Peter shot her a questioning glance, but she nodded and bit her lip as I stepped out the door. Keen, stuffed full of cookies, barked at me, her voice sharp with near hysteria as she cleared the steps in a bound, eager to leave. When I glanced back, the door had already closed. As I walked to my suite, I tossed the stick in my hand to find the natural balance point. Something rough caught my skin, and I stopped to get a closer look, running fingers along the polished wood. There. Right near the center, a series of holes bored through the varnish, tearing out the tiny splinters that had poked me.
They looked like tooth marks, big ones. As though a huge dog had carried my walking stick home.
* * *
I stayed in bed for three days and listened to the sound of muffled voices above my head. Dillon’s rumbled while Chloe’s was barely audible. They fought daily, and I could hear Peter wade in each time. He must have provided the voice of reason, as silence would follow.
On the second day, I stood in my kitchen heating soup when I noticed Peter had got the Chevy out of storage. It now sat between my SUV and the old truck. I guessed Dillon and Chloe were staying for a while.
The fever broke on the third evening, and I slept. Even their arguing didn’t keep me up.
On day four, I dragged myself to work. I’d been in the building five minutes when Darlene showed me the bruise where Fang bit her. Apparently, I owed her dinner, and by default, that meant her and her husband. I considered it fair compensation for a date with Walter’s donkey.
I wandered through the clinic in a daze. The three other vets that worked there gave me an easy shift with small-animal cases rather than the farm calls. So I prepared for a routine stint of vaccinations and checkups.
But my day turned out to be far from routine.
Our senior vet assistant, Mandy, and our elderly clerk, Ardyth, received visitors as I moved into the back where the clinic had four examination rooms. The first patient, a twelve-year-old cat, took one look at me and retreated with a hiss into her crate. I had become accustomed to cats being reluctant patients, so I didn’t think this was unusual.
As it turned out, my first five customers were felines. Every single one behaved as though I wanted to eat them.
Cats were predators, but being small, they could fall prey to larger animals. In the country, foxes and coyotes often killed them. But why were they reacting so severely to me?
I wrestled cat number five onto the table, one hand on its scruff, the other waving a vaccine, when Mandy came to help. She was no doubt curious about the noise emitting from each room I entered. Much like the previous four, this cat screamed as though it was being skinned alive. A sound that cut off the moment Mandy took over the pin maneuver and spoke quietly to the animal. She glanced at me through her heavy bangs, which I noticed sported a new fluorescent orange streak.
The now traumatized owner peeled herself off the wall and advanced toward the table. “Whiskers doesn’t like you.”
“I’m sorry,” I panted, flustered as I administered the vaccine. “I don’t usually have a problem with cats.” Mandy released the animal and in a blur of gray fur, it darted into its crate . She placed a reassuring hand on the owner’s arm as she escorted woman and caged cat to the front counter.
My next patient was a young dog admitted for a pre-exam prior to a routine neuter. I entered the room with unusual caution, relieved to see a dog instead of a cat waiting for me. My relief turned to dismay when the animal took one look at me, cowered, and released its bladder on the floor.
Mandy appeared to mop up the mess. And I spent the next ten minutes ingratiating myself with the quivering hound in an effort to entice him out of the corner. When Mandy returned from dumping the bucket, she shot me a look, and I handed her the leash.
“You can put him in a kennel.”
She peered at me through strands of bright orange as the dog practically towed her out the door.
The owner looked at me curiously. “Never seen ’im like that,” the old farmer said with his heavy accent.
“Must be something I’m wearing,” I said with a shrug. “They hate me today.”
It wasn’t unusual for animals to fear vets, but I’d never experienced this kind of reaction. I chalked it up to a bad day, until I entered the kennel area to sedate the first surgery patients. Mandy was waiting for me with the necessary equipment, and everything was normal.
Until I arrived.
The moment I stepped into the room, the cats flattened themselves against the back walls of their cages, hissing and yowling, and the dogs cowered on the floor, whimpering. What the hell was going on?
Mandy looked from them to me. “What the fornication?” As usual, it wasn’t just our tech’s hair that possessed color. After extensive efforts on Darlene’s part, Mandy had been trained to substitute her profanity with less offensive substitutions. Unfortunately, they didn’t always make sense. “Are you using new cologne? Like . . . Eau de Leo?”
Needless to say, sedation took a while. It was a relief to go into surgery and complete the two spays and three castrations on my plate for the day. Being treated as death personified wasn’t doing much for my morale. At least when they were unconscious, they didn’t shrink from me.
I’d just tied the last knot when Ardyth popped in to say a show horse had arrived to have a minor injury stitched. By this time, Darlene had returned from her round of farm calls and was in
