Outcast. Joan Johnston

the riffraff—so he needed a car to get around. He’d been drunk when he’d left the Hare & Hound last night, so he’d left his car parked on the street near the pub and walked home with his nameless paramour. Which meant he needed to walk back this morning to pick it up.

      He found himself gaining ground on a stray dog striding along the brick sidewalk in front of him. The heavily muscled black-and-tan rottweiler was wearing a spiked collar, from which a piece of heavy chain dangled. The dog sniffed a Japanese cherry tree, lifted his leg, then marched on down the sidewalk as though he owned it.

      The dog’s head turned sharply, and Ben followed the beast’s gaze to a bunch of uniformed schoolgirls, laughing and chattering as they made their way down the opposite side of the street.

      Ben felt his neck hairs prickle when the rottweiler started across the road toward the girls, disappearing between two parked SUVs.

      Ben picked up his pace, afraid the stray might attack the girls, several of whom had begun skipping, seeming to flee the dog. Making themselves prey.

      The dog shot out from between the parked cars at exactly the same moment as a Toyota SUV found a break in the morning traffic and barreled past. The driver hit his brakes and laid ten feet of rubber before he slammed into the rottweiler, sending it flying.

      The girls screamed.

      The dog howled in anguish.

      Ben stared in disbelief as the driver glanced back over his shoulder, then laid more rubber as he snaked through traffic to escape the scene.

      As Ben approached the rottweiler the injured beast bared its sharp teeth and growled ferociously. The bones in one of the dog’s hind legs were sticking through its flesh. The beast tried to rise, then yelped in pain and fell back to the ground. There was no way to get near the animal without getting mauled.

      “I’m calling 911!” one of the schoolgirls cried as she began searching through her backpack.

      Another girl pointed to a brick building across the street and said, “There’s an emergency vet right there on the corner.” She focused her teary eyes on Ben and said, “Won’t you please take him there, sir? Please?”

      Ben glanced at the vet’s office across the street, thinking the vet would have some idea how to subdue the dog so he could be moved and treated.

      Then the decision was taken out of his hands. One of the schoolgirls bent down and reached out a hand to the growling, slavering beast. Jaws snapping, the animal charged at her.

      Ben had no choice but to intervene.

      4

      “Pregnant? How could she be pregnant?” Annagreit Schuster wasn’t often surprised, but the news that her Maine Coon cat, Penelope, was expecting a happy event—was, in fact, in labor—came as a complete shock. Penelope never left the confines of Anna’s small, upstairs apartment in a renovated Georgetown brownstone, except to lie in the sun on the second-floor balcony. How could she have gotten pregnant?

      Anna eyed the ten-pound, tabby-and-white-striped cat lying on the emergency vet’s metal examining table. Then she turned her gaze to the twelve-year-old boy standing beside her, his head hung low. “Henry?” she said. “Is there something you haven’t told me?”

      “When I first started cat-sitting for you, before I knew better, I left the front door open and Penelope ran out. I found her before you got home, so I didn’t see any reason to tell you.” He looked up at her with guilt-ridden mud-brown eyes and said, “I’m sorry, Anna.”

      Anna brushed her hand soothingly across the boy’s tight black curls from crown to nape. Henry’s widowed mother was a surgical nurse, and she was often gone when Henry got home from school. Since Anna lived across the hall, she’d offered him a job cat-sitting, mostly to keep him from ending up home alone. She’d never seen him looking so forlorn.

      “It’s all right, Henry. At least Penelope doesn’t have a tumor.” Which was what Anna had thought when she’d seen Penelope acting so strangely this morning and felt the cat’s lumpy belly under the thick hair that grew on her stomach.

      “If you take Penelope home and make her comfortable in a box in the closet, or any quiet place in the house, she should be able to deliver on her own,” the vet said.

      “Are you sure?” Anna asked anxiously. She knew virtually nothing about birthing babies, human or feline.

      “She’s going to be more relaxed in familiar surroundings. If you have any concerns at all, give me a call.”

      Penelope raised her head from the examining table, looked plaintively at Anna and called out to her with the chirping trill distinctive to Maine Coon cats, which didn’t meow like other cats.

      “Does it hurt?” Henry asked. “For her to have babies, I mean.”

      Anna looked to the emergency vet, but before he could answer, the examining room door flew open.

      “Doc, I need some help here!”

      Anna barely had time to register the blood soaking the white T-shirt of the man who’d burst in, and the enormous size of the injured rottweiler in his muscular arms, before Penelope gave a chirp that was more of a shriek and bounded to her feet. Her pregnant body arched, bushy tail held high. Her pretty cat face scrunched into something resembling an alien beast, mouth wide and wicked teeth bared at this sudden threat.

      “Get your damned cat off the table, lady!” the man snapped. “So I can lay this dog down.” The man’s leather coat was wrapped over the animal’s hindquarters. As he leaned forward, the coat slid off the dog onto the examining table like a black snake and then dropped onto the floor.

      Penelope hissed menacingly.

      The dog growled back through his teeth, which Anna saw with horror were still clamped hard into human flesh. The man’s forearm was streaming blood from numerous canine tooth puncture wounds where the dog had hold of him.

      She grabbed for Penelope, who raked her hand with bared claws. Anna cried out in pain and astonishment, “Penelope!” She stared at the four distinct lines of blood Penelope’s claws had torn in her skin. Penelope had scratched her when she was a kitten, but never once in the five years since.

      “Come on, lady,” the intruder commanded. “Move the damned cat!”

      Anna was more cautious this time, but calling Penelope’s name had made the cat aware of her, and Penelope allowed herself to be lifted into Anna’s arms.

      As soon as Penelope was off the metal table, the man bent over it and laid the dog there. Even then, the dog held on. Anna didn’t want to look at the injured animal, but she couldn’t help noticing the naked bone protruding through a bloody tear in one of its hind legs.

      She noticed Henry was also staring with wide, horrified eyes at the dog’s blood and bone. “Come on, Henry,” she said gently. “We need to get Penelope home so she can have her babies in peace and quiet.”

      She shot an admonishing look at the man, but his attention was focused on the dog, whose teeth were still deeply embedded in his arm.

      Anna would have liked to stay and help, but she felt Penelope’s belly ripple and realized she’d better get her cat back to the comfortable traveling cage in her car and drive the few blocks home before kittens started arriving.

      “Henry,” she repeated. “Let’s go.”

      “I want to see how the vet gets the dog to let go of the guy’s arm,” Henry said, his eyes riveted on the scene in front of him.

      So do I, Anna thought. But what she said as she backed her way out of the emergency room door was, “Come on, Henry. We need to get Penelope home. And you need to get to school.”

      Reluctantly, the boy turned and hurried after her.

      5

      Anna