Night Broken (Mercy Thompson 8)

Mostly, the dogs barking at us were just excited, but I heard the true anger of a dog whose territory is breached in at least one bass voice.

“Maybe I should wait,” Honey said. “Dogs are afraid of me.”

I shook my head. “Most dogs get over their fear of werewolves pretty fast, given a chance.”

I hopped down out of the Vanagon. While I waited for Honey to come around the vehicle, the front door opened, and a small woman came out of the door with a leashless dog that was nonetheless at heel. The dog was white, female, and looked to be a purebred Staffordshire terrier. The woman greeted me in Spanish.

I get mistaken for Hispanic a lot.

I shook my head, but didn’t bother objecting to her assumption. “Sorry. No hablo Español. ¿Esta Joel aqui?”

She stopped when she was about ten feet away, and the dog sat as soon as she quit moving. All of the dog’s attention was on the woman.

“No,” the woman said, then paused. Maybe she’d had to take a moment to switch languages. “You must be Mercy. Joel called and told me what you wanted. I told him to stay at work because I know the dogs as well as he does.” Her English was good, with only a touch of accent.

She gave Honey a slightly wary look, and the dog focused on her, too. “I am his wife, Lucia. Joel tells me that you are the Mercy who keeps him in parts for his old cars. Come into my house, and I will help you as much as I can.”

Her house, when she ushered us in, was not fancy or large, but it was clean enough that I would have eaten off any surface. We sat on an old leather couch while Lucia retreated to her kitchen.

The big white dog who’d accompanied her outside followed her into the kitchen, leaving us under the watchful care of the three lesser dogs who were occupying the living room. All of the living-room dogs were male and all the same brindle tan. One of them ignored us entirely as he tried to destroy a hard rubber bone. One sat across the room and stared at us. I fought the urge to stare him down and nudged Honey when she started to do just that.

“We’re guests,” I reminded her. “Neutral territory.”

The third dog, the biggest of the three, sat on my foot and put his chin on my knee. I rubbed him gently behind the ears. He closed his eyes and made snuffly-content noises. The dog who’d been staring at us heaved a disgusted sigh and wiggled around until his back was to us, not happy about the intruders but too well trained to object.

None of the dogs seemed to have an issue with having a werewolf in the house.

There was not a lot of furniture, but what there was was good. Some of it handcrafted, so maybe Joel did some woodworking. Maybe Lucia did the woodworking. On the wall across from me was a framed Texas state flag flanked by good amateur paintings of dogs. One of them could have been the big white dog that followed Joel’s wife around, and the other was a yellow Lab with a Frisbee in its mouth. There was a case with a display of championship ribbons. On a bookcase were a number of trophies, some of which had dogs on the top of them.

The dogs Joel bred were expensive, well trained, and obtainable only when he was certain the person buying them was capable of taking good care of them. They were good dogs—better, he’d told me seriously, than most people he knew. He had no use for idiots who didn’t respect the damage dogs could do when left untrained or put in situations where they felt they had to defend themselves.

In addition to breeding, he and his wife rehabbed the “aggressive” dogs that were brought to the local shelters that would otherwise have just put the dogs down. Joel had scars on his arms and a huge one on his leg from a terrified, half-grown Rottweiler who now, Joel had assured me, lived happily with a huge family. Mostly, they had success, he’d told me, but a few were too badly damaged to ever be safe in human company.

The Marrok took damaged werewolves into his pack, where he could control the conditions under which they interacted with the rest of the world. Joel had told me with tears in his eyes about a battered pit-survivor he’d had to put down a few months ago. He was as passionate in his desire to save his dogs as the Marrok was to save his wolves.

Joel’s wife brought in three glasses of sun tea and sat down in the chair opposite the couch while I explained about Christy’s stalker—and how I thought that if the dog breed he had was rare, maybe we could find someone who knew him in the dog world. I gave her the bare-bones description Christy had given me.

“Molossers,” Lucia said, then gave Honey a grin. “It is a type, not a breed. It includes mastiffs and Saint Bernards. How familiar is your husband’s ex-wife with dog breeds?”

I called Adam’s cell phone.

Christy answered yet again. “Adam’s phone,” she said. “He—”

“So how much do you know about dogs?” I asked her without giving her a chance to tell me why she was answering his phone—again—and why he couldn’t talk to me.

“I grew up with golden retrievers,” she said.

“Do you know what a molosser is?”

“No,” she admitted reluctantly.

“Ask her if she could recognize a Newfoundland,” Lucia suggested.

I decided this three-way had gone from awkward to ludicrous, and I handed the phone over to Lucia. Eventually, Christy got on the Internet to look at dog breeds.

“Cane corso,” Christy said. “They look right.”

“Cane corso are smaller than you describe,” Lucia said. “Also, they usually have nice temperaments. But poor handling can turn even a Labrador into a dangerous animal. We will keep the cane corso as a possibility. You said these dogs were black.”

“Yes,” Christy agreed. “Really black. In the sunlight, it looked like they were black striped on black.”

After twenty minutes of questioning and checking out various breeds, Lucia’s tones changed from cautiously professional to profoundly sympathetic. Christy was good, even over the phone.

“What language was the dog’s name in?” Lucia’s voice was soothing.

“I don’t speak any foreign languages,” Christy apologized.

“She’s been to Europe,” I murmured.

“Did it sound German?” Lucia asked. “The Broholmer might fit.”

“Not German,” Christy said even more apologetically. “Maybe it was Spanish or even Latin.”

Lucia stared at her white dog as she thought. Finally she said, “The fila Brasileiro—a Brazilian mastiff—might fit. They are rare and very much one-person dogs. They can be very aggressive if not socialized when they are young.”