Jesse chose that moment to reenter the room. The bargest went on alert again, feet planted, tufts of hair standing on end. Jesse didn’t notice; he was focused on the unfolded wad of papers. “You were right, they had to register it with the airline. Paid a fortune to fly it too.”

“Jesse,” I murmured, “you’re too big. Be smaller.”

“Oh. Right.” He sat down on the carpeted floor, and the bargest stopped growling and shifted its feet nervously, totally confused by the situation.

“What’s her name?” I asked softly.

“Her?” He looked at the crate again, but the dog was black and there were shadows. It was impossible to see between its legs.

“Call it a hunch,” I said.

Jesse flipped a page while the bargest eyed both of us. “You’re right, it’s a female,” he noted, scanning the paper. “They claim she’s a Peruvian Hairless mix, which strikes me as total bullshit. Her name is . . . heh. Belle.”

“As in Beauty?” I said incredulously. I don’t know much French, but my childhood had been infiltrated by Disney, just like everybody else’s.

“Yep. The Luparii might be a bunch of assholes, but at least one of them has a sense of humor.”

“Guess so.”

Jesse looked at his watch. “We need to move. We’ve already been here too long. If any of the neighbors saw us . . .” The bargest, hearing our friendly voices, began to tentatively wag her tail again. “Well, look at that,” Jesse said softly.

I nodded. “I don’t think she’s actually that aggressive. I think she’s scared and confused.”

“Scarlett,” Jesse said patiently, like he was talking to some bleeding-heart moron. “She’s evil.”

“Hush. She’s no such thing, are you girl?” Hearing the question in my voice, the bargest’s tail started wagging double-time.

“She slaughtered those two werewolves, Scarlett,” Jesse said gently. “Just because you want something to be true . . .”

For the bargest’s sake, I kept my voice low and calm, even as I said, “I’m not an idiot, Jesse. Look at her: before it started wagging, that tail was tucked between her legs. She’s not cowering—they probably trained her not to run from scary stuff—but she’s leaning sideways so she’ll be ready to recoil. She doesn’t understand if she’s supposed to listen to us or attack us, and we haven’t given her the right cues for either.”

There was a long pause behind me, and then Jesse said defensively, “She was snarling.”

“We scared her, and she’s trapped in a little box. You’d snarl too.”

“She’s dangerous, Scarlett.”

I turned my head slightly so I could look back at him. “So is your gun, but I trust you with it. Now trust me.”

My partner locked eyes with me for a second, and then nodded warily. “Okay. So what do you want to do?”

I told Jesse to go move the scout into the bathroom so she wouldn’t distract the bargest. I also gave him his jeans and T-shirt out of the backpack so he could change. When Jesse closed the door to the bedroom we were in, I approached the bargest’s crate by crawling in a curve toward it, never facing her head-on or making eye contact. I crawled on my hands and good knee until I was at the side of her kennel that had the latches. Making sure I wasn’t blocking her escape route from the crate, I took a deep breath and undid them. The door sprang open.

The bargest exploded out of the crate, suddenly seeming to fill the room with her presence. It was overwhelming, terrifying, but I forced myself not to cower. She could probably smell my fear, but there wasn’t much I could do about that, so I just sat there as calmly as possible while she raced around the room—which had seemed fairly big only a moment ago—in tight controlled circles. Now that I could see all of her . . . well, she was just as ugly as before, with a strange club-like tail that just naturally looked like someone had docked it at ten inches. But there was something else going on with her too: a graceful power and intelligence that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with how she was built. I could see why the Luparii had chosen this particular puppy for the bargest spell.

After a few minutes, when I didn’t seem to be going anywhere, she calmed down and came over to sniff me. I held very still. After she’d snuffled her muzzle around my hair and clothes, I very slowly lifted my hand from the floor, my fingers curled in a loose fist, and held it out to her. She sniffed it for a long moment, and then gave me a single approving lick. Her club tail wagged again.

“I’m not sure that Belle suits you,” I said, lowering my forehead to touch hers. “It seems a little pretentious and cruel.” She was wearing a collar, a formidable spiked leather thing. I scratched her neck under the collar, and she panted appreciatively.

I pulled the new canvas collar out of my backpack and let her sniff it. When she didn’t object, I fastened it around her neck and then undid the buckle on the leather collar, letting it fall on the floor. The bargest was a huge investment of time, money, and magic, and if I were the Luparii, I wouldn’t have been above putting some kind of GPS chip in the collar to protect my investment.